* Posts by phuzz

6715 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010

Official: Windows for Workstations returns in Fall Creators Update

phuzz Silver badge

Re: What about auto-updates?

Windows 10 updates about once per month, so for my work PC, that's about one day out of twenty workdays. Mine's a fairly low/middle spec (i5-4440, 12GB RAM, SSD etc) and it seems to add about 20s onto the boot time (dunno about shutdown, I'm on my way out the door by then).

An extra twenty seconds per month, is less than I spend making tea per day.

Am I just being very forgiving, or does everyone else have much worse problems?

Plink: Lego swaps CEO for newer piece

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Sales slowed down...

It's cheaper to buy the Saturn kit, than to buy the pieces individually. In fact, the Saturn V kit is one of the best value ways of buying Lego, it's down to just over 6p per brick. For most kits it's closer to 10p/brick.

It's a bloody amazing kit though, I'd never seen most of the techniques they used to create an almost perfectly circular rocket, complete with (quite) accurate antennae and ullage motors etc.

At last, a kosher cryptocurrency: BitCoen

phuzz Silver badge
Pirate

"that's doesn't require you to trust any institution."

Would that be an institution like a cabal of miners? Because it's not like an individual can mine their own Bitcoins any more, so you're either going to have to buy them from a miner, or an exchange, and those I'd both put under the heading of 'institution'.

Oh, and neither of them are likely to take physical cash either, so you're going to need a bank of some sorts.

And if you can manage to find someone who will take your physical cash in return for a BTC (and if you can trust them not to screw you over), why not just use the cash to buy whatever you wanted the BTC for in the first place? At least cash doesn't need electricity and a functioning comms network in order to be used.

Can GCHQ order techies to work as govt snoops? Experts fear: 'Yes'

phuzz Silver badge
Headmaster

"The Home Office statement indicates that paragraph (3)(f) of Section 132 of the IPA comes into play, so that anyone served with a warrant - even if they are under no obligation to assist the government - is still liable to prosecution simply by revealing they had been served with a warrant"

In these circumstances, would I still be allowed to talk to my lawyer?

Horsemen of the disk-drive apocalypse will ride upon 256TB SSDs

phuzz Silver badge

There is an ATA command to securely erase the entire disk in one go.

Provided the manufacturer has implemented it correctly, it will wipe every single block in the SSD (or if it uses encryption, it'll erase the key).

phuzz Silver badge

Don't buy them from HP. Buy the caddies separately and buy your SSDs from somewhere else.

We have whole racks of DB servers running Samsung 840 and 850 Pro's and they're about the same price as an equivalently sized harddrive from HP, while of course being way faster.

Of course, if you buy from HP you get a warranty and replacement service, but the cost difference allows you to buy some cold spare SSDs and still come in under budget.

Carbon Black denies its IT security guard system oozes customer secrets

phuzz Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Feature, my ass

You can choose between not uploading anything, just uploading a hash, or uploading the entire binary. Note that I say binary and not 'every file on your system', a keyfile won't be uploaded unless it's an executable.

About the only problem here is if you specifically decide to turn on the binary uploading (and the config window explicitly tells you about the possible drawbacks), and you have a custom application which contains hard coded credentials (why would you do that), then someone could pick through the binary on Virustotal and extract the credentials.

US court system bug opened hole for hackers to scoop up legal docs for free on victims' dime

phuzz Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Cross-site forgery vulnerabilities are still a thing

It's OS independent.

What they're doing is effectively making use of of the client's cookies (and the client can be running any OS and any web browser that stores cookies, ie all of them), using them to make requests to the server (which in this case is using apache, so probably running on linux).

Intel Pumageddon: Broadband chip bug haunts Chipzilla's past, present and future

phuzz Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Virgin Media Tivo

Thanks Badvok and TheVogon, looks like I'll be going back to using the SH as a modem and have a real router again :)

No more "your wifi password must contain two letters. One is two few. Three is too many. Four is right out.".

phuzz Silver badge
Meh

Re: Virgin Media Tivo

Our SH3 needs a reboot about once a week (which takes a good five minutes before you get connectivity again).

Oh, and it won't work correctly in modem mode (the connection would drop every fifteen minutes), so buying a decent router turned out to be a waste of money.

Apart from that it works ok.

Jocks' USO block shock: BT's 10Mbps proposals risk 'rural monopoly'

phuzz Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Well..

