* Posts by Jamie Jones

4281 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

How could the Facebook data slurping scandal get worse? Glad you asked

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Happy

Re: Don’t worry!

my dog has more intelligence and better morals than most social media users.

Harsh words indeed - especially as I know your dog, and he's as thick as pig-shit!

Shining lasers at planes in the UK could now get you up to 5 years in jail

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Coat

Re: Overly bright vehicle lights

You shouldn't really be sleeping whilst driving anyway!

Hacking train Wi-Fi may expose passenger data and control systems

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Security researcher clickbait

He should have gone for "hack the accelerator" - far more scary than "hacked the train to be able to do an emergency stop" - especially when there are pull-cords throughout the train to do the very same.

"Can stop a train without needing a ticket" isn't a very catchy headline.

Make masses carry their mobes, suggests wig in not-at-all-creepy speech

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Airplane mode?

I rarely carry my mobile... I usually don't bother with keys either (unless I'm driving) - I had too much of that shit when I used to be on-call.

It's sad how for some people they are like another appendage.

Let's kick the tyres on Google's Android P... It's not an overheating wreck, but UX is tappy

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: No thanks

I more or less agree, but prefer the task switcher on Lolipop.

My newest tablet is an oreo.. Not played too much with it yet - still using the lollipop tablet. First reaction - omg they're making it look like a dumb iphone (though this may be a huawei addition rather than oreo)

I hope I can make it more like Lollipop - I don't hate the new design because it looks like an Iphone - i hate the iphone because it looks like this!

There will be blood: BT to axe 13,000 employees

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Trollface

It seems to be a British disease - management are held in higher esteem than those that actually know what they are doing, and actively denigrate engineers. It will never change as the senior managers got there by being "managers" - to the detriment of knowledgeable people.

Of course, all that will change for the better when we leave the EU! </sarcasm>

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: They'll be a few thousand BT Van effigies burnt this November, no doubt...

with the senior management that survive eventually getting relocated to Swansea's BT Tower

Why reward them?

Zombie Cambridge Analytica told 'death' can't save it from the law

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Happy

Re: Pass out the torches and pitchforks!

Sorry, I read your post *after* writing my response... Honest!

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Pass out the torches and pitchforks!

Oh, and don't forget their arrogance. Actually thinking they could say this and not face the full wratch of the ICO.. The mind boggles.

From the pdf:

The data controller replied to the Commissioner on 2 November 2017.

It again refused to accept that the complainant was entitled to make a subject access request or a request for assessment under the DPA, asserting that the Commissioner had no vires to consider the complaint. The data controller informed the Commissioner that it did “.. not expect to be further harassed with this sort of correspondence”.

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Pass out the torches and pitchforks!

Geeze John, it seems your default reaction to something you disagree with is to come out with some criticism of Obama.

When will you realise that:

1) Attempting to defend one side by critisicing the other doesn't work. It's not logical. Kids tend to do it, ("yeah??? well your mum smells of farts") but most realise it's stupid when they reach the age of 5.

2) This wasn't even a partisan issue. You are so entrenched in your dogma, that whenever someone says something you don't agree with, they must be "leftie liberals".

3) Finally, even "leftie liberals" generally are free thinkers. They don't idolize their "team" as a god. If you come up with an honest criticism of Obama etc. they'll probably agree, or maybe even disagree, but to get annoyed and all butt-hurt for daring to criticise "one of them" is a right wing tendancy - you'd do well to not try the same tactics on 'lefties' as you would on your own flock.

So, that's 3 strikes.

(I still can't imagine how you thought mentioning Obama in this case was somehow a good point to be made)

As Dr_N said, you keep talking whataboutism without actually understanding what it means.

HAND.

Android P to improve users' network privacy

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Great, there go the useful Wifi utilities

Well, it did say "replaced with suitable api/permission", but yeah, you are right if the process listing block is any indication.

