* Posts by big_D

6775 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009

Ex-director accuses iRobot of firing him for pointing out the home-cleaner droids broke safety, govt regulations

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Re: See that Iceberg on the port bow?

From personal experience, I'd say I have little confidence in such labels and certificates.

Butterfly defect stripped from MacBook Pros, Airs by Q2 2020, reckons Apple analyst

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Re: I liked the butterfly keyboard..

Yes. The VT100 keyboard was really good. Probably one of my all-time favourites. We also had a couple of VT100 clones, I think from CIT, its action was slightly softer and the keys had a rougher surface for better grip.

Lovely feel, lovely sound. I miss the "good old days".

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The original Apple ][ and Mac Plus keyboards were great. The SE/Mac II keyboard was okay. The "modern era" keyboards have gradually gotten worse with each passing generation. Hopefully they've hit bottom and they can only improve from here on out.

Firefox 74 slams Facebook in solitary confinement: Browser add-on stops social network stalking users across the web

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Angel

Facebook free.

Just set it up and activated. It has found no trace of Facebook trackers in Firefox... So that will be my Pi-hole working as expected then.

US prez Donald Trump declares America closed to those flying in from Schengen zone over coronavirus woes

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Paris Hilton

Re: Green card holders and the immediate family of US citizens get a pass.

But, you are forgetting, that they have the special US-gene(tm), so they won't be affected whilst abroad!

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Facepalm

Precautions...

Trump, who described COVID-19 as a "foreign virus", said the "EU failed to take the same precautions" as the US.

Yes, well, our soil here isn't very sandy, so burying our heads in the ground hurts a lot more.

And we didn't botch up the test kits or refuse to test people.

White House turns to Big Tech to fix coronavirus blunders while classifying previous conversations

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Re: "quickly pinpointing the source of illness within vulnerable communities"

Yes, basically, the government sets up testing stations and quickly tests people with symptoms, "for free".

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Re: Oh My!

I hate to break it to the Whitehouse, but most other governments are giving press conferences about the current state of the SARS-COV-2 (aka COVID-19) multiple times during the course of a day.

Giving information like how many government run, free testing stations have been set up, how many thousands of people have been tested and how many infections and deaths have been reported...

The Internet of Things is a security nightmare, latest real-world analysis reveals: Unencrypted traffic, network crossover, vulnerable OSes

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Re: Looks like there's even more money to be made by mining the US HealthCare system

It is not just healthcare. In industry, it is the same story. Why replace several million Euros worth of plant equipment, just because the PC that runs it needs XP or Windows 7? We just isolate the kit or remove it from the network completely.

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Holmes

The "S" in IoT

stands for Security.

Nuff said.

Meltdown The Sequel strikes Intel chips – and full mitigation against data-meddling LVI flaw will slash performance

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Re: If these exploits carry one

AMD have their own problems with the exploit released this week.

UK Defence Committee probe into national security threat of Huawei sure to uncover lots of new and original insights

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Lock them in a room...

Lock them in a room with the source code from the quality lab that GCHQ and Huawei run and let them out, when they finished reading it.

Microsoft spares TLS 1.0 in Azure DevOps Services after customer backlash, Cosmos DB makes good on blurtage

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Anyone who is still using TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1 on the Internet without parental guidance, erm anything using TLS 1.0 shouldn't be let within a hundred miles of the Internet! It is known insecure and fixed through newer versions. TLS 1.1 isn't much better.

Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42

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Mushroom

Re: Anybody fancy a game of...

Belgium! You actually went there!

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Re: fun facts

I'm the same way with the Dune series, English and German books and the Audible series in German.

I loved THHGTTG when I was growing up. I had the radio plays on cassette and listened to them on the bus every day going to college. I bought some anniversary version of the book (all parts in one bound edition). I also have the first part in German.

The TV series was okay, but the film was a real disaster, and I'm not talking about Disaster Area here.

I even had the Infocom adventure game for my Amstrad.

