Posts by I am not spartacus

Re: Not TeamViewer's fault

"Speaking directly to The Register and in announcements to customers, TeamViewer has denied that the crime spree is due to any compromise of its own servers. Rather, it claims, the victims of the attacks had reused their TeamViewer login passwords on other websites that have been breached, such as LinkedIn and Tumblr. Armed with copies of those leaked passwords and email addresses, TeamViewer claims, thieves then log into people's TeamViewer accounts and access connected PCs."

Did they ever produce the slightest shred of evidence that their position on how this happened is correct? Did anyone ask them to (and it seems like an oversight if journalists were to interview them on this, and just take their assertions at face value)?

(And the 'denying the compromise of its own servers' part: had anyone asserted this, or was this just TV's straw man?)

Or is it ' this is a convenient thing for us to believe, so we are believing it...whatcha mean evidence? Of course we don't need evidence. We've got an explanation that suits us.'

Re: What derision?

As long as their HQ isn't somewhere rather irritating like Huawei Way, I'm minded to let them off.

Re: hardly a firewall

Seriously, though, it us exactly a firewall.

What has happened is that people have got used to all sorts of non-primary functions being built in to domestic firewall products and have started mistaking them for what a firewall has as its primary function.

Raises questions about the procurement process, and who worked out the specification and what was in it. I suspect it was really inadequate, and the actual firewall does what is specified, but that could be wrong.

Mind you, I'm not sure how you can spend that much on a firewall, even if you try to spend to the max. Even if you are the gubmint...

Re: 20,000 unread emails

That way it will appear as if they have been busy at work while the rest were slacking off for xmas.

Err

That way their e-mails will appear buried in an enormous pile of fetid festive 'offers', and the odds against anyone ever reading beyond the title are really quite long. And, in advanced cases, any tricky questions that later come up can be referred to 'the e-mail that I sent you that you could never be bothered to read'.

Optional

"Oh well - whatever happened to devices having an ethernet port :(

It really has come to something when this fits in to the general category of 'Grumpy old git/technophobe response' (and, I'm not sure whether you would count that perception as undesirable, but that is how I read it).

Re: I agree...

"That sort of ignorance is still culpable of course.

Exactly, although 'our engineers will do the impossible by next Wednesday' is worse.

Re: The affair is far from "largely concluded"

"I wouldn't, it's not difficult...

"All they need to do for lower NOx is increase fuelling at low power output to cool the combustion, that is what Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) does. A simple engine remap will fix that, perhaps with a tiny (< 1%) fuel consumption penalty.

Well, I think that you are underestimating things slightly. For the medium-sized VW diesel engines, I believe that there are two categories; the larger cars have the 'AdBlue' system for NOx control, and the smaller ones, Exhaust Gas Recirculation.

As far as I am aware (and it may just be that I am not sufficiently aware) the AdBlue cars don't have the EGR hardware, so being a bit more generous with the EGR would not be an option here, but it doesn't have to be. They would use more of the urea liquid, and it would need more topping up (so, in between service intervals, for those who have been able to stretch it to scheduled VW visits, so far). This shouldn't affect fuel consumption or CO2 materially.

For the cars that use an EGR system currently, EGR would have to be used a lot more. This would be such a significant change to the calibration that they would really want to repeat much of the qualification testing (eg, environmental extremes, behaviour with poor quality fuel...even electromagnetic compatibility) but they'll probably find excuses not to do everything while taking long enough to actually do it.

This will affect CO2, potentially,, and fuel consumption (and, even if it didn't, there will be howls of pain from drivers who claim that it does, even if they have only been taking any serious notice of consumption since the scandal broke). I'd estimate the potential fuel consumption impact at a bit more than your 1%, but still not gross.

Optional

"I kid you not. It has been added to our mandatory training, completion of which determines our annual increment. If we don't wash our hands correctly we don't get a pay rise.

"You couldn't make it up.