And I'm sure that any company that is willing to put that kind of investment in (maybe Verizon or Comcast?) will be really friendly and will do it's best to offer a good service at a fair price, right? Right?

Windows Subsystem for Linux is coming to Windows Server

phuzz Silver badge
Devil

Re: Really...it's early and I've not had my coffee yet.

Other way around, they're translating Linux kernel calls into Windows kernel calls, so in your terms they're jamming rancid penguin gizzards into an old goat skin.

For fork's sake! Bitcoin Core braces for another cryptocurrency split

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Where does the money come from?

Well, to take a real world example, say you wanted to buy something from Scan.

Now, scan will accept Bitcoins by using a company called BitPay as a payment processor (in a similar way to many companies using another company to process credit card payments).

However, BitPay are currently sticking with the main fork, and don't accept Bitcoin Cash (BCC), only regular old Bitcoin (BTC). So, your £10 worth of complicated maths is still worth £10 worth of stuff from Scan, and the BCC is worth bugger all.

Of course, if you can find someone to accept your BCC then it might be worth something after all.

Meet VRfox: Mozilla's latest attempt at regaining browser share

phuzz Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Priorities!

Well, Internet Explorer isn't getting updated ever again, so that fits your first criteria.

Joking aside, you could just move to the ESR release of Firefox which doesn't get updated that often.

KCOM whacked with £900k Ofcom fine over 999 call handling

phuzz Silver badge
Thumb Up

"KCOM created an alternative route to carry traffic that bypassed the flooded exchange within two hours of identifying the problem."

That's actually quite impressive.

Google's macho memo man fired, say reports

phuzz Silver badge

Let me put it a different way, if you want to write ten page essays, go find an evening class, don't force your coworkers to read it.

phuzz Silver badge
Facepalm

If you're sending ten page manifestos to your colleagues about what you believe to be wrong with the world, then I probably don't want to work with you, no matter what those views are.

New Amiga to go on sale in late 2017

phuzz Silver badge

"512MB of RAM"

Exactly 1024 times more memory than my first Amiga :)

Core-blimey! Intel's Core i9 18-core monster – the numbers

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Bragging rights ...

And AMD are not cheaping out and using crappy thermal paste between the CPU die and the heatspreader.

(seriously Intel, how much are you really saving on a £2000 part?)

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Cost of AMD CPU In General

The short version (and I'm trying to get this comment in before the Intel and AMD fanbois start fighting) is that AMD hasn't been making competitive CPUs for a few years, until now.

They've been making cheap CPUs, but Intel are still making the fastest. With their new Ryzen (silly name) architecture, it seems like AMD are finally at least in the same race as Intel, so I suspect you'll start to see them being used by more OEMs. AMD are cheap because otherwise nobody would buy them, they've been losing money to stay in the game.

Unless you're looking at the high end, the AMD chip will probably be better value for you.

phuzz Silver badge
Flame

Re: 36 cores at 4.2 GHz?

According to this table (from PCGamer) it can manage 3.4GHz with 18 cores, 42.GHz with two cores.

Can the last person watching desktop video please turn out the light?

phuzz Silver badge
Pirate

I definitely agree with you about the adverts before things on Amazon.

I can't argue with them on Youtube, because I don't pay them a penny, but I actually pay money to Amazon (partly) for prime video, so I surely don't want to sit there and watch bloody adverts. They seem to be forgetting how easy it would be for me to just pirate their shows, and to watch them with definitely no advertising at all.

I will happily pay for content, provided I get at least as good a product as if I pirated it, which means no adverts, no "FBI copyright warnings", and no unskippable trailers.

Foot-long £1 sausage roll arrives

phuzz Silver badge
Happy

Re: Best sausage roll

Ah yes, the one twinned with Tebay services. Yep, they completely buck all the trends of UK service stations (except for the prices). Lovely grub :)

HMS Queen Liz will arrive in Portsmouth soon, says MoD

phuzz Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: I'm pretty sure that...

Here's your missing icon >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

phuzz Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: I've been thinking about cheap ways to kill carriers.

How does the (sub-sonic) artillery shell get through the flight deck, and every deck in between that and the keel?

You might make a few holes in the flight deck (which would render it useless for a time), but a killing shot is pretty unlikely.

