Posts by Robert Carnegie

Re: Can't we get rid of May?

I assumed - though I seem to be wrong - that the message meant there was no present of money in the "sorry about your new job" card.

Re: Why now?

It was dealt with at the time, by which I mean it was ignored.

While I'm at it, I'd suppose that files on the computer disk are labelled as belonging to dgreen or to dgreensecretary so you would be able to tell who did it, including the web cache.

As for what's legal or illegal porn, it may be only a few pixels difference but I expect that forensic investigators have file checksums to identify commonly available smut. Images may also include the publisher's name e.g. Playboy which you would expect to be legal.

Re: Acronym alert...POS = Point Of Sale or Piece Of Shit

Thanks for prompting me to look up an explanation of why the policeman wizard (!) in Ben Aaronovitch's "Rivers of London" novel series ends up mostly driving a "Ford Asbo".

Re: Frankly I'm astonished you can "HFT" from across the atlantic due to signal delay.

I think the idea is to HFT in two or more exchanges simultaneously, which are geographically separated. So, toilet paper futures go up microscopically in Frankfurt, you instantly buy shares in a laxative company in New York. Or sell. I'm not an expert.

For best results, you may also have to have an undersea base in mid Atlantic to do the trading from. This may be in a James Bond film soon (and blow up), or one made already, I haven't quite kept up.

But I find it distasteful that so much effort is put into playing on the stock markets as casinos instead of in actually running businesses well.

Re: Translation please

Software copyright is one thing, a business trademark is another. It's how you're recognised and your reputation, and it's mostly up to you to defend your right to be known by it - by chasing others off it. That includes deliberate fakes, coincidental duplications, and people who think your name is clever and so make up a similar one, and it includes near exact duplicates and distant suggestions - but in the latter case, the chasing off may only consist of a lawyer's letter in harsh language but no further enforcement action.

I think the incident of the Software Freedom Law Center goes further, into officially acknowledged or registered trademarks. I'm not a lawyer but I think a "registered trademark" is presumed to be legitimate until it isn't, so if someone applies to registers a trademark that resembles yours, then you'd better speak up.

To me, "Software Freedom Law Center" sounds generic anyway. They should maybe have put an "Acme" in there somewhere. Or, I dunno, "Spartacus". Something that just distinguishes it from alternatives.

Re: BRS

Microwaves - just guessing that the idea is, if the stuff on the turntable bumps into a wall or something and stops turning, then it should auto reverse. So it always reverses. That will also allow the reversing action to be tested.

Microwaves also shouldn't be run with nothing inside to be heated, but AIUI this isn't prevented?

Re: Nursing Acronyms

Phil Hammond the comedy doctor has stated that funny descriptions of patients become less funny when you are explaining their meanings during a court case.

Re: And....

Yeah, I was thinking your digestion will be spurlocked after (less than) thirty days of pies.

Re: How teensie weensie exactly?

The picture in Reg is not actual size? Aww.

Re: One of these days...

It probably costs you more than £2.50 to drive to the council dumping facility. You're making a big objection to a small charge on what presumably ends up being expensive and unecological landfill somewhere.

Come Brexit we shall need to produce more food inland anyway, so, stuff your landscaping, and Dig For Victory and potatoes.

There was a johnny in the street and I parked next to it.

That would be slang for "a gentleman's prophylactic contraceptive".

I don't remember whether "john" is UK or US slang for a prostitute's client. That would be who had left the prophylactic in the street.

Worth cruising around for? It depends whether you get a charge out of it.

Re: Could have been worse ...

Uber does limos but I can't testify to the actual quality of UberLUX (Limousine Unbelievably Expensive).

The title is real, the interpretation may not be.

Re: While I'm here - Sarahah?

They are privacy focussed so you cannot get in touch with them.

In the bible, Abraham was told by an angel of God that he and his wife would bear children. They were in their nineties and she laughed so hard that her false teeth came out. Then she said, "Wasn't me", but it was, so God changed her name to Sarahah.

Some of this actually is in the bible, some I made up.

I think 2FA by text works by sending a random code as a message to your mobile number. You must input this code in your process of logging in, but you don't have to send a text back?

Re: "Gambler's Fallacy"

This is Bayesian, yes? But the probability that your five-heads coin is crooked depends on the prior probability of you obtaining - accidentally no doubt - such a crooked coin. If they are very rare then you are probably just looking at luck and a fair coin.

I expect without checking that it's physically difficult anyway to make a coin which favours heads over tails, except of course by printing heads on both sides of the coin which is rather a giveaway. Of course, making sure that when the referee inspects the coin, they aren't inspecting the one with two heads, is just a matter of dexterity.

