* Posts by Kiwi

4368 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Sep 2011

Disk drives suck less than they did a couple of years ago. Which is nice

Kiwi
FAIL

Re: WD

Used to be if you had a WD drive it would take two to six months for it to fail. Bought one a couple months ago, it was already dead fresh out of the box.

I got a drive for a friend in a boxing day sale. They didn't have the Seagate he was after so after MUCH discussion I got him a WD for the same price. He was desperate, and though I had misgivings I got the drive (it was a good special).

This thread reminded me and I rang him to check. Such language!

Oh, the drive has been returned, he got a replacement but also tresspassed from the store. Apparently he made some offers about where to place the old drive that the manager didn't quite fancy partaking in. Thankfully I suggested we don't trust it and give it movie machine duty instead of main file store duty. Thankfully more so that he listened.

Not dead out of the box, but it didn't last a month. At least WD are consistent!

Icon - SOP for WD!

Kiwi

I used to see a VERY high failure rate of WD drives for my customers, many already failing before they got them out of the box, literally. One lady had one fail in her laptop so for me to do the data recovery she got one of the middle-[priced ones and brought it straight to me, roughly a 5 minute drive. Opened the shrink-wrapped box, plugged the drive in, no go no spin no nothing. Check the wall-wart, that was fine, tested the USB lead on another device, also fine. Sent her back for another one. Spun up, started transferring data for an overnight transfer, came back to a few megs transferred and an IO error. Two more drives failed before we gave up and went with Seagate - the last WD one lasted a week, but had the 5-6 hour transfer of her data from our recovery disk then was sat on a shelf till she came to collect. When I went to show her the data was there, safe and sound, tic tic tic.. (not tick of death but clicks of badly de-virginised surface).

From what I know her Seagate drive is still fine some 5-6 years later.

Data hackers are like toilet ninjas. This is not a clean crime, you know

Kiwi

Sign..

I recall one toilet I saw a while back with the sign "Please step closer. Its not as big as you think".

I was only there briefly and did not know if it'd had the desired effect, though the floor did seem nicely dry.

Kiwi

Re: Arrested development?

Ugh.

Glad I haven't been sick in a while!

Kiwi
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Arrested development?

And smartphones which you've been given to repair, and touchscreen queue kiosks at banks, etc.

I changed jobs, no more touching filthy phones for me! (well, except my own?).

I may have to stop reading this thread though. Gonna end up OCD myself soon, unable to touch anything in public...

Kiwi
Boffin

Re: Inquiring minds want to know...

With increasing age increasingly damaging my memory, I try to limit the number of passwords I have to use on a variety of devices.

I work it like this.

Bank, email, and server logins - as strong as I can make them, stored securely on PAPER until I can remember the, changed on a semi-regular basis as needed. Either random tool to create one (repeated till I get a fairly easy to remember password) or created using a unique pattern each time.

Sites like El Reg and a few other forums I care about but it won't matter much if they get cracked - created at initial login, only changed in the event of a clear need.

The rest - Completely random password remembered long enough to get it into the login. Usually I'm using 10minutemail.com to create the account and even if a 'real' address is used, I don't expect to return in a hurry. If I do return, there's the options of creating a new account or using the password 'reset' function. I sometimes use a pattern involving part of the site's name and some other stuff, but of late that's dropped in favour of 'I don't need to ever remember this'.

Also sometimes I save the password in the browser, but only for sites I don't care about.

Kiwi
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Arrested development?

with shot and piss on their hands (or at least the bacteria associated with it)

Apologies in advance. I know some of you haven't thought of this.

I try to know which places have the toilets with an open door between the wash basins and the rest of the world, so I don't have to touch any part of the door to open it after I have washed my hands. There's no part of the door/handle that hasn't been touched by someone just after they used the toilet, nothing safe.

Failing that, I at least look for those that have paper towels and a waste bin near the door where I can use the towel to open the door then toss it in the bin. And failing that I'll carry the towel to another nearby bin, or go elsewhere.