Instead, find a way to block the Lockheed Autonomic Logistics Information System, and then none of the F-35s will fly (ALIS is a requirement for the F-35), thus transforming the QE to a big, expensive, cramped and uncomfortable cruise ship. After all, what's the point of an aircraft carrier without aircraft?

The Next Big Thing in Wi-Fi? Multiple access points in every home

phuzz Silver badge

Re: "controlling software in the cloud"

The particularly 'clever' mesh networking products need quite a lot of computing power to work out the optimum arrangement of backhauls and client channels, which is why several of them offload the calculations to 'the cloud' (ie 'someone else's servers'). The little ARM chips these things tend to run on just don't have the power.

WannaCry kill-switch hero Marcus Hutchins collared by FBI on way home from DEF CON

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Phew

We have an NHS, I'm pretty sure that makes us basically communists by US standards...

phuzz Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Stay CLEAR of the USA

"with color revolution and everything"

Is that a revolution to change the spelling of "colour" back to being correct?

CMD.EXE gets first makeover in 20 years in new Windows 10 build

phuzz Silver badge

Re: What's the point?

"There are programs which are bottlenecked by the speed of stdout."

Minimise the window and the program will run faster.

I have no idea why that is the case.

(Kudos to whichever Powershell programmer added a set of default command aliases so that not only does dir do what you expect, but so does lh)

Four techies flummoxed for hours by flickering 'E' on monitor

phuzz Silver badge
Coat

Re: "by the size of his Micro Channel Adapter"

"Pwhoooor, look at the size of his Micro Channel Adapter Description File collection..."

>>>>>> Mines the one with...actually, you probably don't want to know....

Teen who texted boyfriend to kill himself gets 15 months jail

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Jump! Jump! Jump!

"at 15 years old she was plenty mature enough to understand her actions."

Some people twice that age don't seem to be able to manage it, and I'm sure you could find some kids half her age who would be able to explain why it was wrong.

Different people grow up at different rates, that's why having a cut-off at a certain age and saying "this person is a child, but if they are one day over their "X"th birthday they are an adult" is a bit of a kludge, but that's why we have jury trials

Russian admits being Ebury botnet herder, now jailed for 46 months

phuzz Silver badge

Minnesota eh?

I now assume everyone there talks like they were in Fargo.

WannaCry-slayer Marcus Hutchins 'built Kronos banking trojan' – FBI

phuzz Silver badge

If they wanted him to work for them, they could have just waited until he got home to the UK and had GCHQ go round and have a quiet word (maybe commenting on how nice his mum's house is, and what a shame it would be if it was repossessed).

Or maybe that's the second part of the plan. The FBI scares him, and then when he eventually does get home, our security services have a quiet word, deploring the heavy-handedness of the cousins, and coincidentally offering him a job...

phuzz Silver badge

Well, Wannacry was written using some of the NSA exploits that had leaked earlier, so you're at least half right.

Trump as US president (in Sharknado 3)? Oh Hell No!

phuzz Silver badge
Coat

So our daily reality is actually a rejected idea from Sharknado.

That explains a few things.

>>>>> mines the one with the sharproof lining, (the guy who sold it too me said he'd cut his own throat if it didn't work)

Microsoft breaks Office 365 sign-in pages ahead of surprise update

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Yeah...

Just add the communication to the login page, "hey, blog team, we're ahead of schedule so you can put that post live now! thanks, the dev team"

Coming soon to a Parliament near you – UK's Data Protection Bill

phuzz Silver badge
Trollface

Re: EU again

We should try and find a way to get some kind of influence over EU laws and regulations, we should get a vote or something. Even better, then we'd be able to steer the regulations so that they benefited the UK!

Oh wait....

Canadian ISPs do not Canuck around: Bloke accused of piracy grilled in his home for hours

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Fight club

Most of the time I hear about Kodi, it's being used to watch football (what you call 'soccer'), so that particular use isn't going to be common in the US.

RentBoy.com boss faces six months of hard time

phuzz Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Double-standard

"If that site was Rentgirl.com and pimped out women"

Slight correction, he was allowing the men to pimp themselves out, acting as a broker not a pimp.

I'd be very surprised is similar sites don't exist for hetros.

Brit voucher biz's signup page blabbed families' details via URL tweak

phuzz Silver badge
Terminator

Yes, but by making companies take a bit more care with people's personal data, it will make life a bit harder for the security services to snoop on us, and May-bot won't like that.

