* Posts by ender

27 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2008

The Pirate Bay clambers back online after cop raid sunk site for 7 weeks

ender

Re: The day...

> Things are priced appropriately is the day pirating dies.

For me, the price isn't that much of a problem - it's convenience. I don't mind paying for content (as my library shows), but when I pay for something, I want to read/watch/listen to it on my own terms, not on somebody else's (and unless I'm paying a really tiny amount of money, I expect to keep the content forever, not until somebody decides that it's not economical to keep the servers running).

Get coding or you'll bounce email from new dot-thing domains

ender

Re: Agree - fix the '+' problem first

> a) Accept it, but just strip it out so you don't actually get the emails

I registered on e-bay with an e-mail address that contains a | character in the local part. Everything works fine unless I try contacting support - then I get some bounces from their internal servers saying that | isn't a valid character (it is).

As for IDNs, I've had an IDN domain for a few years now, and I also have e-mail on it. The only users that have had problems replying to messages sent from this domain have been using gmail...

Chipmaker FTDI bricking counterfeit kit

ender

Re: Very dumb idea

> Exactly. It's not a FTDI device, so why should any FTDI driver send any commands to it?

Because it pretends to be one. And as marcan points out, the driver doesn't discriminate between genuine and counterfeit devices - it sends the same commands to both, but they have no effect on the genuine part.

ender

The driver doesn't need to have Microsoft's signature - it just needs to be signed with a certificate that supports with kernel-mode codesigning (which you can get from several CAs).

ender

Re: All FTDI needed to do...

The driver update ensures that the official FTDI drivers (current and old) will ignore counterfeit devices. It's quire easy to modify the drivers to keep working with those devices (they're not bricked, they just don't pretend anymore that they're something they aren't), but such drivers aren't official anymore, and anybody using them should know that they do it at their own risk.

ender

Re: Very dumb idea

> This device does not belong to FTDI, thus FTDI have no permission to make any alterations to the device whatsoever.

Exactly. It's not a FTDI device, so why should it work with any FTDI driver?

HP 'clarifies' firmware/support contract rules

ender

> What will be next for firmware updates to prevent this? Firmware serial codes and numbers, phoning home?

I wouldn't be too surprised - recent ProLiants have built-in firmware downloader in BIOS (which failed to do anything every time I tried to use it - it just gives you a black screen with an X for mouse cursor, and you have to power down the server to get away from that).

GIMP flees SourceForge over dodgy ads and installer

ender
FAIL

Re: Not visible here

> All while trying to install free and opensource Filezilla.

> I'd say that's a big-time fail for Sourceforge.

It's at least as big fail for FileZilla, too - SourceForge didn't just decide and put that drive-by installer up, the owner of FileZilla project had to give explicit consent.

UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

ender

Re: Fine

@Slumberingjournalist

> As you've probably started realising... if someone then extracts the un-watermarked picture from the client's product, and removes the metadata (easily done by accident or deliberately), then the photographer's traceability is seriously compromised. The work is as good as orphan.

Use a reverse image search tool, such as Tineye or Google Images (click the camera icon there) - both are surprisingly good at matching images, even when they have been cropped and recoloured.

Where were the bullet holes on OS/2's corpse? Its head ... or foot?

ender
FAIL

Re: Terse?

> The most difficult for message formatting are the Slavic languages, with their multiple number cases, which provide no end of punishment for people who still write stuff like printf("%d item%s",count, (count!=1)?"s":"");

Guess what? Windows still doesn't know how to do plural forms properly, resulting in Explorer telling me "Selected is this number of files: 1"

Malware made which can share a smartcard over the internet

ender

Re: Err...

My previous bank let you use either the calculator thingy, or you could install their middleware and stuff the card to an USB reader (but you had to get the reader yourself).

Faustian descent into backup hell: A play in two acts

ender

> And why is Cobian a Fail because you can't get it to work? If your running an 80GB system image backup on a network at 100m and it runs over 2 hours then the problem isn't the software. Letting it run for 5 days - now that is a fail.

It's a gig network actually, and I let it work for 5 days because I had some other long-running process working at the same time. I tried Cobian a few more times later (with some different settings), but since it never looked like it was doing any better than in my initial attempt after a few hours, I killed it (just for comparision, Windows 7 built-in backup took around 45 minutes for a full backup over the network, and TrueImage needed 20-30 minutes).

ender
FAIL

> Until you are at some kind of corporate level Cobian provides everything you need - including ftp and network backup which actually makes it likely that you will use the thing.

I tried to use Cobian to back up my system drive (80 GB) to my network. It took 5 days, and after it was done, I didn't find any way to actually restore something from the backup.

