* Posts by Danny 14

4301 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2009

It's [insert month] of 2016, and your Windows PC can still be owned by [insert document type]

Danny 14

Re: Noticed Flash updates....

We have run without java for 8 months now. Flash will be next.

Judge slams BT for blaming engineer after 7 metre ceiling plunge

Danny 14

Re: Gives a whole new meaning...

He doesnt hang about for long though.

Hardcore creationist finds 60-million-year-old fossils in backyard ... 'No, it hasn’t changed my mind about the Bible'

Danny 14

Re: Evidence.

Avenger? Nah. I miss my old twin carb Hillman hunter. A frightening beast that could actually reach the 90mph speedo top speed (allegedly I heard it could be done on the M6 inbetween Preston and Wigan with a rolling start from parbold junction, allegedly)

Danny 14

Re: re: creationism makes perfect sense. As long as you ignore all of creation?

Actually, creationism does seem to make sense if the planet was also artificially created.

I mean, perhaps (maybe 6000 years ago) the Galactic Ordnance Division needed to bulldoze some planets to create a new bypass. Perhaps GOD didn't have the correct paperwork (or GOD contracted it to some dodgy people working out of a caravan) so was ordered to rebuild everything EXACTLY as it was before being destroyed. That would explain why GOD needed to create the lot including all the nuances such as 60 million year old fossils.

Might be mileage in a book for it at least.

Telegram crammed: Hackers find way to send massive messages

Danny 14

Re: Have some fun?

your definition of fun and mine differ greatly.

Fresh hell for TalkTalk customers: TeamView trap unleashed

Danny 14

Re: Still, look on the bright side.

so is morrisons vodka. Still wouldn't touch either. Unless ive been glossing and need to clean the brushes - it is more effective than white spirit and not much more expensive.

Thief dresses as Apple Store drone, walks off with $16,000 in iGear

Danny 14

Re: Nice phone if you can get it repaired

Inventory stock taking is mandatory for insurance purposes. This was a repair room,they will know the imei and details of each phone in there. Scan what remains and within 20 minutes you will have a list of what was stolen, their imeis blocked and replacents sorted for customers awaiting those repairs.

As for class action, nope. Buy stolen goods and it might be *you* proving you didnt know they were stolen in order to avoid a handling stolen goods rap. Bought it from ebay with the 'says IMEI blocked so selling as spares' might not be a good defence.

Danny 14

You can block them by blocking the imei. Yes you can tecnically get round it but most average fences wont be interested in doing so.

Danny 14

Re: $763 worth of gear

They were stolen from the repair room. So these were either broken or refurbished then? I doubt nonrepairable phones are given new ones again (usually refurbished) and if so surely the new ones will be stored in the stock room? So if that is what the writedown on a refurb phone is, then what is the writedown on a boxed new one?

Crysis creeps: Our ransomware locks network drives and PCs. Bargain

Danny 14

"First, don't use the most vulnerable system ever created..."

Righto. So no VPN into work from home? No WEBDAV? SFTP? You can have internal lockdowns as much as you want but as soon as you have external access to any resource for staff then you need to plan for these sorts of things. Afterall, there is nothing stopping staff accidentally moving/deleting/archiving/encrypting manually ANYTHING that they can write to (in one way or another).

File versioning is a quick and dirty solution (and available since 2003) or backups that use independent privs and access to the common drives. Even if you do use 100% windows stuff, there is no excuse to having at least +x week rolling archive backup for various reasons - at least the most you would lose is 1 week (which may be a disaster for a company sure, but if so then PLAN FOR IT). Have the backup running off the network and attached to the storage independently so it cannot be compromised by something happening on the network. Sure that becomes a slight management pain but at least you have safe backups.

In short, it doesn't matter what OS you run, there is always the possibility of data loss through non-malicious reasons so plan for it. It just so happens that crypto virus automate the stupidity process for the user.

Chinese space station 'out of control', will do best firework impression

Danny 14

Re: No worries

they tried but as soon as other random volunteers were told to put on red uniforms they left without saying a word.

