Posts by phuzz

Re: The spectre of Charles De Menezes has no face...

British Prime Ministers have been proving for a while that gender is no barrier to being an arsehole.

Re: "Buying" a ticket is a classic money laundry method.

Or you could put $4000 into a London bank and have a clean $4000.

I'm not sure why you got a downvote for this, apart from assuming that a bank wouldn't charge as many fees as possible on any transaction. For what it's worth HSBC were charging approximately 20% to launder money.

Of course, HSBC got caught and got fined $1.9 billion, which sounds harsh, until you realise that all charges were dropped in exchange for just five weeks worth of profits. Too big to fail and too big to jail.

Backhoe is Americanish for the rear digger on a JCB

They're also known as 'cable finders', because if you're not sure where your fibre connection is buried, the digger putting in an unrelated pipe will almost certainly find it (and destroy it).

Re: "5G will hopefully fix it"

From TFA:

However, the current 5G specification does not require this security feature as mandatory, but leaves it as optional configuration parameter.

So lazy/cheap operators aren't going to enable this, plus a stingray type device is obviously not going to enable this, making a downgrade attack easy.

(Well, easy if you've got a few grand's worth of gear, but what costs $4k today will be $400 in a few years time.)

Just pick something easy like 12345.

You can't use that one though, that's my PIN.

Re: No chain of trust?

From TFA:

"Since the master Gentoo ebuild repository is hosted on our own infrastructure and since GitHub is only a mirror for it, you are fine as long as you are using rsync or webrsync from gentoo.org," Warner said."

So yeah, there's a chain of trust, unless you chose not to follow it and to download from Github instead.

Re: Ticketmaster / Live Nation

I can't remember the last time I bought something via Ticketmaster, but I assume they're still charging you loads for a ticket, and then adding mandatory booking fees and then postage fess on top of the price?

Funny how my local ticket shop gets away with just charging a few quid for postage, with no booking fee at all.

Support your local venues, support your local ticket shops.

A lot of people in the UK don't have landlines these days. Although the people that do tend to be older, and as you point out, they're often the most at risk from scams.

I should probably look at getting one of those phones for my folks...

"In that case at 235M X 35M we really don't want to upset the owners."

Or we could try selling them an oil tanker or two, they're probably the right size...

You don't need to cover your whole face, just a few strategically placed sections to throw the computer off.

For example.

Possibly makeup that only showed up under IR, would mean you could look normal to humans, whilst confusing cameras.

Re: Phone cameras

Same here, I'd be happy with a phone that was, eg 15mm thick (my current one is about 10mm) and that used all that 5mm to cram in more battery (and possibly a better camera lens).

I know I'd be happy with a 15mm phone because I used to own phones that were much thicker than that (an original 3310 was 20mm thick for example).

Re: Fgs

"Sorry, but I don't believe in a benevolent God, nor in a benevolent EU."

Instead you believe that the rest of the world will be benevolent.

At least with the EU we know we're going to get, for example, contracts to build Galileo satellites because we're helping to pay for it. There's not much chance of getting a contract to build GPS or Beidou satellites, and that low chance doesn't go up if we leave the EU.

Re: We need gunlaws like in the US to fight crime

I'm not sure why everyone has jumped from "murder rates are (possibly) increasing" to "I need to defend myself from random criminals".

The statistics are pretty clear on this, across all countries; you're most likely to be murdered by someone close to you. A pissed off spouse, a jealous sibling, a jilted lover, these are the people you should be wary of, not a hypothetical burgler.

And if you keep a gun in your house, guess what you're likely to be murdered with?

Re: GDPR?

Presumably the argument is that if you buy the printer, and hand out print-outs, then it's you spreading your own personal information. Perhaps you could sue yourself?

Re: Many things but not a traitor to the US

"That never prevented American-born Irish William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) being executed as a traitor by Britain, despite never having been British."

He had had a British passport (which he'd lied about his nationality to get), and the court decided that that made him a British citizen and thus a traitor. He appealed but was turned down, so legally yes he was a British citizen, as far as the British judicial system of the time was concerned.

Re: ROFL

"Hands up how many of you run a separate (secure) router INSIDE of the ISP provided one that does get upgrades?"

We did, until an obscure bug in the Virgin (not-so)Superhub would drop our connection every fifteen minutes until we took it out of modem mode and removed the proper router.

It's probably fixed not, maybe I should have another go at setting it up.

Re: Bah!

You know, if the wall went along the Canadian border as well, and then down both coasts, all finished off with a big roof right over the top, then I think the rest of the world might happily chip in. As long as there's no doors left.

"HMRC ... is developing a new process which will be operated on the basis of the explicit consent of the customer."

And how will that work?

".. if you do not wish for your voice ID to be recorded, please hang up now"

Yep, that'll be really helpful when you need to get your taxes sorted.

Re: disappointed...

