* Posts by Dan 55

15337 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Openreach kicks off 'rebrand' by painting over BT logo on vans

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Will it really make any differece?

For Openreach/an ISP to fund that would be exceedingly difficult. To stand any realistic prospect of breaking even on the install you'd need to be tying the consumer into a 5-10 year contract which almost no residential user is likely to agree to.

The bit of the cable that goes from the property to the cabinet has to be paid for, this is an ongoing cost that could switch from ISP to ISP as the customer does, n'cest pas?

Unfortunately this would require a huge loan behind it all but you can't have everything.

Indian telco Reliance Jio denies claims of 100m record data breach

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: biometrics target?

If I could go off on a tangent for a moment, it seems to me that Indian bureaucracy, descended as it is from British bureaucracy, is only doing what British bureaucracy would do if it thought it could get a way with it.

However British bureaucracy is having a go at it with the proposed ID cards for EU citizens database and your story serves as a warning as to how it could go wrong.

It'd be interesting to know how many in the upper echelons of the Indian civil service are Oxford PPE educated or similar.

And now, back to your scheduled programme...

Got a Windows Phone 8 mobe? It's now officially obsolete. Here's why...

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Could've been something...

The only Google apps I've got on my phone are Play Store, Play Services, and Translate. In those three, settings are set to the most private possible (not very much I know, this is Google) and the fewest notifications possible. I use a dedicated Google account for that one phone.

So I don't get nagged to review businesses or upload photos or whatever they want to crowdsource today.

Ghost of NTLM still haunts Microsoft: Aged protocol hole patched

Dan 55 Silver badge

I bet it there's still LAN Manager code buried in there somewhere...

Insurers may have to adjust policies to reflect 'silent' cyber risks

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Could it be a box ticking exercise?

“The PRA expects firms to adopt a proportionate approach when assessing their non-affirmative exposures. The firm’s underwriting and risk management functions should play a key role in leading this effort,” it said.

More of a key role than the IT dept?

Seems like box ticking to me.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Could it be a box ticking exercise?

Certainly sounds like one.

Ex-GDS man to pluck tech strings at UKCloud

Dan 55 Silver badge
Flame

Oh, is that why it's going down the pan?

"Since GDS director general Kevin Cunnington took the helm and effectively ousted former GDS head Stephen Foreshew-Cain in 2016, a raft of senior folk have jumped ship. Most of those have joined their previous boss Mike Bracken at Co-Op..."

Two-factor FAIL: Chap gets pwned after 'AT&T falls for hacker tricks'

Dan 55 Silver badge

The software could not let the call centre drone get to do things if the customer doesn't get the password right.

If the customer's forgotten the password it could go on to other security questions, again not letting the drone go on to later screens unless the customer gets most or all of them right.

And it should certainly not allow repeated spamming of the call centre.

If there is some doubt about the customer then the drone should be able to play back previous calls to the call centre to compare voices, check if the caller is calling from their own home or mobile, and so on.

There are certainly ways to tighten up things.

Trump to world: Forget moving to America to do a startup

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Why on Gahd's Green Earth....

Of course he doesn't like them, they compete with GM, Ford, and Boeing, Lockheed, and oil.

Dan 55 Silver badge

The one and only thought in his head (apart from Obama did it so it must be bad) was it means that AT&T and Verizon have less competition.

Not that AT&T and Verizon were ever going to be able to compete and if it's an Internet start-up it doesn't matter anyway as it can be based anywhere.

G20 calls for 'lawful and non-arbitrary access to available information' to fight terror

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: A G20 spokesman explains the groups position.

Wasn't it more like...

We don't want the precious. That would not be free and democratic.

Silicon Valley must collaborate with us and show us the precious or else.

But we don't want the precious. That would not be free and democratic.

... and similar cognitive dissidence?

'My dream job at Oracle left me homeless!' – A techie's relocation horror tale

Dan 55 Silver badge

12k is great, so is 24k. Doesn't matter if they don't let you have the money, show no interest in letting you have it, and fire you because you couldn't use it.

This story just confirms my prejudice that Oracle is a viper's nest.

