Posts by Pen-y-gors

Re: Oh, crap they caught us again!

It's in the post...

Printing stencils on the dot-matrix - I remember printing some of my first Green Party leaflets that way.

Then we managed to acquire an electronic stencil cutter. Clever piece of kit - 2 drums. On one you wrapped a document (printed from ZX Spectrum complete with fancy fonts, and even a few photos pasted on), and on the other you put a special stencil. Start her up, and a detector (with a little light) scanned the input image as it span round while a little spark thing burned away on the stencil. Basically like a low-res photo-copier, but just created a master. Lovely smell of ozone or something while it ran. Major technical advance!

Re: crying out for a mashup with hotornot.com

Coming soon to an interweb near you...

But it raises some interesting questions. How does a non-existent person demonstrate that they are over 18? Would the software also generate fake ID?

Re: Relate

Trophy hunters get a bad press. I think rich people should be allowed to hunt endangered large carnivores as trophies. Unarmed. In hand to claw combat. If they can strangle the lion or hippo they get to put its head on the wall. Part of the deal is that before the hunt they change their will to leave all their property to appropriate charities.

Re: Goodbye Youtube?

Never mind Youtube - Google Maps is now illegal.

Re: Has anybody asked ...

Generally quite a sensible view. I'd go a little further and suggest that perhaps Verizon could introduce a new plan, especially for the emergency services, which costs the same as the 25GB capped one, but without the cap. And publicise it heavily as "Verizon - working for your community" - and if all the Fire Service phones suddenly start using several hundred Gb a month as the firepeople watch pr0n during quiet moments then they start another advertising campaign "Verizon - bringing free self-pleasure to our brave fire-fighters"

The proposed law to ban throttling also means that some dork in his storm cellar during the tornado can happily hog all the available bandwidth watching pr0n while he waits for it to be safe to come out. That is not a good thing.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire

I think I can do better than that. Early 80s went to the Science Museum in London and they had an exhibition on early C20 Hollerith tabulator technology - including a manual single-card card-punch (with 12 buttons on a sort of carriage on top) (Not have heavy use, we had proper 029 punches and 'punch girls' for that)

I gleefully told my friends that we still had one in the department that was used daily!

[I'm sad that I can still remember 12-0-1-8-9 as being an important code as it was x00]

Re: "Britain's FBI"

Brits always run into problems over here because they don't realize that American states (and counties within states) have different laws, let alone law agencies

Worryingly many 'Brits' have problems in Britland, and don't realise that different parts of this scepter'd isle have different laws and regulations. Scotland and Wales are devolved nations, with (limited) law-making powers, and this means that visitors to Abersoch have to remember "We're not in Birmingham any more, Toto"

Oh yes, and in some parts we even speak a different language!

Re: Had to happen

By "standing behind the door" do you mean standing outside the door?

Could be worse.

It's when they're in the bedroom, criticising, that you have real problems. " No, no, son, that's not the way to do it. Here, get out of the way and I'll show you..."

Nah. A real government consultant would forget about the ink.

Re: Snooping platform

Possibly excessive cynicism, but I see where you're coming from.

The aim of helping prevent people trafficing is excellent, but as with so many tools it can be used for good and evil. Trafficked slaves? Good. Opposition politician on the run and in hiding gives TV interview from hotel room? Not so good.

Re: So I gather

Photos are simpler and can get round the biometric hurdle. If, for example, they asked you to bring a passport-sized photo of yourself when you buy the pass, which they laminate to the pass, that's absolutely clean. Your photo, your pass. They don't have a copy.

Take it a stage further, they provide an instant photo booth so you can get the photo. Again fine, so long as they don't keep a copy (and they don't need to anyway).

Re: reporting the account and the IP address to Twitter and the Met Police

While the fate of the criminals is unknown

Now that the Met are on the case I think we can safely assume that they are happily carrying on as before, enjoying the fruits of their labour.

It's pointless reporting 'cyber-crime' to the Met, even when you give them IP addresses, account details used to purchase IT services in the UK, and loads more, they do nothing.

The ddodad usb connector was vey useful for me!

Re: Jaw-droppingly inappropriate, yet perfectly legal

would likely result in heart attacks or resignations from almost all top level public sector management

Oh dear, how sad, never mind. Thank you Windsor Davies

That may have the side-effect that we get people in top level public sector management who are there because they believe in the public sector and working to do the best job for the public, rather than seeing the job as a short-cut to excessive wealth at the expense of the public. There are highly competent people in our society who are driven by other things than avarice and greed. They usually end up in junior positions, actually helping people, rather than climbing the greasy pole.

