Posts by Robert Carnegie 4557 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Sep 2009
I think I remember that current Microsoft products, including Windows 10, have a licence that grants Microsoft the right to delete illegal software from the device. Presumably a web browser that doesn't let them override the search service to be Bing may be considered illegal?
I use WordPad often. It's light, it makes presentable text in RTF, and it's there. It's always there on any Windows PC I'm using.
When I use WordPad, I'm deliberately choosing not to use Microsoft Word or Microsoft Office. Consequently, "reminding" me that using Microsoft Office is an option is just an annoyance. Hey, computer! You work for me. Not to be vulgar, but I -own- you. So act like it, huh?
It's not clear that "lying about homeless pets" was considered. Presentation evidently is a factor, an appropriate photograph... vaccination was mentioned, so if that's important to prospective owners then it may be worth doing for animals in waiting. (They may or may not get a different injection instead if not adopted.)
My local newspaper has a "homeless pet of the week" feature; often these are "rescue" animals and they variously need to be in / not in a family, kept indoors / outdoors, with or without other animals, things like that... but another option, perhaps, is to foster-home unowned pets temporarily and make them more sociable for rehoming.
They don't need to apologise to The Register, for which it is providing a news story. They don't need to apologise to most Register readers, who, going by replies here, are mostly not using this service, preferring the little black book or the mysterious tattoo. I don't have access to Twitter, but I expect they are apologizing there to their actual customers.
Whenever Doctor Who goes anywhere in space and time after the year 2020, they will know straight away that it's him/her.
...until 5045 or whenever that s/he creates and distributes a virus that encrypts him/her, or something.
…like, an actual virus.
(Possibly an intelligent and friendly one.)
While it's important to remember that cracking vulnerable systems is a full time everyday job for naughty people and they are serious and professional about it, it's also the case that if your system is better secured than the company next door then your neighbor will be hit first. For that matter, profitable extortion can be as simple as the good old "protection" racket. They threaten violence, credibly, against your premises and staff, unless you protect yourself by paying them to leave you alone. They also bribe or threaten your staff to facilitate all this. No need to fiddle around with computers, which can get pretty complicated.
From dictionary.com:
Idioms for edge
21 have an edge on, Informal. to be mildly intoxicated with alcoholic liquor:
He had a pleasant edge on from the sherry.
22 on edge, a (of a person or a person's nerves) acutely sensitive; nervous; tense.
b impatient; eager:
The contestants were on edge to learn the results.
...it wouldn't be right to recommend Idiom No.21 as an antidote to Idiom No.22, but it's an interesting neighbourance - well, juxtaposition, but fancy words bring on NO.22 as well. ;-)
Helicopters do sort of potter about though. Like the one that crashed onto a pub in Glasgow last decade.
I think it was in the 1980s that a photo snooper caught The Sensational She-Hulk, who had temporarily joined the Fantastic Four, sunbathing on the roof of their famous New York skyscraper. When the FF (I think the Human Torch specifically, he can fly) looked for the culprit, there were dozens of helicopters. Dang.
(To be clear, this was in a comic. #275 actually.)
The pictures were published without her permission, alas. But, being a Hulk, she's green, but the printer assumed that the pictures weren't, so corrected the colour. Result, anonymity.
Segway just showed a wheelchair with no front wheels apparently, it just balances underneath you. It looks even more fun than ordinary electric wheelchairs. A visitor at the show joysticked themselves into a wall on it, but even so. In the UK none of this is street legal unless you actually are disabled, I'd sort of like to be for a week just to try out all the various ride-on things.
People who want to keep heir hair nice don't want to wear a helmet. It's not a problem for me. Less and less so, in fact, sadly.
For cycling this means that people miss out on hypothetically healthy exercise - traffic fumes aside. The health benefit of an electric scooter is less obvious.
However, you can do either at home, stationary and safe.