Hmmm, before I even got to your post I did think that someone from the NHS or other healthcare organisation will be along with their tale of how realistic this is, how the current training is given badly, and how people (probably secretaries with little frontline medical involvement) are being sacked for either not going to the training, or not taking it sufficiently seriously.

So, I claim I could have made it up (the 'pay rise' bit is better than my 'sacking' idea, but it is close). On the other hand, it isn't something I'm proud of. I made this up out of contempt for the modern world, and all that passes for management within it, and it is very troubling to be even that close.

"That is the sort of attention to detail (and I see signs of more of the same all over the car) that commands my respect and loyalty....

And it does that in the face of the evidence that VW's popular reputation for reliability is significantly overblown? That is, in spite of all the technical gallimaufry that VW does to make a reliable car, really, they don't.

" ...but I'm absolutely convinced all major players either do something similar or do some entirely different but equally unsavory other stuff.

I would say no: I would say that all manufacturers get close to the edge when approaching this kind of test and all do things that most of the general public would consider slightly beyond the pale when it comes to fuel economy numbers, but the VW thing is of quite a different order.

Going over limits by 15 - 40x really is quite a thing, and then, on being caught, trying to get away with the 'You've measured it wrong' defence is a bit staggering, and then, when it was very apparent that they were bang to rights not preparing a fix, in the twelve - eighteen months that they had, is incomprehensible.

Re: Let me be the first to say...

I think when it came to the big funeral bash, where the choristers would have normally been equipped with a single candle holder in each hand, on this occasion, they were given double candle holders, so each Chorister was....oh, you are ahead of me!

Re: ARM did it!

Apart from the upvote,, for being generally correct:

"I'm sure that adding multiply would have improved benchmark results, but you can't argue that it is also useful in real applications."

I can argue that it would be useful. I want to multiply two numbers. A multiply instruction would be useful for that. There is a multiply instruction. That's useful.

QED

Re: I'll make your own Wikipedia with

"Any dissident Kazakhs would be very foolish to expose their real names by editing Islambekov's articles."

In that circumstance you are absolutely correct; the only outcome can be a bias towards the forces in power with whatever local opposition not choosing to give the regime a handy list of those to be disappeared. Ex-pat opposition might have a go, up to a point, but it would still be a bias.

One thing find a little disturbing is how few Wiki articles that you see with a 'this side claims this, that side claims the opposite thing' kind of tone. You'd probably expect all of politics and the contested parts of science (say, climate change, evolution, particularly from those who claim that they haven't), religion, whole swathes of history to be all of that nature and they're just not.

Re: "that total fuckwit Teresa May"

I would rather consider that the, in your words, "*almost* total fuckwit Teresa May", hasn't so much seen sense, as seen the opportunity to grab a minor advantage against Boris 'the Buffoon' Bunter in a forthcoming leadership spat.

If the Camerooney sticks to his pledge of not standing for PM again, that seems to imply a Toady leadership bash by the end of this parliament, at the latest. May, Johnson and Osborne seem to be the lead contenders (Davies a possible outsider), so I feel both trepidation and incredulity at the prospect. I mean, how could a party line up such an unattractive bunch of zomboid mutants as the prime choices for an important role? Makes Labour, whose selection looked initially weak, seem like a glamour contest.

I'm quite happy to contemplate Davies seeing sense, in spite of being from a different part of the political spectrum. He may be a little bit to the right of sensible, from my perspective, but not without intelligence. May, however, is a completely different kettle of kippers. Evil, but effective, I would say.

Re: diesel

I know that there is a case that I'm missing the point, and I know that it isn't what you immediately think of, but my main question was 'Is the diesel any good?'. (Any good being primarily, does it clatter like an FX4 taxi, and does it just waft you along on a wave of torque?)

Probably a bit sad to be more interested in those than in 0 - 60 times and gorgeous curves and detailing, but I don't think I'll be buying one, either way. But, the way these things have traditionally depreciated, who can tell?

