* Posts by phuzz

6715 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010

Like its Windows-noob-stabilisers OS, Zorin's cloudy Grid tool is Linux desktop management for dummies

phuzz Silver badge
Devil

Re: Why bother with the Windows look ?

"Because not all people are as technical and open to change as you and I"

Mate, I'm not sure if you've read basically any comment thread on here, any time any OS or application changes it's GUI, but 'technical' users can be even more inflexible when it comes to small changes than average users.

It's the same as the "I tried to run x on my 286 and it was slow, so I've never tried any software from that company ever since" crowd.

Technical users are often the worst when it comes to adapting to new things.

Boris celebrates taking back control of Brexit Britain's immigration – with unlimited immigration program

phuzz Silver badge

Re: You still do not understand why we voted to remove FoM.

Hey now, it's not racism.

Sorry, I mistyped, I meant, it's not just racism. There's xenophobia too!

You're always a day Huawei: UK to decide whether to ban Chinese firm's kit from 5G networks tomorrow

phuzz Silver badge
Windows

Re: Treasury Notes

Britain lost it's sovereignty in 1956, and we'd only do something daft if we got it back.

Cisco Webex bug allowed anyone to join a password-protected meeting

phuzz Silver badge

Potential attackers are welcome to join my meetings, but they do run the risk of dying of boredom.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: TLA

Friendly to who? The US only looks out for itself.

Remember that 2024 Moon thing? How about Mars in 2033? Authorization bill moots 2028 for more lunar footprints

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Getting to the Moon is no walk in the park

"which is something hardly any country has these days"

China does. India and Israel both seem to be gearing up for their respective second attempts. ESA and Japan both have plans, as do Russia.

Pretty much ever country with space launch capability seem to be working on landing on the Moon, and several private companies too.

Brit brainiacs say they've cracked non-volatile RAM that uses 100 times less power

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Re: RAM clear on power off ?

This is basically how the 'secure erase' function works on modern SSDs. The drive is encrypted on the fly from factory, and running secure erase just changes the security key.

Windows takes a tumble in the land of the Big Mac and Bacon Double Cheeseburger

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Coffee/keyboard

Re: Wash your hands

How are you going to test your immune system, if you're not going around touching things and then licking your fingers?

Anyway, McD's doesn't count as real food, so no need to wash your hands.

German scientists, Black Knights and the birthplace of British rocketry

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Flame

Re: German scientists, Black Knights and the birthplace of British rocketry

HTP might not be the sort of thing you'd want in a submarine, but in comparison to other substances used to fuel rockets, it's a peach. You can have an open container of HTP on a workbench an nobody will die (probably).

Compare that to something like Red Fuming Nitric Acid, (which is inhibited by adding HF!), or hydrazine (if you can smell it, then you're over the exposure limit, sorry).

Take DOS, stir in some Netware, add a bit of Windows and... it's ALIIIIVE!

phuzz Silver badge

Re: All washed away like tears in rain

In the same way you might be proud of a particularly gnarly scar?

Everyone loves our new desktop web search design so much – the one with ads that look like links – that we're tweaking it, says Google

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Thumb Up

uBlock Origin does this, and I assume most other ad blockers.

Microsoft previews Visual Studio update with added Linux love, many new features

phuzz Silver badge

None of the people who I know who develop for linux do so using linux. Most of them use OSX on the MacBook Pros.

And that's part of the answer to your question; if you buy a laptop, chances are it'll either run Windows or it'll be a Macbook*. Most likely, they'll keep that OS, because it's just easier than having to try and work out what set of binary blobs you'll need to get the wireless to connect, or to get suspending to work, or to get sound**.

So they develop on Windows or OSX, and they push it to the server running linux.

(I'm not a developer, but I work on a Windows machine, to administer many linux boxes).

* and yes, System76 et al. do exist, but I'd be surprised if they sell in a year what Apple shift in a day.

** I jest of course. Everyone knows that you can't get audio working on linux.

This episode of Black Mirror sucks: London cops boast that facial-recog creepycams will be on the streets this year

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Lazers

As an alternative, you can fit IR LEDs to your hat, which should dazzle most CCTV cameras without being particularly obvious to the ol' Mk1 eyeball.

phuzz Silver badge
Facepalm

"And to oppose legislation [in the UK], you need to demonstrate opposition across the majority of those 28 countries. 650 constituencies".

