* Posts by Robert Carnegie

4532 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Sep 2009

Google enables private Play stores

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Wait, did you say

Android devices have a force field now?

Man, I wish there were still updates for my Original Edition Samsung Galaxy Tab!

Report blasts NASA for 'lack of consensus' on goals, plans

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: wonder why?

That is just what I was going to say - NASA's goals -and- project budgets are set by the government, and every -two- years there is a new government.

If I was running NASA, I'd try to keep things going along slowly that any government could jump on and get behind and push along, without it costing too much to keep the unfavoured cinderella projects ticking over for the -next- government to like. Such as, to go to the Moon, or to Mars.

Or the main purpose of the organisation - to occupy space with my space war machines without getting caught breaking too badly the treaties in which we promised not to do that sort of thing. Which is what everyone else is also doing.

Google kills free version of Apps for business

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Re: 5 years 10 months

On theother hand, "forgetting their roots" is bad, whenever. If that's what they've done - I wouldn't definitely say that.

Explosion of DANGEROUS IT GEAR injures and CRIPPLES MEDICS

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Yes. Confusing.

Not about actual computers actually exploding.

Who's using 'password' as a password? TOO MANY OF YOU

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

But

In that case is Mister gsvug93u10!£T!£1 still screwed, only now you don't know it?

But collisions are unlikely to the point of mathematical near-impossibility in a well-designed hashed password scheme.

Anyway, I suppose that protecting your users by storing the salted hashes of all bad passwords is also possible.

However, the error message ought now to read, "The server has noticed that your chosen password may be on a list of inapproiate obvious passwords. On the other hand, your choice of password may be reasonable, and this message a 'false positive' for this situation; nevertheless, we would like you to choose another, instead."

A password in hexadecimal digits is about as random and obscure as those digits are, so I propose that if there's enough of them then it's fine. Whatever it is, you're probably going to have to type it, which makes punctuation symbols just a pain. However, I did once maintain a set of several dozen UNIX servers that made various objections to alphanumeric pure hex numbers as passwords; when I put "0qz" in front of all of them one month, and then "qz0" after all of them the next month, most or all of the remaining objections to my choices went away. And the other part was and still is secret, so I think it's okay to tell you what I've told you.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

¡Hola!

No doubt, you are correct. It depends on where in the world you are.

If something has to be secure, I favour random hexadecimal characters, if there are enough of them - although of course that could still give you "12345678".

IETF bakes Google's SPDY protocol into HTTP 2.0

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Yeah.

But apparently SPDY is - still? - vulnerable.

I wonder if it's worth trying to use up the supply of cool names for Interent threats, such as putting a telephone return-call protocol on Windows 8 phones and calling it "NEMESIS". Then hackers will be faced with calling their cool new hacking technique something like "PIMPLE" or "BUTTHOLE" or "TWINKIE". And when they announce at hacker conference that that's what they're going to talk about, no one will come.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

...oh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY : "In September 2012, security researchers claimed to have found a vulnerability in SPDY allowing an attacker to hijack an encrypted SSL session." Remedy: don't use SPDY??

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Are you saying that SPDY was in Opera before it was in Google's own web browser, Chrome?

As for "not allowing" Google to be involved in developing Internet standards - why on earth not? It's a big stakeholder with diverse content delivery needs (search, ads, video) and it has expert programmers and system analysts and designers on payroll, and anyway the standards body isn't going to approve some old rubbish just because Google puts it forward.

I only dread the SPDY-specific malware that is surely coming. If a server can send you files that you didn't request, that's just asking for an exploit to be invented.

Antivirus biz's founder unmasked as noted Chinese hacker

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Antimalware needs to understand malware.

So who better than a malware writer?

I'll think carefully before installing their stuff, though.

Think Xmas bashes in your biz are scary? Try partying with the Channel

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The flesh incident

Sounds like the sort of game that "Ford Prefect usually played to lose".

Who cares about your archives anymore?

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Surely "the latter camp" is

the "others", for whom their archive is of less strategic importance.

Astrobioboffins seek funds to search for ALIEN HAIRSPRAY

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Re: Destroying the planet?

The ozone layer merely prevents a lot of the local star's deadly radation from reaching the ground and exterminating all life. Or all life that doesn't have a thick black skin. Or dark green skin for plants that have to carry out photosynthesis to make a living in spite of the unobstructed death rays.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

CFCs a sign of not intelligent enough inhabitants...

I'm looking at the global civilisation in the mirror...

I'm not sure if this counts as a "global warming story on The Register that isn't worth wearing out your eyeballs on the headline of", but, hey? hello? ozone layer?

(I've also forgotten whether CFCs and ozone respectively are supposed to be good or bad for climate change. You're certainly not supposed to do it deliberately.)