Microsoft drops Office 365 for biz. Now it's just Microsoft 365. Word

Dan 55 Silver badge

That would never happen.

Insert coin to continue.

His Muskiness wheels out the Tesla Model 3

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Mass market?

It's aimed at the mass market and when it is widely available at that price it will be.

Atlassian hikes prices for most cloudy JIRA and Confluence users

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Jira...

I guess not. I hope you get your workflow transitions right first time before you've started your first project as when you need to re-do an active workflow because you forgot one then only Jira can make life this painful for you. But as it's Jira we're told its workflows are the best and to carry on drinking the kool aid.

If you want to track branches and builds in Bugzilla you make flags for them.

But then again Bugzilla is an issue tracker, not some PM's wet dream which runs with the absurd idea that a whole project can be specified as a bunch of tickets that need clearing ASAP.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Jira...

I still find Bugzilla infinitely more sensible, but it's obviously not reassuringly expensive.

OMG, dad, you're so embarrassing! Are you P2P file sharing again?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Youtube

Free where you've got coverage and a data allowance.

Dan 55 Silver badge

That works until the next time Taylor Swift gets upset with Spotify or YouTube.

Talk about a hit and run: AA finally comes clean on security breakdown

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: GDPR (as of May 2018)

Far better any RFC-based OTP solution. You could then use HMRC's app or an open source one.

But the less Google the better.

(I didn't downvote.)

Behind the scenes of Slovaks' fight to liberate their .sk domain

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Entirely predictable behaviour

Indeed. At the moment Nominet are holding UK's ENUM entry hostage because BT doesn't want to compete with VoIP. They could do with a bit of accountability.

On the couch with an AI robo-doc asking me personal questions

Dan 55 Silver badge

Offside!

Google ships WannaCrypt for Android, disguised as Samba app

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Why?

Well, I doubt a MIPS NAS server running Samba only available on the LAN is going to get pwned, and calling it WannaCry for Android is also a bit of an exaggeration seeing as it's a server-side exploit.

Yes, it should be updated to SMBv2, and it probably will do when it breaks. Yay for support.

No, I don't expect there's a need for Android to connect to SMB servers in businesses so SMB1 can be disabled and any complaints can be safely ignored.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Why?

The problem wasn't in the protocol but MS' implementation of it.

Google have taken the code from Samba which it is to be hoped is less holey than MS' version.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Does this actually mount the drive on the filesystem?

Or does it just show it in the file manager, in which case it's just the same thing that Explorer and so on already do.

Well, that escalated quickly: Qualcomm demands iPhone, iPad sales ban in America

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "Apple will no longer use any Qualcomm chips in future products"

Who are Apple going to go to? Intel? They've already tried that and the result was spectacularly unimpressive.

Google patches pwnable 'droids for Wi-Fi vuln

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

And will Broadcom release open source drivers?

Answers on the back of a postage stamp...

Windows Insiders with SD cards turn into OneDrive outsiders

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Place holders

Dropbox seem to have worked it out without this restriction though.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

Why would you want to convert to NTFS if there's FAT for compatibility or ZFS for integrity?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Uninstall OneDrive

If it's for corporate, they probably do want that.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Re: Place holders

When they had place holders in Windows 8 it didn't need NTFS.

Just another excuse for lock-in to keep the Nice Try File System relevant.

Create a user called '0day', get bonus root privs – thanks, Systemd!

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "Nevertheless, some modern Linux distributions, like RHEL7 and CentOS, allow this."

It doesn't matter if it's useful or not, it's used in some distributions and systemd should be able to cope with it.

And someone at Red Hat should remind him who he works for and force him to open that bug again and fix it as otherwise it's a potential security problem on their own OS.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Nevertheless, some modern Linux distributions, like RHEL7 and CentOS, allow this.

Red Hat you say? That place where Poettering works?

As you say, fucking Poettering.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Re: the problem with clueless amateurs...

Isn't not checking and acting properly on return values part of this very bug?