Congratulations, you've just found the downside of democracy, in order to get what you want, you need a majority of other people to want it too. (Although, depending on the 'democracy' we're discussing, large sums of money will do just as well).

As Churchill called it "Democracy is [..] the worst form of Government, except for all those others".

Apple: EU can't make us use your stinking common charging standard

phuzz Silver badge

Re: This can be summed up in one word: Profit

Try putting a bigger disk/SSD in it without the T2 chip throwing a fit.

Oh wait, the SSD is soldered on so you can't upgrade it even if you wanted to. Oh, and don't even think of getting it repaired at a non-Apple shop, because, yep, that pesky T2 will brick it.

We need to make it even easier for UK terror cops to rummage about in folks' phones, says govt lawyer

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Pint

Re: Wipe Password

"What you actually need is a code that performs this function on the *first* attempt."

Which is great, until you accidentally wipe your phone because it was early and you'd had a couple too many the night before >>>

Windows 7 back in black as holdouts report wallpaper-stripping shenanigans

phuzz Silver badge

Re: UEFI boot... DO NOT!!

There has been computers sold to the public, which only have Microsoft keys in the EFI, so they can only boot a Microsoft operating system. They were Surface tablets.

As far as I've heard, the newer ones allow the end user to add their own keys (so you can boot linux).

phuzz Silver badge

Re: XP compatablity

XP can only use SMB1, but SMB 1 is so dangerously insecure, you just shouldn't use it. (see above comment)

phuzz Silver badge
Stop

Re: XP compatablity

"not *THAT* insecure"

Well, anyone on the same network can access all of your files, and run arbitrary code on the machines hosting. I'm not sure how much more insecure it could get.

The flaws are the protocol level, so Samba was affected as well.

Basically running SMB1 is the equivalent of enabling remote desktop with no password, you should only do it on a completely air-gapped network, and you should think twice before you do even that.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: yes, yes...

"Because you updated from Win7, which most likely used MBR."

XP used MBR, but from Vista onwards GPT has been preferred, if only to allow use of disks bigger than 2TB.

If the machine was first installed in the last ten years or so, then someone must have made an active choice to use MBR. Although now I think about it, I suppose that's the exact sort of person who would have put off upgrading from Win7 until now..

Microsoft boffin inadvertently highlights .NET image woes by running C# on Windows 3.11

phuzz Silver badge

Re: VisualBasic developers are daft enough to fail to realize this

I've never manually installed any version of .NET, so presumably this is the version that's installed with the OS. As another commenter pointed out, you might have to switch it on in Windows Features.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: "Visual Studio is a paid-for product"

What exactly are you expecting? "For-profit company tries to find ways of making profit" isn't much of a surprise surely?

It's the same approach for the Unity and Unreal game engines (which between power a lot of modern games), free for personal use, and the cost goes up as you make more money.

There's always the old Adobe approach I suppose, where you turn a blind eye to low level piracy of Photoshop/Illustrator etc. so that young designers grow up (pirating and) using your products, so that when they get a proper job, their employer ends up having to shell out for a license. Of course these days they go for the "charge everyone all the time" tack.

phuzz Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: VisualBasic developers are daft enough to fail to realize this

Just tried installing it myself on Win 10. I also had no problems, and apparently am using the same version of .NET (2.0.50727.9148).

Edit, I was using this version

German taxpayers faced with €800k Windows 7 support bill due to Deutschland dithering

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Re: Well, looks like that migration to Linux is getting cheaper and cheaper

Snapshots aren't much help when a GRUB update hoses your disk. Waiting until it wasn't bleeding edge wasn't much help easier, as it was a weird bug that only occurred on a specific CPU/chipset.

Still, at least installing an update marked as 'security' was my choice eh?

Flinging resource-hungry apps at landfill Android? Ubuntu daddy wants to lure you into Anbox Cloud

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So basically they want us to go back to mainframes with remote terminals again.

Only this time the terminals are wireless! (and also phones). I guess the wheel keeps on turning.

Alan Turing’s OBE medal, PhD cert, other missing items found in super-fan’s Colorado home by agents, says US govt

phuzz Silver badge

Re: The Way We Live Now

Possibly someone at the NSA heard about the case, and this was the way they managed to put pressure on the situation?

Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia accused of hacking Jeff Bezos' phone with malware-laden WhatsApp message

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Flame

Re: "it... may see the kingdom cut out of deals altogether"

It's unlikely that the government of Saudi Arabia had any idea of what was going on, after all, who would they sell their oil to, and buy weapons from, if the US wasn't there?

On the other hand, it's well documented, but apparently not widely known, that the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens, and interactions between the hijackers and the Saudi embassy in the US were redacted from the official US report into 9/11.

CityFibre relieves TalkTalk of its FTTP sister biz for £200m – after Boris win blows away Labour's nationalisation vow

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Trollface

Re: FTFY

BigSmokeFibre? OverpricedEverythingFibre? SmugArseholeFibre? TaxExileFibre?

There's plenty of options.

South American nations open fire on ICANN for 'illegal and unjust' sale of .amazon to zillionaire Jeff Bezos

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Balkanise

I'm pretty sure China could cope if the entire rest of the internet went down.

And that pretty much tells you all you need to know about 'balkanisation' as a solution. It's only possible in countries where the government holds complete control of the communications infrastructure, and countries like that aren't much fun to live in.

(Unless you always agree 100% with what your government gets up to, in which case you probably don't really know what said government is actually getting up to).

WTF, EFS? Experts warn Windows encryption could spawn nasty new ransomware

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"Yes, you can use Encrypting File System (EFS) to encrypt files on a BitLocker-protected drive."

From here. And yes, EFS is for individual files, Bitlocker is for whole disks.

Looks like the party's over, folks: Global PC sales set to shrink as Windows 10 upgrade cycle tails off, says Gartner

phuzz Silver badge
Gimp

Re: "there will not be a Windows 11"

Window's minimum requirements have not changed since Win 7 (1GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 16GB HDD space, ie, about a mid-spec phone in 2020).

I suspect hardware and software upgrades are being done at the same time, because it's just easier for IT departments.

(Of course, if your machine has those minimum specs it's going to be slow no matter what OS you run. On a more reasonable spec, say 2.5GHz dual core CPU, 4GB RAM and 100GB+ SSD, Win 10 is going to be just slightly faster than 7 or 8.)

Fly me to the M(O2)n: Euro scientists extract oxygen from 'lunar dust' by cooking it with molten salt electrolysis

phuzz Silver badge

That would explain why I can never remember which one is called which.

I prefer to call them "the one the electrons are coming out of" and "the other one".

LastPass stores passwords so securely, not even its users can access them

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Why is it so hard to learn ?

Lastpass is supposed to have a local backup, clearly that's gone wrong for some people as well (been working just fine for me).

phuzz Silver badge
Thumb Up

I'm going to say it. Writing passwords down is just fine for most people.

After all, the usual threat for the average person is some hacker either brute-forcing their password, or taking one that was revealed in a breach somewhere else, and trying it on other sites.

If you're using fairly complicated passwords, and not re-using them across sites, then a hard copy is more secure than any password manager from a typical hacker.

Obviously it's not much use against someone with access to your home, but unless you need to keep your kids out of the amazon account, it's more than enough security for the average person.

EU declares it'll Make USB-C Great Again™. You hear that, Apple?

phuzz Silver badge

Re: And ethernet has gone from 10mbs to 10gbs using the exact same connector

True, but I'd bet a 10Mbps network that was cabled by someone who knew what they were doing (admittedly rare in cabling, in my experience), would probably manage GB.

Maybe not without a bit of re-transmission, but it would connect at that speed. Ethernet will put up with all sorts of crap at the physical layer before it completely fails.

phuzz Silver badge

I've seen broken USB Mini connectors, although that seemed to be because the connectors broke loose from the board they were soldered too. No idea if that was because of some idiot plugging them in the wrong way round, but it just seemed to be a poor connector design.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: I don’t see how USB-C solves the charger-zoo problem......

This is only talking about phone chargers, and guess what? Most phones draw a similar amount of power.

So if you go round to a friend's house, you know that their phone charger will work just fine with your phone, at least enough to get you home.

Hospital hacker spared prison after plod find almost 9,000 cardiac images at his home

phuzz Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Differences...

If you still have a local paper, you might find that they publish a regular list of the more newsworthy people who've been convicted.

Here's an example from last week in Bristol.

Big Falcon explosion as SpaceX successfully demos Crew Dragon abort systems

phuzz Silver badge
Stop

Re: "given that the rocket is lost during the test anyway?"

