* Posts by Joe Harrison

858 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jun 2007

Here's how TalkTalk ducked and dived over THAT gigantic hack

Joe Harrison

I am not joining in the hating until I have all the facts

Nobody knows what actually happened, apart from speculation that they might have got SQL-injected. What if they were actually running a tight ship but got clobbered by a 0-day could you still call them idiots?

As an aside, the only time I ever had a problem with a Talk Talk connection I bypassed their official customer support entirely and went straight to their user forums. Some excellent people on there who helped me wireshark my way to success.

Deutsche Bank to axe 'excessively complex' IT, slash 9,000 jobs

Joe Harrison

Re: Respect

There probably really are that number of operating systems (at least) but only if you're allowed to get seriously historical, NetWare, Plan9, VME/B, TOSD, George3, CP/M, DOS keep counting and be at the 45 mark in no time.

You own the software, Feds tell Apple: you can unlock it

Joe Harrison

But you do own the phone

I don't have any Apple kit but probably the EULA can only say "you don't own this software"? I mean you do own the phone hardware. I'm guessing that Apple cannot do a remote unlock and would need actually do hardware things to the phone, connect something to it at least. Why can't they say "OK it's our software but not our phone".

New Nexus 5X, 6P smarties: Google draws a line in the sand

Joe Harrison

Autocarrot is a menace, keeps making me say things I didn't Nintendo

Joe Harrison

Serious question

What are you supposed to do with no SD card? For example I like to watch video on the boring train, but even in populated area like SE you could not hold a signal long enough to watch a film or episode which was streaming from gdrive or other cloud. In fact I doubt could even listen to one complete music track without it dropping out.

If I didn't have the 64GB card I would be reduced to carefully managing local copies on what's left of my 16GB, needing to keep on top of loading and deleting things all the time.

O2 joins Virgin Media as member of weak crypto software club

Joe Harrison

But in real life...

Not defending poor security practice but let's be fair, cracking RC4 is still "hard enough" to deter blackhats from snaffling that ten quid you just paid to O2.

Accidental homicide: how VoLTE kills old style call accounting

Joe Harrison

But even when you are no longer making "calls"...

...they'll still want to make you pay Line Rental.

Shoebox-sized satellite enters orbit packing 3Mbps radio

Joe Harrison

What is it for?

As title. Article explains what it can do but why is it up there? Presumably even small satellites are not cheap.

Wheels come off parents' plan to dub sprog 'Mini Cooper'

Joe Harrison

And whilst we're at it

Let's ban directory design choices which insist on displaying names back-to-front, such as "Smith John". Absolute nightmare in a large organisation especially when there inevitably exists a few legacy systems which for some reason displays the right way round.

Ad networks promise to do something about the awful adverts you're all blocking, like, real soon

Joe Harrison

Unfixable

I too remember when there were no ads on the www, although that didn't last long. When "banner ads" (there were even standards for pixel sizes) came along I didn't adblock because it was so easy to train yourself to ignore them. The advertisers knew that so they got clever with punch the monkey and so on, at which point I had to start getting creative with my hosts file.

So what are they going to do, go back to static ads which they know didn't work the first time? If you as a site operator really feel you should get paid for your content then there will have to be some other way than ads.

Lies from VW: 'Our staff acted criminally but board didn't know'

Joe Harrison

Doesn't pass the smell test

I believe VW did this, since they have owned up to it, but everything still bothers me.

1. Rumour says the US emissions test limit is deliberately set impossibly low, in order to keep out foreign competition, and because they don't want diesel cars in the US for some reason. I haven't driven in US for years so don't know if it is true that diesel cars practically nonexistent there.

2. Apparently known about for some time but scandal broke at the exact same time as VW opened their engines manufacture in Russia.

3. Why are we not seeing huge numbers of VWs failing their MOT if they are that dirty?

Has the UK Uber crackdown begun? TfL opens consultation on private car biz

Joe Harrison

Doesn't matter

The rights and wrongs and legal definitions are not really important. In the end, black cabs haven't a chance because nobody likes them.