Optional

"You may find it easier to have the Tories as nasty and Labour or whoever as a paragon of virtue, but it doesn't in any way reflect reality.

Nastiness is not so much the issue, so much as 'Would you be ashamed to admit it?'; many people will divide this in to different sub-groups, 'Would I be ashamed to admit it to my neighbours?', 'Would I be ashamed to admit it to my work colleagues?', 'Would I be ashamed to admit it to my friends?', and so on, and give different answers to the different questions, but the fact is that if you would be ashamed to admit it, there has to be some chance that you would suppress the shaming fact in a poll response.

"I'm a Conservative voter ( of the socially progressive, libertarian, small state variety ).

While it may not be relevant, when I re-read this response, it sounds to me like 'I'm an Apatosaur, one of the most socially progressive and least Euro-sceptic, of the Dinosaurs'. allowing that there is a degree of misrepresentation here, maybe you feel that dissembling or suppressing the response now has its attractions?

Re: Surely this article is a joke

"What will the fossil record show of us in 10,000 years?

I don't really know, but if there is someone around to interpret it, I'm sure they'll misinterpret it. You know "Plugging their sleeping pods into the electricity supply only confirms that they worshipped electricity as a god, because it symbolised a healing cult (or something)".

Yes, this thing is handily ahead of the older 'Moto E', but the 2015 version has had a bit of a makeover, and now it isn't as clear as it was.

All cheap Androids are a bit marginal on the Camera side, and the 'E' is more marginal than the 'G'. But, if you are in the 'Cheap Android' department because you don't care about the camera, that may not be a factor.

The processor in the cheaper model is slightly better and the display is worse.

So, the thing that I missed from this review was the 'decent cheap phone, but is it worth the extra cost over the Moto E, 2015' aspect, which seems to be one of the more interesting questions.

Re: Neil Barnes Switching off phones does not disable built-in GPS functionality

There is hot start, warm start and cold start.

Cold start, where you don't know which satellites to look for takes - relatively - ages. Better is to already have an idea of which satellites are likely to be there. If you have an approximate idea of position, from either last lock (you may have been moving, and the satellites certainly have been) or by triangulation, or even known locations of WiFi signals, then you can get close to the hot start times.

Re: "We fully comply with the law"

...or the law is horribly broken.

I can't say that I fully agree with that. What I think is most likely is:

"We've got a room full of experts, and we've found a loophole in the law, or maybe a surprising use of technology, or even of the English language, and, provided that we are very careful with the exact words that we use, we can give you the impression that we are fully in compliance with the intent and the letter of the law, while only actually complying with one of the above. Or maybe even with something our legal eagles tell us is strictly allowable, but with which no one else agrees. Whatevs."

Of course, you might argue that, in practice, that is the same as 'horribly broken', but we have to be quite careful with wording here.

Re: Astouded!!

"Read up on the principle of the 'Divine rights of Kings'.

You see, you can't both believe in the Divine Right of Kings and the Magna Carta principle that the King is subject to the law (err, particularly if you think that the MC was confirmed by at least a couple of Kings, even if one did have his fingers crossed behind his back when he signed up).

Chas I was a bit of a pillock, and he wouldn't have to have been a lot more reasonable to defuse the situation. Being reasonable wasn't in his nature, though.

Now, to make a slightly strained analogy with the current situation, being reasonable with personal privacy (and formalising it, in some kind of statement of rights) would be a big step forward.

Re: TalkTalk

"As a TalkTalk customer who has had one of the scam phone calls I can say that the spammer did not have the customers bank details until they asked for them when the wanted to upload a fake program to the customers computer. What the spammer did have was the customers name, address and most disconcerting of all, the customers TalkTalk Account number which they quoted to the customer without being asked for it.

That corresponds to my experience of the scammer, almost exactly. On the three occasions, in rapid succession, that they called, All I had to do was to go out of my way to neither do nor say anything more than the absolute minimum required (Q:'Can you turn on your Windows PC', A: 'No, I can't do that, currently') and they either gave up or hung up on me.