I do wonder if these scooter accident victims would have found other ways to injure themselves if, say, on the inauspicious occasion they'd found their scooter uncharged and unusable. Or can you push charge them, I don't know, so you could still go along push-powered... I have face-planted on a non-electric scooter, but not recently. And this report is from the "National Electronic Injury Surveillance System" so......
A modern mobile phone can make calls over the wi fi router... oh. ;-)
Power banks for mobile stuff is all over the place, though. I expect you could have as much UPS as you want, that way. Or, if you have an electric vehicle, it can be a really big battery for your home stuff, too.
Could some sort of robot mole get the copper out and the fibre in - possibly inside the existing armouring, if confirmed present? But that would be more mouse sized… I'm told that mice can get in through extraordinarily small holes. The ones I occasionally trap (dead) in the attic (why there? do birds of prey drop them?) look a bit big for that, though. I have not tried squeezing them to see what happens, I think it would be unpleasant. Even with the thick rubber gloves on (tip).
I'm a bit unclear about what was hacked. Does the TikTok app receive SMS messages, or, is this about a hacker sending malicious SMS with a link to a handset malware web site, with TikTok as the apparent (and actual) SMS sender?
And, can't hackers send evil SMSes of their own anyway? So the only difference is that they are falsely hiding behind TikTok's reputation for respectable communiation. And are not paying.
I'm going to imagine that the Microsoft-Windows-based tool is an imaginary one called "LongJohnSilver" - no connection if there is a real software product of that name (or a, um, specialized film actor) - and that it's slightly possible that the claim of recovered data is not authentic and is originated by the imaginary seller of the imaginary software. And endorsed by the, ahem, actor. It's just something to check.
And, having said that, the technique exists of simply scanning the disk surface for data regions that appear to contain data intended to be a file (not encrypted). So, without repairing the file system, you can get your data back. Even in Windows. Obviously an array of disks may be more challenging to investigate if a file is distributed amongst them. But if the distribution follows a simple pattern, it's not impossible. Or if you have small files that actually don't split across disks.
Put the little goodies IN the till, with the money. Practically speaking, its security is basically a solved problem. Video camera watching the cashier all day has been used.
A recent case reported on Snopes was a police officer at Starbucks who reported that his drink came with "Pig" written on the cup. Apparently the company were able to disprove this with their video system. Not clear whether people were already fired anyway. But the cop was, after that.
'Connected" cars are due to be compulsory in the EU. Presumably either you'll be able to plug in a box for that in an older car, or there'll be a bounty for people hunting down and capturing older vehicles. Hope you're good at hiding. :-)
What if the power grid had Y2K trouble and the voltage went down, up, off and on, or backwards? Then your lights, electric (?) kettles, and other plug-in appliances could be unusable.
Desk drawers... what if Y2K crashes an aeroplane, and someone on board has the only key to the desk?
Spanners... nope. Well - if the British economy is crashed by Y2K and you have to get everything from whichever of Europe or the U.S. or China survives, then it'll be all metric sizes / all non metric sizes / made of surprisingly soft "steel" which needs very gentle handling. So maybe that.
I like the idea of a two key access system for disaster initiation.
That can be done very simply, if not well, with an ordinary password set to letmein younonce. Me letmein, younonce. We each type our bit of the password. Then click OK. It says "Password incorrect" and we are required to bicker for sixty seconds over whose fault it is. Not because of a bad login time-out, it's just how professionals "bond".
Yeah, the "Not Always Right" web site recently (...this year - probably) had a story about a guest who objected when his "single room" booking was / was going to be actually a single, not a double. I think he wanted his wife to come as usual, or something. Anyway, then he wanted a discount refunded to him because he was getting what was ordered. The other reason that didn't happen is that his employer had paid for it anyway.
There are fun cables now with a micro USB plug and then one or two caps tied to the end for alternate fittings, and these are starting to appear with USB C although there's a risk that this may be not truly compatible with USB C and charging rate control -USB C being more than just a wire. But it works. There's also plugs with a selection of short cables attached. You probably should use those with one device at a time.