By the way, the last that I heard, the U.S. was thinking about not banning, or un-banning, some chemicals of this type. Now was it something about agricultural use... does that make any sense... well, on a scale of planetary species survival it doesn't, but for short term profit, maybe so.

Scoop! The inside story of the news website that saved the BBC

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Reasonably, 9/11 had the BBC web site inaccessibly slow or crashed.

We couldn't get BBC news pages, so I got the news on Ananova instead that day. Not as authoritative-feeling although apparently it was PA, but adequate in a hurry. And, on that occasion, evidently not as busy. Taken over by Orange - the phone company of that name - and gradually digested, in a metabolic rather than n

editorial sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananova

Skills shortage may crimp Asia's IT rise

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

My mistake

I thought the headline was "Skills shortage may crimp Asda's IT rise". I suppose it happens a lot.

Boffin claims Bigfoot DNA reveals BESTIAL BONKING

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Blue bollocks syndrome

Have you considered how physically painful arrested chortling is?

85% of Windows 8 users wield the desktop on day one

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Terrifying.

If I try this out, I'm going to read the licence very, very carefully first. I didn't like the last one much.

‘Anonymous’ takes down Texan RFID-tracking school

Robert Carnegie Silver badge
Joke

Or do you mean, oxymoron?

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Smash the schools. Like the Taliban is doing.

we dont need no education

New table-munching worm ravages Iranian biz databases

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Well-managed backups - what a good idea.

I will urge that my organisation implements well-managed backups immediately. Not because of this malware but because it just generally makes sense to back up the data that your business relies on. I advise other readers to do this, too.

Driverless trucks roam Australian mines

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

As far as I'm aware, "GPS" won't work underground.

But of course you can wire your tunnels for location.

Still, I assume this is work on the surface, or "open cast" mining, i.e. just scrape all of the land off to get at the goodies underneath.

Mining is an unpleaant and frequently deadly job, such as in that case in New Zealand, and many others. (Yes, ruthless unscrupulous negligent mine owners, the same as all the others there have ever been.) Even living near one isn't safe, as in Aberfan. It's a bugger for your community if your kids can't get jobs down the mine like you did, but it's also a pretty poor show if they do. So let robots and remote-controlled machinery do it. Hurrah for the Descent of the Machines.

Sandy Island does exist - on a 1908 chart

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Sleuthing... a whaling vessel?

I think that a whaling vessel would correctly identify a whale, and not mistake it for an island.

The early days of PCs as seen through DEAD TREES

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Speaking of smut,

I may have missed, did you get adverts for modems and hard disks and PC expansion cards being held out to us by cheerful Asian ladies in swimsuits, or was that a British and European phenomenon? For that matter I have an idea that the glamorous side of computing, in the "ladies in swimsuits" sense of glamour, was just across the English Channel. And, after all, computers' bits are made of silicon, which you find as sand on the beach, so perhaps swimwear was just the thing. Blokes tended to have suits on though.

Asus VivoBook S200 11.6in touchscreen notebook review

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

By the way,

That looks to me like a keyboard squeezed towards the screen, so that your hands are closer to be able to touch. I mean, the spacebar is close to the screen.

Maybe you'd develop a technique of touch-with-knuckle while typing?

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

I've just lost a long comment for some reason, but the point was that this makes full Windows 8 tablets look really expensive. Even Asus VivoTab seems to have a price in German Euros of £610 before VAT and that's a 2 GB RAM Atom machine. But according to my notes it has SSD and a Wacom pen touchscreen. However, I'm lusting after a Samsung Ativ Pro - retail price £1000.

Microsoft dragging its feet on Linux Secure Boot fix

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Solution,

I have just been reading about how you can get a working copy of Windows 8 for free by downloading Windows Media Center, whatever that is, although this is not really meant to happen. So just bundle Linux with that.

...What?

'Rare for tech not to be involved in child abuse cases'

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Would you like to see a video about puppies?

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Mike, it's true that children may be mistreated by people their own age, suffer terribly, and be driven to self harm or suicide. And that children have "gangs" or may be involved as members of adult gangs. But this and the linked BBC story

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20409229

seem to be talking about organised commercial sexual abuse of children, either producing records of abuse that can be sold to those credit card holders, or passing the children themselves around for abuse by paying customers or by gang members as a membership benefit. The people running it may not even be perverts themselves, they just do it for the money.

And still the real most common abuser is an adult that a child's carer somewhat trusts, or the carer - parent or other - because a responsible carer protects the child from identifiable threats, including other children whose behaviour isn't to be relied on.

If you're speaking as an abused person then I am very sorry for what you may have suffered.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

A credible argument is made that information technology and communications technology often are used on victims of sexual abuse as part of the exercise. There's also an alcohol and drugs dimension.