Now, for a combination of reasons, I have left TalkTalk and the calls have stopped. I can only suspect that the scammers probably have more of a direct connection with TalkTalk than they would like to admit, as me leaving them seems to have stopped the calls, and I can't see how someone who only nicked their customer list once would know that (or care).

Optional

"Android is also facing the other Windows fate: being judged by old versions of its own software. Microsoft did itself no favours by continuing to support XP into 2014: likewise, many Android users are stuck with Jelly Bean (or even Gingerbread) with no chance of future upgrades.

Yeah, but to an extent Microsoft did support XP. More-or-less timely (often less) bug fixes and security enhancements. Not seen much sign of Google coming out with security fixes for Gingerbread and them being rolled out to the phones. Not seen much sign of Google making it easy to upgrade a Gingerbread phone to something that is 'supported'.

So, in the Google ecosystem, the user is also damned if they do (to the extent possible) and damned if they don't. While it is also true that a large percentage of Android security problems are due to apps that are over-promiscuous (so you can be under-promiscuous? oh, well) with permissions, this is also a problem, and Google need to fix both problems.

The phone hardware manufacturers quite like this situation, of course. Phones become buggy/malware ridden before their time, and so they sell replacement phones more frequently, but, at some point, this casualness will come back to bite Android sales, and then there will be a real panic to fix it.

@Andrew Orlowski

"Android’s biggest problem in 2015 won’t be Apple, but competition authorities. And strategy, policy and regulatory issues are increasingly defining the landscape. I’ll deal with these in another story.

No, it won't. It'll be the users. At some point, the users will rebel, unless Google fixes the issues first. Right now, it hasn't happened because it is difficult to see where users would go instead.

Apple? Cost. Well, and buying in to being a ***** with an iPhone (other derogatory references are available). Tizen, Firefox? Insufficient apps, range of phones, not much presence in retail outlets. Not an established platform. Windows? Close, but it is still something to do with the hated Microsoft (with whom people will deal when it is a necessity, but here it isn't). But, it wouldn't take all that much for there to be enough of a change that one of the other options starts looking attractive, and then Android could get quite a kicking and quickly.

Let me just say that I like Android in many ways, but you can see the clouds on the horizon, and this stuff will take time to fix, so Google needs to be working on it now (or, if they want to do it properly, six months ago).

Re: A car key I have to recharge every day?

That BMW vuln is an issue, but is it so much worse than being able to open a BMW using half a tennis ball (which was a feature of rather earlier BMWs)?

After all, arguing to the plod that you are carrying around a tennis ball (pre-cut, or not) for non-nefarious reasons, is probably easier than a similar argument for a computer loaded with 'cracking' software.

Re: Why the fuck ...

Well, at least that's broadly plausible.

I came here (the comments section) to find out what the story was actually about - without knowing why the 'names in space' thing was going on, it is impossible to assess the risks in someone subverting the process.

So, a plausible story is 100% more than I felt that the original author gave me. Make your own decision about whether that is significant.

Ah, but did she die in vain?

Re: Interesting phone but not original

You may have a very valid point about how LG deals with their customers, or at least it is a point of view that I have heard before for TV products. On the other hand, development will have started on this phone at least 18 months ago, and at that time, LG will not have had intelligence about what OPPO was going to do.

Optional

"If they are under 18 they can't be on the internet because they wouldn't have been able to sign a contract with an ISP.

I believe that you are thinking of the wrong problem. With the coming of the 'Internet of things, wearables dept' this problem will only get worse, but it is already here.

Assuming that the person in question has a phone, they are trackable. Now there are certain limitations, and some smartphone features make this easier, but the bottom line is that having a phone is enough to do some tracking, in some circumstances. Now, various things like smart watches could well make the problem more severe, but the problem is - potentially - here, and it isn't clear what is going to make it go away.

