* Posts by Dan 55

15337 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Intel's super-secret Management Engine firmware now glimpsed, fingered via USB

Dan 55 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: First

Start here:

http://localhost:16992/

http://another.ip.on.your.lan:16992/

Yep, it's got a web server too. With bugs.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Minix licence

Just did a Google search site:intel.com +amt +minix, and it doesn't come up with anything relevant.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

I just read Wikipedia's entry on the ME.

The thing can execute Java as well.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Read the open letter righr till the end

The bit at the end is the important part. It says earlier versions of MINIX were designed for education, later versions for availability, and none were designed for "military grade security".

Intel took a copy of an earlier version. The creator of MINIX hopes that Intel did security hardening on it in addition to the changes that Intel asked him to make to the source code.

Activists launch legal challenge against NHS patient data-sharing deal

Dan 55 Silver badge
Stop

Re: Re downvote

You will end up with a third world country if you don't have a health service anyone can trust and use.

Tuberculosis is back. Will turning the NHS into another arm of the Border Force meaning that some sick people don't go to seek medical help they need help eradicate it?

I think you know the answer to that one.

Dan 55 Silver badge

If the legendarily inept Home Office need to know about illegal immigration, they could perhaps control one of the world's easiest borders to control a little better than turn the NHS into big brother. They'll probably screw up and get the wrong people anyway.

Doctors are going start asking about sexual orientation even though it's got nothing to do with your visit next year. Where do you draw the line?

Better filters won't cure this: YouTube's kids nightmare

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Minecraft!

If only it were the language. Stuff on the MangoTango channel (available on YouTube Kids) usually turns into ritual sacrifice by the end of the video.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: YT kids is like concentrated nastiness

I think they've realised how to game YouTube Kids, a verified account and a few family friendly keywords seem to get past Google's algorithms. Then it's up to parents flagging individual videos if they realise their child has seen something strange, Google may or may not remove it, and if it's removed it doesn't matter as it's re-uploaded as soon as it's removed. That's how crap like this never disappears.

Dan 55 Silver badge

And for platforms which you can't admin, download it and put it on an internal file server.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Wow..

The last few videos in the Medium article show some stuff which a bit weird, but there's still plenty of rabbit hole to go down. Just search for "Investigating YouTube - #Elsagate" or "Something strange is happening on Youtube #ElsaGate", appropriately on YouTube.

Preferably in a private browser window not at work. Those are just two videos which talk about what kind of sketchy stuff can be found but it's enough to screw up your YouTube recommendations, which is probably why the article wasn't just a page full of videos.

Then arrange for the YouTube and YouTube Kids apps to 'break' or 'go away' on home devices.

Dan 55 Silver badge

YouTube Kids actually got a pat on the back from the government, mentioned in the same breath as iPlayer Kids. It's at that point you do think that nothing's ever going to get done and you consider sending YouTube to the great /dev/null in the sky.

At the moment I'm using every opportunity to get the fact that the Internet and especially YouTube are not reliable into mine because banning isn't a viable long-term solution. Yeah, thanks school for teaching eight year olds to how to type search requests into Google and YouTube. There's no "warning: anything could be disturbing or a pack of lies", not even "other search engines are available", just "here's how to drink kool-aid from the fountain of Google".

Coinhive crypto-jacking increasingly pops up in top 3 million websites

Dan 55 Silver badge
Coat

Ignore that lot, olive a good deep pun pizza.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Genie out of the bottle

If browser makers think the browser controlling USB and Bluetooth is a good idea, why ever do you think they'd draw the line at cryptomining?

How do you like them Apples? Farewell sensible sized phones, forever

Dan 55 Silver badge
Headmaster

The 4-inch SE is the smallest popular phone on the market

Or the most popular small phone on the market?

Logitech: We're gonna brick your Harmony Link gizmos next year

Dan 55 Silver badge
Mushroom

And the reason why it will stop working is...

Logitech don't want to renew a digital certificate when it expires in 2018. link

So, think on that before buying your next piece of smart tat from Logitech.

Card shark Intel bets with discrete graphics chips, shuffles AMD's GPU boss into the deck

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Wait, what? I don't understand

And it's not the first time AMD have bailed out Intel. x64 vs Itanic.

Most new Intel initiatives die a few years later. The only thing they manage to do is keep the x86 zombie alive.

One wonders what they've been doing all this time, apart from relying on their brand name.