On the other hand, it's all too likely that they only catch the buggers when they post the video on YouTube, pay for abuse pictures online with a credit card, or work prominently in the music business and children's television and radio and marathon running for fifty years. Whereas if you just quietly interfere with your nephews, nieces, and grandchildren and don't blog about it, you'll probably get away with it for ever so long. At least they get to write a book about it when they grow up, but you'll probably be dead by then.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Apparently so.

It's the rapey, child abusey alternative version of watching a dirty video while performing the act with a consenting partner - if you can both see; it's tricky.

In an episode of QI, Alan Davies said of his wife (I suppose) not that they do that, but that in a certain sexual position, he can put the TV on to watch football with the sound off. He also said something about hearing a magazine page being turned by his partner in the course of events. Mr Davies is a comedian and he may have been joking.

Pop songs by Bloodhound Gang and Blink 182 also come to mind.

4chan founder Moot threatens site for using his handle

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Example

I saw it used in a 1980s American comicbook. The hero is in the vicinity of Pittsburgh when a huge explosion occurs. He meets people concerned about loved ones in the town and he offers to check if they're okay, but he realises when he gets closer that the house address he was given "is moot" because the entire town and population has been vaporized.

On the other hand, the writer went on to have the hero tell us that he eschewed euphemisms when he brought back the bad news and said "They're gone." That's a euphemism. If they'd left town, they'd be gone. The non-euphemism version is "They're dead." Unless they'd left town, that is. So, we don't have an absolute authority on words, here.

Still, it happens often enough that Britons and Americans use the word "moot" and think that they're communicating when they aren't.

Another to watch out for is British braces and American suspenders, which are the same item worn to hold one's trousers up by a set of elastic straps passing over the shoulders and neck. American braces are to adjust the teeth, and British suspenders are for stockings, usually of ladies but not always (e.g. Rocky Horror Show).

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Moot

In American English, "moot" means "irrelevant", like the positions of the deckchairs on the Titanic.

It also means "a ring gauge for checking the diameters of treenails".

I mentally associate 4chan with computer misuse and horrible people doing dreadful things and upsetting everybody else, although this may be a misunderstanding. "Moot" means nothing to me in this context, and I don't suppose that Moot.it would be treated any better or worse than puppies-and-kittens.org , if there was such a site.

Ten Linux apps you must install

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

And you sass that hoopy Linux Torvalds,

There is a frood who -really- knows where his towel is.

Bah humbug! Google cancels Christmas

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

By the way,

A while back, the "Doctor Who Adventures" comic gave away a Time Lord time traveller's calendar for the next year as a near-Christmas gift. Contents: ten months. At least in my copy. In the context, and with overactive imagination, you might wonder if it was authoritative, and what was going to happen before November to make it unnecessary. Also, in the magazine, notes for the year ahead such as "April: you do NOT want to know. Really."

Another time I got a clock from them, a real one, working! If it was lying on its back.

This week"s "Time Vortex Manipulator" doesn't work either. ...What?

Robert Carnegie Silver badge
Joke

It's called "Facepalm error",

I think. :-)

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Yes; daylight saving is tricky, whoever you are.

Programming a video or radio recorder for the small hours when daylight saving time starts or stops is basically a gamble. Maybe when PCs converge fully with TV it'll be possible to select "View all times -without- daylight saving" temporarily for a clearer view.

BBC World Service Radio, at least in Europe, uses GMT all year round, which means that you have to be mentally alert when listening to their time announcements. But they change their regular schedules and programme times around then, anyway, so it's still baffling.

So probably we should be tolerant of temporary hiccups in our personal time management applications, and, on the other hand, don't depend on using them as your alarm clock unless you're very sure of what they're going to do in these cases.

Author of '80s classic The Hobbit didn't know game was a hit

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Lots of comments,

THE ROOM IS TOO FULL TO ENTER.

I think I never completed The Hobbit. I suspect I never paid for it, maybe, someone at school had a tape-copying stereo. But I think I got a copy later.

Mozilla needs to find alternatives to the Google umbilical

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

It's easier to buy apps for Apple, with real money.

I might be out of touch on this, but my understanding is that Apple apps can be charged to your phone bill. Android apps generally can't, you have to put your credit card details into Google Play store or an equivalent, and casual users don't do that. So there are a lot more free Android software titles, sponsored by advertising, which means unfortunately that they have a slightly sleazy feel, at best, and a lack of the means of encouraging a developer to improve the product, by giving or offering money.

Taliban official's email blunder leaks 400+ contacts

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

It's a paradox, but who else would they send press releases to, but the press.

SUBSCRIBE

Long-suffering Virgin Media victims see no end to vid PURGATORY

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

And another paranoid proposition

If they wanted to drive you onto watching Virgin cable video instead of third-party Internet online media, this might be how they'd do it.