Morrisons puts non-essential tech changes on ice as panic-stricken shoppers strip stores

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Re: "throughput of goods is in excess of the usual Christmas peak"

Our favourite brand is on offer this week at Famila, so we will probably buy 2.5Kg, as we usually do, when it is on offer... I don't see a need to suddenly buy huge amounts of everything.

Interestingly, the local supermarkets were all fully stocked on Saturday, but about 200KM south in the Ruhrpott, the shelves were being stripped bare by "hamster" buyers. I love the German term, Hamsterkäufer (hamster buyers) and hamstern (to hamster), sounds much more cute than panic buying.

More than a billion hopelessly vulnerable Android gizmos in the wild that no longer receive security updates – research

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The same with my Android TV (Sony). It hasn't had an update since last August. It is now permanently offline.

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Re: This is what the vendors want ...

The problem is, most people don't even know they are vulnerable.

"Hey, its a phone."

As long as their app du jour works, they don't know or care about anything else on their phone.

My brother-in-law and wife replaced their 2013 Galaxy S4 mini smartphones last summer. I'm guessing they probably haven't had a security update since 2014.

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Re: And in comparison...

My brother-in-law and his wife replaced their 2013 Samsung Galaxy S4 mini smartphones last summer... Given how bad security updates were back then, that means at least 6 years of being vulnerable.

Stop us if you've heard this one before: HP Inc rejects Xerox's $36.5bn buyout plan as takeover saga drags on

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Re: won't someone think about Canon :P

The first LaserJets were basically badged Canon parts. They've always used Canon technology in laser, as far as I know.

Sadly, the web has brought a whole new meaning to the phrase 'nothing is true; everything is permitted'

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Paris Hilton

Re: What? They've been lying to us?

No, no, no. It was William the Conqueror on IRC.

Or was it King Alfred on Usenet.

It's only a game: Lara Croft won't save enterprise tech – but Jet Set Willy could

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Re: ZX Spectrum != Legacy corporate IT

My point was legacy unnetworked tech is easier to retro-cool with an FPGA than a legacy network security nightmare...

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ZX Spectrum != Legacy corporate IT

One of the problems is that the ZX Spectrum was designed as a stand-alone computer. It has no networking it has no security and it is used by one user at a time.

The problem with legacy corporate IT is that is generally used by many people at diverse locations, whether it be in an office block or at separate physical locations in other cities or countries. If the system is easy to isolate, there are no problems, but for systems that have to stay online, but are no longer secure, an FPGA won't help there.

On the other hand, FPGAs are a great way for modelling problems going forward. Doesn't Azure already offer FPGA instances?

Hey, fatso. If you're standing desk-curious, the VariDesk Pro Plus won't break the bank

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Re: Ikea do a full standing desk...

I came here to say the same thing. I bought a long and short standing desk from Ikea in December, when I re-did my office. It is only manual, there was an electric motor available as an option, but I decided I could make do with the manual winder.

I think I paid under 500€ for both desks together (L-Shaped desk when put together). I'm very happy with them. Very stable (and very heavy!).

We regret to inform you there are severe delays on the token ring due to IT nerds blasting each other to bloody chunks

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One of our devs managed to take the network and the VAX down in one go!

He was the first to receive a DEC VT1000 X-Windows terminal. He was working away and people would crowd around his desk to look at all those terminal windows. And those X-eyes in the corner, following the mouse around.

He then tried experimenting, making the eyes bigger. Then, we had a "fun" idea... Open up dozens of X-eyes windows. Gesagt, getan, as they say in Germany. The whole screen was carefully filled with dozens upon dozens of x-eyes at the smallest windows size possible. A bit jolty as he moved the mouse around, setting them up...

Then wooosh, wooosh, wooosh, he moved the mouse around as fast as he could. The VT1000 stuttered, the other terminals stopped responding, the VAX stopped responding. All those hundreds of eyes following the mouse were sending packets back to the VAX with each small mouse movement.

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Mushroom

Pacwars

We had multi-player Pacman. That was fun. Invisible Pac with a rocket launcher for the win.

Sure, check through my background records… but why are you looking at my record collection?

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No tests...