It's the white heat of the tech revolution, again!

Joe Harrison

Because things are so great right now

The global economy is in a fine mess. Trillions wiped off stock markets, central banks' money-printing completely out of control, ridiculous bubbles across asset classes such as property, oil wars, commodity crashes, you name it. Also not a day goes by without a banker somewhere accused of trashing the rulebook even harder than yesterday.

Governments got us here, shall we have even more of the same or something new?

Hands on with Google's Nexus 5X, 6P Android Marshmallow mobes

Joe Harrison

Re: Still don't want Chinese Kit!

I have a Huawei phone (Honor 6) and yes it does randomly connect to .cn addresses. After a lot of work with wireshark I am pretty satisfied it is a rather oddly-implemented cloud storage option, a sort of Huawei competitor to Google Drive. So tin-foil hat removed.

UK.gov unleashes 3D virtual world to train GCHQ's kiddie division

Joe Harrison

Sigh

Can't we just go back to the good old days when you were only regarded as suitable intelligence material if you went to the right school and your dad knew lord thingy? Then the rest of us can get on with the actual security work.

Spirit of the Ghost: Taking a Rolls-Royce Wraith around France

Joe Harrison

Re: 21MPG?

Bah 25mpg RUBBISH!

My Volkswagen does 1000mpg (according to the emissions test report.)

BBC Micro:bit delayed by power supply SNAFU

Joe Harrison

Why?

My kids and all their friends already have about six computers each

Microsoft has developed its own Linux. Repeat. Microsoft has developed its own Linux

Joe Harrison

It's everywhere

They will even SELL you Linux

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/#Linux

Cryptome founder revokes PGP keys after weird 'compromise'

Joe Harrison

Re: Word transposed in headline

He is a bit weird. A few years ago I emailed him and encrypted to the key on his website at that time. He replied with some rambling story and would I mind resending in plain text. To my mind that is an odd thing to do after you have gone to the bother of generating and displaying your key.

Uber is killing off iconic black cabs, warns Zac Goldsmith

Joe Harrison

Can't get rid of them quickly enough

Last week an unsuspecting German colleague took a black cab from Heathrow to our Bracknell office, mid-morning, and got charged 126 pounds. We make that journey all the time and the normal fare is about 40 quid. It's legal but black cabs please just die.

Confession: I was a teenage computer virus writer

Joe Harrison

"I didn't really understand it, but it solved my issue, so I used it."

Sums up my entire career as a "developer" :(

Coder pleads guilty to writing Gozi banking trojan

Joe Harrison

Almost three years in jail?

So he was arrested in November 2012 and last Friday he pleaded guilty. What's been happening all that time?

ICO probes NHS clinic's data blunder that exposed HIV+ status of 800 patients

Joe Harrison

Happens to the best of us

A few years ago a prominent UK digital rights organisation (I can't bring myself to embarrass them again) sent out a mail about their internet privacy campaign to the entire dlist instead of bcc...

Small wonder, little competition: Asus Chromebook Flip

Joe Harrison

keep it

Whenever I am on a train listening to music on my phone, and it goes into a tunnel, and the music doesn't cut off because it's on sd card and not in a cloud, well that's when I pat myself on the back for being old and boring instead of hipster 2.0

Bloke clicks GitHub 'commit' button in Visual Studio, gets slapped with $6,500 AWS bill

Joe Harrison

What is wrong with Amazon?

I wanted to sign up for their free trial on day one but have never done so precisely because

(a) I don't know what I'm doing until I have learnt

(b) don't want my lack of knowledge somehow to trigger a massive credit card bill.

You would think they would understand this.

Jailbreaking pirates popped in world's largest iCloud raid – 225,000 accounts hit

Joe Harrison

Rooted mine

I have barely any reason to root my Android phone but did it anyway just on general principle. Why not, I paid for it. Cannot understand the "jailbreaking is bad and you mustn't do it" sentiment in this thread.