Icon - these people also touch their mice and keyboards. I often carry my own, or alcohol-infused tissues.

Kiwi
Flame

Re: Work Kitchens

I think it was that people might put a mug in a dishwasher but not set it running or know when to unload it or just not have time to do it.

The problem I've seen is that the first people putting stuff in don't want to start it because then others have to wait. It should be the last person to put something in.

But the last person to finish their break is often some entitled twat and "it's not my job, that's servant work" or words to that effect.

A bit of signage could often help. But then, those types with a huge sense of entitlement seldom read such stuff. Again, it's for the serfs, not them.

Kiwi
Pint

Re: But...

and Simon about twice a year...

I have it on good authority that he will soon be making an appearance :)

(Enjoy this if it helps your creative juices, Mr T :) )

'Numpty new boy' lets the boss take fall for mailbox obliteration

Kiwi
Black Helicopters

You forgot KAW.

(Last word is "Witnesses" for those having trouble guessing it)

Kiwi
Pint

Re: 100% honesty 90% of the time

Luckily the boss was very understanding and we had our test server pretty quick after that.

I've "accidentally" done a few things like that in the past, when the reasons for a test (or backup) machine weren't fully clear to the boss.

Completely accidental and only due to the stress of NOT having a safe/redundant way to test things without error, of course.

(Funny how after I got the test gear I never managed to make such mistakes again, must be due to the relief from knowing I wasn't putting the company's data at risk... :) )

We did Nazi see this coming... Internet will welcome Earth's newest nation with, sigh, a brand new .SS TLD

Kiwi
Thumb Up

Good.

For a long time 'SS' has been used to symbolise hate and torment, mostly at the hands of nasty little men without the guts to stand on their own.

It has been granted some power by those who still insist on seeing what it used to stand for, rather than letting it be used elsewhere and removing the associated negativity.

By doing this, the association with Nazism and all it stood for begins to be broken down.

I also hope that SS has a largely 'black' population. I can think of no sweeter justice than the symbol that has been used with so much hate against 'people of colour' now is adopted as the ccTLD for one such country!

NASA's Opportunity rover celebrates 15 years on Mars – by staying as dead as a doornail

Kiwi
Coat

Re: A great job of engineering, but next time....

I dunno.. There's an awful lot of vacuum in space, and some of it might need cleaning. Who better to provide the hardware than Mr Dyson & co?

Kiwi
Pint

Re: Mileage

"Spawn of Satan" icon because it looks like a car..

Glad I'm not alone in thinking that! :)

Kiwi
Black Helicopters

A totally silly and impractical idea. And yet..damn' that would be cool. It gets my vote :)

Mr Trump, perhaps you can prove your worth and send it with the bigliest feather duster. A real man such as yourself should be able to get something done. Or are you too weak as a leader for this?

(I guess by now he's shutting the gibbermint down yet again to get funding for this project, maybe even using emergency powers as after all covfefe-stealing terrywrists might want to set up a base on Mars!)

Straight outta Blighty: Readers, if you were a tech billionaire, what would you do?

Kiwi
Pint

Re: "No Irish need apply"

if you think England is racist you really don't want to move to NZ.

Not sure where you get your ideas but they don't seem to be on this side of reality.

I am of Australian Aboriginal descent (though I am rather pale skinned, some people can still see it if we're in the right light). I've grew up an a small conservative rural town where Maori and Pakeha were not noticed; while there were inequalities they were not race or gender based.

We have the odd lout here and there who does make race an issue, but they're few and far between.

You should try living here for a while, see what it's really like. And if you are someone in NZ and think it's racist, get out of your mom's house for a bit and actually see how other people live.