I've had 1 aptitude test, for my first job application at an insurance company in the late 80s. I failed.

It didn't stop me getting a job a week later at a defence contractor and nuclear processing plant builder. Those traffic lights at the end of the street? Yep, no aptitude test to administer the systems running those :-P

I've had several jobs over the years, but it was always just an interview, a talk and a handshake. Given the current landscape, that will probably be via Skype and the handshake will be of the electronic protocol variety going forward.

Your phone wakes up. Its assistant starts reading out your text messages. To everyone around. You panic. How? Ultrasonic waves

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Old?

Wasn't there a similar attack demonstrated when assistants first came out? It didn't use ultrasonics, but it did use steganography to hide commands in background noise that the human ear couldn't pick up, but the phones could.

Spider-eyed Lite version of Huawei flagship flies out before actual P40 launch event

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Re: Target market

Huawei is/was the number 2 smartphone maker, after Samsung, beating Apple. The last quarter has probably pushed Apple back into the number 2 position, due to the US embargo on Huawei.

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Re: Target market

Generally, over the last 2 years, the main reason to get the high end Huawei is that its camera is superior to Samsung, Apple and Google...

Zyxel storage, firewall, VPN, security boxes have a give-anyone-on-the-internet-root hole: Patch right now

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Re: CPE

The USGs are SME level unified security devices. As well as cheap modem/routers, Zyxel have a corporate arm that produces a lot of heavy duty networking appliances.

Google begs for US Entity List exemption to let Huawei use its mobile services – report

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Sparse...

The number of "useful" apps for European users is relatively sparse in the Huawei App Gallery at the moment.

Neither of my banking apps are in there, no Audible/Amazon, no PocketCasts, no Signal, no Outlook. The only non-Huawei app I use that is in the Gallery at the moment is Telegram...

I like Huawei's phones, I disable most Google services anyway, so the current situation, with the exception of the PlayStore, is fine by me. But without the common apps, it is a little pointless. (Yes, I could side-load the Play Store and hope everything works.)

The Ghost of Windows 10 Past shrinks back as Microsoft's axeman tiptoes ever closer

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Re: 90k PCs, 5k Windows Store apps, "a handy pointer"...

Yes. 1809 is probably around 50% of our machines. But they have the Store disabled by group policy.

Famed Apple analyst chances his Arm-based Macs that Apple kit will land next year

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Re: Where are the benchmarks?

On the other hand, running a math benchmark on a multi-tasking PC is never going to give you the full performance, unless you boot into benchmark, with no macOS running in the background. iOS has an advantage there, in that it sleeps a lot of the background stuff.

But it is still indicative. What will be interesting is to see if their ARM architecture can do full multi-tasking and what Apple had to tweak to get it from the phone to the laptop. I think it will be very interesting.

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Re: Where are the benchmarks?

Raw numbers are fine for the "mine's faster than yours" brigade. What we need are actual numbers for running things like Photoshop under macOS and real desktop multi-tasking results. Of course, we won't see that until Apple actually releases something.

The architecture has been fine-tuned for lower power and "co-operative" multi-tasking, with non-visible tasks sleeping most of the time. I suspect this is where Apple has been concentrating its efforts, getting their ARM design optimized for a general computer, as opposed to the more controlled environment found on an iPhone or iPad.

It will be interesting to see, if they can turn that theoretical advantage into a real one.

Apple also has the advantage, that they have done this before. As well as Rosetta, they had "big executables", which had resource branches for PowerPC and Intel code. They just need to bring that back into play for Intel and ARM, then developers can cross-compile to both platforms in one package.

Of course, the emulation would need to be there for software that hasn't been re-released in dual-executable format.

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Re: Where are the benchmarks?

No, passive air cooling a MacBook with ARM...

Dear makers of smart home things. Yeah, you with that bright idea of an IoT Candle. Here's an SDK from Amazon

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Re: I still abide by...

Me too. I want streaming video, so the FireTV Stick is an anomally. Everything else is good old, long lasting, dumb stuff.

Most of our light switches are 10 years old the rest 50 years old.