Danny 14

Re: LMGTFY

I have a feeling there is a man in a grey Nehru suit with a white cat controlling it manually. That will explain how they lost control.

Danny 14

Re: Typical problem when you don't have all the data

to the OP, sure! I mean they should just do the same as the US did for their space programme right? I mean it isn't as though they stole German plans, scientists and breakthroughs after WW2 is it? Von Braun was a good dyed in the wool American afterall (who happened to be a member of the Nazi party and the SS - a minor inconvenience I suppose).

Did you know that more people died building and constructing Von Bauns V-2's than were actually killed by them? Concentration camp labour was cheap enough for him to not worry about such losses though. The V2 became the cornerstone of the US HIROC ICBM which was the incubator for ATLAS (and later Saturn V). That's some heritage though.

Ironically enough, only the European (with german input) Ariane was based on new research that did not come predominantly from Nazi backgrounds (the Russians stole just as much technology and Nazi Scientists as the US); insofar as the US and USSR basically copied V2 verbatim for their early efforts and merely improved them as time went on.

Idiot OP

Google snubs 'dark money' questions at AGM. Shareholder power? Yeah, right

Danny 14

Re: Dark money OMG

and it will be money pissed down the drain if Trump gets in.

Geek's Guide to Britain – now a book. Permission to geek out granted

Danny 14

Re: ??

mmmm pie.

Danny 14

Re: "your pocket-sized guide"

there is plenty of room behind the thinkpad in your rucksack. Pockets are for reserve swiss army knives (in case the leatherman tool doesn't have what you are looking for)

'Windows 10 nagware: You can't click X. Make a date OR ELSE'

Danny 14

Re: What date is good for you?

Just set it for 5 days time. That is PLENTY of time to either A) abandon windows or B) install GWX control panel and be rid of all W10 nag screens.

Smartwatches: I hate to say ‘I told you so’. But I told you so.

Danny 14

One of my first gigs was designing and coding a bardcode scanning system using SQL 6.0 on an NT backend (good old 7 of 9 font). windows CE appeared on little barcode PDA scanning machines and the rest was history for us - VB6 could be used to code on them, good old zebra printers made the barcodes and the warehouse tracking system was born. Windows 98 desktops using a VBA front end, PDAs on windows CE, SQL on NT4, 7 of 9 fonts, zebra printers, intel dos boot disks, GHOST server and it wouldn't have been possible without the PDAs on offer at the time. I bet there are still windows CE barcode scanners about today.

The PDAs were used by all sorts of staff to check stocks, check PC builds (each component was barcoded so we knew what bit was in each PC), each HDD scanned (each scanner logged onto the system so you knew what its "job" was) loaded the correct GHOST image (dos Intel network boot too!). All this was in 1998 so a long time before ipads etc came about.

Don't panic, says Blue Coat, we're not using CA cert to snoop on you

Danny 14

Re: simple don't trust anyone else's CA

im assuming you MITM everything, doesn't that just shift the issue onto your edge proxy? Or do you have that (gulp) set to ignore cert errors?

I too have very few CA on our domain PCs and we do MITM everything through our filtering proxy (school, signed agreements with staff and students - don't like it then don't use it, be aware that this is happening sort of thing) but that just means the proxy does the cert checking.

Danny 14

Re: Internal Testing my arse

which is pretty much the whole point of internal CA too, Outside of your own testing environment the cert would be as untrusted as any other. Odd isn't it.

The Windows Phone story: From hope to dusty abandonware

Danny 14

Re: Aww

my android screen has the weather at the top bar, next calendar entries on the next line and 4 folders on the next line with all my apps within each folder. Bottom line is call, email, txt, flashlight and all apps. I don't even need to scroll the main screen or any of the folders.

I press the home button, swipe unlock pattern, then 2 thumb presses for any of my apps. I suppose the next evolution might be an e ink screen on the "case" outer updated slow time.