I think android should be a lot tighter, but in doing so, should not affect the capability of "power" apps. I know they want to steer it more towards being just a consumer kit, like an iphone, but if it wasn't for the 'techies', they wouldn't even have the software they're profiting from!

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: yey

Just because things can be accessed as a file (*not* everything, by the way.... ref: ioctl) it doesn't imply lack of securuty.

As you know, there are directory permissions, file permissions, acls.. etc.

Pentagon in uproar: 'China's lasers' make US pilots shake in Djibouti

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Welcome to The Register, Mr Bolton!

Virgin Media to chop 800 jobs in Wales call centre

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Swansea was still there when it was NTL.

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Someone didn't get the memo:

From https://careers.virginmedia.com/locations/swansea/ (http://archive.is/znnJe)

Swansea

About the location

Solving problems like Sherlock, our 850 legends are so good at fault management and technical support that Swansea is Virgin Media’s official centre of excellence for those areas. We’re not the only ones who reckon it’s great. Swansea has won a whole heap of awards, including Welsh Contact Centre of the Year 2012. We’re gonna need a bigger display cabinet.

Where is it?

Our location in Swansea Enterprise Park means we’re rubbing shoulders with a diverse bunch of businesses, including several other contact centres. Of course, they wish they were here.

if dev == woman then dont_be(asshole): Stack Overflow tries again to be more friendly to non-male non-pasty coders

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Coat

Re: "Mansplaining"

Well, I'd prefer things explained to be by a man, than by my ex.... /coat

Eurocrats double down on .eu Brexit boot-out

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: EUnuchs create another fine mess?

"and the .EU is a generic TLD rather than a genuine ccTLD"

Wrong....

A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code.

All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all two-letter top-level domains are ccTLDs.

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: In Next Month's News

"P.S I like to leave them confused over whether to downvote or upvote, or not. What a dilema!"

An overinflated view of your own importance and relevence to the rest of the world... Just like the view you and your cronies have about jolly old england!

Facebook confesses: Buckle up, there's plenty more privacy lapses where that came from

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Happy

Re: I never realised I could have had a scoop

He's canny that way.

Jamie Jones Silver badge

I never realised I could have had a scoop

In a former life, I did some facebook app coding, mainly just for 'fun', about 7 or 8 years ago.

What data you could grab (including "friend of friend"...) was never hidden in any way. It was the norm. No special handshake, no secret societies.

I wrote one 'fun' app that gathered stats for a user on all their friends, and collated it - nothing they couldn't do manually, and I never kept copies of the data (though obviously I could have)

Very few users (less than 1%) had 'friend of friend' disabled... I think the setting may have been called 'allow friends third party apps access to the same data as your friend has'... well, something more catchy, less descriptive, and more hidden.

Basically, if a user was savvy enough to disable this access, when a friend of theirs used my app, the only info I could received was the friends name and id - not the full information the user could retrieve directly.

So, you sorta needed 'friend of friend' capability to be able to write apps with a similar access ability to native facebook functions. But even so, it was bound to be abused in the way that has now been revealed. It was staggeringly obvious immediately, and should have never existed.

So now they are saying "we expected the data to be used for the users experience and not mined" - really? Bollox.

Basically, if they cut off that access, they'd severly restrict what profile-related things legitimate apps could do, and they knew it, so whilst they didn't want the things that cambridge analytica did (after all, why would they want to give away millions of user data for free?) I guess they thought it was a risk worth taking, or a price worth paying.

But to claim that they didn't think people would do it because it's against their AUP... What next? Facebook exec. fall for 419 scams, phising emails, or forward junk emails to 1000's of people because for every one, Bill Gates will donate a kidney? Get real.

Academics: Shutting down Facebook API damages research, oversight, competition

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Burn it.

I read that as "driving to work"...

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Damned if they do....

"Damages oversight"? huh?

"Please open up your API so we can see how open your API is."

