Posts by tiggity 3165 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Oct 2015
In terms of big name browsers
Firefox is good on mobile (as some decent privacy / security add ons), but eats battery and MUST be closed down when not in use if you want your battery to not be hammered.
Opera is OK (unlike desktop the VPN is a separate app on mobile, not inbuilt)
There's plenty of less well known browsers, but as FF does the job for me, I have been idle and not investigated much.
most useful thing would be to legislate to prevent all the pre installed crud (be it telco / handset manufacturer added) being system (and so not removable by non root user) - as most consumers get handsets full of dross installed.
e.g. Facebook often added as system app FFS - I don't use FB and its a total pain to have to root a phone to get rid of an unwanted app plus risk of something going wrong as rooting breaks warranty
I'm sure lots of people are happy at FB by default, great - I understand its popular (and I assume some other pre installed dross), but just make it simple for us (who want a pared down phone) to uninstall junk.
Yes I know there are vanilla phones out there but they are expensive (& I can't justify big bucks on a phone) - and sadly most cheap and cheerful phones come with some amount of non removable dross.
.. and force the manufacturers to give security updates, not treating a "new" phone as something to never get a patch ever. If a phone is being sold then should be patches for at least 3 years after it is last on sale IMHO.
100 grand for over 400K users details
It did not specify how many of those had credit card data (or how detailed the CC data was e.g. obfuscated card (not all digits stored - e.g. just last 4), full card, encrypted (properly), no card details just tokens etc.)
But given the huge amount of time it takes (defrauded person) to resolve card fraud (& problems of getting some fraudulent transactions refunded) then its not a biblical old testament level of punishment
(SO had card physically stolen a while ago so recent experience of how much time spent on phone to bank anti fraud team is requited to get things resolved - it took quite a long time)
I had a car with cruise control but, after trying it a few times, I did not use it afterwards.
It was too easy to lose concentration when the CC was doing the work - not a good idea on a 70 MPH motorway.
Obviously people are different, I'm sure some drivers may be able to stay fully focused with CC doing the work - I can't pull that trick off so avoid CC use.
I would be up for that.
Streets seem to be full of huge cars, bigger than vans used to be years back
With old age creeping up (hence being able to remember vans smaller than modern breeds of Chelsea tractors) it's painful (literally) doing all head turning to manouvere into tight spaces without hitting anything, so self parking would be good
Some of their phones had nasty contact slurpers "system app" pre installed and so (without jumping through rooting hoops) impossible to uninstall thus GDPR illegal as user could accidentally fire them up.
Really needs a big GDPR inspired legal action to stop phone makers / telcos installing junk that cannot be easily removed
(obv rant mainly about android)
Just replaced Snow Leopard with Fedora on old iMac (approx 2007 model I think - Snow Leopard was highest OSX it could run as not enough RAM rec for later versions)
I liked Snow Leopard, but needed an OS that was more up to date (bonus of more recent security patched) as there's only so long you can keep an unsupported OS & browsers going even when you take care to avoid malware
After Win 10 broke parents machine (totally bricked - after W10 reinstall it bricked again later when updating) I installed Linux.
There was no model specific driver for either of their printer / scanners ... but a bit of hacking around gave a workable solution using drivers for other models by same manufacturer
Not perfect (duplex printing would not work but not vital for home use, just an irritant as uses more paper for home use) but better than a bricked PC & no printing (or anything)
No, thats the sort of I'm a skilled coder language use that can be unreadable to someone else.
Long winded loops are easier for someone (who may be less proficient in teh language / from a different language background) to analyse in code review.
Using someone with limited knowledge of a language in code review can be good as it means code has to be very clear and verbose
The mass mailer (I wrote for a club I help run) just sends (same) mail to each user, so bandwidth heavy but no chance of email address leakage. As the membership is only in 3 figures and the mailings are just text then the bandwidth "waste" is not really an issue, but would be if mail numbers were significant
@ Ian Johnston
"Many employers only give sick leave for illness, and using it for elective vasectomy, circumcision, or hysterectomy would be gross misconduct."
There are medically necessary reasons for all those ops.
e.g. vasectomy - 2 partners have genetic predisposition to an illness that would mean stillbirth / best case child lives a few agonsing months / years then dies. To avoid the mental health issues of that then a vasectomy makes sense (lower risk op than female sterilization, potentially reversible)
Circumcision - various nasty infections can necessitate this late in life
Hysterectomy is about the only option for women with severely debilitating endometriosis.
It is in the EU interests to ensure UK gets a really bad, financially & politically shafting deal
This will discourage other countries from leaving & make EU membership attractive as its a nice earner for members (all the intangible benefits of frictionless customs borders etc outweigh the net inward payments to EU by the UK - when Brexit occurs we will see how huge tiose intangibles were).
Thus EU negotiating team giving zero concessions - this was always going to happen (unless you had a brexit fantasy vision) so no surprise.
Mine did not eat brake pads, but then again I drive anticipating situations so emergency style braking is rare & it was fine with standard gentle in advance braking.
Surely all (non leccy) cars have petrol and so can catch on fire? Given all the ludicrous tests cars have to go through I doubt a car with a massive fire hazard would be allowed
Desserts are the biggest "brought in" item for most restaurants, always best to avoid dessert at low priced Italian restaurants as although they will typically do homemade starters and mains, the desserts will be often the same selection as the Italian restaurant down the road from same 3rd party Italian dessert suppliers
Indeed, although Andrew is keen on camera / video info a few lines detailing other features would help e.g.
SD card?
Headphone Jack?
RAM / Processor info
Dual SIM?
Removeable battery?
Android version & chance of updates for longer than a nanosecond
USB C or B to charge
How much unremoveable pre installed crud
Are a fact of life.
