Posts by Lyndon Hills 1

Some years ago an experiment was done at a large London train station. One finding was that a large proportion of people would reveal their password in exchange for chocolate.

news story

Re: Hello... Anyone there?

Me too

Re: Same old chicanery

UK Biobank

Re: £7.9bn

It includes an Oracle license for every patient in the health authority district.

Re: These guys are amateurs and need to go on a course.

Even if the person wasn't a DBA, they might be able to use an office tool like Excel, or other reporting tools. Some reporting tools provide the ability to download the data as csv, for easy onward use.

Re: "Oh, it's ah ... Neo ... um, Enterprise ... uh ... Executive ... uhm ..."

The 'cockpit' idea was suggested where I worked around 17/18 years ago.....

Re: desktop zoo

support for all that stuff becomes a nightmare too.

I think this is when we get into the corporate/business area, where computers are tools used to support some end result, rather than the end result themselves.

Re: Easy or Expensive?

The worry is not just fire, but what fumes furniture stuffing etc might generate.

Re: No requests, no retry, that’s why it takes ...

this blog post is all about stealing cars by hacking a 'related' network. In this case the attack starts with the headlight circuit.

Re: Someone Else's Computer certification

You might want to read this Troy Hunt of Have I been pawned. This is an article about bursty traffic and scaiing

Re: Another one bites the dust

Maybe time someone set up an equivalent of f*ckedcompany.com?

Re: I don't understand why we still use PDF

Things still get printed (posters, flyers, book covers..). A Pdf is often what you supply to the printer.

Re: Clone of Android

Write, yes. Package for deployment? Not when I last looked, which was a few years ago, admittedly.

Re: Don't know what they're talking about

If they made it a requirement, see icon. I'm close enough to retirement now that I probably just would.

In the UK, I've recently read that part of the labour shortage is caused by this attitude (which I share). These articles usually go on to discuss how to persuade these retirees to come back to work. Seems we have at least one answer.

Cross-Platform wpf-alike

You could look at Avalonia. Not used it but it looks like a possible cross-platform substitute. If you're a heavy user of toolkits like DevExpress, then maybe they would not be compatible, though.

Re: Yes, but...

Perhaps a greater acceptance of remote working will make this argument meaningless?

Re: The one thing that no one

At the time a lot of this was happening, the Post Office was in the process of being 'privatised'. I think at one reason for the denial that there were any problems, was to avoid screwing up the sale.

Not saying that's a good reason, just that it may have been a reason.

Re: Certificates

Indeed. In the web world, the browser can check that the ssl certificate from a site does at least match the web site domain.

Forcing an app (or extension) to be signed really just tells you the dev got a certificate. Without some method to validate that the certificate belongs to the purported publisher, it's not really very useful.

Have a barney with said crims. Let them re-arrange your face for you

Re: The ' loopy Scot retro-wavers the Rezillos' are still using Stingray to announce themselves...

In related news, Thunderbirds are Go! is on the Mission Accomplished album...

Fond memories

Re: “Kill switch”

There was a film called "Upgrade" on Film4 (UK TV) in the last few days. Not a great film, but the central idea was just what this article is about...

Re: Auto-save

I think some of the use cases would also include the possibility of failures of other things than your own computer, remote editing for example? They don't see VS Code as only for desktop use.

Re: No more Mr Nice Guy

This idea of not knowing what your directs reports are up to, was part of what Sarbanes-Oxley (in the US) was designed to address. The concept is that you (as a director/manager) are responsible for your direct reports and ought to know, and also have controls in place to ensure that you do. ISTR that this was one of the results of Enron's failure, mentioned above.

Re: Open the can and go fishing...

I've broken the law at least twice;

at home for providing a hacking tool,

Depending on where 'home ' is. Is providing a hacking tool illegal in Israel?

and two, the law of the targets home state.

Surely the person you sold the tool to has broken the law in the target state, not you?

