* Posts by TheVogon

3511 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2013

Use ad blockers? Mine some Monero to get access to news, says US site

TheVogon

Re: How about

"Just not the cryptocurrency of choice for all the fraudsters out there. Anything but Monero."

Last time I checked, there were things called exchanges where you could easily convert crypto currency so the choice of starting point is fairly irrelevant..

TheVogon

Re: How about

Or just block the ad block blocker.

Kentucky gov: Violent video games, not guns, to blame for Florida school massacre

TheVogon

"And what about those recent deliberate crowd rams using cars and trucks?"

Easier to dodge than a hail of bullets at least. And less likely to be fatal.

TheVogon

"Not trolling but when you have a larger population these things are bound to happen"

So why doesn't it happen in say China then?

TheVogon

Re: What a load of Trump...

"Legislation won't make most of them go away. "

You could try bullet control?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuX-nFmL0II

TheVogon

"Guns sold at gun shows ... have the same restrictions. "

No they don't. And neither do second hand gun sales:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_show_loophole

TheVogon

Re: What a load of Trump...

" Legislation won't make most of them go away"

Australia made guns illegal without a license and reason to own (self defense was not a valid reason), and over a third of their guns were gone in a year and havent had a mass shooting since.

However the best first step would simply be to ban assault weapons. They have no legitimate civilian use.

TheVogon

Re: I know what trump will do

"Isn't that what an NRA spokesperson said after Sandy Hook?"

It's pretty much what the president of the NRA said after Columbine too. Hasn't that worked well?!

TheVogon

Re: What a load of Trump...

"The US culture is largely to blame"

The culture of easy access to guns you mean?

BBC presenter loses appeal, must pay £420k in IR35 crackdown

TheVogon

Re: Really!!

"IT contractors warned to get house in order"

IR35 isnt really an issue for real IT contractors with compliant contracts. HRMC has lost pretty much every case it has tried to take through the courts.

Mobile phone dealer boss faces 12 years in director limbo

TheVogon

It was a limited company. He is not personally liable for the debt.

TheVogon

He should have used the Sponge Bob plan. HMRC wouldnt have bothered investigating for only £20k. Surprised they had the records to go back so far to find the fraud

Magic Leap's staggering VR goggle technology just got even better!

TheVogon

Re: It's, like, snake oil.

But Microsoft have a shipping product in Hololens that you can buy right now in 39 countries. (it's currently £2,700 a pop). V3.0 Hololens hardware is apparently due circa early 2019 with a custom AI processor and double the current field of view so I really cant see a space for Magic Leap unless they produce something better, cheaper and sooner. None of which currently seems likely.

Hyperoptic's overkill 10Gbps fibre trial 'more than a clever PR stunt'

TheVogon

Re: Latency...

"It is Verminmedia, but I use their Hub3 in modem mode only."

Doesnt make any difference. It will still have latency spikes and packet loss.

Corpse! of! Yahoo! drags! emails! of! the! dead! case! to! US! Supreme! Court!

TheVogon

Re: A subject close to my heart

"DaRT 10 supports BitLocker natively in case of encryption."

Uhm thats great, IF you had the required Bitlocker keys...

"Also, (I'm not sure of this) but DaRT may be able to get past Secure Boot as it is a Microsoft product"

Im not sure how you propose that running a modified OS would help, or what you propose to run, but you can simply disable secure boot in the BIOS.

TheVogon

"" I suppose the ideal place to keep it would be on a metallic strip hidden someplace inside your body, retrievable at your autopsy, but even that one might be a bad solution."

Could be fun and games at airport security!

TheVogon

"This assumes that the email was left on the mail provider's servers. Why? "

Because its a legal requirement in many places such as the UK that email and browsing history are kept for at least one year? And anyway many people dont delete read emails or empty deleted items.

TheVogon

Re: A subject close to my heart

"She had a recent Windows 10 notebook, one of those with no discrete hard drive, just flash chips soldered to the motherboard, for which nobody knows the login, so I've been unable to access that at all - due to the EFI BIOS I can't even boot from a USB Drive or Flash stick so that's essentially useless now.

If she stored her various account details on there, we'll never know."

Sorry to hear that. Someone hot on windows might be able to help. EFI Bios doesn't stop you booting from USB. You just need to enable it. If its not encrypted as would likely be the case you can just do a fresh install of windows to access the disk. If it is encrypted then the key gets backed up to OneDrive by default if she logged in via an MS account.

Even if a Bios password is set you can get it cleared at a cost by replacing a chip on the mb in most cases.

Can i suggest you also check all her known emails on haveibeenpwned.com - you might well find some passwords are out there - people mostly use the same or similar everywhere. The underlying lists can be found on bit torrent etc.

And failing that then a company like Vogon (no relation!) will get the data off the disk at a cost.

Hope that helps.

TheVogon

Re: Privacy for the dead but not the living

"Tell me, what is your view of the Microsoft case?"