There's already software that can be trained on a small amount of speech audio recording and will do a great job of mimicking someones speech so the super advanced speech recog bank system mentioned is on borrowed time
Passport and driving licence details are easily grabbable - e.g. many a young looking person has to flash one or other of those as ID for access to a pub / club
Biometrics are stupid - as article said, if images / videos of people exist then possible to subvert biometrics. I managed to open OHs device (at their request as they were not present and needed some content on it emailng to them & it was not configured for remote access) and had no pin fallback - this involved defeating fingerprint ID system (lots of OH prints around the house to give me raw material to work with).
All you can do is put up decent barriers to your system being broken - and as ever there's the sweet spot of not too much security else people give up using your system as it's too difficult
Indeed, few devs are allowed a blank slate on which to craete code, normally its a matter of starting a psot and slotting into the way of doing things.
A few lucky people may get a new post with sufficient "power" to be able to investigate & radically change things biut most people have to work within the proscribed in house methodologies.
Suggestions on changes often met with that would be nice but deadlines so it will have to wait (and wait, and wait, ad infinitum )
As I'm unimpressed with all the parties I get a "choice" of voting for, some I despise more than others, but in my constituency on voting numbers each election it's essentially a 2 horse race between Lab & Con (as vote share of other parties is negligible) and as there is no form of PR then even if another minority party had a (IMO) great manifesto my vote would achieve nothing.
So, given that brexit is arguably the main political issue of the time, a choice between pro brexit or pro brexit, so not much of a choice on the key issue if you would quite like to have hassle free trade with Europe as that helps pay your wages!
BTW I'm not a lib dem fan either (I do want some form of PR as would like some hope of my views getting reflected, but lib dems shown not to be trusted e.g. coalition with Con & happily binning their pledges on uni fees so pointless to look at their manifesto as they will ditch it to ares lick whoever they coalition with if the chance arises)
I do not want the Sun etc. appearing in my search results, so please News Corp have zero relationship with Google (use robots.txt to stop them spidering any of your websites)
.. and obviously that should apply to all search engine companies - they might all be using iffy algorithms -I use multiple search engines and do not want to risk dangerous (soaraway) sun exposure.
Then there is no need to store peoples details on their system
After all the tickets are expensive enough!
Caveat - I try and avoid public WiFi (free or paid for) as you can never be sure of how secure it is. If I must use it I go in VPNed up to the eyeballs & do nothing sensitive.
@ }{amis}{
Indeed, that is why (Despite MS wanting to kill it) WinForms lives on.
Its fast to change things - and with the ludicrous timescales pointy headed bosses demand in software, the quick to market tools are popular.
I have some superbly elegant MVVM pattern apps - however it always takes me ages to do even minor changes (even thoooough its my own code) compared to legacy quick 'n' dirty winforms code
GPS and accurate maps are IMHO the wrong way to do it.
GPS can fail.
Maps get outdated
Not sure about US / Canada but in UK Motorway / Dual carriageway / restructure you can end up in extreme cases (lots of cones to separate things) using a lane of the "opposite direction" road. A car that throws a wobbly over roadwork induced changed topography is useless.
The only (IMHO) viable solution is car that can create its own internal image of the road layout (taking account of signs, cones, lights etc) - just like people do
.. and if they have to deal with some of the dubious lane markings / instructions on some UK roundabouts, give the AI the ability to cry / scream in frustration.
Their use of maps / GPS is because (as article states) the real time processing to build an internal model is too intensive currently - so wait until the tech is better then!
Still, all a long way off in UK as most of the work going on with US road systems.
A vehicle AI will only be any good when it seamless deals with moving from country a where they drive on left, signs in miles, to country B where they drive on the right, signs in km, lots of signage different e.g. UK person taking car on Eurostar / ferry to France
What they really need is to port winforms stuff to be cross platform - then old full fat apps could be happily ported.
Even some new development on desktop will be full fat as commercial companies with deadlines will be using known tech rather than learning curve of UWP (& UWP far too limited for some seriously complex apps) or the Xamarin WPF approach
Different companies will use different methods to encrypt a password (& ilikely one way i.e. be unable to decrypt it). So any "hashed" data would have to be in a known, unencryptable format and so slightly better than passing raw password around, but still open to attack
Like others I am on on an old FF version so I can still use the addins I want (xul lovelies with no replacemanet in new low functionality chromey style FF addon world ).
The last few years have all seemed to be about alienating users & making it harder and harder to have a secure & customized browser (addon needed for cookie management as they remove fine grained control from native menu system - WTF?)
Theres no point becoming a chrome clone - if I want chrome alike I can install the real thing
@Ben1892 I'm without any original docs (from birth cert through to exam results, the all got destroyed in a building fire)
So original docs can be lst.o
I'm OK as I was born here - so could get copy of birth cert if needed, but I would be screwed if I was a Windrush person (or if I was offsppring of windrush legal who had no papers). Never assume legal docs will not be lost / destroyed by someting beyond someones control
@Phil O'Sophical
Women can have kids wth donated eggs so zero genetic link there.
Adoption - zero genetic link, but parent(s) are legally resposnible for that child.
If someone marries a person who has young kids they typically accept their share of legal rfesponsibility for those unrelated kids.
So, DNA often irrelevant, thus it was discriminatory (not even going into areas of 2 men having kid via surrogate to add more complex example's of zero mother)
I would say no to ZTE for no other reason that they CBA to provide android updates for lots of their phone models.
Wnen you have your fingers in lots of pies, irritating someone at trivial level of a mobile phone may impact other purchases (irrespectivof security issues) - just like Sony CD rootkit made lots of people boycott Sony hardware
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