Yeah, I'm going to consider this a bad user ID so I'm not going to change to it, I'll carry on as root as I can't stop as I'm booting the system, so I'll just stick a warning in the log and hope that somebody reads it.

Later when somebody files a bug report...

ITS THERE BAD SOFTWARE!!!!11!11!1

I mean he works for the same employer that makes Red Hat (which considers it a good user ID), FFS.

TfL, WTH is my bus? London, UK, looks up from its mobile

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: There, there children. Sorry your pacifier is b0rken.

unerringly tell you the approximate time

Oxymoron detected.

European MPs push for right to repair rules

Dan 55 Silver badge

Which phones do this?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I wouldn't worry too much

Given the plummeting pound and lack of regulation, I'm sure Chinese manufacturers will be happy to shift a bit of landfill Android even if known brands adapt to the EU's rules.

Microsoft boasted it had rebuilt Skype 'from the ground up'. Instead, it should have buried it

Dan 55 Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: You will appreciate what *we* say you should appreciate!

Don't get me started on that. Where's the fucking date range? Why are you only allowed one page? Why are the results 1000 times worse? And the fucking mobile version with left-right slidey tiles that bring the browser to a standstill. Did the people who do Google News actually read the fucking news? Fuckers.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Social disease

They did however have the sense to row back and allow text status again. MS will carry on regardless.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I face a dilemma.

The last few times I've used Skype it's inflicted a forced update on both calling parties.

One of those times it wouldn't let either me and the other party log in because something had changed server-side but the client couldn't say this, it just said an error happened, but it didn't say that you had to update either to fix the login problem. It must have been about 15-20 minutes before we could talk. Fucking abysmal.

Hopefully this latest update will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and push everyone over to Wire or something.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Haven't they've already done it?

Emirates and Turkish Airlines lift laptop ban on US-bound flights

Dan 55 Silver badge

That's probably how she'll end up leaving office.

Nationwide banking suffers its own Black Wednesday

Dan 55 Silver badge

Odd

Nationwide's Internet banking is usually quite good. Any downtime I've noticed has always been scheduled.

So it looks like Joe Garner's got settled in, then.

Oh, and the twatterers could at least tweat the right Nationwide. I don't think the one in Ohio can do much.

Extreme trainspotting on Britain's highest (and windiest) railway

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Reasonable compromise

No, I don't think the UK goes overboard. I've been to a restored castle in Spain which had brickwork, parquet, and air conditioning.

Just a little bit more work put into it and it would have made some nice studio flats in an up-and-coming area.

Automobile Association under fire for car-crash handling of data breach

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Taking it seriously

"Only accessed a few times"

So that's only a few database dumps making their way round the Internet then. Nothing to bother about.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: So all the details for a nice little phishing scam?

Dear customer,

Due to new "know your customer" regulations, we must ask you to confirm your account details with us within the period of one calendar month. If you fail to do so we will be forced to lock your account and you will have to book an appointment at your local branch with the data we require and two forms of primary ID (what is this?)

Please click here to be taken to our secure page on our Internet banking website where you can confirm the data we need:

- house number

- postcode

- the first 12 digits of your credit card number. For security do not enter the last four.

- CVV number (where is this?)

We thank you for your understanding and co-operation in this important matter.

P. Fisher.

Regulatory Compliance.

Bonkers call to boycott Raspberry Pi Foundation over 'gay agenda'

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Christ only knows what they'll do

Don't worry, that'll never happen.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Right now you're safe. If you buy one more Pi and 7 covers, one for each colour of the rainbow, then the DUP will come round and throw bricks through your window.

SBU claims Russia was behind NotPetya

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "SBU claims Russia was behind NotPetya"

Yep. I know I'm tired of Windows.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Most Wanted

It spreads using a bug in a Ukrainian business accountancy software package, who else is it going to be? Some elaborate western false flag which is a cunning plan that is so cunning, it targets the Ukraine, collapses their economy, and lets Russia walk in so the west has them exactly where it wants them?

Occam's razor and that.

Happy 4th of July: Norks tests another missile

Dan 55 Silver badge
Terminator

Re: Oy!

Global thermonuclear war.