* Posts by Dan 55

15336 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

As the UK updates its .eu Brexit advice yet again, an alternative hovers into view

Dan 55 Silver badge

Good old .com

We don’t just help with the nasty things in life like Brexit. We’re there for the nice things too.

Edinburgh-based rocket botherer seeks UK or overseas launch location for fun times, maybe more

Dan 55 Silver badge
Go

I have a cunning plan, my lord

Ask 'em if you can rock up and launch LOHAN too in exchange for coverage. You know you want to.

Google pholds! Just kidding. But Android Q Beta 2 drop supports those cool bendy mobes

Dan 55 Silver badge
Windows

Re: 'Focusable' microphones

Does that mean we can look forward to the end of the youth holding their phones like slice of pizza while wondering round outside?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: Usual horseshit

What would you call two or more different APIs which do the same thing?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Forget the hand movements

Why has he not taken his flat cap and coat off inside? Most rude.

It's time to reset the 'Days without a Facebook data loss' sign after 500 million records left exposed on AWS

Dan 55 Silver badge
Mushroom

Facebook wouldn't know privacy if it got slapped round the face with a GDPR

Have we had the one about Facebook verifying your email by asking for your email password so it can fish through your inbox to find it (and whatever else they feel like)?

No? Well here it is.

I wonder if they're stored in plaintext too?

Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I'm an American citizen

Dan 55 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Non-slurpable software

Seems to be becoming an offence.

No Widevine DRM for you! Developer left with two years of work stymied by Google snub

Dan 55 Silver badge

"I'm sorry but we're not supporting an open source solution like this"

I wonder why they supply a plug-in to Firefox then or why Chromium can be furtled to use Chrome's plug-in...

Dan 55 Silver badge

Make the asterisk a hyperlink to the note at the bottom.

Nice People Matter? NPM may stand for Not Politely Managed – job cuts leave staff sore

Dan 55 Silver badge
Go

This looks promising...

How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript

Code pulled from NPM – which everyone was using

"I think was a great disturbance in NPM, as if millions of Stack Overflow copypasters cried out in terror as their remotely hosted scripts were suddenly deleted."

And then security and reliability go up at least ten fold when they fix and self-host.

Only one Huawei? We pitted the P30 Pro against Samsung and Apple's best – and this is what we found

Dan 55 Silver badge
Coat

Re: A shootout wouldn't be a shootout without some grub.

Who knows what the AI does to the photo. Perhaps it was originally an avocado smash and the AI replaced it so it looked better on Instagram.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Raw?

Why is everyone a Troll? I chose a thumbs up!

Yeah, sure you did!

Naming your company 101: Probably best not to have the word 'Oracle' anywhere near branding

Dan 55 Silver badge
WTF?

Eh?

What happened to the rule about similar names not mattering if it wasn't in the same sector?

Apple redesigns wireless AirPower charger to be world's smallest, thinnest, lightest, cheapest, invisible... OK, it doesn't exist anymore

Dan 55 Silver badge
FAIL

Keyboards still failing

Apple's hardware record has not been stellar recently. Its laptop "butterfly" keyboards elicited enough complaints and lawsuits that the company sleeved the internals to prevent dust from blocking the optical sensors.

Apple are on the third generation butterfly keyboard and areas still having problems...

Appl Still Hasn’t Fixd Its MacBook Kyboad Problm

I think they need some real engineers in instead of some pretty thin box designers.

Metro Bank enjoys an early Friday tipple and topples over

Dan 55 Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: The Post-COBOL Apocalypse Gathers Steam!!

What post-COBOL apocalypse? TSB's new platform is also a COBOL platform and is definitely apocalyptic.

Mozilla tries to do Java as it should have been – with a WASI spec for all devices, computers, operating systems

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: LLVM

But it will fit onto the device it syncs to which can cross-compile.

Dan 55 Silver badge

LLVM

Isn't most of the work done already with LLVM intermediate representation? Stick to POSIX (and Qt if necessary) in the code, distribute the IR with a compiler which compiles and installs it, and job done.

(Someone will tell me what I've missed...)

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: If it happens

Java's destined for a long decline thanks to Oracle. If Moz manage to make something slightly less terrible than Java without Oracle's licensing waiting to snare you then it's almost guaranteed to take off.