Turn-by-turn directions coming to Ordnance Survey Maps

Joe Harrison

Phone recharge not a problem with this bad boy

http://www.dx.com/p/13w-dual-output-foldable-portable-50000mah-solar-panel-charger-acu-camouflage-404135

Joe Harrison

Re: A question.

Unfortunately OS ruled over the maps business for too long, then woke up too late. I personally have all the mapping I need for free thanks, so no need for OS to try and charge me for anything (which I already paid for anyway.)

T-Mobile US CEO calls his subscribers thieves, gripes about 'unlimited' limited tethering

Joe Harrison

Daft

Phones are fast turning into general purpose computers, PCs are fast becoming more nonexistent. How long before "tethering" is meaningless?

Honor 7 – heir apparent to the mid-range Android crown

Joe Harrison

I have an Honor 6

Not really that different just less resolution camera and less fingerprint toys etc. The battery is not all that and a day of heavy use will have you looking nervously at the battery meter come evening. The thing I like least about it is the way that promised dates for software upgrades came and went with nothing released. Having said all that it is otherwise a pretty good solid phone and definitely worth a look if you think you can cope with it's oddball Apple-like GUI.

Krebs: I know who hacked Ashley Madison

Joe Harrison

Re: Hmmmm

Exactly, because everyone who likes a particular song has it playing 24x7. It's not only the song that's being played, Krebs is as well.

French woman gets €800 a month for electromagnetic-field 'disability'

Joe Harrison

Microwave oven

Put your head in one, you will soon find out whether RF affects humans or not. Mobile phone emissions on much the same frequencies not so much, if at all. Which is another way of saying the whole thing is about the effective radiated power.

I doubt very much that if you actually tested people you would find that all humans have identical sensitivity to power levels. To all you smirking "double blind tests never show anything" types in the thread, have your tests been done on that particular French human?

Security for those who know they can't win the security war

Joe Harrison

I'm tired already just reading it

"The bottom line? The measures you take should mirror the sensitivity of the files you want to protect."

This is fantastic advice, unfortunately the rest of the article sounds more like "go to enormous lengths to protect everything 100%".

I don't think I could realistically operate such an intense regime on my ordinary daily stuff. No good having a secure backup if you can't remember the 30-character password allowing you to mount your Truecrypt volume so you can enter your other 30-character password etc.

FBI probed SciFi author Ray Bradbury for plot to glum-down America

Joe Harrison

What does liberal mean

It wasn't until 1968 that the FBI gave up trying to tag Bradbury as more than a “known liberal writer”

What does "liberal" actually mean when used by Americans?

I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_United_States but it doesn't really explain the way that a lot of them routinely use the word.

'Unexpected item in baggage area' assigned to rubbish area

Joe Harrison

Re: Waitrose (very posh - sorry)

Yes, and for some reason it all works fine without needing to weigh all your stuff.

Joe Harrison

Never mind bag it, just bin it

After a lot of thought I came to the conclusion that self-scans are so disruptive because they don't operate in the way that customers expect a checkout to work. Everyone has learnt from an early age that checkouts have a conveyor belt, a scanner, then a dumping ground where you can put your things into bags. The self-scans break that model with their unintuitive and ultimately pointless weight check.

One of the most annoying aspects is that self-scans work differently in different supermarket chains. In Morrisons Manchester recently I even watched the machine's video which shows a cartoon figure placing scanned goods on a platform at the right-hand-side of the scanner. The weighing sensor is in fact on the left of the scanner. I pointed this out to the employee who turned up to help but she still treated me as if I was too thick to put my own socks on.

Oi, Google! Remove links to that removed story, yells forceful ICO

Joe Harrison

Re: Please remove the link...

How is it even possible; Google would have to check for that person's name for the rest of the lifetime of the internet. What happens a year from now when someone posts "... yes and don't forget how they made them take down that link to Mr. Blobbo Boggins and his inflatable friend." Suddenly Google is back in the poo again.