"I suspect that's the problem of having a monopoly supplier who can charge what they want and deliver when they can be bothered."

I get the theory, but in theory NASA should be able to go to Boeing and say "we can get the same service from SpaceX for less money, so drop your prices or we'll go elsewhere".

However, NASA are paying Boeing more per-astronaut than they're paying SpaceX for commercial-crew, and yet they don't seem to have told Boeing to fuck right off yet.

It's almost as if NASA has become just a distribution system for moving US taxes into the pockets of big corporations...

To catch a thief, go to Google with a geofence warrant – and it will give you all the details

phuzz Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: And this is why...

"I would hope that none of this information would be given out without a proper warrant FIRST"

If you bother to read TFA you'll find a link in the first paragraph to their application for a warrant.

"I also put aluminum foil in my wallet"

You can buy wallets with that built in, that way you can save your tin-foil for your hat.

Who says HMRC hasn't got a sense of humour? Er, 65 million Brits

phuzz Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: As useless a a hat full of busted arseholes

Fortunately I've been PAYE for many years, so not had to deal with HMRC for years.

However, when I was much younger, they sent me a letter saying they weren't quite sure if I'd paid the correct amount of tax, and would I please send them my pay slips from the last three years.

Now, I was just a kid then, so all the jobs I'd had up to that point were in the local pub, working for minimum wage, and often cash in hand. I had about six months of (mostly) legit pay stubs at that point, but I decided to to take the easy route, and just ignored the letter.

Six month later I got another letter. It said that they'd checked the records and had actually paid too much tax, and included a cheque for £500.

I have no idea where they got that idea from, but I kept quiet and have been fortunate enough to avoid their attention ever since.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: They do have a sense of humour sometimes

"You *can* beat the man."

Well, you say that, but your mate is dead now, while HMRC are still going strong.

All they have to do is outlast you.

Bad news: Windows security cert SNAFU exploits are all over the web now. Also bad: Citrix gateway hole mitigations don't work for older kit

phuzz Silver badge
FAIL

Re: "This vuln doesn't affect Windows 7"

If your Windows 7 machine has RDP turned on and hooked directly up to the internet then you've made some bad decisions in life.

phuzz Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Hullo, NSA? Microsoft here...

This vuln doesn't affect Windows 7 (or 8 for that matter). It's specific to Windows 10 and Server 2016/2019.

Which means that in the last few years, someone decided to rewrite the way Windows checks certificates, presumably with the intent of making it more secure.

They* really fucked up that one.

* they, and everyone who's job it was to check the code

Autonomous Logistics Information System gets shoved off the F-35 gravy train in favour of ODIN

phuzz Silver badge
Facepalm

So, they pay Lockheed for the original system, which turns out to be shite. Now presumably they're paying LM even more money to develop the successor.

What happens when that also turns out to be a bug-ridden mess? Let me guess, pay Lockheed for a third attempt?

Unlocking news: We decrypt those cryptic headlines about Scottish cops bypassing smartphone encryption

phuzz Silver badge
Holmes

Re: Let me get this right

"Can anyone see a possible place in this workflow where there's a chance for evidence to be planted/removed?"

Well yes, as soon as you get searched by the police, they "find" a baggy of class A in your pocket, or a knife with bloodstains on, or a signed confession saying "it wuz me wot dun it" etc.

If the police want to frame you, then they still have a myriad of ways to do so without ever going near your phone.

The solutions to this are the same as always: Try to live in a country where the police don't routinely do that sort of thing. Don't be a minority. Have enough money to pay for a scary lawyer.

phuzz Silver badge

Re: IndyRef2

I had that problem, but it turned out to be my Moto G, not Lineage.

Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, muaha... Boffins build laser-eyed intelligent cam that sorta sees around corners

phuzz Silver badge
Pint

Re: Jeremy Bentham

Presumably because some bloody students have put him on a turntable.

Copy-left behind: Permissive MIT, Apache open-source licenses on the up as developers snub GNU's GPL

phuzz Silver badge

It's always amused me that the act of accusing someone of 'virtue signalling' is itself, signalling a (perceived) virtue.

It's practically the whole point of conversation.

Azure consultant's Google image search results hotlinking sueball booted off the pitch by High Court

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Trollface

Re: "replace the hotlinked image with something unsavoury"

Reminds me of the time Jason Scott goatse'd MySpace (or at least part of it).