Someone's spreading an MBR-trashing copy of the Christchurch killer's 'manifesto' – and we're OK with this, maybe?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It's 2019 and...

So basically run from home and many workplaces and click the Yes button if the macro dialog box pops up.

The bar's set pretty low isn't it?

Dan 55 Silver badge
WTF?

It's 2019 and...

... a Word document can run an embedded BASIC program which has permissions to connect to the Internet and download an executable binary and then run it, which then has permissions to trash the MBR.

Has Microsoft set a new world record? So many layers of WTF before we get to the actual WTF document itself.

Builds aplenty, taking calls from the pub with Teams, and Edgy leaks: It's the week at Microsoft

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Teams on linux

I think it would be better to keep Windows 10 in a VM on Linux, that way you can keep snapshots one hand in case one decides to suddenly update and take your work with it...

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Team player

It's "free" with Office 365.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Teams on linux

For which you can be thankful.

Huawei savaged by Brit code review board over pisspoor dev practices

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

I'm looking at the list of sins...

... and I see nothing that hasn't been done in any western multinational, where individual programmers who might have a clue are unable to do anything against the massive internal bureaucracy which doesn't particularly care and the antiquated development environments where no installation, compiler, or library is updated because otherwise stuff might break and it would need retesting to check and we can't do that.

VP Mike Pence: I want Americans back on the Moon by 2024 (or before the Chinese get there)

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Saturn 5 again?

Musk's Thunderbird 3 is cooler though.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I may have seen a documentation about this recently

I thought Pence might have been inspired by watching Iron Sky, some of that far-right space action sounds like the kind of thing that'd float his boat.

Our amazing industry-leading AI was too dumb to detect the New Zealand massacre live vid, Facebook shrugs

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: You mean make more money?

Muh freedumb of speech!

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Our Hearts go out, but we will keep the add revenue

Thoughts and prayers, but no donating the ad revenue from these videos to charity, or even acknowledging that ad revenue was made from these videos.

Meanwhile, anything goes, moderate as little as possible, pretend Facebook has nothing to do with society being polarised, and carry on raking it in.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: You mean make more money?

You could do it from the audio stream alone alone and quite easily find and ban any terrorist or gangland video involving shooting, if it weren't for the yee-haa fuck-yeah redneck gun demonstration videos which are wholesome family viewing and attract advertising dollars.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Facebook virgin

I think a livestream needs the streamer's co-operation to stop for ad breaks, but shared copies certainly have advertising, which is why they're currently facing a boycott.

Hey, what's Mandarin for 'WTF is going on?' Nokia phones caught spewing device IDs to China, software blunder blamed

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: no excuse....

I bet they were told to send it in this format if they wanted to sell phones, so that's what they did. China's a very big LAN with a firewall round it, after all.

Windows Defender ATP is dead. Long live Microsoft Defender ATP

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Microsoft extends protection to other Operating Systems?

He said this:

Too many enterprises are turning off telemetry (which you can on enterprise versions of Windows). We want to fix that. And we want to get telemetry from Macs too. So please do install Microsoft Defender.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Why do you think they're pushing Defender on Windows and Mac?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: What is the recommended AV on OSX at the moment?

Sophos do a Mac antivirus for non-commercial use. There's also Avast.

Brit Parliament online orifice overwhelmed by Brexit bashers

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Suspicious activity?

Answer from the horse's mouth:

https://twitter.com/pixeltrix/status/1108673644660699136

Well done everyone - the site crashed because calculating the trending count became too much of a load on the database but we're back now at around 180k per hour by my estimation.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Suspicious activity?

Presumably that's the maximum throughput it has while serving so many clients rubbernecking.

Seems odd that they don't have an option to pull the plug on the automatic update under times of high load, but I guess nobody thought of the use case where the PM is about to drive the country off the edge off a cliff and broadcasts live from the nation from her Downfall bunker citing the will of the people, while denying a referendum to find out what the will of the people is three years later, leading to the petitions site being used as a kind of proxy referendum.

Andrea Leadsom said "should the petition reach more than 17.4m signatures [ie, the number of people who voted leave], there would be a very clear case for taking action" once again leaving the nation in no doubt of her grasp of statistics, mathematics, referendums, and whatever else you care to mention.

Android clampdown on calls and texts access trashes bunch of apps

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Why on earth would Google have a problem with BlackBerry Hub?

