Posts by phuzz

Re: Easily solved...

Even easier to solve than that. Just use an adblocker if you have to visit facebook.

Re: Progress

OpenReach is (finally) not part of BT.

Re: Never forget who pays the tax

"The money they pay in tax is taken from the customer, and if that customer is not at the end of the selling line, they simply add it on to whoever they sell to"

If that's true, then when the government reduces tax on a company, it's products should get cheaper for the end consumer.

Re: Mar-a Lago

It always reminds me of a character from Monkey Island (2 as it turns out).

It doesn't cover airports or embassies, but "100 miles form the coast" still covers about half of California, and all of Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont etc. IIRC it's not that the constitution doesn't apply, but border patrol officers don't think it applies within 100 miles which amounts to exactly the same thing (if you've been locked in a cell with no means of communications, it doesn't matter if it's technically illegal or not, you're still locked in a cell).

I've never even been to the US and I knew about it, I assumed it was wider knowledge.

Re: Why have HMRC given my tax records to the USA government ?

Theoretically local laws apply, for example there's the case of a certain large US based email provider who had a data centre in Ireland, and refused to hand over emails from that data centre to the US government, and went to court for years to deny them.

Mind you, not every company can be as principled as Microsoft ;)

Re: @eldakka

What I can't work out is how the brother got hold of the texts in the first place. I can imagine the sister potentially mentioning that she was having an affair with the worlds richest man (you would wouldn't you), but who the hell shares their sex texts with their sibling?

I might tell my brothers if I'm fucking someone, but I wouldn't let them see my nudes. Equally, I wouldn't leave my phone around unlocked where anyone, family or not, could get into it.

Re: This looks promising...

"And then security and reliability go up at least ten fold when they fix and self-host."

Except they'll never bother to update, so they'll never get any security or bug fixes.

I'd ask my butler, Jeeves.

Re: music-for-people-who-don't-like-music

"It's nothing to do with being popular"

Sure it is, you wouldn't even know his name if they weren't popular enough to be famous.

Re: If they have rooted the system...

"Was this a <three letter acronym> back door?"

No it was a misjudged attempt to bring features that were usually reserved for the lights-out management system in servers, down to the desktop level to make it easier for admins to administer large numbers of machines. (eg, Imagine you had to update the EFI on a thousand desktops, you can rack up the overtime walking round all the offices, or use ME to schedule it overnight and head down the pub).

Why they thought it was a good idea to bring to all of their CPUs rather than just a subset I don't know. Laziness?

Re: The problem here

"if any was passed to Snowden/Assange/Manning/etc?"

Snowden and Manning both took information themselves, they weren't sent it by other people. Assange relies on other people sending him information, but as he's not reposted it we can safely assume that he didn't receive it. (Also the US government would be making more of a fuss if Martin had shared the info).

"Drives affected generally stop responding after a reboot"

Sounds basic, but test with a different (known good) power supply. Power supply problems can cause the weirdest fault conditions.

Re: Pardon my ignorance...

I've seen other malware-infused documents which start with instructions on how to enable and run macros (eg). (I'm not sure if that's the case here, but it wouldn't surprise me)

I guess it does restrict the malware to people who are able to follow simple instructions to enable macros, and yet are stupid enough to do so, but the internet is a big place and there's no shortage of idiots.

Or to put it another way, on average people are replacing their phone every 3-4 years, which sounds like it's in the right ballpark to me.

Some people swap every year, some people hold on to their phone for years, most are somewhere in between.

Re: Pence

Now now, you're taking things a bit far don't you think?

I mean, is there even any evidence that he actually has a heart?

Re: A good start

Look at the date that they spammed people. Look at the date GDPR was introduced. Note that they were punished under the old laws.

Be patient.

Re: This is good advertising for ChooseCo,...

I have heard of ChooseCo before, but only in the context of them aggressively suing anyone who used the phrase "choose your own adventure", without (TM)-ing it to them.

In fact, if Netflix lose, I could see Brooker fixing the problem by just inserting a scene where the character stares straight into the camera, and says "'choose your own adventure' is a trademark of ChooseCo", and then cuts back.

Re: PuTTY's days are numbered

As far as I can tell, examples are not used in man pages for commands anywhere in linux (which is odd because they're recommended in the style guide for man). Many commands don't even include a simple description in the DESCRIPTION part of their man file (for example, less, which proudly informs you that it is similar to more but has 'many more features'. Alas, nowhere does it mention that it's a program for displaying the contents of a file).

So I suspect that even if I did show up with some new documentation containing lovely examples of how commands should, and can be used, they'd be thrown out as 'not being in the spirit'.

Compare and contrast when practicality rather than ideology is the driver between writing documentation, eg.

Re: The only conspiracy

Watching a 3D printer must be the modern equivalent.

It's strangely hypnotising watching them lay down layer after layer...