Hey, folks. Meet the economics 'genius' behind Jeremy Corbyn

Joe Harrison

Not impressed

I'm no economist and I'm not going to start arguing the toss with Tim about all those formulas, although I must say it's hard to take a writer seriously when he uses terms such as "lefty". However in the context of the current worldwide insanity (central banks printing like crazy to buy up bonds and stocks) my naive view saw nothing in the article which really sounded all that bad, relatively speaking!

The average voter will not understand the formulae either but may be very tempted to vote for someone like Jeremy Corbyn as a change from all the smooth Westminster lookalikes infesting their TV screens every night.

Dell, Google dangle Chromebooks over IT bosses sick of Windows

Joe Harrison

Will nobody think of the users?

People are usually fairly alright with being given a corporate laptop despite having to look after it, charge it up, cart it around everywhere, and so on. This is because they can also use it for their own stuff (if necessary by ignoring policies that say they mustn't.)

The same might not be true for a dumb box that only boots into a locked-down remote desktop.

SEC: Ukrainian hackers' investment fraud ring raked in millions in 'unprecedented' hack

Joe Harrison

One to bind them all

Why is a group of people suddenly referred to as a "ring" as soon as they get up to something dastardly?

Stop taking drug advice from Kim Kardashian on Twitter, sighs watchdog

Joe Harrison

Epic fail! Nobody is going to give them 3.4M for that, because jealousy.

Hey, Apple! 1999 just called and it wants its voicemail avatar back

Joe Harrison

Wildfire was a saucy one

She used to invite me to listen to her collection of William Shatner LPs

Let's all binge on Blake’s 7 and help save the BBC ... from itself

Joe Harrison

License ≠ BBC

Just a reminder that the TV license is not something you pay in return for having BBCness. I am not bothered about BBC and in fact I have my dish pointed at a satellite which doesn't broadcast BBC. I still have to pay however.

Bloke cuffed for blowing low-flying camera drone to bits with shotgun

Joe Harrison

Re: Good for him

Things fly over my house without my permission all the time, doesn't mean I can shoot them down.

We put Windows 10 on a small fondleslab: STILL not ready, 3 days to go

Joe Harrison

KB305583

If you are not seeing the "update to Windows 10" icon you need to install KB305583. Sometimes a few registry hacks are needed as well.

Google dumps ISP email support. Virgin Media takes ball, stomps home

Joe Harrison

who cares

It's not the 1990s any more - do people really expect an email account from their ISP these days?

Google robo-car in rear-end smash – but cack-handed human blamed

Joe Harrison

Totally agree. Brake lights are (intentionally) very bright and I really don't need them shining in my face for a couple of minutes because the guy in front could not bother to engage the handbrake like the highway code says you should.

Your security is just dandy, Apple Pay, but here comes Android

Joe Harrison

who pays

So Apple get paid a small slice per transaction, which is to say using the phone costs more than using the card. Who ultimately foots the bill for that? You already know the answer.

Seems to me very similar to having your airport boarding card on your phone - quite cool the first couple of times but rapidly becomes annoying.

Microsoft again offers free certification exams to failures

Joe Harrison

I think they're good

Everyone thinks they know their stuff but when you need to pass an exam you are pretty much forced to learn the lesser-used bits as well. I did the NT4 exams back in the day and made a point of implementing everything I was learning on some test servers. For a short period in my life I did actually know what I was doing. Although having said that I couldn't agree more with AMBxx, the NT4 track had a lot of useful generic networking,not just learning product features A to Z.

Someone at Subway is a serious security nerd

Joe Harrison

To be fair

I've got a lot of sympathy with everyone who just wants to buy a sandwich and doesn't see the need for top security. To be fair though perhaps they are planning some sort of electronic payment in a later version? It didn't go down well when Starbucks gift cards got the hack.