My current community? A few Maori, some Germans, some eastern Eurpoean's (not sure where from), some elderly overweight nudists (why is it always the old fat people???) who are pasty-white despite their sun-hunting proclivities, people from various Asian countries and a decent smattering of Somalian families. Down the road we have a Samoan lady married to a Malaysian gentleman, and their respective families are the only "racists" I know (hers don't like Asians, his don't like non-Malaysians, so the couple moved to NZ and raised a family).

If you hate racism come to NZ.

We all love bonking to pay, but if you bonk with a Windows Phone then Microsoft has bad news

Kiwi
Coat

Re: NFC? No fucking chance.

i prefer to root my phone.

I think you've mis-understood the idea of "bonking to pay with your phone"

Mine's the one in the gutter.

As netizens, devs scream bloody murder over Chrome ad-block block, Googlers insist: It's not set in stone (yet)

Kiwi
Thumb Up

Re: Embrace, extend, and extinguish

They will continue to spam anybody visiting their sites that Chrome is the solution to all the browser performance issues.

I don't get that spam. Maybe because I seldom visit google sites, google doesn't get to load their BS JS on my system, and adblocking/piholing takes care of the rest :)

Kiwi
Holmes

Re: Google doing this might actually HELP Chrome dominate

I've watched many large sites rise and suddenly fall, as if they're on the Simpson's escalator to nowhere.

I've seen the same for software, with browsers for example. Not too long back Chrome as unknown and another had an unassailable lead. But that browser fell out of favour, and Chrome swallowed up the ground seemingly overnight.

When people get sick of very annoying ads and not being able to manage other content in a convenient fashion, Chrome will no longer be convenient to use. Others are waiting in the wings, watching the mistakes of the big leaders and biding their time. Customer laziness only protects you for so long.

Kiwi
Pint

Sometimes great evil happens because bad actors conspire together.

Sometimes it happens because good actors get it wrong.

And sometimes evil just happens.

We can rule out the second option in this case (nothing good left at google, and little good left at MS).

I can't answer your question, but a few of --> might help you to be less interested in the subject :)

Kiwi
FAIL

Re: welp....

It will also make it much harder to see what DNS traffic is occurring

When I was doing front-line stuff one of the things we looked for on a suspect machine was who it was talking to, and logging DNS queries helped, as did logging which IP's they tried to talk to.

Most of the time it was stuff like Win7 getting stuck talking to update servers or AV software innocently (yet annoyingly) using up resources, or other simple harmless oddities. But at times we could see stuff going on that would point us to a bit of malware that had somehow escaped notice or detection, and of course traffic NOT going through our DNS server told us of things amiss.

Thanks Google, yet another tool for security, minor as it may be, now going thanks to your desire to rain more ads on people already saturated.

Kiwi

Re: welp....

The reason: I do not live close to their house, so when they find a way for the system not to work, I'll have to do over-the-phone tech support to instruct a technically-unaware person how to fix an embedded Linux system.

Tools like OpenVPN (allowing you to remove an open SSH port) or perhaps Teamviewer (locked down as tight as you can, perhaps starting/stopping on a schedule) might be a bit of an aid there, but that doesn't solve the other issues.

I recently put a Pi into operation at a certain place, and to stop SD card tampering it's in a box with some other nasty looking electronics. The fact that they do nothing is only known to me, the look is the key and that'll keep prying hands well away ((I should've had one of the larger caps charged, as a backup in case prying hands got tempted anyway). Putting network gear away into a roofspace or closet can help a lot, especially if the wifi router they can access is secondary to the network and behind the pi etc so you can get in remotely.

But still there are those people for whom that setup will only last but a day. For those cases I provided the number of a 'helpful friend'. Not someone I wanted bothering me so I figured I'd solve a couple of issues, the "friend's" insistence on trying to contact me and the rellies insistence on hands-on knowledge of things of which I said "It's working perfectly now, don't touch". (they break it, I'm too far away and too busy to fix it, so they have to deal with Jim - and, well, Jim's great in rare short doses).

Kiwi
Childcatcher

Re: welp....