Re: Relax ..

One civilian newswatcher's impression from a series of wars where the U.S. had allies is that U.S. forces early on test the commitment of said allies by shooting some of them dead. If that is put up with, and it usually is, then so will a lot more be, e.g. Abu Ghraib (until the photos get out).

Re: This won't be addressed

It's fairly easy to attach a small package of electronics to a car to do mischief on its own. Spider-Man would do it using his special spider web that lasts for an hour. Indeed he's been using electronic "spider-tracers" on people as well as vehicles for decades - the device makes his secret spider-sense buzz.

Oddly though he tends to ride on the outside of buses, trains, and private motor vehicles to get around, when he isn't swinging on web-lines around town like an urban Tarzan with lianas.

Re: Coup shame fame?

One evening I tuned into Russell Brand's show on Radio 2 - mostly an easy listening music station - and he was chatting to guests about Plato and the school of Socrates. However, politics is difficult, and telling people not to vote, as a protest, really doesn't help. Come to think, Socrates got poisoned by government decree, so, bit of a blind spot there as well.

I was told that Boris Johnson isn't as stupid as he seems but I wasn't given supporting evidence, and obviously there's an awful lot of room between "as stupid as he seems" and even "traffic warden". There is however a kind of moral stupidity about where and how to ride a bicycle, which women to sleep with, and how to coordinate a party line with the prime minister, that he seems to have a lot of. I think he intentionally shams being intellectually deficient to disguise his full awareness of being a horrible manipulative bully, and enjoying it.

Re: I wonder...

"Personal attention" from someone with a track record of twisting things the wrong way around, requires careful consideration.

I suppose you could put a large arrow and "THIS WAY" on it.

Re: One way ...

For this solution on iOS, you wouldn't need to protect against web hacking the secret image that the system uses in its own dialogs, because it isn't being transmitted over a network.

You might need to protect it from the phone's camera seeing a reflective surface in your room where the secret image can be picked up, but that's a different challenge. Maybe turn off the camera when the password dialog is displayed.

Also, of course, there's the touchscreen / accelerometer problem.

Re: There was something newsworthy there

I suspect the selling point of this product is that the disc write-protect setting itself is also write-once read many - once you make a disc read-only, it stays read-only. But I don't know this. If it is, then I recommend buying the deluxe edition of the software, that includes the "Are you sure?" prompt. :-)

Re: Announcement not particularly clear

We know that Disqus lets you use an account with Facebook, Twitter, or Google to log in to Disqus. I think in fact you may or may not also have a password, because I think I got the process wrong and set my Google password as the password for Disqus too, which isn't the same thing. I've now pre-emptively changed both of them to a formula of Leters78 which I've then forgotten, but I wrote it down in my diary of secrets.

So:

If you log in to Disqus with a password then it may have been leaked, although protected with salted SHA1, and you have to change it.

If you log in to Disqus using Facebook or whatever, then the leak includes your Facebook name (plain?) but not any password.

Or it may be both. If you see what I mean.

At https://haveibeenpwned.com/ you can input an e-mail address (plain disqus login) or user name and see where it has been leaked from, not counting what you just did :-) At the moment this may be showing all of Disqus's users and not only as of 2012, since people are claiming that they joined later and are being shown as included in this leak.

Are we sneering at pediatric nurses? If we are doing that, then why?

Re: Drink the Cloud coolaid

Register's readership may love the idea of pulling in consultants to advise on this sort of thing, but if there already are in-house staff, they probably already spent a lot of time thinking about how to do this stuff - and they are committed to the organisation like consultants aren't. In Dilbert cartoons, for instance - which is not the SMB case - the consultant, usually "Dogbert", either tells very client to buy the same thing, or finds out what in-house staff think is needed, and pitches that. But they get believed by mnagement because they're the consultant.

Some furniture makers assemble their product before it's sold, and probably do it better than the owner ever could. Cars... I don't know if a self-assembly automobile or "kit car" is even legal now.

Re: "Two wrongs don't make a right." tl;dr.

I look forward to a law that forces Donald Trump to stop tweeting and maybe also deports his wife, not particularly because justice would be served but only because it would be funny to hear about.

Re: Password Creation Rules

Random non-repeated consonants, a couple of digits, a symbol if some idiot system insists. Then convert your consonants to a phrase to remember. For instance Gchqnsa04 - "God can hear quiet nuns saying Angelus." (No, A isn't a consonant.)

A class of password that maybe does need to be reset is the shared one. You may have ceased to employ somebody who knows a lot of your important system passwords, whether they were supposed to know them or not. Just routinely changing these passwords protects against this.

Re: Is sound really the best way?