So either we'll dump the GDPR (because it's "EU interference" I'm assuming the headlines will say), or we'll get a specially gimped version which means the Home Sec can still read our emails.

Browser trust test: Would you let Chrome block ads? Or Firefox share and encrypt files?

phuzz Silver badge
Thumb Up

On one hand, I do agree that what with Google being the biggest ad slinger out there, there's definitely a conflict of interest going on somewhere (unless the Chrome devs hate adverts so much, they're willing to bite the hands that pays them).

On the other hand, this can do nothing but bad things to the online ad industry, and so should be applauded for that.

(I'll be sticking with uBlock though)

Don't make Aug 21 a blind date: Beware crap solar eclipse specs

phuzz Silver badge
Boffin

Re: When I was a kid...

Same here, and my eyesight is still better than most people my age. Of course, I'd have a blind spot for five-ten minutes afterwards, but it always went away quickly for me.

It's safe to look at the sun for a few seconds, but I guess that's a bit too subtle a message to tell most people so they stick to "just don't look at the sun at all".

On a similar note, did anyone else used to press their knuckles into their closed eyes near their nose? It pushes on the optic nerve and you get great hallucinations. It does start to hurt after a minute or two though.

Fox News fabricated faux news with Donald Trump, lawsuit claims

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Interesting story

"what the loyal subjects of good King George the III suffered at home whilst he pissed us off to the point that we disrespectfully legged it in 1776"

King George III (as with basically all of our monarchs since the early 1700's) was basically a figure-head, all the various reasons the US felt compelled to split from the UK (eg taxes) should rightly be placed at the feet of the British Parliament.

George made a good hate figure, and consequently all the rhetoric around independence was put in terms of 'shaking off the yoke of monarchy'. Really though it was was about independence from British rule, which in reality meant (and still means) rule by the government (ie Parliament and the civil service etc), rather than by the king himself.

As a constitutional monarch the king or queen has effectively no political power. Technically they can veto acts of parliament, but that would be a sure way to turn the UK into a republic by the end of the week.

So please, feel free to continue being angry at the British government, but old George the farmer was really one of our better monarchs, who by and large left the governing to his government.

WANdisco sticks Fusion into Amazon's Snowballs for mega-petabyte data pelt

phuzz Silver badge

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a grocer's bike loaded with backup tapes.

How can you kill that which will not die? Windows XP is back (sorta... OK, not really)

phuzz Silver badge
Linux

Re: Linux 1.79 per cent (was 1.55 in Jan)

Most Android devices are still using v3.18 of the Linux kernel (some are on 4.4), so an up to date desktop shouldn't have any of the same kernel flaws as your phone.

Instead it has new, and as yet undiscovered vulnerabilities ;)

Kernel bugs are only a small part the story on either though, user installed programs are generally a bigger risk on any platform.

NEWSFLASH Now even science* says moneybags footballers are overpaid

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Way to bring their wages down

The "not showing matches in pub at 3pm on a Saturday" part is a UK only idea. The Football League set it up in the 60's to prevent people from going down the pub to watch a match rather than going to their local club.

Perhaps that's the reason for the downvotes.

It’s 2017 and Hayes AT modem commands can hack luxury cars

phuzz Silver badge
Pint

Given the idiocy human drivers get up to, you could probably hack one or two percent a year and still be safer than letting some people behind the wheel.

Game of Pwns: Hackers invade HBO, 'leak Game of Thrones script'

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Game of Thrones?

I think I speak for everyone here when I say that we're all very impressed with you, for not liking something that other people like. Truly you are a pinnacle of a human being. One day historians will look back and say "this was when it all changed". There will be statues of you, and people will name their children, and less smelly livestock, after you. The way you pretended to not have even heard of it was masterful, especially the way you took time out of your undoubtedly busy schedule to write a comment on an article which even included an explanation of what GoT is, but being such a badass renegade, you probably didn't even bother reading the article did you?

Brace yourselves, Virgin Media prices are going up AGAIN, people

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Is this to fund upgrades so they can fix the horrific congestion?

Ours seems to go through cycles. It'll gradually get worse and worse at peak times, until clearing up all of a sudden, then after six months or so it starts getting worse again.

I assume they're adding extra capacity every so often, but then using it all up quite quickly.

Petition calls for Adobe Flash to survive as open source zombie

phuzz Silver badge

Re: Please, No!

Just write your emulator in Javascript and you never have to worry about what the host machine is going to be again.