Besides, installing and maintaining a filtering Pi on all their friends' and relatives' homes might become a full time job for the 1% who can actually do it... IMHO some will do it, most won't, at least not for long.

There's a couple of solutions to that.

One, make the system sufficiently self-maintaining and simple to fix (perhaps using your own form of repository system). This can reduce the actual amount of time needed per person to a few minutes a month, maybe less.

Another - constantly berate your family and friends for how stupid they are and how little they value your time, how much more superior you are to them. Remind them you're so busy you don't even have time for a weekly shower (try seaweed juice (the stuff you put on plants) dabbed on your clothing for the odoriferous effect without the lack of hygiene), and you're there only because you cannot tolerate such worthless idiots accessing the internet without someone much more skilled there to take responsibility for watching over their actions and making sure they don't hurt themselves, like a parent should watch a 2year old. Thus guaranteeing you will have few people to worry about!

Kiwi
Coat

"banning extension developers from using obfuscated code"

That's me out then. Most of the time I re-visit my own code I spend hours staring at a line wondering "WTF does this do????"

Where other coders are concerned? Furgeddaboutit!

(BTW, I cannot change the flow of time simply by slapping my car into reverse - at least not without some minor changes to the engine. Please stop using the marketfreak newspeak "moving forward" phrase in place of the more appropriate "in the future" or similar terms! The article writer my be a yank and thus somewhat linguistically-challenged, but El Reg should be better than this coming from ol' Blighty!)

You're an admin! You're an admin! You're all admins, thanks to this Microsoft Exchange zero-day and exploit

Kiwi
Trollface

Re: Possible quick fix

Now come on Bob, if we all install Linux we won't have the joy of waiting for nearly a month to get the official fix in!

Heads up: Debian's package manager is APT for root-level malware injection... Fix out now to thwart MITM hijacks

Kiwi
FAIL

Re: HTTPS is expensive!

Remember these mirror servers could be handling thousands of requests per second on gigabytes of data. They are not your two-bit "mom-and-pop" shop

If they have the resources to pay for that, they have the resources to pay for someone who knows what they're doing.

If my "mom and pop" setup took only an hour or less to install and run basically automatic software that configures the server (using industry standards, not "the latest fad") and does the rest for you, they can do it. Their testing/approval requirements may be larger, but they have more resources to put into it.

These guys aren't some mom-and-pop dime store where the website exists only to show where they are, when they're open, and what they sell. These guys are handling a pool of software that much of the world's critical infrastructure runs on.

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

Kiwi
Big Brother

Re: But wait, Chrome can still "read the network requests made on the user's behalf"

Agree.

You can get HTTPS certs for 'free' via LetsEncrypt, but that stills requires either knowing how to set it up + time or paying someone to set it up.

I think part of the reason for pushing HTTPS and punishing those who don't use it is so google can point to this and say "See, we are all about privacy. Look what we've done!". But most sites DON'T have stuff that would be an embarrasment if your ISP knew you were going there, and the pages on most sites are the same site-wide (eg El Reg is basically IT news, a motorbike site is about those particular bikes or riding styles, you'll find little about 1980's Suzuki cars on a site devoted to Tesla Powerwalls and so on).

They may have pushed it on the grounds of better privacy/security, but I suspect something else. But then, a company whose motto now is "Do much evil!" - what can you expect?

Kiwi

You can show ads (and much more effective ones!) without pumping huge amounts of wasted data that just pisses your users off and causes us not only to never bother to visit your site again but also to go elsewhere instead of to your advertisers.

You're also wrong about monetisation. Google doesn't care if you make money from your content. Actually, they prefer YOU don't make money from your content because that means less money for them to make from YOUR content.

Talk to relevant firms about the content you create. If it's local-town stuff then talk to local businesses, or find others relevant to your content. Sell them advertising space on a click=payme basis and make it clear anyone following up the ad is doing so because it's relevant to what they want, not some automated thing like AdNaseum which makes them pay for the the ad but no human actually read it.

