Posts by Number6

Re: The single biggest problem with turbulence

Turbulence can hit without warning, and if you've got the trolley in the aisle when things start getting bumpy, wedging it in place might be the best you can do.

Re: OK, I'll bite

Sunny California uses the driver's licence (-se?) as official ID. Those who don't drive can get an equivalent official ID from DMV if they want to. Quite a few places ask to see it, often if you're making a large purchase with a credit card, but it's not the intrusive thing that would have been the UK ID card. You hand over your credit card (or swipe it yourself, or occasionally put it in the chip-reader slot) so they already know who you are, then they ask to see ID, so you show then your licence, which looks official and the photo looks vaguely like you, and that's it. No logging into a surveillance database that you bought such and such an item at a store, it's very low key and there seems to be no push to make it worse.

Now, if the UK had started along those lines they could probably be introducing their huge database around now.

Easy - wave a magnet near it, if it interacts then it's irony, otherwise it's sarcasm.

For cable modems the US cable companies do at least allow you to purchase your own box rather than rent one of theirs. There is a list of approved boxes, although in searching for the ones that support VoIP I found several hens' teeth on the journey. So now I have my own box, it's been installed just over a year and has probably just about paid for itself in terms of saved rental costs. It works quite well too, unlike the one they'd been renting me up to that point (which they'd broken with a firmware upgrade).

It would be interesting to see how this works out with the TV boxes, there's a whole different product requirement there.

On the other side of things, I don't remember having a choice of box with UK cable, but then there wasn't an explicit line item for rental either, and part of the sales pitch was that if it broke they'd fix it or replace it for free. That doesn't happen if it's your own box.

Re: Chip-and-pin «vulnerability»? No, it's not

Yes, I've come across this one - swipe the card and the system tells you to insert it in the slot instead.

Britain's last laugh - a country that was founded over a dispute about taxes and then it ended up with the IRS. US government at all levels is very strict on getting the taxes in.

I mean honestly, how many people didn't set Windows update to auto check, download and install updates on previous versions of Windows?

More to the point, I always go and disable automatic updates. The OS is free to tell me there are updates available, and I'll even let it download the files, but it doesn't do the upgrade until I say so.

If you've ever left a machine running a task overnight and come back to it the following morning to see the smug "updated" message and no trace of the work it was supposed to be doing, you'd probably be disabling auto-updates too.

There's also the previous history of borked updates - far better to let an update settle and make sure there's no outcry of "MS broke my PC!" before letting it loose on your own.

Re: So when he says “football” he means soccer

Aussie Rules is a bit of a misnomer because I thought they didn't have any rules in that sport.

Re: Risk to who?

You'll just create a market for stolen credentials - access the site and it'll show you for free the ID details for a well-known politician, so you can enter those to go further into the site 'legally', where you can go buy a bunch of other ID credentials. Then you can go surf happily.

If all the websites are required to verify with a central database, then that's one hell of a scalability problem, not least a security one. If it doesn't have to verify then there's no onus on the individual to provide anything identifiable. Also, you can only verify the details provided, or are we all supposed to fit cryptographically-protected fingerprint or iris readers to our PCs, phones and tablets?

Re: Not just the Boss'es that do this

A good learning experience for the students on the perils of data loss.

I know for my final year project I had the document on a floppy disk at home, one at work and used a third to transfer the file from one place to the other. Plus a hard copy print-out updated at intervals so I could at least type it all in again if necessary. I don't think I suffered any disk failures, presumably Murphy was too busy picking off the low-hanging fruit at that point.

Re: Maths v the Law

Part of the problem is that the "good" guys were caught with their fingers in the till, so even the ones who were supposed to be looking after our best interests are not to be trusted either. That's why we need a new system, the old one has broken (assuming it was ever not-broken).

Re: The government [of USA] can lead by example...

Why did the chicken use weak encryption?

Because it wanted the information to get to the other side?

Re: Onion?

Nah, The Onion is doing proper news now, ever since Real Life started producing better stories than they could invent.

Or at least their stuff seems to be more believable than Real Life at the moment.

Re: OOh missus!

Sorry to mess with your stereotype, but these days, engineers carry tool cases or even briefcases,

So she turns up with a briefcase. Is that where she keeps her briefs?

I have to admit when I saw the picture and the implication of in-your-end-o, I had flashback to some Star Trek comedy sketch where someone shouted "Scotty's been grabbed by the Klingons!"

Re: Fundamental differences/Alien DNA

Now the evil plot behind systemd becomes clear...

Re: A Kick in the Nuts

I'm interested in why I got so many downvotes - is it because I implied criticism of Apple and the fanbois got upset? I'm actually on their side on this one, but I can appreciate the way the FBI are fighting their propaganda war. Until they produce the actual iPhone properly cracked and reveal what was on it, it might all just be hot air and sour grapes on their part. Saying they've done it but not passing on any information about how it was done or proof that it was done is, as I said, a kick in the nuts. They probably didn't want to risk a long drawn-out court case and possible adverse verdict at the end, so they've found a way to back out of it.

Re: Funny no one stopped to think...

The email address the government has for me is not the one I'd expect my phone to know, given that I use different ones for different purposes. That's usually the first give-away, that it wasn't sent to the correct email address.

Re: NX is getting there but only recently

VNC is promoted as 'easy'. The problem is that the only easy thing about it is the 'getting hacked' part. In my experience SSH is easier and better, so it is hard to fathom why people keep messing with VNC.

It has its uses. Mostly I use ssh because all I need is a terminal window and that will do pretty much what I want. Where VNC comes in handy is where you need to set up a GUI application for a remote user, such as my father, who can be a tech support nightmare. I can set up a VNC session as him and either see what error he's getting on a GUI program or configure it properly for him. While it's theoretically possible to set up Thunderbird (as an example) entirely with text files, it's a lot faster with a GUI.

That doesn't mean I dispense with ssh - I need that to get in to the machine and start the VNC session, which then gets taken down when I've finished with it.