Brit moron tried buying a car bomb on dark web, posted it to his address. Now he's screwed

Dan 55 Silver badge

Should have bought the How To book off WH Smiths

No checks, convenient payment options, safer than the dark web.

Facebook's send-us-your-nudes service is coming to UK, America

Dan 55 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Only someone as disfunctional as Zuk could have come up with this

You know what will happen next...

This only works for Facebook. The photo will have to be shared across across a common nude photo platform and made available to other social networks.

Don't worry about those 40 Linux USB security holes. That's not a typo

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Physical access means you own the system

The secure boot "golden key" was found a year ago as reported by this very esteemed organ.

We're not saying Uncle Sam has lost control on Twitter, but US Embassy in Riyadh just did a shout out for oatmeal

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Social media 101

Are you a government department? Don't delete your account ever.

KRACK whacked, media playback holes packed, other bugs go splat in Android patch pact

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Easy upgrade

Unfortunately too many cretins are blinded by other features and patches are an afterthought.

Other features like removable battery, SD card, dual SIM, and reasonable after-sales service or a phone which is a reasonable price and doesn't click like Flipper or have a screen which burns?

You're pontificating as if Nexus or Pixel were perfect.

Google has stopped updating some Nexus models and others are due to be EOL'd shortly. So much for the updates, they could have at least tried to support devices like Apple does.

You know what's coming next: FBI is upset it can't get into Texas church gunman's smartphone

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: FBI can't unlock smartphone

That's right, leave no tragedy UNEXPLOITED by political activism.

No, it's pretty obvious that the problem isn't in his phone, it's in letting people unfit to have guns, have guns.

If this turns into another FBI banging on about "we must be able to access his phone for great justice" thing, then that there is the EXPLOITATION. They can use another tragedy to bang on about phones, but not this one because we already know everything we need to know - the army and the police both knew they had to flag him so he couldn't buy a gun, but neither of them did due to procedural failures.

Google on flooding the internet with fake news: Leave us alone, we're trying really hard... *sob*

Dan 55 Silver badge
Flame

Re: Lessons from Orlowski

I think most regulars have tuned our headline regex filters to detect Andrew.

Now does that let Google off the hook?

No, no it doesn't.

The level of effluent that emanates from Silicon Valley is damaging society. There isn't a second that goes by without Google giving a Tweet containing a link to a Facebook page full of conspiracy theories the same prominence as news organisations which still cling on to ancient rituals like getting a couple of reliable sources before going ahead with a story. YouTube is full of videos of drug cartel shoot outs, neo-Nazis, ISIS beheadings and YouTube kids is full of extremely dodgy videos aimed at children.

Their advertising network serves malware, their Play Store serves malware, and YouTube and Google News serve malware for wetware. They aren't very good at what they do and they don't even realise they've got a problem. Google's response is always "it's not us, it's the algorithms", "please flag it and it'll go away someday", "oops, never mind, we'll try better, give us a little while would you". They have a RDF bigger than anything Apple ever had back in the day which means they've got away with it for far longer than they should have.

Unfortunately they make up a lot of the Internet, and when politicians finally do come down on them like a tonne of bricks, everything else is going to get caught up in it too.

Commuters' phone data could be tracked to save megabucks on census

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: cut the cost of producing population statistics. - WTF ?

The census could be avoided by requiring that people register with their local authority after they move house.

Give us a bloody PIN: MPs grill BBC bosses over subscriber access

Dan 55 Silver badge

"What Amazon has done is utterly brilliant and has transformed the way we do things," he said.

What has Amazon transformed, a way to get more money for less? Prime is a wasteland and you have to pay for everything else which isn't much better.

BT hikes prices for third time in 18 months

Dan 55 Silver badge

BT Sport

The gift that keeps on taking.

Apache OpenOffice: We're OK with not being super cool... PS: Watch out for that Mac bug

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: OSX10.7?

OS X Lion is the last OS X which runs on Intel machines with a 32-bit EFI. The machine still works and shouldn't go to landfill but it probably will if there's no office suite which runs on it.

Apple should push out an EFI update so a later OS X will run, but that's not going to happen.

Dan 55 Silver badge
WTF?

Old?

"Again, this is due to AOO trying to maintain backwards compatibility with very old versions of OS X (10.7!) and sometimes small variations in libraries can cause some weird interactions."

It came out 6 years ago. It might not be new, but it's hardly ancient. Xcode does most of the heavy lifting for you.

Lord of the Rings TV show shopped around Hollywood

Dan 55 Silver badge

Well they did turn something that could fit into one film into three. Hollywood's very own quest for treasure.