Re: You have to opt in

I think the point here is that it's old location data that is still being distributed, regardless of whether or not you are currently not opted-in.

Personally I switch location off on the phone unless I'm using Maps - just to save battery life you understand, I'm not paranoid, whatever you may have heard. And who told you anyway?

Re: Nanu nanu shazbat!

Nah. Why spoil a good thing? It's such fun!

Re: Alice

And what about the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI)

How much did they pay for that sponsorship?

May be a good way to raise funds for future probes? The Complete Optical Camera Array - Capturing Otherworldly Light Action

Re: Environmental Protestors?

I'm sure we shall find out in time.

Not too sure about referring to them as "one theory is that they may be environmental rights terrorists" - as far as I'm aware there was no physical injury to anyone, actual or intended. One of the key points about the all-embracing 'terrorism' is that it involves using violence for political ends. If violence wasn't deemed to be necessary, and simply causing terror for political ends = terrorism, then I'm afraid the entire Parliamentary Tory party would be going down for a very long stretch.

Let's stick to 'activists' ?

Re: Well, there was this time...

Surely a lump hammer and a cold chisel is the standard way to decommission hard drives?

Re: Statistically speaking

It came in a box?

You were looky! I remember playing it in the late 70s and all you could buy were a few AD&D (TM) books, plus the aforesaid D20, D6 etc

Re: The whole point of the metric system is to make large numbers more ‘palatable’.

Yep 10,000 tons a second - which the article implies is incredibly fast.

BUT... the line before says

For other types of exoplanets like hot Jupiters, which also orbit close to its host stars, the rate of evaporation can be as high as thousands of tons per second but the impact is much smaller.

So, is 10,000 tonnes a second a little or a lot?

It's very bad practice to mix units in an article.

Re: emails contain poisoned Word documents

The whole point of spearphishing is to run a con on a specific target.

Exactly. Carefully crafted for the target(s). Ideally, for a specific person, but a small group can be effective too.

<war story mode on>

Some years ago one of our clients who we had developed a website for (to do with uses for timber) had an email from a customer saying there was a virus on the website. Instant panic mode, check everything, absolutely clean. Scratch head. Then look at email in more detail - wrong domain name. Someone had registered a .com version of our .co.uk site, grabbed our entire site (not exactly difficult), and cloned it onto the .com, with added sprinkles.

We suspect they then had a nicely crafted email referring to some recent interesting pieces of news in the burning trees industry, and sent it to a smallish number of people in organisations and businesses interested in burning trees. A fair proportion would probably follow the links, see a plausible site, and leave none the wiser, while something nasty started to nose around their network.

And that's even without Office attachments. No matter what we do, highly intelligent scumbags will craft new ways of conning people. Even if we provide people with non-network connected tablets using a 4G data connection for all web access, they will still get conned and reveal a password to a 'Windows Security Team member' via email.

Re: Tech or pretend-tech?

How does the mirror and holy postcard help with that?

Re: Doh....

Now, WE (the vaguely IT-literate Reg-commentardiate) know that VPNs are basically a good thing, so long as they aren't free! Paid for and used properly they can considerably increase security while browsing, and not just smut.

Could someone explain this to the BBC and the Lottery? Who flatly refuse to let you use iPlayer or buy a ticket while you are using a VPN, even if it terminates in the UK.

No, they want you to disconnect your VPN and use the highly questionable free WiFi in your local coffee shop without the safety of virtuality.

But kids can still sit in Star*ucks watching movies showing grown-ups in a state of undress, so long as they use their VPN.

Why do we bother with a Parliament of morons?

Re: Offsite scripts GAH!

@Clanger9

Have a look at the TSB login page. Offsite resources include:

That got me interested. Just looked at the Lloyds login page:

we-stats.com

tiqcn.com

webtrendslive.com

All now blocked by ABP of course.

And looking at the Network info from Webdeveloper in Firefox there are a lot of curious bits - cross-site scripting blocked to other subdomains? XML parsing errors? Some very curious "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at wss://127.0.0.1:5900/"

And am I the only one who is suspicious of GET requests that have a parameter of 500 bytes of hex?