I bought a cheap cable that ingeniously fits in micro USB both ways round and USB A likewise, but the little DAB radio I was charging with it has had its charge socket come adrift so I'm not recommending that product.
This. I draw an approximation of the USB fork symbol on the "face up" side (for e.g. laptop USB A ports), as on the plug also, pointing into the socket. I may label the opposite side of a plug or socket with a black dot.
For reasons, I put USB thumbdrives into a socket cable lurking under my desk, and I just got around to fitting the new black cable labelled black on a black background with orange tape round the socket, then a white adhesive "this side up" label drawn as described, then Scotch tape over the label since it seems to be not sticking. That tape seems eventually to eat ballpoint ink, or maybe it fades naturally. Something to watch, either way.
I have a nice white pocketable "powerbank" where I just drew on the case then taped over it. Like most of them up to now, there's micro USB socket in to charge the powerbank, and USB A socket to draw from the battery. In terms of the icon on plugs, the sockets are facing opposite ways.
Obviously the government, like all others, wants you to use encryption that it has keys to. They gave themselves permission.
The new catch is that the spy software also watches and listens all the time through the camera, microphone, and location sensor. That went too far, apparently.
I've vaguely thought that a shower that generates hot water on the inkjet principle would be efficient, just heating the water as it's delivered, probably well programmable for temperature as well. BUT you'd have a lot of electricity inside the shower head or handset. If that's fixable, it's a thought.
My heated shower's on the blink, I should replace it... it has half power and full power, but full is painfully hot and half somehow isn't working any more, it comes out slightly above room temperature and I don't like that either. So I have to switch between the two settings throughout my shower. And apparently it takes around ten seconds for water to pass from shower box to shower head, so I have to anticipate.
If there's such a thing as a low-current UK extension cord, it's liable to have a current fuse in the plug that pops if it's overloaded. I once made an extension cord with cable rated 5A, since I happened to have that cable I suppose, and fitted a 5A fuse. We had a slightly amusing incident one cold Christmas when I put an electric heater on it, using 1 kW, which was fine. Until my sister turned the heater up to 3 kW, as I said "No!" loudly but too late; of course the fuse popped. I think I found a spare fuse, or another plug to take one from...
I did similar to myself with a multi-socket extension, which I think had the intended feature that three sockets would only turn on when the fourth was supplying current, so that you could turn on, say, your TV, and the rest of your "home theatre" stuff also switches on. This did have a limit of 1kW, I think, for no clear reason, and a tricky internal fuse, but I was short of an extension and I assumed that it would cope with a 700W domestic microwave oven. It didn't, because such a microwave produces 700W of microwave energy but uses somewhere above 1000W to do it, as it's less than 100 percent efficient. Statements online include "50 percent" and "650W / 1000W". (And there's a motor for the turntable, but that can't be much.) The actual number is in the machine's small print. So again the special fuse popped.
I had a fire inspection at home, one thing they don't like is chaining a multi-socket block onto another multi-socket block. Preferred is a two-faced tower thing that can have as many as 10 sockets on, which is the same as three x4 blocks since two of your sockets are occupied by the blocks of the plugs. So I've switched to towers. Obviously not for small children or pets to play with, but nothing electrical is; arrange furniture accordingly. These may also come with a promise, for what that's worth, of "surge protection", and/or a couple of USB charging sockets.
The Two Ronnies used to do it regularly.
I think their news desk reported that scientists crossed a German Shepherd with a vacuum cleaner, and got a dog that really puts the wind up postmen (70s or 80s so gendered language).
For the monkey-pig chimera, I'm afraid that the joke I've thought of is not very good and also too suggestive for my sense of their level, they only wanted to be slightly rude. So I don't think they would have told us that scientist had bred an animal that can grind its own organ.
IGMC
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