Posts by phuzz

Re: Change? No way.

That's not much consolation really is it? If anything it makes it worse.

Re: Ha

'No-one employed or commissioned by HMG engage in, or faciliate, bulk data collection in the UK'

That doesn't rule out the NSA hiring someone who worked for GCHQ until last week, and will go back to working there next week, but currently is 'unemployed'. (Much in the way that the CIA employed U2 pilots who'd 'resigned' from the USAF, and were therefore technically civilians).

This 'non-GCHQ' worker then helps the NSA do some bulk collection, the results of which can of course be shared with the UK via 5-eyes, but in this scenario no-one currently employed by HMG has done anything.

Re: File Encryption?

Written on a piece of paper, and then stored in a fireproof safe would be fine. The vast majority of password attempts are online. Storing a password on a physical piece of paper secures it against any online attack.

After all, if someone knows where you live and can break into your house, they can just stand over you with a rubber hose until you give them all your passwords, online or offline. (Or they could install cameras and record you typing in your password).

(oblig xkcd)

Re: Good and bad

"Google just want to use DoH so they can get the data on what you are resolving"

If that's true, why haven't they enabled it in Chrome? (It's only available in Firefox so far).

Why haven't they set up a DoH host? (Firefox are using Cloudflare so far).

At least try to remember which companies you're ranting about.

Re: Infrastructure

The specifications are open, so if you're curious you can check up on them.

As for being used as a super-cookie, well, I suppose if you login using (eg) Google, and use that authentication to log in to a bunch of other sites, then Google may well be able to track which sites you've logged into. The solution to this is of course, not to login using Google.

So in general, it looks like the end user gets to decide who gets their login data.

"if there was really a piece of paper with the keys on it in his fishing gear, the Garda failed to spot and seize this when they did a search of the perps premises."

Why would they have been looking for a bit of paper with some numbers on? I doubt he wrote "Keys to the bitcoin accounts where I keep my ill-gotten gains" across the top. If he was smart (which seems unlikely at this point), he might have written them in such a way as to look like the weights of fish he'd caught, or phone numbers etc.

Either way, the police were looking for evidence of drug dealing, so as long as the paper didn't look like a list of people he sold drugs to, then they wouldn't have looked twice at it, even if they had found a single sheet of paper inside a fishing rod box.

"Come on now, they clearly said that was a mistake afterwards."

And then made the same 'mistake' again the next month.

Why not a last chance personal pack?

Because he wouldn't have been able to get out of the seat in time to use it.

'Go soft' means they'll use lube. The first time at least.

Re: Beware survival bias

I have an working 8" floppy drive and a bunch of 8" disks, how would you connect them to a modern laptop?

Well, just based on this video I'd use a PII running Win98. Those are IBM Type 1 disks though, which might be older than yours.

Either way, you need to start thinking about getting the data off those disks and onto something newer, as the substrate will start breaking down over the next five-ten years. Backup now, regret never.

Re: I'll wait it out.

I'll admit, I'm not a telecoms engineer, I took my info from here which says that adding 5G will increase the power consumption of a typical LTE tower by about 3-5kW. It doesn't sound particularly out of the ball park, but I'll submit to anyone who actually has experience in these things.

The expensive HP printers still seem to have that old HP-'built like a brick shithouse' quality, but the cheaper ones are pretty worthless from what I've found.

Rough rule of thumb, for every £100 you spend, you get an extra year of lifespan (of the HP printer obv, you can't just make yourself immortal by spending money, no matter what certain billionaires would like to believe).

Re: Offensive?

Why not use the left-overs from liposuction? It's not beef or pork, so there won't be any religious problems, and technically it's not an animal product, so the militant vegans shouldn't get annoyed either.

I'm a bloody genius me :)

Re: Corona masking

Especially if the mask was printed to look like the bottom half of, ooo, let's say, Cressida Dick's face.