Microsoft have a security model that can require approval from a local data custodian to release data to offshore company entities and in Germany have even employed a third party for this function so that even if they loose the case in principal they will then have the fall back argument that they dont have access to the data. Not to mention that GDPR will likely be in effect before this case concludes and the penalties are potentially vast up to imprisonment of company officers.

In addition you can "bring your own keys" for Azure and O365 so that Microsoft cant get your data at all even locally. Those keys are stored in Thales HSMs that also dont permit cross region or even cross silo access.

As far as I am aware they are the only cloud provider with such a model.

This is also why the US are trying to create new laws to formalise a right to access such data. They know they will likely loose this case one way or the other. Of course the UK are going along with it under the usual excuses - think of the children, the terrorists, the money launders, etc, but the rest of the EU are unlikely to i think.

Uber and its 245 million reasons to settle with Google's Waymo

TheVogon

Re: Why not kill Uber off question

"Nobody is anywhere close to deploying a self-driving "ride share" vehicle, and progress toward that has stalled."

Such vehicles have already been deployed in a few places. And the technology is moving on all the time. We are only a few years away from commercially deployable Johnny Cabs.

As GDPR draws close, ICANN suggests 12 conflicting ways to cure domain privacy pains

TheVogon

"From what I can see, companies are using enforced consent to meet GDPR. If you visit a page or try to use an online service, they leave an unticked box with "Tick to agree to our terms and conditions" with no option of proceeding without ticking. Somewhere in those terms and conditions is a legalese set of terms to allow them to do whatever they want with your data."

Which still breaches the GDPR. Large fines will soon fix that, dont worry. Their will be a major business of 'ambulance chasing' lawyers around this imo.

TheVogon

"Their policy statement lets you know, up front, what they want to do with your data."

But they need your *explicit* permission to use your data. Not just passive permission from continuing to use their services.

UK worker who sold customers' data to nuisance callers must cough up £1k

TheVogon

I have used Truecaller for several years without issue. Blocks almoat all spam calls and tells me who most of the rest are before i answer.

Truecallers policy says "we would like to state that Truecaller does not sell data, and we follow Google Play and Apple Store policies, meaning we do not upload numbers to make them publicly searchable."

Most likely you installed a similarly named fake app.

Russian-monitoring Shetlands radar station was nearly sold off

TheVogon

Re: Been there!

"but chunks of it are still a holiday lodge"

Presumably no need to use a microwave to warm your food....

A Hughes failure: Flat Earther rocketeer can't get it up yet again

TheVogon

Re: 1,800 feet

Anyway, how do they explain satellites in orbit, how GPS works, how compasses work, that we can measure our rotation relative to the moon, sun and planets, observe them with telescopes, the phases of the moon, and the above point how otherwise could you sail or fly round the planet?!

TheVogon

Re: 1,800 feet

"Hughes estimated he will need to raise about $2m to bankroll his adventure"

You can get a round the world plane ticket for less than £1000. Won't that do?

Dori-no! PepsiCo boss says biz is planning to sell lady crisps

TheVogon

"it would seem ladies also don't like bags of air."

Unless Bulgarian of course.

No Windows 10, no Office 2019, says Microsoft

TheVogon

Re: As soon as Windows 7 support finishes

"Registry keys are equivalent to files, which can also have ACLs and auditing"

Nope - Registry keys are much lower level than a config file in Linux. And you don't get such auditing in Linux without a version control system.

"Most configuration files are stored in the user's home directory meaning the settings are private to that user without doing anything."

Nope - not private - you can't block root accessing anything on a Linux filesystem.

"MS now recommends %APPDATA% is used for desktop software settings and it isn't used in TIFKAM app settings."

MS always gave you the choice for software. Almost all OS configuration is in the Registry and all the advantages above apply. Also it's much faster to parse and far more scalable than text files.

TheVogon

Re: Cold Dead Hand

"Office 64bit is a blessing & a curse"

Office 64 bit is currently for specialist requirements. Microsoft recommend you use 32 bit by default. Hopefully it changes in Office 2019

TheVogon

"Which is a bit inconsistent with news from the very same announcement that Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2018 will land “in the fall of 2018” and get five years of extended support."

No it isn't. The LTSB is for things like kiosks and appliances and Microsoft specifically state that if you need Office then you shouldn't be using Windows 10 LTSB. You should be using the CBB branch.

UK data watchdog whacks £300k fine on biz that made 9 million nuisance calls

TheVogon

Re: And the amount they will actually pay?

Quite probably. However the insolvency service make quite a thing of banning directors of companies that don't pay such fines. The wheels of justice turn slowly but they do turn.

Nork hackers exploit Flash bug to pwn South Koreans. And Adobe will deal with it next week

TheVogon

"You do, you just can't run Edge as Administrator"

No you dont. You don't even have a GUI by default on Server 2016. Or a browser.

TheVogon

Here's how to disable Flash in Microsoft Edge:

Click the menu button in Edge. It's the three dots in the upper right corner.

