Posts by Pat Harkin

Grauniad and ransomware - not a good combination

There's no way they're ever going to type in the recovery password correctly...

I have a bad feeling about this.

Did we learn NOTHING from Captain Scarlet?

it was triggered by a valid customer configuration change

SET GLOBAL_INTERNET_WORKING=FALSE

Every time I see the word "Theranos"...

...the voice in my head is The Hood from Thunderbirds saying "Kyrano! KYRANO!!!"

Artificial life looking for real life?

Tell me it's called Pinocchio.

"Durham Police’s Harm Assessment Risk Tool"

While I'm sure they want the acronym to be "Durham Police’s HART" which sounds all warm and cuddly, if you read it slightly differently it says Durham PHART.

Just as warm, nowhere near as cuddly.

I should have gone to SpecSavers

I thought your headline was "baulky booster keep ISS nut sacks on the ground"

There was a statement on Russian TV

"We visited only ISS because have read of magnificent 408km altitude. We may have passed near Soyus we do not know where that is. We did not need to drill hole to evacuate novichok as we did not have any."

"NASA has fixed up one of its thrusters"

NASA can fix thrusters 137 million km away and my local car dealer can't fix my car even if I bring it in.

I'd buy NASA next time if they weren't so expensive

'"These could then be picked apart using a combination of statistics and predictable words" to decrypt the contents, he added.'

But not by me, I added.

It's easy to improve security by using this...

....just fill it with wrong usernames and passwords, and use a password vault.

Many moons ago (1975? 1976?) Nat West issued me with an ATM card. It could only withdraw £10, was always retained by the machine to be returned in the post and was protected by a SIX digit PIN.

I wrote an incorrect PIN on it in pencil, just to be evil.

About once every 3 months I'd get a letter from the bank advising me having my PIN on the card was bad practice - but I couldn't tell them it wasn't my pin, because that would up their chances of guessing to 3 in 999,999! We're both less paranoid these days - I don't write PINs on cards and banks reckon 4 digitis in enough.

"The team still haven’t detected any signs of dust or a tail"

Glad to read it isn't drawing a green mist behind it...

How long until...

....we see the first clickbait "Have scientists found proof of homeopathy?"

Isn't this just the equivalent of the pocket dial?

I've received several calls from peoples' pockets over the years but that doesn't seem to have sparked the paranoia this one Alexa report has.

Let's make money...

...by heating the planet! What can go wrong? We'll make our fortunes, cash out and retire to our tropical beachside villa in Reykjavic.

Sample size 1252

Results stated to 2 decimal places of percentages.

No mention of how many students are in the GPA 3.5 and above vs 3.0 and above groups.

Doesn't make clear if 3.0 and above INCLUDES 3.5 and above, or if he means 3.0 to 3.499

No statistics.

Ignore.

I see they went for the easy task...

...of building the furniture, and not the currently insoluble "Get out of IKEA" problem which has defeated all maze solving algorithms.

It took an hour to reboot?

What's are they running - Vista?

Who remembers the Nat West bank mail out to its 2000 wealthiest customers?

"Dear Rich Bastard..."

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dear-rich-bastard/

"The monolith was originally designed as a crystal tetrahedron pyramid beacon, which is mentioned in Clark's The Sentinel. During production it became a large wooden block painted black with a graphite mixture that had to be swaddled in plastic sheeting to keep it free of fingerprints and dust. Why the change?"

I asked Clarke this in the summer of 1975 - he said they're tried transparent but they couldn't get it optically pure enough and it looked terrible and though a tetrahedron sounds good to nerds it doesn't look very impressive in the flesh.

Gosh darn it all to heck.

Just when FaceBook don't do enough, Microsoft go too fudging far.

My god. It's full of...

full of... full.. What are those things? They look like rice grains or something? Gary? Can you see them?

So, they're saying "We're against free porn...

...but we're happy to sell it"?

Thanks a lot NASA!

How the hell are we going to manage First Contact with an alien ship if you can't even talk to one of your own devices from a few years ago?!?!

I'm sorry Dave...

...but the replacement AE35 communications unit does not appear to be functioning. I cannot understand it.

I have a Philips Sonicare which does this

And works with both iPhones and Android. The robo nanny element has certainly improved my morning routine but whether that translates into better dental care remains to be seen.

How common IS this problem?

The Samsung 7 got a dreadful reputation but I never saw an authoritative statement of how many went up and how common this was compared to other brands and models.

I met him once in the late 90s.

I wanted to talk about The Great Egg Race but as soon as he found out I was a doctor, he just wanted to talk about his new implantable defibrillator, of which he was immensely proud! So we talked my shop rather than his - but I enjoyed it greatly and still remember it clearly.

A great communicator. Sadly missed.

"fined roughly $130,000, the cost of fixing the damage."

Considering what he did, that's not a lot of loot. Isn't it only a few weeks or so since we were discussing a malware removal which cost 2.6 million?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/22/it_contractor_logic_bombed_army_payroll/

YouTube? Not surprised.

Sometimes when I watch YouTube I get an urge to cement my head into a microwave instead.

The videos which really annoy me aren't the pillocks like this, it's when I'm trying to find out how to do something - let's say "Bold text in Word" and I get a helpful video which starts off

"Hi! I'm Tad Bratwurst! <Don't care who you are just tell me the keyboard shortcut> Thank's for watching this video <Get on with it> and if you like it, don't forget to subscribe to my channel <Not looking likely Tad> Today I'm gonna show how to bold some text in Word. <Evidence thus far not terribly supportive of that claim, Tad> This is a common problem. I've had lots of friends ask me this <You need a more diverse set of friends>. It's really quite easy and you can do it in less than a second <And yet we're 4 minutes into this video> First of all, you need to have Word installed on your PC.... [Several minutes later] SO as you can see all you have to do is Click File, open your file, press ctrl-F to find your text, drag with your mouse from left to right - some people say right to left works too, I'm not sure, it doesn't always seem to work with this mouse then click Home on the Ribbon, sorry , on the Toolbar, make sure the font face and size are the ones you want, if they aren't I show you how to change them in one of my other MasterClass Videos, and then click the bold icon. Hope you enjoyed that, that's all for today, and don't forget to subscribe!"

Hmm.

"Moreover, would-be dodgy characters don't even need the Cayla or i-Que app installed, because phones simply identify the doll as a hands-free headset."

"The agency said the toys were in breach of Article 1 of the French Data Protection Act, which provides that technology "shall not violate human identity, human rights, privacy, or individual or public liberties"."

Does that mean Bluetooth headsets are also in breach, if they're just the same tech in a different plastic shell?

I can show (via seller) that my family had iPhones but...

how can I show they "kept the default browser security settings and did not opt out of tracking and collation via Google's ad preference manager"?

"the moment the rules are rescinded we will have fast internet lanes for extra dollars – and by extension a slower internet for every not willing to pay a premium."

Isn't that what we have now - and have pretty much always had, right back to "more expensive (voiceline) modems get you faster rates"?