Danny 14

Re: Too little too late

Thing is, the android based devices are good as a work phone too. You have office apps, HDMI out, DNLA, outlook, VPNs and remote wipe capability. You can install certificates with security minimums too (in fact you HAVE to add pin capability if you install a custom certificate). The lock screen can show you just as much as live tiles - with the scase on note 3 you don't even need to open the phone up.

Our Note 3's function well as business phones plus they have removable batteries, at the time we purchased them the MS offerings were quite poor in comparison for both functionality and battery life. The DofE guys take one out with a metal waterproof case too, it comes complete with the same mapping routes and maps that the garmin handhelds have too (uses anquet OMN maps as the core) (changing the battery is an arse with the case on as it really is a snug fit with seals but you can pull a sealed trapdoor for a charging brick). WP couldn't do any of that at the time (and there were limited cases too) - maybe this has changed now but who cares, the ship has sailed and there is even stiffer competition now.

Danny 14

Re: Where's the room for another competitor?

It depends on what competition there is. Apple is apple, walled garden and all. Android on the otherhand can be tweaked and installed by just about any manufacturer. Competition is in the hardware and device - there is plenty of variation - but the apps remain a constant. There is competition and the windows phone added nothing to the mix (hence why they are irrelevant).

Danny 14

Re: I wonder when Microsoft is finally going to pull the plug.

Intel aren't making low end chips because ARM do a much better job. They are mature and feature in just about every device going. Look inside switches, routers, phones, media devices, cars, GPS devices etc All ARM stuff. For once, intel had no answer, they are great at the lumbering powerhouses or even moderately low consumption devices but ARM has being doing it longer and can do it better and cheaper (plus with a lower consumption)

Microsoft won't back down from Windows 10 nagware 'trick'

Danny 14

Re: MS couldn't even jump the shark properly-

stuff the condom, take M$ to be spayed. It will stop more horrid offspring.

Danny 14

Re: so

We have a couple of windows 10 laptops, they came with windows 10 on them and our 8.1 image didn't like the laptop.

Rest of the network is 7, laptops use 8.1 purely for the fact you can add WIFI from the ctrl-alt-del screen (and thus VPN in from CTRL-ALT-DEL) rather than getting a user to cache their logon first before going home and adding their WIFI.

Danny 14

Re: My opinion on this?

If this app installed malware I bet the malware would be better than the windows 10 installed otherwise.

As for spinrite, I used it once at a customers premises. 80gb hard drive, clicking away. Would eventually boot into windows given a few hours. spinrite managed to at least mark huge chunks as "bad" so that the drive wouldn't go near the clicking portions so the drive could be booted and data copied off (at the time neither ghost nor PING would clone the disk so it was last ditch). apart from that ive had little experience with it but wondered how it actually worked as I thought the drive firmware would stop you messing with raw data.

'Acts of war in a combat zone are not covered by your laptop warranty'

Danny 14

Re: Act of Allah

We have "accidental damage" on our DELL kit here at work. It doesn't seem to mention being blown up, only that "total loss" is covered once per year.

Danny 14

Re: BS

As a former serving infantry grunt (first gulf & bosnia only, QRL recce 102striker commander) I can assure you that gunfire and large calibre guns going off is fairly normal and the sound does carry over flat areas. You get immune to noises quite quickly as you realise that life goes on, you are no longer on duty and you need to deal with your normal every day things. Unless you are under contact (in which case the only people you are talking/listening to is your platoon net on your left ear and company net on your right ear) then believe you me you start to do things people wouldn't believe - because you only have 4 hours off and need sleep too.

Ive seen church masses taking place in the open whilst arty is firing away in the background, people playing basketball whilst mortars land 1km away, ive slept in countless places with allsorts happening (I did call home once to assure the girlfriend I wasn't dead but it only made things worse as SHE thought the "normal" noise in the background was worse than it was). So whilst the geezer on the line might not have ACTUALLY been under contact, it isn't surprising that to an average joe listening to the sounds of an active zone might think they were.

Microsoft phone support contractors told to hang up after 15 minutes

Danny 14

field work in the lake district.

I worked for Delltech school support in the lakes. Whilst people in the more urban areas were getting 10 jobs a day i got 1 if i was lucky. Due to the geography of the lakes i was exempt from the normal metrics too.