In the debate over online network neutrality - which in Britain we simply don't have - one of the use cases of a non-neutrality policy is for a video supply company to be able to throttle or block Internet video supplied by third parties. I think it wasn't even secret, it was in people's business plans.

Anonymous attacks Israeli websites over Gaza bombings

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Fun to watch, anyway, regardless of one's views on the physical conflict,

"Anonymous" hackers worldwide, versus a nation that has its own professional military hackers, and international death squads, and U.S. backing.

I'm not a fan of Anonymous and I don't mind if they get themselves killed, I just want the entertainment.

Opera site served Blackhole malvertising, says antivirus firm

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

As a fan of Opera, and of circumscribed technical knowledge,

I see that the active malicious content apparently was in a PDF - so it would be a problem introduced by installing Adobe Reader, and not necessarily the latest version.

Having said that, any web site carrying evil advertisements as described is doing ill.

Also, Adobe seems to have updated to a version 11 - except on Windows Vista which is only given version 10.1.4, at least when I last looked. But of course Vista is obsolete and not fully supported now even by Microsoft. (My Vista machine got some security patches this week, though. They still do those.)

Problems with Adobe Reader 11 are rumoured but shadowy, I think; what catches you out is running an oldef version that hasn't had loopholes fixed.

Apple granted patent for ebook page-turning

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

It's not an invention patent, it's a "design patent".

If I've got this straight, which you shouldn't count on, this is more like legal protection for an identifiable trademark or distinctive look-and-feel of their product. It means, or is meant to mean, that competitors are discouraged from making a similar product that looks too much like Apple's in this respect. So, it doesn't matter how often or how long it's been done before, if Apple has exclusivity on it now.

Memo to Groupon: Best cheapo deals have a premium tag

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Back in the day, when IBM sold PCs,

I might have this wrong, but I understand that you could negotiate to buy IBM PCs at EIGHTY PER CENT discount if you haggled, but it was a $1000 PC priced at $5000, or whichever. So with the discount, you got to pay just $1000, for a class of computer that you could buy elsewhere for just $1000 - only without being the smart negotiator that got the terrific discount.

Worried dad invents pepper-spray iPhone case

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Excuse me?

You think this isn't a James Bond device? Not one of Q's best efforts, I admit, but an effective counter against the watch with a magnet that unzips ladies' clothes.

Medical scan record that the NHS says will cost £2k to retrieve: Detail

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

But if I was the NHS,

I'd be tempted to make you a present of the disc. As-is. Framed, to hang on your wall.

You've got a point, though. But I work in IT and this stuff is hard.

App designed for safe sending of naughty selfies is rife with risks

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Granted this sounds like a disastrous idea,

What about using this stuff for the pictures?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Eye

Remember that? Could you ever see what it was? I couldn't, but I have sight problems - not terrible but probably enough to make this sort of trick impossible for me. Anyway, to get a snapshot off -that- seems like probably more trouble than just hiding a camera with timer in your date's bathroom.

Fujitsu guru: Win 8 will triumph. And we'll have brain plugs in 2027

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Business doesn't need Windows 8...

If we have to give up using Windows XP, then later versions are sufficiently different, Win 8 especially, that you may as well seriously consider using Linux for your business desktop as well as servers. If a stupid start screen appeals to you then try out the latest Ubuntu :-)

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Apples and Oranges

The man in the street back then didn't know what an operating system was, but anybody following enterprise or personal computing news knew about OS/2. But for various reasons, some of them short-sighted or unprofessional, the world bought Microsoft Windows instead. It was technically poorer in many ways, but it came with the Solitaire desktop card game, with Reversi, with Minesweeper - in whichever order.

OS/2 had a painful text mode and probably would have locked us into a relationship with IBM sooner and harder than we did get tied to Microsoft, so maybe it was for the our ownlgood in the end. A shame about Lotus 1-2-3 though - great spreadsheet product, got diverted into developing mainly an OS/2 version because professional customers were supposed to be using OS/2, consequently Microsoft Excel won although it wasn't as good.

And if we were all running OS/2 now instead of Windows then IBM probably wouldn't have gotten interested in Linux, and then Linux would be a lot poorer than it is.

On the other hand, an OS/2 universe might have been frIendlier to UNIX users. IBM had reasons to make that happen. Microsoft didn't, particularly - although Microsoft very grudgingly tacked something called POSIX onto Windows NT, because they had to, because of the government I think.

And what else? Oh, I think there was speech recognition as standard sooner in OS/2 than in Windows; you got a version of it with Microsoft Office, if you were running XP and you got it if you bought the Wind XP "Tablet Edition" (i.e. bought a tablet), otherwise mostly no. It became standard provision in Windows Vista/7/8 but ironically they don't like to talk about it, seemingly.