It's not the ads that are the problem, it is the way they have been handled.

Kiwi
Boffin

Is there any way to import Chrome Bookmarks into Firefox?

Is it possible to save the bookmarks out as a HTML or XML file, then import them?

Waterfox may also import them on install. Just install it and see what it does. You can always delete it later.

(Last time I tried WF seemed to import very well, but I don't use chrome so I can't comment on that)

Kiwi
Boffin

You can install Pi-Hole alongside OpenVPN server on basically any Debian-based (or Devuan for those who value init freedom :) ) system.

Only took me a few minutes to do it once I found a tutorial for 'Pi Hole + OpenVPN'.

Kiwi
Stop

Re: Oh it's worse than that.

The following comes directly from the Google terms of service .. . .

Some years back I was involved with the development and marketing of a couple of small businesses.

I sat down with the people involved and went over Google, LinkedIn and Facebook terms. Surprisingly, FB was the best of them. Google and LI claimed a perpetual license to use any material you supplied for their purposes as you quoted, and stated elsewhere that even if you deleted the content from their servers they could retain a copy and use that content for their purposes. FB, on the other hand, took license to modify for the purpose of displaying (eg you took a panoramic photo they could clip it for a thumbnail), and if you deleted it you understood that copies may remain on backup media for a time (until the backups were wiped). I don't defend FB, but at that stage they had by far the better policy.

I strongly recommended to these businesses that they did NOT willingly upload their logo, tag-lines or other IP data to Google or LI - if they did they lost the ownership rights to them and could have a hard time prosecuting other trademark/copyright infringements.

Few people read the T&C documents. Fewer still actually understand the meaning of the text, and even fewer the potential consequences. The South Park "HUMANCENTiPAD" episode should be required viewing for all who wish to click through an agreement.

People using the Poli 'service' I mentioned elsewhere in this thread don't realise they give Poli the right to access your bank account, store your bank account information (balances, deposits, withdrawals, statements, login times etc etc etc) because they trust the face-value without thinking - 'government site uses this so must be OK', or worse the cheap convenience factor - 'bigbox store uses this so I can pay them and just pick up the bits from the front counter'.

The levels of stupidity still amaze me. Used to be that people would give away just their password for a chocolate bar, now they give away their full log in info for the picture of one :(

Kiwi
Boffin

Re: Hosts

OK...I give up. If I put an actual hard IPv4 address (or even an IPv6) address in the hosts file, how could a DNS server possibly mess with that?

The DNS server couldn't.

But if I write my program to ignore the hosts file and use another route for it's DNS queries, the content of your hosts file becomes irrelevant.

I believe the Opera browser (or a variant) has a built-in VPN that is separate to anything the machine uses. This could get around even blocking IPs at the firewall or router level I guess, unless you were to block the VPN itself.

Kiwi
Coat

Re: Blocks

I want a browser that blocks bollocks

No more social media/ El Reg comments for you then!

Kiwi
Boffin

Re: How to say goodbye. . . .

Maps. Lots (and I mean lots) of free Android apps that use Open Street Maps or others to give you pretty decent and offline navigation. Maybe not all the businesses loaded but for the most part you'll be fine, especially if you can figure out how to use a phone book or search engine

Kiwi
Unhappy

Re: DNS blocking will not work for long...

To those suggesting using a dns server which blocks domains, this will likely also be subverted in the future as browsers implement DNS-over-HTTPS which bypass your DNS server altogether.

It may be that it's 1:30 am after a rather long and annoying day, but I simple cannot see any really valid reason for DNS-over-HTTPS. It seems like it opens up several attack vectors and blocks attempts to close them.

But at least for a while a decent firewall should be able to block the IPs. Wonder how soon they'll have lists like the DNS tools have now...

Kiwi
Unhappy

Re: DNS blocking will not work for long...