Select Settings from the menu.

Click the "View advanced settings" button. You'll have to scroll down a little bit to find it.

Toggle "Use Adobe Flash Player" to off.

Dinosaurs gathered at NASA Goddard site for fatal feeding frenzy

TheVogon

"or, in this case, "scaly""

But dinosaurs were feathery ?! Are you confusing them with reptiles?

TheVogon

Re: My eyes are the age of that slab...

"Here's something you might not have known: as the body ages, the muscles in the eye tend to harden"

Whoooooosh. The sound of a Red Dwarf quote shooting way over your head.....

$14bn tax hit, Surface Pro screens keep dying – but it's not all good news at Microsoft

TheVogon

Re: does the replacement trigger a new warranty period?

"one thing I discovered after 3 replacements of my Surface Pro 3 was that the warranty period didn't get reset each time... "

The warranty is only in addition to your consumer rights. You get up to 6 years in reality:

https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/what-do-i-do-if-i-have-a-faulty-product

Trump White House mulls nationalizing 5G... an idea going down like 'a balloon made out of a Ford Pinto'

TheVogon

"It even falls back on the US government's long-held desire to export American ideals to the rest of the globe."

Yes we definitely need lots of gung-ho idiots with unnecessary firearms. And Elon Musk flame throwers.

Firefox to emit ‘occasional sponsored story’ in ads test

TheVogon

Re: Firefox should get money from UK's TV licence...to save it from ads.

"We like Muffin"

Or muff...

TheVogon

Re: Firefox should get money from UK's TV licence...to save it from ads.

"There should be a requirement for Firefox to play the national anthem whenever a tab is closed,"

And to randomly point out in search results facts that Americans are commonly ignorant of such as Brits have the best teeth of any country in the world, broke as an adjective only means out of money, and that anthropomorphic global warming is a thing!

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Tokyo crypto-cash exchange 'hacked' for half a billion bucks

TheVogon

Re: Just VOID the Crypto numbers and redo them

"CryptocurrenciesBearer bonds have historically been the financial instrument of choice for money laundering, tax evasion, and concealed business transactions in general."

Not as much as US $100 bills are.

Cold calling director struck off for ‘flagrant’ breach of duties

TheVogon

"(I don't know if he really is, but it's simple to use a variation on your name on company registrations)"

But it's not so simple to change your National Insurance number that is also required on registrations. Not to mention the 2 years in prison that doing so would possibly incur!

TheVogon

Re: Struck off as a director

"Have you any idea how inconvenient it is to get a partner to set up a business for you? All that form filling and stuff."

Have you any idea how illegal that is on both sides? You can be prosecuted, imprisoned and become personally liable for the company’s debts if you carry out company business on the instructions of someone who’s disqualified.

Sad-sack Anon calling himself 'Mr Cunnilingus' online is busted for DDoSing ex-bosses

TheVogon

Well they do say you are what you eat....

PowerShell comes to MacOS and Linux. Oh and Windows too

TheVogon

Re: " from top to bottom Windows is"

"No. Windows is still mostly a C API"

Some of it, yes, but not mostly.

"which is not object oriented"

You are not understanding how this works. Windows from top to bottom can pass data as objects via it's management interfaces - what the underlying APIs use doesn't matter.

"Powershell requires its wrappers over all of them."

No, it doesn't. You might need a Powershell wrapper to say access a specific database as an object but the Windows OS access is baked in.

"And frankly, I'd prefer to call a COM API than a .NET one."

You don't need to care what it calls if your system supports .Net core.

TheVogon

Re: Poor old MS

"Still trying to remain relevant, no phone OS"

Microsoft are still developing Windows 10 mobile. To run on what is more the question! And we know that Andromeda is coming which will merge Windows Mobile and Windows capabilities so they haven't given up yet.

"a declining user base,"

Nope - Microsoft's user base is still growing.

" and a far smaller set of tech evangelists as they stopped listening and providing TechNet."

That did suck. But people were flogging the license keys on eBay.

TheVogon

"In 10 years (give and take) Windows will be based on a Linux kernel."

Seems unlikely - a modern hybrid microkernel has several advantages. More likely Linux when needed will run as a plugin to the Windows kernel. In fact you can already do that under Windows 10.

TheVogon

Re: No man

"They deliver a complex language without the help"

Erm, no. Just type Update-Help and then Get-Help

TheVogon

Re: PowerShell?

"Powershell is far superior to Bash"

Quite. I seem to recognise that list from somewhere...

Women reboot gender discrimination lawsuit against Google

TheVogon

Re: The Pence Rule

"Where is the outrage that most truckers are male?"

Or that all lesbian porn stars are female?!

CPU bug patch saga: Antivirus tools caught with their hands in the Windows cookie jar

TheVogon
Headmaster

Re: Running AVG

"McAfee however - still broke."

I'm pretty sure McAfee is solvent. Or did you mean broken?