Posts by Joe Harrison

Fingerprint lock

My health club recently changed their lockers so I bought the recommended combination padlock. I soon realised that my eyesight is not good enough to see the tiny numbers in the combination without my glasses, which are in the locker. Didn't really want to have to look after a physical key during gym/swim so a bit stuck, what to do?

A kindly friend bought me a fingerprint padlock. This works surprisingly well 99 times out of 10, and on the occasion it really doesn't feel like recognising your finger then as a backup method you can open it via bluetooth from your phone. Showed it to office colleagues and everyone impressed.

Turned out in practice to be a disaster as wet wrinkly fingers in a steamy environment don't open fingerprint locks ever. And the bluetooth phone for the backup method is... in the locker. Wearing a key on a string round my neck now.

Dog poo vigilantes

I don't approve of dog poo as kids used to trek it in after playing in the park and when we got a dog I knew what I had to do with the poo.

The dog poo vigilantes are a pain in the poo nozzle though.

Can't think of a catchy title

Those of us who remember how the internet was in the beginning-ish... There was no need to figure out policing solutions for Facebook and Google and Whatsapp because there were no Facebook or Google or Whatsapp.

How would it be if we could go back to those days of millions of leaf-node unregistered self-policed peers (AKA "normal people") just doing stuff on Usenet or whatever and talking on free inter-compatible xmpp chat. This time with the added goodness of additional layers of perfect forward secrecy and other assorted crypto.

You couldn't make it up!

I flew from London to Warsaw and during the LOT flight bought a can of Pepsi for 5 Zloty, which is about 1 pound sterling. The finance department bounced my expense claim because although I had the foresight to get a receipt it was not what they considered to be a VAT receipt.

There then followed a six-week ping-pong battle to get my claim paid, which I finally won when I was able to prove that VAT is not payable on a flight between UK and any EU country (HMRC VAT Notice 709/1 section 2.5). I think finance's mission statement is something like "protecting our corporate wealth with financial excellence"...

In fact Jupiter DID have a lover named Moony McMoonface

Prove me wrong!

Seriously, how is anyone supposed to know for sure how many lovers Jupiter/Zeus did have, and what their names were. Nobody knows who MY lovers were. Even I can't remember them all.

No seriously, really, there are a finite and predictable series of names which can follow those very restrictive rules so what is the point of a "competition"?

Too much

A long password for your online banking is obviously sensible. For other stuff not so much - at work my Windows PC locks itself after 10 minutes and I don't fancy typing wrongdonkeyAAcellfastener dozens of times a day. As correctly pointed out by Time Waster strong passwords are a strong nightmare when not using a proper keyboard. Finally a password manager - you're stuffed when you have to use a computer which hasn't got it installed.

Washable keyboard

Plenty of waterproof washable and antibacterial keyboards/mice available for the use of clumsy or germophobic users. Accumed or Logitech for example.

Where he went wrong

He sets up this very secure VOIP network. Why didn't he hand over the keys to the drug lord and tell him how to change them, and insist he do change the keys immediately. Now the encrypted calls can't be listened to by the cops, and more importantly can't be listened to by the sysadmin. Sysadmin therefore useless to the cops. Or maybe he tried that and drug lord wouldn't go for it because too much to remember etc.

Wandering totally offtopic

As it's Friday...

Firstly "ransom scam looks like a hoax say FBI, cops" does not make grammatical sense. It really should be "FBI and cops." Yes I know it's a common form of words in America but we're a .co.uk here and arrogating my right to speak on behalf of all British gentlefolk I can say it does boil our piss. You're welcome.

Secondly working at/from home. So common these days that for the sake of status whiteboards everywhere we really need to resolve the industry standard acronym - is it WAH or WFH. No effort required with WFP (working from pub) as that one is sufficiently established already.

no just no

This article is just plain wrong. For starters "Novell's product was so good and so reliable nobody needed to upgrade it." OK we've all heard the stories of ancient NetWare 2 servers with an uptime of 50 years but normal NetWare 3 and 4 boxes used to crash all the time if you looked at them funny and even if you didn't.

More importantly this "ethical" Apple, are we talking about the same company that sends you an over the air remote brick-o-gram if it spots that you had the cheek to get your cracked screen repaired by someone who wasn't Apple?