While I like the idea of DNS over *secure transport*, it should be via a DNS service running on your PC, so that you retain control.

Sadly, lots of things we should have control over are being removed under the guises of security, convenience, or "no one does that any more"

All the while our machines become less secure and harder to use :(

Kiwi

Re: Scary...

Last time I tried that my GPU just about smoked it's last under the graphical load.

Must run it again. Have been out of tobacco for a while! :)

Kiwi

Let me give you just one example. These are the scripts on one website that are not from that website:

Is that stuff.co.nz? Their site is stuffed full of JS badness.

Or try Revzilla. I think you might be able to scroll the NS list for a few days with all the garbage they have in there!

Kiwi
WTF?

Re: why won't El Reg ever write an article about why major sites still have Google Analytics on them

I went to pay my fucking car tax and HM Gov wanted to tell Google Analytics about it. On a fucking government website. Fucking Clueless!!!!!

It could be worse.

I went to do our equiv of that here, and the gubbermint site uses (and reccomends) a thing called "Poli".

This is a 3rd party that you give your banking credentials to and they manage the payment for you. And yes, I do mean your ID and password and any other necessary details so they can log in to your account as you and withdraw money.

The government says "It's fine, we trust them". The banking ombudsman says "Wha? Duh.. Erm.. I dunno. Sorry come back with something less hard".

The banks say "WTF???? This is NOT OK at all, and is a breach of your contract if you use it!".

I think I'd rather analtics over poli!

Kiwi
Pint

Re: Google are cunts

It seems a given now that if you want to get results, you need really obnoxious ads that do all of the things that print ads never could.

For me, if your ad leaves a bad taste in my mouth that's the impression I have of your company. I don't return.

I am more likely to respond to a plain text ad (maybe with a photo of the product) than I am to anything distracting. It's trivial to make the content flow around the ad. A site can have a pool of advertisers with a bit of PHP to display an add on a page at random, and you can make a simple counter internal to the server to tell how often an add has been loaded. The advertising client could provide their own picture if they really wanted their own counter, but it must be static and not distracting form the content.

I'm teaching people to look for cached/archived versions of pages instead of allowing the ads to inhibit content, and teaching people that there's a couple of big alternatives to companies who annoy you with ads - 1) their competition probably has an equivalent product and 2) maybe you don't actually need it anyway.

Kiwi

Re: Google are cunts

I really hope that was meant to be sarcastic

I think the use of the Troll icon makes that obvious :)

(@Prst. V.Jeltz - going by the responses I think you may be in for the "best obvious troll on El Reg" award for the year, maybe the decade!)

Kiwi
Thumb Up

Re: Google are cunts

The greatest search engine in the world

May once have been, now just the biggest piece of spyware.

Free google drive gigabytes,

Check the T&Cs. Those documents you stored there? They have a right to use them as they wish, forever. If they wish to make derivative works and sell it, that's their right - you gave it to them. Those photos you were storing there planning to sell later? You no longer own the copyright to them, Google does. Nothing "free" about it, they trawl the data for what pleases them to use.

Google earth - they photograph the entire planet for you

I don't actually think having some creepy guy riding past my house with a camera on his bike helmet that took photos of me while I was working on a friend's motorbike was a good thing. (https://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/apps/108237074/lower-hutt-is-the-secondmost-photographed-place-in-the-world-on-google-street-view). Nor do I think their taking record of my WiFi details - illegally - was a good thing either. What I do in the privacy of my yard is my business.

A free mobile phone OS, you'd all be on iTings otherwise

Show's how little you know. I use neither for my phone.

A fast free broswer...

Nope, it's based on Chromium - ie someone else's work. I don't know whether it is 'fast' or not. Clearly it is not 'free' as it appears they wish to do everything they can to subvert any tools I would use to make my internet experience tolerable.

A free email service

Again, see the T&Cs - NOT free.

Calendars...