This was Symbian's model, as a dev you could sign apps with special certs that gave you more access to the system, but that required more checks into your company and the app and the certs were more expensive.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: The trouble is...

Bluetooth connectivity is also being strongarmed into making you turn on location too so every other app on your phone and Play Services can also read the location at the same time, and that is that first thing I thought of as well.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Why on earth would Google have a problem with BlackBerry Hub?

You'd expect on even the most closed systems BlackBerry would be regarded a trusted developer and would get waved through.

Crazy.

New Zealand cops cuff alleged jackasses who shared mosque murder video, messages online

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: His Manifesto

It's a shopping list of the usual kind of hateful stuff we've all heard before made by a lunatic who kills people because of their skin colour, calling it a manifesto is raising it way above its station.

Dan 55 Silver badge

You'll note that 9/11 and JFK's assassination has no shortage of conspiracy theorists despite being caught on camera.

This is not a video that shows what happened anyway, this is just a video which glorifies terrorism whose intent is bringing other nutbags out of the woodwork. You don't need to see people getting murdered, I don't need to see people getting murdered, nobody does.

I haven't seen it and I don't intend to. I don't know why anyone would want to see it.

Renegade Android apps can siphon off your web logins, browser history. So make sure Chrome or OS is patched, friends

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: More information please?

However Firefox Focus is a Webview wrapper but it doesn't store history or logons.

Don't get the pitchforks yet, Apple devs: macOS third-party application clampdown probably not as bad as rumored

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: This.....

The fact that some dev makes ten different wrappers for ffmpeg with analytics packages included then spams the internet for those paid-for apps using SEO, does not mean that I should miss out on open source software out there that probably doesn't get enough donations to pay for a yearly Apple dev certificate (that's if they even accept donations).

Apple can add granular permissions similar to iOS (in fact, things like opening the contacts file already pops up a permission request on the Mac) but if non-mainstream users are pushed off the platform they will go elsewhere and take the software they develop with them.

The most Apple can expect of the Mac ecosystem if they do this is that it is pared it down to the minimum - hipsters with too much money to burn and Mac Minis for developers to develop iDevice apps. I get the feeling Tim wouldn't be too bothered if this happened anyway.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Gatekeeper's a handwave anyway

If you copy an app from physical media (DVD/USB) it won't check it. If you delete the quarantine flags from the downloaded app bundle it won't check it. It won't check shared libraries used by the app. It won't check binaries downloaded and run by the app. And you can still run UNIX binaries from the command line (I don't think they're going to change the ELF format anytime soon). And any checks it does do happen only once when you run an app the first time. It's not OS-wide protection, but just a bunch of things Finder does when you double-click an app.

But, if they make Gatekeeper any more annoying in their next release then I will not be upgrading, because obviously this won't be the final step, but one more step in appliancing the Mac and there will be more of the same in the release that comes after that.

Meet games-streaming Stadia, yet another thing Google will axe in two years

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Did they change the laws of Physics?

I can't even get VNC mirroring across my home WiFi without noticeable lag, so I'm not sure how Google are going to do this.

PuTTY in your hands: SSH client gets patched after RSA key exchange memory vuln spotted

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: PuTTY's days are numbered

God know what's actually in the Windows OpenSSH code.

It's probably quite easy to maintain, they probably only added telemetry (check out the recently open-sourced MS calculator).

Croydon school rolling in toilet roll after Brexit gift deemed unfit for the Queen's Anus Horribilis

Dan 55 Silver badge

Fruit and veg farmers in the EU had their produce caught up in the Calais strike and it arrived unfit to sell. The result is that some fruit and veg farmers are now not sending produce to the UK. The Calais strike was work to rule to show what things would be like after Brexit.

Obviously toilet paper has a longer shelf-life, but this is one reason why some businesses would refuse to sell to the UK.

Another would be legal uncertainty in a no deal situation.

Bandersnatch to gander snatched: Black Mirror choices can be snooped on, thanks to privacy-leaking Netflix streams

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

UUDDLRLRBA

"Interestingly, the choices made and the path followed can potentially reveal viewer information that ranges from benign (e.g., their food and music preferences) to sensitive (e.g., their affinity to violence and political inclination)," they explain.

Or, in my case, it'd show how I OCD my way through all the possible paths.