I agree with the concensus here - these "academic" rsasons are dubious. They think they can get away with calling foul because Facebook is currently (justifiably) whipping boy of the year.

The tech you're reading these words on – you have two Dundee uni boffins to thank for that

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Where's the thumbs up?

Ahhh, I would if I did, but I don't.

Jamie Jones Silver badge

I'm using DLP :-)

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Thumb Up

Where's the thumbs up?

Brilliant article - it's times like these I wish we had the option to thumbs-up an article.... I'm sure you used to have such a facility, back in the day....

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Happy

Re: I was going to say "how do you know I'm reading this on TFT?"

I'm sitting on my sofa, reading this on my wall, via a DLP projector. It runs at 1920x1280 so stick that to your TFT resolution assumptions! :-)

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Don't forget the deep fried mars bar!

Whoops! Google forgot to delete Right To Be Forgotten search result

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Happy

Re: Sounds like many sites will publish enough hints

"But if you write "no" and have a record, then you can get fired for lying on the application, since it's technically fraud"

I think that's basically the reasoning behind some of the questions on the security clearance form:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/669196/20160927-Form_NSV001_v0.2-U.pdf :

"Have you ever been involved in Espionage?"

"Have you ever been involved in terrorism?"

"Have you ever been involved in sabotage?"

Have you ever been involved in actions intended to overthrow or undermine Parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means?

Have you ever been a member of, or supported, a group or groups involved in any of the above activities?

Have you ever had a close association with anyone, including any member of your family, who, to your knowledge, has been a member of or given active support to any such group or activities?

I don't fancy your chances if you answer 'yes' to all those!

UK 'meltdown' bank TSB's owner: Our IT migration was a 'success'

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Where did it go?

As google cache isn't permanent... :

http://archive.is/4AT2X

AWS DNS network hijack turns MyEtherWallet into ThievesEtherWallet

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: A lot of sites still sport self-signed certificates

Why care if you trust them? The browsers trust them - that's what matters.

They are not self-signed.

You admit your own ignorance in never having heard of letsencrypt (really? in a topic about CAs and certificates?) - you could have at leasf done 30 seconds research before posting.

Yay, you've won your Fitbit lawsuit, folks. But, lawyers, about those filet mignon expenses...

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: LOL123

@LOL123:

"@Michael Habel

Ah yes another one - where every debate or discussion reduces to the good/bad left and/or good/bad right rant."

Ahhh, I posted my reply before seeing yours, sorry!

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: 'Plenty of notices'

"You are however free to try your luck in 'ol Mother Russia. Or has Putin put you off Russia? No matter then there's still China, Cuba, and Venezuela left open to you to discover that there IS no true form of Communism that has yet to be tried."

My god... it gets worse! You've got to be a parody, right? Even Fox isn't that cliched any more!

Jamie Jones Silver badge

@Michael Habel

It seems you deleted your posts out of shame, so I was struggling to grasp where you were coming from until I came to this part:

"you Lefters"

*facepalm* What does this even mean? Are you saying that all people who prefer human rights over corporation rights are somehow all the same? Like clones of each other in some weird brainwashed cult?

Apart from showing stupidity, it shows the mindset of someone who can't have an independent thought, and instead blindly cheers his own "team" - nievely grouping everyone into either "them" or "us".

Oh dear... Netizens think 'private' browsing really means totally private

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Naming Confusion?

... just like the article itself says!

Jamie Jones Silver badge

But again, not necessarily.

Many browsers record private mode access to disk, albeit in temporary files, or deleted on exit.

It seems you'd be surprised how much "private" stuff alot of these browsers reveal was you do a raw dump of a database file, or failing that, the raw device.

ICANN takes Whois begging bowl to Europe, comes back empty

Jamie Jones Silver badge

I realise your question is rhetorical, but I'll reply "they can!" anyway!

Of course it's going around in circles a bit - it's simply a way to avoid ICAAN rules, that need to be removed in the first place!

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Good.