Re: Human Rights, where Assange is concerned

You link doesn't say anything about 'medical isolation' (isn't that just quarantine?).

The only evidence for the inmates being the reason he was released from solitary comes from the rarely-reliable wikileaks twitter feed, and does beg the question; why would the prison authorities listen to the prisoners?

If the prison governor is going to listen to the inmates, then that suggests a level of compassion that is unlikely, and also that they would have moved Assange out of solitary anyway. It's almost as if they took two events (Assange being sent to the medical wing, and the prisoners complaining), and said that one caused the other with no evidence other than wishful thinking.

Re: Adversarial attacks

I suppose you could have an 'accidental attack', perhaps if a leaf had got stuck to a road sign, making it look like it said '80' (for example).

But yes, it is a bit of a tautology.

Re: Judgement

Too many different lobbies throwing money at politicians?

Well you didn't think they worked for you did you?

Re: "The repayment of these fees will enable us to invest in the country's digital...

They are investing. Of course they do seem to all be investing in 5G in city centres, rather than filling in blackspots in the countryside, but coverage is actually something that mobile networks in the UK compete on. (This may confuse US readers, who aren't used to competition in telecoms).

Re: Newton - MessagePad

For me it's been a dogsend

I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but it made me giggle.

Re: "as your mum once told me"

"Unfortunately my old work won't let me take the keyboard and mouse I've used for 3 years even though I know it will get chucked in storage and never used again."

Make friends with the IT flunky in charge of chucking your keyboard, and I'm sure they'll ensure it gets chucked into a waiting bag...

It's not possible in all circumstances, but companies like Vodafone and Talktalk don't manufacture their own modems, they just buy them from other companies and slap their own branding on.

So, sometimes, the (eg) Vodafone router you received, is just a re-badged Huawei unit, and you can just flash the default firmware to get a non-vodafone device.

Or you might end up with a bricked modem that Voda refuse to support, you takes your chances...

Re: Don't let the swamp dry out

"the other guys who did the same thing"

citation needed

Re: How to spot the couples headed to divorce court?

You're dating the wrong people.

One of my friends made it into Ikea, grabbed the item she wanted, and was back at the car within eight minutes. On a Sunday.

Re: CPUs? Apple stopped making servers even though there was a demand

"though the user's files would need to already be in the cloud"

What, and give Apple a chance to charge them for that storage? Yep, I can see them doing that.

I usually start to type rm -r /blah/blah, then realise what I'm doing and put a 'z' at the start, so it reads zrm -r ..., so even if I accidental hit enter, no harm will befall me. Hopefully.

Of course, the other day I ran an rsync with the --dryrun flag. Those paying attention will notice that it really should have been --dry-run. Fortunately it gave me a syntax error instead of running.

Re: You have (the right) to remain silent

It sounds like he's using his own money, and doing it in his own time, so it's really nothing to do with his employer.

Of course, if he did something like, (eg), using the company private jet to fly out there, that would be a different matter.

If your boss wants to be a scumbag on his own time, there's nothing you can do. Except quit and go work for someone you do respect of course.

Re: "being a Windows component that is tied to Windows versions more of a possibility"

Video drivers are one of the few hardware drivers still pretty deep into the kernel, so it's not totally surprising they need a reboot (my AMD drivers do most of the time at least). Similarly, if you want proper support for recent Intel integrated-graphics in Linux you're going to need an up to date kernel, so it's not like any other platform has definitively solved that issue.

Re: Expect the biggest fire sale ever

Now down to ~€60

I worked at a shitty PC builder (fuck you Evesham Micros!) and IIRC we weren't paid for the 30s it took to be searched on the way out.

Mind you, most of that thirty seconds was spent chatting to the guard, who would take one look in our bags and let us past, ignoring the bulging pockets of many of the staff.

I think management there thought that a 15% 'wastage' level was normal, for some reason. A box of MP3 players would be delivered, and be almost empty by the evening, despite no orders coming in...