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I still abide by...

I still abide by the rule "the 'S' in IoT stands for security and treat all IoT devices appropriately - i.e. they don't receive any power and are not joined to my network, well, with the one exception of a FireTV Stick, but that gets a bunch of special rules at the firewall, to help isolate it.

Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this

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Re: Good and bad

Yes. That is my point. If they want to do something to help users, they should be helping them learn how DNS works and to secure their networks. Instead, Google are breaking DNS in a way that cuts other data gobblers out of the equation and allows them to get all the information on a connection.

Firefox are going half-way and providing a, theoretically, indepedent DNS provider, who won't log your lookups.

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Re: Good and bad

Because the browser already does HTTPS... Implementing DNS in the browser is a hard science problem. ;-)

They should be promoting the use of DNS over TLS and helping users set their machines / networks up to do that.

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Re: Thank goodness we can turn it off...

And my network is smaller than the Internet and the Internet DNS server don't know anything about it.

n1a is a server on the local network, that the local DNS resolves. No need for the browser to go to Google or to use DoH, because it won't find it!

If I ping it, it translates to a local IP address, if I enter it into the browser, the browser ignores the DNS lookup and goes straight to Google/DuckDuckGo/whatever. You can override it with "n1a/", but most people generally forget the first time.

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Re: Good and bad

Agreed. I use a local (to my network) DNS server which connects upstream to a main DNS server using DNS over TLS (same security as DNS over HTTPS, just using the standard DNS protocol) and DNSSEC.

That then covers all services and all devices on the network.

It makes trouble shooting much easier. If the browser stops working, you can use other tools to check the network connection and they respond in the same way.

I also have around 2.5 million tracking, malvertising and malware websites blocked by my DNS server. I don't want the browser ignoring that.

If I am out-and-about

How many times do we have to tell you? A Tesla isn't a self-driving car, say investigators after Apple man's fatal crash

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Re: Company Policy: "Don't Do Illegal Stuff"

At most of the companies I've worked for, there has been a policy manual for most things, including driving company vehicles, which includes not using the phone whilst driving, for example.

Apple tries to have VirnetX VPN patent ruling overturned again, US Supremes say no... again

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Re: What??!!

That is why I am glad I live in Europe, which decided software isn't patentable. You can copyright it, but not patent it.

If you live in a country that allows software patents, use the software patents yourself to stop competitors, you should also abide by them if you are caught using other people's works.

Huawei claims its Google Play replacement is in 'top 3' app stores after Trump turns off tap to the Chocolate Factory

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Re: "Aggressive" push out.

My Mate 10 Pro came with the App Gallery, but it was overhauled in Q3/Q4 last year.

The selection of apps is still fairly poor, for my needs.

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Re: Individual developers not allowed

In most countries, you need to be a registered business with a registered VAT number. Registering my one-man-business with my local council was the first thing I had to do, when I started a consultancy in Germany, then obtain a tax number.

Before I had the tax number, I couldn't buy anything or sell anything.

Using Amazon for business, in the past we have bought stuff from Amazon.de which was sold through a UK firm on the marketplace that wasn't VAT registered. As a VAT invoice is required for every transaction, we had to return the goods. Since then, we have avoided UK sellers, unless they actually have a registered VAT number in their Amazon profile.

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I just had a look at my apps, neither of my banks are there (to be expected, I suppose), Signal and Threema aren't there, although Telegram is. Firefox Klar is there, but Firefox Mobile isn't.

Audible isn't there.

All your base station are belong to us: Intel joins spec race with new 5G chips

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Intapple?

I thought Intel sold their 4G/5G team to Apple?

The Wristwatch of the Long Now: When your MTBF is two centuries

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Re: Beware survival bias

On the other hand, the watch is always with me, because it is on my wrist, the phone, not so much. It is usually on the worktop in the kitchen, or at work it is in my bag. If I go shopping etc. I often don't have my phone with me.

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Re: Beware survival bias

My daughter bought her fiancé a pocket watch as an engagement gift. He wears it regularly.