Cue motorbike and scenery all on works time. Good gig till they farmed the jobs out to unisys.

They were clueless about anything north of Manchester and couldn't understand why getting from Barrow to Carlisle was a 2.5 hour journey. Metrics meant i was always hottoof the pile (patterdale in January is 20 mph at the most, assuming the school was even open) but they didnt care and had no idea. I left and they loat the contract as they couldn't recruit anyone in.

EU vetoes O2 and Three merger: Hutchison mulls legal challenge

Danny 14

Re: Dam

Vodafone are bad but up here in the lakes they are about the best for reception. Hobsons choice really.

The irony is getting isle of man roaming in some parts.....

Danny 14

Re: It's a cartel anyway ......

I thought it was unlimited (as long as you stay under 2gb)

Google blocks Pirate Bay

Danny 14

Re: One must remember,

What are these 'browser adverts' that you speak of? I dont see those around since the advent of browser plugins.

Danny 14

Whodathunkit?

Spaniard live streams 195km/h burn-up

Danny 14

Re: C'était un Rendezvous by Claude Lelouch - YouTube

I remember watching "the black prince", enough to scare most people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AgzZd8Lr64

Russia poised to unleash 'Son of Satan' ICBM

Danny 14

Re: Advice

or france.

Danny 14

Re: Two steps forward...

and waste a lot of resources doing so. Anti missile technology is useful in multiple genres. ICBMs less so.

Microsoft: Why we tore handy Store block out of Windows 10 Pro PCs

Danny 14

Re: Same old, same old.

There are quite a few gpos that wont work on pro. Metro customisation is another big enterprise only.

Woman charged with blowing AU$4.6m overdraft on 'a lot of handbags'

Danny 14

Re: How do I get that unlimited overdraft ?

Russia might have you for a few million in bribes.

UK govt admits it pulled 10-year file-sharing jail sentence out of its arse

Danny 14

Re: It makes one wonder!

or being offered.

EU set to bin €500 note

Danny 14

Re: Re:It's time to start hoarding gold while you still can

surely violence would be a better skill than farming? It would be easier to take goods off hipsters than grow it yourself.

UK.gov refuses to give surveillance commish enforcement powers

Danny 14

Re: In other words

nothing to see here citizen. Move along. Move along.

Chap runs Windows 95 on Apple Watch

Danny 14

Re: "...520Mhz processor..."

Mhz is mega heinz? 520M beans per second? That will be some serious gas.

F-35s failed 'scramble test' because of buggy software

Danny 14

Re: Mayday! I have flight stability and weapons arming problems!

Wait till they start getting the 'upgrade to windows 10' on the HUD mid engagement.

Danny 14

Re: Stability Event

Better off with the f18 hornet/super hornet. Carrier capable, intercept or strike, proven to work. Problem is, i bet the pork barrel potential is quite low with them.

Danny 14

Re: Stability Event

The f18 is superior in every way simply because it works. It is carrier capable, intercept or strike. Proven capability etc. I imagine the pork bartel potential is low though now.

Score one for the patent trolls: US appeals court says it's OK to shop for patent-friendly judges

Danny 14

Re: Weasels!

Or attempt to smash patent lawyers together at close to superluminal speeds to see if you can create a passable human being out of a few of them.

Must listen: We've found the real Bastard Operator From Hell

Danny 14

Re: They could use Pink Floyd's "Time" as hold music.

Oh no, it will be the 'as inspired by Time' played by year 5 St Judes primary school.

Your mother has a smooth forehead, Klingon language lovers roar at Paramount

Danny 14

Re: What!?

Are there really weird tricks to getting k$ per hour (as per the woman from Birmingham)? Are people missing out on new insurance quirks?

Danny 14

Re: ST:WTF!

Oh I doubt it. The new ST films were not really "trek" enough; here were plenty of booing and hissing in the cinemas. Paramount probably want to bury trekkies so that they can sell the new action films to a newer generation.

Ironically without the trekkies the franchise would have sunk a long time ago.