Posts by Steve Davies 3

Re: only available from HMSO in person

Ah... you must mean the HMSO office at No 42 Ganges St, Kolkata that is only open between midday and 1pm on alternate Wednesdays.

Re: More tools is a good thing (not)

The more tools like this that become available the more beancounters will decide that we humans are even more expendable.

They'll boast at the reduction in staffing costs and get the corner office.

That will continue especially when Lord Elon Muck's robots come on the scene then we can say goodbye to all IT jobs.

The thing is that many problems require the non-logical POV in order to come up with the right solution. I wonder how these AI/Robotic systems will handle that.

My immediate answer is 'badly'.

You forgot

all the phone home telemetry... for your security or some such bollicks.

W10 was when MS truly became the 'Borg'.

Re: When did Musk become the richest man?

All down to Cryptocurrencies. He got in early. Personally, I hope that he and Bezos both lose the lot but that ain't gonna happen.

Don't zip it,

Encrypt it. Generate your own public/private key pair. Encrypt it with the private key and distribute the public one to the students by email or some non google method.

It would have the extra benefit of getting the students aware of data encryption.

Let's go Google!

Re: Ground Attack

was dominated by the Mosquito and Typhoon in the latter years of the war. The mosquito could carry more bombs than a B-17. The Mossie attack on the Amiens prison is one of the outstanding raids of WW2. If it sounds like I'm a Mossie fan then I am. My Uncle flew them from 1943 to 1946.

Re: binning Google Services

Just do it. The more people that reduce their dependency on Google the better IMHO.

Far too many people are locked into their stuff. A lot of that is because they make it so easy to get in.

Google... the IT version of Hotel California.

Re: USA and Teletext

There was a bit of NIH but the 525 line sets in use at the time had less capacity to carry the signal than our 625 line standard. The result was a very, very slow system.

Re: It's an iPhone

I think that there is a version of Little Snitch that runs on IOS. That might be worth a try.

I invested a small amount of money in a Raspberry PI Firewall. That sits between my WIFi hub and the router. It blocks a huge amount of dodgy spyware/data slurping connections as well as all Social Media sites.

If there is some site that I need to get to but is blocked, I have another WiFi access point that I can connect to that bypasses the firewall but don't tell my grandkids about it...

Not only Sainsbury's

Dozens if not hundreds if not thousands of sites get a bit shirty when you have:-

- An adblocker

- Noscript blocked 5,000 bits of javascript from running and doing god knows what.

Some are downright offensive if it detects an adblocker. Those get blocked entirely and I go somewhere else.

Little Snitch is a wonderful tool for sorting out what you can block and what you can't.

Even sites that were working suddenly throw up a load more ad slinging and data slurping domains.

Re: Starlink

didn't Putin's mob demonstrate downing a satellite just recently?

We'll be back to using semaphore flag towers before we know it.

Add in TECO

where you could edit binary files.

A multi-role combat aircraft before its time.

Re: Swap space

AFAIK, you could configure swap to be a file (or even more than one)

Saves mucking around with partitions although, on my video rendering rig, Swap is a 120Gb HDD. It gets very little use as there is 96Gb of RAM and 8TB of SSD and M2 storage.

Re: Never trust fixes from random people on the internet

OR

if you do have to use them make sure that applying them does not make your firewall go TITSUP or even worse, totally open to the world.

You should have a backup bit of the Firewall kit so you test it on that first.

THEN you make sure that all your configs are triple backed up before doing anything other than scratching the itch in your nose.

If your system allows for it then you could swap in the 'patched' device for a short period and monitor it. Reverting to the old one is then just a matter of swapping a load of cables but that means getting into the DC which in some places is harder than getting into Fort Knox.

I'm so glad that I'm long past that part of IT work.

Re: "TRUST"......yes, I've heard of it!

But do we actually TRUST it?

No we don't.

Intel get stuffed!

Re: It's a film set

Indeed. It is the 'B' site for the Sentinal sequence.

Arthur C Clarke is probably laughing at our stupidity from Heaven.

Re: Politics, not Good

Quote

Actually, the BBC will tell you lots of inconvenient things about Canada and the States.

As will the Guadian and Independent.

Whereas the US news orgs are far more beholden to their advertisers (and ownership) than others.