So, what could possibly go wrong? Well, I think the first thing that comes to mind to most parents is some very undesirable character following their kids around, and while that is one aspect, it isn't the only one.

Right now, all the bits probably exist for Supermarket B to know whether you have been to Supermarket A and to give you offers (or not) on that basis. That's a bit creepy, but probably isn't going to worry anyone too much. What about something that identifies you as having been at the scene of the crime, in the way that the street cameras can? Well, you might not have too much objection, if there was regulation that ensured that the data could only be used properly, in the way that you might have similar feelings with street spy cameras.

And, of course, everyone's favourite, speeding offences! For fixed road speed cameras, the government has a least done a job on making the conditions of use of the devices 'reasonable'; here there are no regulations, so a Police Force could use them in any way they wanted. I can think of a couple of circumstances where they could produce a likely-sounding accusation against a train user for exceeding the road speed limit, if the system were not set up sensibly. You might think '...but then I'd go to court...', but you'd probably be underestimating the degree of hassle involved in this, particularly if Plod was just doing this to make your life a misery.

Re: the difference between

I'm sorry to make what seems to be the obvious answer, but:

" "Proper" banks also benefit from centuries of learning from the school of hard knocks."

...and that has helped them a lot recently, hasn't it? Without that particular benefit, you could really see bankers being disliked, couldn't you?

"So they have lots of checks and balances in their system to ensure accountability."

"It isn't fobbed of on "the mathematics" or some other such nonsense."

Well, some of the recent crash was fobbed off on the mathematics, but I'll accept that it wasn't, in reality, the primary factor, even if it was an early, common, excuse. Well, actually two, or more, excuses if you count the US sub-prime usage, the viability guarantees for banking institutions (since revised), Lehmann Brothers, mortgage lending guidelines (since revised) and probably others that my fuddled brain is too weary to bring back (there was also some computer modelling of share price movements that wasn't adequately robust, wasn't there? You know, the kind of modelling that works except for when there are exceptional share falls, which then got caught out when there were exceptional share price falls - no one could have seen that coming, could they?).

Of course, there are some examples that you might write off as just 'bad luck', if you didn't expect financial institutions to be competent, and that, at the moment, looks like too far a stretch. I mean, it just looks like 'bad luck' that all of the major Scottish banking institutions had become maniacally risk-tolerant just when it became obvious to even a dunderhead that good times weren't just around the corner, 'bad luck' that a major Building Society got so overstretched that it nearly caused a widespread run on the banks, bad luck that one of the largest mutual institutions couldn't find a director who could be relied upon to know how many beans make six.

"It accounts for humans being fallible and in some instances corrupt, and the fact that any entity that holds large quantities of easily transportable wealth tend to attract the attention of the most corrupt in society. "

Fallible human beings and greed were big factors, but again I'll have to accept that corruption wasn't, particularly, to the fore. Greed though, greed would be another matter and, bad as corruption is, it is hardly bad enough to make greed seem glorious by comparison.

"And yes, some of that learning is that governments will enforce some of those learned lessons on "proper" banks because even "proper" banks would sometimes prefer the bad taste from the learning event were forgotten."

A lot of that learning seems to be susceptible to selective memory once the people who would like the rules relaxed are in possession of loads of money (They are bankers, so they will be, won't they?) and are big contributors to the tax system. Once you pay - directly or indirectly - for a few hospitals to be built, it gets difficult to ignore your wishes (Think of the Children!). It may be the job of government to resist 'bad' pressure, but that doesn't mean they'll do it.

Even though bankers were in receipt of much opprobrium, governments generally didn't come out looking squeaky clean. Some governments worse than others, of course, but I fail to bring to mind many with reputations (eg, reputation for prudence, an early paramour of one Gordie Bruin, oddly) burnished by the crisis.

There really was enough blame to go around.

Honestly, I accept your major point that trusting 'Scamcoin Enterprises Inc' is not something you can take lightly, but the 'serious' banking establishment has been covering itself with something recently, and it doesn't seem to have been glory.