Both parties here seem equally obnoxious, to me.

Re: a series of food and drug laws in the United States

just as we wouldn’t prescribe addictive drugs to billions of people

Also see prescription painkillers, especially in the US....

Re: To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers -Frank Herbert

I've always assumed amanfromMars was a bot. It never ocurred to me that it might also up/down vote.

Re: An Impossible Situation?

Yes, a bit of a double whammy. Unless you get a very privileged account, you can't encrypt everything, including backups, so grab a load of data as a plan B. It also feels like a more sophisticated attack. Surely it would take a bit more time on the target network, to get access to and find some juicy data? Maybe this step can also be automated?

Re: Right

One might also note, that there is quite a lot of content on TikTok taking the piss out of Trump....

Re: distance and signal strength

Some interesting thoughts, but let's get real. This discussion is about the problem of estimating range between two phones. In a tube train, the phone might be within 2 metres of up to 20 others. If the phone is going to be performing this 'complex analysis' measuring response times and sending audio 'pings' to figure out the distance between itself and these multiple other phones, it won't actually be much use for anything else...

Cake and government remind me of the 'Brass Eye' stunt, where they persuaded various people that cake was the latest drug menacing the nations youth. youtube Led to questions in the house, ISTR.

Re: How is no one in JAIL?!

They were also trying to gear up for privatising the business at the time. Probably hard to do if you have to admit that all the branch accounts are in doubt due to a faulty computer system.

Certainly various people knew this, as I think I recall reports of errors at the branch being 'corrected' by transactions entered at head office.

Preference for hose

Within a few years they realised they would be better of doing the processing in-hose. I can't recall why this was, maybe other readers can.

More women working in IT?

I think this sentence was produced by a bot...

Re: Am I perhaps too old to use a payment robot?

If you were buying booze, you have to wait until an assistant comes over to ok the purchase. Quite likely quicker to go to a staffed till in the first place.

Re: The thing is

They didn't take steps to ensure that they were handing over our data to someone who was taking the necessary steps to secure it.

I know this is an Amercian story, but this sounds like something covered by the GDPR?

Re: Not turn them in to apps.

Edlin had the ability to be used along with a file of commands to be executed, which was pretty useful occasionally. The next comment (when I was reading) suggests programmers are using Linux, in which case they can do all the same sort of things from the shell.

Re: 'It's not clear whether he also has a FB account or whether he's a non-account'

The individual is not (necessarily) a user of Facebook so there is no way that the data is collected as an essential part of any service provided to the individual.

The 'service' is not being provided to the individual, it's being provided to advertisers.

97 year old contestant

just for a second, I thought there had been a breakthrough in anti-aging products.

Re: What is clickbait?

Or words ending in! ??

Re: Who else is available

The NHS would do better to just hire a few capable sandwich students.

People who study sandwiches? Where do you sign up?

Re: Customer Delight Providers

better than deskside support, which often got auto-corrected to the strangely appropriate despised support..

Re: WHY...

Additionally at least one has detection of repeated transactions per ip address. Causes problems if people in an office are on one shared external ip, and many of those people try to buy something at the same time.

IIRC this protection (and others like disallow a card issued in one country from being used from an IP apparently in a different country) can be turned of by request of the website owner.

Re: Don't be cretinous

I think what he meant is that for the import side, we can charge whatever tarriff we want, so if we have no tarrifs then we have no processing of imports to do. Exports are really the responsibility of the receiving country so again no need for the UK to do anything.

This would be to ignore export controls we might enforce on weapons etc, that would still need handling, although there might not need to be much or any chnage here. It would also suggest that people can bring in rabid animals, nuclear material, drugs and so....

Re: Invest in hard drives

Need to check el Reg rules, but I believe this comment is copywright to me. It'll be a bit of a faff for me to now generate a hash of my comment and distribute it all websites.

--edit now I need to generate another hash and redistribute...