The thing is.... Change what?

It's not critical to infrastructure. The only people who have ever used my entry in my 20 odd years of being on it are domain-renewal company scammers, domain sellers (ok, so if I own ***.com why the hell would I be interested in buying my***.com ***online.com or ***web.com ?) and the domain registrar themselves (who have access to thus information via my private billing information anyway)

I can understand the purpose back in the days when only real companies got domains - after all, no legitimate company would want to hide that information.

And there's probably a good case to still require it for these types of domains (though it's something that could be required not by Icann, but by third parties - i.e. barclaycard refusing to be usable on a site with dodgy or anonymous info)

But even then, still, it's not a technical issue. Registrars have the information already. DNS and the rest of the internet don't require it.

What time do they need? They could literally demand that every registrar disables it within 24 hours, and the ONLY things that MAY break are the sweet deals they have with those who want to plunder our information.

So yes, good on the EU to see through their bullshit (we need a *bullshit* icon!)

Brit bank TSB TITSUP* after long-planned transfer of customer records from Lloyds

Jamie Jones Silver badge

You must be new here!

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Just as worrying...I wonder what this one does

All your base belongs to us:

This app has access to:

Identity

find accounts on the device

Contacts

find accounts on the device

read your contacts

Location

precise location (GPS and network-based)

SMS

read your text messages (SMS or MMS)

receive text messages (SMS)

Phone

read phone status and identity

Photos/Media/Files

read the contents of your USB storage

modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

Storage

read the contents of your USB storage

modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

Wi-Fi connection information

view Wi-Fi connections

Device ID & call information

read phone status and identity

Other

receive data from Internet

view network connections

full network access

run at startup

control vibration

read Google service configuration

Sysadmin unplugged wrong server, ran away, hoped nobody noticed

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: its like the leads at the back of my desk at work.

Those evil spiders really hate Christmas tree lights too!

US government weighs in on GDPR-Whois debacle, orders ICANN to go probe GoDaddy

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Huh?

ditto me with welshgit.org :-)

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Huh?

Currently only ICANN-accredited registrars are allowed to make changes to name server and mail server records.

Excuse-er-me-a-wots-a-wait-a-minute-huh?

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Ever thought that these laws are actually consumer friendly?

The people complaining about GoDaddy have absolutely no real reason to have access to the data. They are just telemarketers, but as always in America, corporations trump the right of the people.

Chrome 66: Get into the bin, auto-playing vids and Symantec certs!

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Chrome 66 will roll out in coming days and weeks.

Today is one of the coming days, yes.

"roll-out" is the key term here - packages for all different operating systems and distributions will not be updated today.

Additionally, android updates don't reach everyone at once.

Whois is dead as Europe hands DNS overlord ICANN its arse

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Sick of the spam calls

"Why yes, I'll certainly answer your questions, as long as it doesn't take long - the traffic is really busy and tricky at the moment, and I shouldn't be on the phone anyway!" (said whilst sitting on the sofa)

...

"Um, yes, I do own a Microsoft computer....... SHIT" *plays screatching brakes and car crash sound effect, then hangs up*

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Re: Stating the obvious.....

"Whois" could disappear in it's entirety tomorrow. Nothing will break. It's not related to the technical infrastructure at all.

And as many people have already pointed out: registrars will still have the registers information, and scammers use false details anyway.

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Happy

Re: Unstable operation coming soon...

It's clear enough that your opinion is worth fuck all, your IQ is clearly way too low for you have anything meaningful to contribute and are far happier spouting meaningless tripe than even stopping to read the very references you demand.

Blimey! Some-one needs a hug! :-)

Anon biz bloke wins milestone Google Right To Be Forgotten lawsuit

Jamie Jones Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Google UK vs Google.com

Re-read the bit you quoted....

El Reg needs you – to help build an automated beer-transporting robot

Jamie Jones Silver badge

Mahammad and mountains...

Just move the office closer to the bar.