> As for Acronis I wouldn't buy something from a backup company that says "cloning, unlike backup, always requires a second hard drive"

Cloning in this case means disk-to-disk copy. At least in TrueImage's case, creating an image of the current drive isn't called cloning (and the image destination can be anything).

ender
Linux

> Windows 7 has built-in system image utility which works perfectly, unless I am missing something?

It works very well if you're backing up to a local (eg. USB-attached) drive. It fails pretty badly if you're backing up to network (only allows a single copy to be held, it's pretty slow at creating said backup, and while it's backing up to network, the whole machine is laggy).

(and according to somebody a few posts up, it's crippled in the home versions of Windows)

ender
Meh

I've been using TrueImage Home to make a daily backup of my SSD for about 2 years now. It's very fast (both when doing full backup and when doing incrementals), but it has a few quirks:

- FTP backup is apparently impossible to set up in 2011 - when you try to set it up, it changes forward slashes to backslashes, then complains that ftp:\\server-address doesn't exist

- backup to a network share works, but you really should run TrueImage as a different user if you want to do that, because otherwise it'll forcefully disconnect all your network drives, and close any files you have open over the network

Also, while backup is quick, restoring of a full image and cloning are both awfully slow (restoring individual files is fast). For some reason, when writing to disk, TrueImage likes to do about 20 seconds of writing, then takes a few minutes break, rendering what would be a few minutes of work to several hours.

PETA to launch .xxx smut site 'to help animals'

ender
FAIL

Re: Ok, now I'm officially confuzzled

> So does that mean if I don't subscribe to PETA's masturbation site then some animals will die because PETA couldn't save them, but if I do subscribe then kittens will die on a regular basis?

Don't feel too bad - since the majority of the animals PETA "saves" are eithanized anyway, kittens will die one way or another.

Think file-hosting sites guard your private data? Think again

ender
Joke

I don't see much of a problem with this...

...since anybody sharing sensitive data over these services would certainly keep it encrypted, right?

World's most advanced rootkit penetrates 64-bit Windows

ender

Re: UAC violations

> The NT family were deisgned from the get-go so that in everyday use you run as a limited user but there are still too many lazy coders out there who take shortcuts that compromise the whole systems security, forcing you to run as root.

Problem with NT's design is that until Vista you were encouraged to run as admin.

Telco sets honey pot for nuisance marketers

ender

Re: How about ...

From the blog:

"Yeh, one idea if we get enough callers so there are always a few concurrently is drop them all in to one big conference call and stream it live on a web page."

Mystery startup uncloaks 512-core server

ender
Boffin

x64?

The article mentions Atom Z530 and then x64 - Z530 doesn't support x64 - only x86.

Dodgy BitDefender update bricks systems

ender
Jobs Halo

Re: number of malware threats

> Aw, really. And who is going to approve them?

What kind of stupid question is this - of course it's going to be Apple.

Opera cuts cord on first open-source baby

ender
WTF?

SunSpider score

"Losers, by open sourcing they would give Opera at last a chance for a decent SunSpider score."

Hmm...

SRWare Iron 4.0.280: 472.8ms +/- 4.0%

Opera 10.50 Beta Build 3261: 394.0ms +/- 3.5%

I thought lower was better?

HP, Dell punters furious over Windows 7 upgrade delays

ender
FAIL

"Free" upgrade?

You still can't buy HP desktop machines with Windows 7 pre-installed here (in Slovenia) - instead, they offer you free upgrade, which actually costs 39,90€ for "administrative and manipulative expenses". Where are they shipping Windows 7 from - Afghanistan? And when you actually try to use the upgrade offer, you need to retry entering your product and serial numbers several times (closing the browser in between tries) before it actually acknowledges that you're entitled to the upgrade.

ender

HP and multiple computers

I forgot to mention that after checking with a HP rep, I was told that you only need to order a single upgrade kit per computer type, and that you can use the same upgrade kit on all entitled computers of that type. We'll see if that's true once the kit arrives.

HP breaks Japanese excessive packaging record

ender

That's a DIMM package?

The inside box is much smaller than the DIMM packages we get here (which are about 20x10x5cm, with a plastic insert that's apparently made to hold 5 DIMMs). The outside boxes are usually somewhat smaller (though not by much).

Undetectable data-stealing trojan nabs 500,000 virtual wallets

ender

MBR?

I'm really interested in how exactly the trojan hides itself in the MBR - after all, there's only 446 usable bytes there, and the MBR is executed in real mode (and has to start the bootloader), while the OS runs in protected mode.

Kentucky judge OKs 141-site net casino land grab

ender

Re: To James Butler and Hud Dunlap

> Here, just have a few lines of code in the script that says "if IP matches Kentucky, display 'sorry mate' text, else give access to site"

Few lines for Kentucky, few lines for Texas, few lines for Germany, few lines for Iran, few lines for China, few lines for ... where does it stop?