I think "audio QR" is an incorrect or novel term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code doesn't mention a version in sound, and Google of "audio QR" initially produces web pages about "how tu put an audio file on the Internet and then make a QR code that finds that file and plays it".

As I understand it, QR is specifically a format for a two-dimensional image which contains an encoded data file. You scan the image, decode it, and you have the file. Very commonly, the file contains a URL which is the address of further data. My weekly bus ticket now is a QR code on paper; it may or may not be a signed data file which represents a valid ticket for the current week - also presumably there's some tracking to prevent me selling photocopies of it to friends: if more than one person seeming to be using the same ticket then you get stopped. Having said that, I probably shouldn't flash it around at other times in case someone photographs it. Of course a criminal could just steal my actual ticket...

"audio QR" evidently is an ultrasonic data standard which similarly transmits a file, and it may not even have a proper name in English (one that isn't embarrassing). It needs electronic audio equipment to send and receive it but it doesn't need a visual display or printer or camera, so maybe that works better in India. It's probably pretty fast, and, being ultrasonic, it won't easily be recorded by a third party or send over actual phone lines, which filter down to spoken-word frequencies. And tapping it may do you no good anyway if it's like my bus ticket but only actually valid during the split-second that it's transmitted.

My basic impression of India from many many miles away, but watching it on television, is that it's d--- noisy - from (not) watching films like "Gandhi" and even before you consider the background music as well. On the other hand, slightly more reflection tells me, accurately or not, that lots of India is miles and miles from anywhere. No doubt the developers of the "Tez" dispenser have both of these situations in mind.

@HmmmYes

A slush fund / insurance for farmers, the EU may be. Let me inquire: do you eat food?

Even producing a product that everyone needs, farming isn't a great way to make money when your production is at the mercy of weather, pestilence, and the Berkeley Hunts literally riding roughshod over your goods in production in pursuit of what is now theoretically an imaginary fox. Pokemon Go with added horse crap.

Subsidy uses tax to keep farms running to put food in our supermarkets whether each individual farm has a good or a bad year this year, which sounds smart to me.

Pictures or it didn't... ah.

Re: Whilst I've toyed with the idea...

I cycle with Radio 4 on, but I put it off during manoeuvres that require undivided attention in case Boris Johnson or someone gets me wound up at the wrong moment. Doesn't help if Boris Johnson is cycling in my line of sight, but what can you do? Actually I have a few ideas and that's all I'm saying. (Only joking. Mostly joking.)

As for the "red alert" indicator (I've been watching "Star Trek Voyager" lately, they probably use 24th century red LEDs because theirs are on most of the time), you'd do better with either magneticable "SOD OFF" printed discs to slap onto both earpieces, or, wear your bicycle helmet at your desk, and people won't want to talk to you.

I don't know if it actually happens and how often, but in Ben Aaronovitch's novels about London policeman PC Grant - special skill, he's a wizard - they routinely look up someone's driving licence photograph, on home visits they phone-photograph any personal pictures you leave on display... PC Grant describes this as "cheating" but only because he can do it and I can't. It may also help that he is effectively boss of the Magical Crimes Unit afar as computer access goes because the actual boss is Merlin's great-grandson and doesn't know how to work the things, either HOLMES or Watson.

Re: Black vs white vs grey

I don't see a reason to prevent me from using password "tliuwsusuoeucp" because someone used it in 1997 on a web chat site that was subsequently hacked.

Currently I use Randomuniqueconsonantsthendig145 which works in most places except where some genius thinks I need to use a non-European punctuation symbol as well. Which isn't on my keyboard or doesn't work through the web interface. And which happens on my work account. 1diot0!

And whoever bans re-used letters in passwords needs a keeck in the butt, and fiqbly. (Fiqbly is blocked as password because it is a noun followed by a surname, says some champion Scrabble player with no reason to exist.)

Smart doorbell has potential

If only they hadn't advertised it on TV (this is "Ring") and shown everybody how it works.

You can pretend to be in, that's the main idea. You also can photograph people, and this works BEFORE they ring the bell because it can be motion sensitive. (Yes, this means if a cat does a whoopsie on the doorstep. Yes, there are repeats on of "Some Mothers Do Have 'Em".)

Delay in answering is normal for door phones as well as bells.

Rubbish sound quality is also normal for door phone. If it's bad enough then your visitor won't know where you are or what you're saying. For that matter, the app could be written to play pre recorded messages such as "Can you tell the man next door, I'm just getting into the bath" etc. Or a big barking dog would be a great sound effect to use.

Also if it is a burglar by the look of it then you can call the police straight away. It seems unlikely that the naughty boy or girl will win that battle of wits.