Dan 55 Silver badge

It's like the Star Trek Discovery of Lord of the Rings.

Microsoft goes to bat for Dreamers: Windows giant sues Uncle Sam to block staff deportations

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: declaring "the Dreamers are part of our nation's fabric. They belong here."

Microsoft sent child catcher vans into Mexico and smuggled children through the border? The bastards!

AMD, Intel hate Nvidia so much they're building a laptop chip to spite it

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Rumor has it

A year ago it was announced Apple was working with nVidia. What changed?

Google, Twitter gleefully spew Texas shooter fake news into netizens' eyes

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Measles and vaccines...

Your Dad's generation had MSM to filter out the crap. Now it's practically all bullshit all the time.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Why shouldn't Google fact check presidential tweets?

Pixel-style display woes on your shiny new X? Perfectly normal, says Apple

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

OLED is so new and shiny, of course there are teething problems with the iPhone X and Pixel 2

Even though the Nokia N85 had an OLED screen about 10 years ago.

Nokia Sleeping Screen, eh? Never been beaten. Jumpers for goalposts.

Firefox bookmark saving add-on gives users that sync-ing feeling

Dan 55 Silver badge
Windows

Re: IE is dead now anyway

My $BIGCORP still actually peddles webadmin products which only work in IE6-11.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Oh wow

Why would he need to make a backup? The unicorns and rainbows in the cloud do that for him.

Co-op Bank's creaky IT should be flogged off, growls UK.gov

Dan 55 Silver badge

That's half their problem. They market themselves under one name, but then when something goes wrong they drag out the "Thank you Mario, but the product or service you wanted is in another Co-op" line. If one name is good enough to sell you something, one name should be good enough to sort something out when it goes wrong.

Guy Glitchy: Villagers torch Openreach effigy

Dan 55 Silver badge
Coat

Re: I regularly communicate with openreach

Now it all makes sense, Openreach is a small family business which is having trouble keeping up with demand. Ian Openreach answers phones and emails when he's not busy installing cable.

El Reg assesses crypto of UK banks: Who gets to wear the dunce cap?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "we do have a number of layers protecting the website"

I think really they forgot the 'w' from lawyers.

Over a million Android users fooled by fake WhatsApp app in official Google Play Store

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: .. and that ..

Because it has a human being that sees something is called "Update WhatsApp Messenger" from a new developer with a Unicode hack in their name and a rip off of the legitimate app's Play Store resources is not legitimate.

Perhaps Google will update their algorithm to pick up this more often, but then fake app devs will find their way around it (change the Play Store images or description in some subtle way).

Official: Perl the most hated programming language, say devs

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Easily javascript

But in C you have to set the field width to something rediculous to get that level of precision in the output. In JavaScript you get nonsense anyway.

Black Horse Down: Lloyds Banking Group goes TITSUP*

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: There may be trouble ahead

There aren't any, but if you choose to bank with Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, Halifax, or Natwest then you know that it's going to go down more than [insert favourite end to saying here].

Past performance may not be indicative of future results, but in this case they probably are.

HPE HQ to leave Palo Alto birthplace as it 'consolidates' offices

Dan 55 Silver badge

They'll be going back to Palo Alto soon

A few more years of this inspired leadership and the garage will be just the right size for them again.

"Venerated Valley brand" about sums it up. There doesn't appear to be much else left.

Donald, YOU'RE FIRED: Rogue Twitter worker quits, deletes President Trump's account

Dan 55 Silver badge
Mushroom

Just one Twitter account?

Should have deleted the whole damn lot. And the backups.

Bah humbug.

Osama Bin Laden had copy of Resident Evil, smut, in compound

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "ecause, at that time, the US was not run by fuckwits."

About not "run by fuckwits", the disasters in Syria, Libya and Egypt say otherwise

Libya - The US decided to get involved after being dragged in by France. Turned out crap.

Syria - The US decided to get involved. Turned out crap.

Egypt - The US decided not to get involved. Turned out crap.

Whatever you do or don't do in the Middle East, it will turn out crap.

HTC U11: U-hoo. Look over here! Two new phones! We're Not Actually Dead

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: All very nicely reported...

Even so, good Android games are few and far between as Ouya found out. You hardly need it for Candy Crush.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: All very nicely reported...

If you want to play games while on the go, why not get a Switch which is half the price? As a rule games on mobiles are pretty bad. No buttons.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Dongle

Less is more, or so we're constantly told.

Apart from the price tag, of course.