Not being a noisy neighbour

having first ensured no marine wildlife is nearby that would be distressed by the sonar

How the hell do they do that? "Hellooo, yes you that funny-looking crab, is it OK if we do some surveying"

Very odd company

Friend wanted one of the new Dell XPS13 laptops and some accessories, but every time she got to "checkout" on the Dell website the price 1700 ish quid jumped up by another 70. I checked her browser configuration for funny cookies or whatever but it was clearly Dell's ordering system at fault. Contacted Dell via webchat and they insisted that she pay 1500 ish. Not complaining of course but no wonder profits are low.

I'm feeling animated already

a computer animated "border guard" that is localized to the traveler's language and ethnicity

(formerly known as "Clippy")

Can't believe this

The kids do <naughty thing> as kids do, father gets mad and yells "you're grounded and no pocket money", so kids hatch revenge plot with fake comments to rubbish off his election chances. Charming. How do we know this didn't happen?

Or maybe it didn't and maybe the guy actually is evil, still can't believe people are publicly calling for his head just on his kids say-so. Either way they can watch their inheritance going to the cats home.

Confusing

My previous Huawei phone had a configurable option for carrier aggregration, with a big warning not to turn it on unless you knew what you were doing. My current Xiaomi phone doesn't have that option but does light up VoLTE quite frequently. The rest of the time it flickers between 3G, H+, E, R, and a couple others I forgot.

I agree with @Rathernicelydone that none of it matters if the carrier's connection to the internet is maxed out, which does seem to happen.

Final solution many years from now

Redesign our municipal spaces so that dangerous moving traffic and pedestrians are separated. In the same way that right now we don't have train drivers having to choose which people to swerve at. Also everything that moves and potentially can crash is under control of same superglomulous AI. Casualties reduced to small percentage of passenger miles. Job done.

why do we need app stores?

I successfully used Microsoft Windows for several decades without needing an App Store. If I wanted an app (we called them applications back then) I bought it from someone who made applications. Sometimes it even came in a snazzy box. Why do I need to buy my Android apps from Google?

Homeland Season 7

Fairly prophetic I thought especially the secret bunker where the evil deep-state hackers had their botnet C&C to flood "social media" with fake shill comments to influence opinion. I reckon that happened here.

"Sarge, there's another Assange story, am I cleared to proceed?"

"Sure thing son, unleash the sock-puppet army on the no-good sumbitch. Start with The Register they're all flakes anyway and it will blend in better"

Debt = Bad

Inevitable that once you load a business up with debt you give it a finite life. Let's face it Maplin isn't unique it's just one of the latest dominoes to fall in the high street.

Years of super-low interest rates have encouraged businesses and consumers to borrow to the hilt. Why not, it's almost free? I know people with unbelievable mortgages, loads of stuff on tick, several maxed out credit cards but outwardly they look as though they are doing alright mostly, and in fact they themselves do really believe they are doing alright - it's become a normal way of life. They are just about keeping going so long as nothing happens.

Everything's fine so long as the economy can keep the plates spinning but now that interest rates are going back up (expect yet another rate hike from US Fed real soon now) the zombie companies'with fingernail existence on borrowed money will finally keel over, jobs will go, people will stop paying their bills, and we're going to see an extremely nasty fertiliser/turbine contact scenario.

Sorry this is a bit shouty but I am astounded we made it this far even.

Bread

I was in a well-known supermarket the other day and saw people picking up bits of bread and squeezing it to test for being stale then putting it back. Never buy bread or anything else unwashable that is on open display.

Don't get me started on checkout ladies (it is only ever ladies, men don't do it, no idea why) who lick their fingers before giving you a carrier bag.

What are they looking for

When you get past all the quota-filling filler it looks like they are short of people who actually know what they are doing with computer / network security. Why not just expose a few medium-difficulty honeypots then people who get in find a path like /HR/confidential/executives/salaries/README_if_you_want_a _job.txt

Only serious crackers (whether for fun or for profit) put in the time and effort needed to get good at sensing weaknesses and exploiting them in previously-unknown ways. You can't expect the same level of dedication from industry people with real-world objectives like large estates to protect and relying on vendors to find and patch any holes.

It's not about the job

In my experience people who yell at other people all the time do it because they like yelling at people. "Bad coding", "poor customer service", "failing to hand in homework", whatever, the ostensible reason for yelling at people is just fluff and cover to "justify" the real business at hand which its... yelling at people. They are a breed apart for sure.