I was surprised by how many recruitment agencies had picked up my CV from somewhere, and were sheepishly sending me GDPR emails, asking pretty-please could they keep my data. My 'unsubscribe' finger got a lot of work out (not that I subscribed in the first place).

Re: Not quite the end of the month....

If you're only introducing one bug per version, then you're doing pretty well.

Re: Why blockchain?

I think you might have actually hinted at the answer to your own question.

As we know, Microsoft prefer to use their own products in house. I'm guessing someone at MS had a bright idea for a blockchain based accounting system (based in the cloud for added buzzwordiness), and they looked around the company until they found a problem that it could be bodged into solving.

In this case it happened to be the Xbox royalties division who got to be the guinea pigs.

Re: Another standard?

It looks like you could bodge-fit one into a current M2 slot, depending on the components around it.

Re: PDF can be cool... if you stay away from Adobe

Wait, wasn't it PoC||GTFO who produced a PDF, that also functioned as a valid NES ROM that would display the MD5 sum of itself?

Oh, yes it was:

Technical Note: This file, pocorgtfol4.pdf, is a polyglot valid as a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) ROM cartridge, a PDF document, and a ZIP archive. We collided 9,824 MD5 block pairs to place the hash of this document on its front cover and the title screen of the NES game, but only 609 of them made it to the final release.

That's damn impressive.

(source)

Re: 2 points here

"Because there are profits to be made spotting asteroids?"

Well, if you're into mining them, the ones that are already heading at the Earth will be easy to fly to (and hopefully re-direct).

That said, the only private entity I know of currently tracking asteroids is the B612 Foundation, but they're a non-profit just trying to keep us all safe.

Re: Avoidance

"the UK's has been awash with asylum seekers who typically use this device to get into the country, fail their application [...] and just disappear."

In 2017 26,000 people applied for asylum, of those, the majority (14,000) were granted asylum. There's doesn't seem to be any hard statistics on what happens to people who's claims are denied, but in 2017 almost 27,000 people were detained, so it's unlikely all, or even most, people who fail to successfully claim asylum, manage to "just disappear".

(source and on an IT note, it seems the government provides it's figures in .ods format, rather than .xls. Who knew? Other source)

Re: Hand Off My Internet

"The Internet and World Wide Web are [...] a decentralised, mesh based network,"

It might look that way from a distance, but when you look closer you'll see that generally internet connections are star shaped networks, with an ISP having all their customers connecting to them, and only a small number of routes out. Likewise, most links between cities and countries all come together in peering exchange points, and of course submarine cables tend to follow similar routes, and land at the same places.

For these words of mine to reach you, most of the way they'll be travelling over corporate owned networks and systems, only the last few meters are somewhat 'free'.

Re: Perfect for my home lab

We had a bunch of what were supposed to be (and looked like) genuine HP Gen8 caddies, but the drives we put in them were never detected. Which is odd because there doesn't seem to be much in the way of electronics in them. Complaining to the seller got a new batch which looked identical, but did work.

Re: Pooh to intelligence sharing

What's the betting that most of the hops used in British ale are either imported, or picked by immigrants?

Re: Let's not forget...

LineageOS already has triggers that you can set to turn on different profiles. Eg, when my phone connects to the wireless at work, it switches to the 'Work' profile which silences the ringer. I'm not sure if that's a default Android thing, or something Lineage have developed (often good ideas from the open source ROMs get integrated back into vanilla Android, just look at the quick settings dropdown)

Re: What does 'licensing support' mean

I assume it's the 'friendly name' for their license enforcement division.

Speaking of which, you read the article with both eyes, however your license only allows for single-eye reading, so Oracle are going to have to fine you. Oh, and once they fine you you still have to pay to upgrade your license for binocular reading.

Yes, but the important part was knowing exactly which component to switch off.

Re: Hmm

Who's to say that Crapita won't turn out to be designated 'too big to fail'? (I guess it depends how many ministers have cosy positions there lined up). We might end up paying even more for their losses.

Re: How would ID cards prevent anything?

"Introduction of an ID card would not have prevented the Windrush debacle, it would have forced it to happen sooner"

It might have happened sooner, but even if we had ID cards, under the current 'hostile environment' I could imagine the Home Office going back through old applications and revoking ID from people who got them through perceived 'loopholes'.

Re: Donate

"They removed segregation from schools because it didn't benefit anyone."

Turns out sometimes kids learn better in single sex classrooms (but still within a mixed school). They tried it for some subjects at my brother's school and did see an increase in GCSE grades (and this was 20 years ago).

I still feel that schools as a whole should be mixed though, after all academic subjects are only part of what you learn at school.

Re: What do I need to specify on my next motherboard?

We've been using them in £200 Intel NUC machines (eg), so they're very much not an expensive enterprise product.

That's why I'm glad they're introducing a 120GB model, because for a small desktop you only really need about 30GB of space (120GB models are still only £25).