Do they? I use the ones I get from my own cloud server (Nextcloud). Don't have any desire to have 'others' sniffing my appointments or plans looking for whatever they can market.

They keep Youtube running for you ...

I think the demise of YT would probably be the best thing to happen to this planet since the first coming of our Saviour. The only thing that could be better would be the return of the King, or maybe the invention of Mr Fusion.

But a nice troll where I should've checked the icon before typing all this out. Have a well-deserved and sadly-lacking upvote! :)s

Kiwi

Re: Google are crafty

Google will counter that by using DNS over HTTPS (RFC8484) or DNS over TLS (RFC7858) instead.

Which I counter by not running their programs and running my own DNS server and shitcanning suspect IP at the firewall level.

IP6 could be an issue. But I think I'll just make sure my guest network is IP4 only, or I do't have a guest network - if you want Wifi at my home you do it my way or not at all.

Kiwi
Angel

Re: Google are cunts

The problem with FF is that FF57 broke the extensions I use.

Waterfox may well be your friend.

Holy crappuccino. There's a latte trouble brewing... Bio-boffins reckon 60%+ of coffee species may be doomed

Kiwi
Thumb Up

Re: Coffee :- someone who has been coughed upon

I have a feeling that was Compo or one one of the crowd from "Last of the Summer Wine", perhaps seasons 5 or 6.

Kiwi
Joke

Re: Join the dark side

Switch to camomile tea, it never hurt anyone... probably.

Oh trust me, it has hurt people.

Just ask the last person who tried to give me some, and I 'rapidly handed it back to him' :)

Kiwi
Windows

Re: Starbucks

Civet Coffee?

Surely far too high quality for Starbucks?

Dunno. I have it on good authority that SB is "total shit" coffee.

I'm glaf the civet stuff is still very expensive. No chance of someone I know accidentally getting some and giving me a cup. I stop my pre-digested food at honey.

(Windows- closest we have to a steaming turd icon)

Kiwi
Boffin

Re: Temperature?

If only a wind powered pump could be invented, just like they used to use when such things were often quite basic and easily built and maintained even with very simple tools.

I still see them around a few places. If I was to win the lottery (which I'd have to buy a ticket for the chance to do so!) I'd buy a larger plot of land and toy with wind for water movement.

But I've been stuck with one question.. Wind pumps are quite simple, quite reliable, low maintenance, but they need wind to work. You also need the source of power to be at the same spot as the source of water.

Wind or solar generators OTOH generate electricity which is easier to store or move to another location, however they're more expensive and have a higher potential maintenance cost.

I'll probably do some of both TBH, in the unlikely event I wind up with the combination of land, resources and need :)

France wants in on the No Huawei Club while Canuck infosec bloke pretty insistent on ban

Kiwi
Big Brother

Re: Evidence

May be.

But they don't seem to be in much of a rush to lock up Kiwi's or Ozzies or Brits or yanks do they? Yet these countries have also banned Huawei.

The person they sentenced to death - did he not commit a potentially capital crime in their nation?

And I'm sure I heard something about someone senior to Huawei being arrested while travelling, possibly on some trumped up charge possibly for something real (and knowing the quality of NZ's news media, possibly this never happened at all).

What China is doing may or may not be wrong, may or may not be related to Huawei, may or may not be an over-reaction. Still not evidence of wrong doing by Huawei.

We do still have plenty of evidence of the "five eyes" nations spying on the citizens of their allies though.

Stalk my pals on social media and you'll know that the next words out of my mouth will be banana hammock

Kiwi
Holmes

Re: But what if you don't have an account at all?

I have an older friend who cannot see the harm in giving out anyone's details to whoever asks.

Gave up trying to educate him that my number is my number to give to whom I choose, not whoever he wants. So my number and email are listed.

Those details and a few about who I associate with (freely available to Google and Apple since few people using their phones make any attempt to stop the location tracking!) I can't stop leaking. But other details are easier to hide as they don't require other people to keep their traps shut.