Posts by Adam 1

Re: PDF in a Browser?

I thought foxit was now wrapped in spyware installer crap. Haven't touched it for years now.

Re: I know who will have first dibs

> if the Oz Revenue Dept. felt they were owed something by Plutus it would follow this same pecking order

I guess it depends on whether the government feels the political heat enough to try and leave some scraps on the table for the state coffers in lieu of having no palatable alternative gst carve up.

Re: $250 million

Free biro? Luxury! All my work biros seem to get downloaded from my desk by person's anonymous and unauthorised. Those and bloody HDMI cables from the projector. There's got to be a black market for biros and projector cables.

Re: Winter upgrade boosted 'inverse femtobarns'

I agree we need a better unit for density. Inverse Knights would seem an excellent candidate.

Make it so El Reg!

Re: Happy

I recently upgraded from a nexus 5. It's power button had broken and got stuck in a reboot loop (yes, known issue). So I installed an app to wake up the phone with the volume button instead so I could still use it. Then the microphone stopped working (yes, also known issue). So I got myself a cheap Bluetooth headset so I could still use it. Then the battery dropped so low that I couldn't be more than an hour or so without a charge. It finally died after replacing the battery.

I didn't buy a Google phone because I don't need a 1300AUD telephone.

Your comment may be correct for the nexus but I'm afraid it is not with the pixel. Unless by fraction you are considering numbers greater than one.

Re: Dear Apple.

> You were at least a contender in my list of potential computer vendors for my next one

I don't mean to sound rude, but as one who considers multiple potential vendors, you don't strike me as their target market.

Re: Good on Jim

> but I don't like coffee

A BOFH who has never had his coffee. Ouch!

What did <blink>Geocities</blink> ever do to you?

> a device that is essentially a glorified microscope optics attachment for a smartphone is not exactly a new idea and has not been for the better part of a decade probably.

Absolutely correct. Such an attachable microscope lens is definitely covered under prior art. There is, however, one novel part of this invention which you have missed but any of the highly trained USPTO officers​ could have recognised. This is not just any attachable microscope lens, but rather an attachable microscope lens on a mobile device. Don't beat yourself up though. Sometimes the novelty of an invention is hard for a lay person to recognise.

Re: Hydrogen fuel cells

Hydrogen is not a fuel in the same sense as petroleum or diesel. There aren't any special rocks you can whack a drill into and slurp it out. Instead you find the atoms attached in other molecules. You then need to apply some energy to those molecules to break the bonds. When you burn that hydrogen in a fuel cell, you get some of that energy back. In other words, it is closer to a battery. You consume some energy to charge it up (create the H2) then consume it in your motor.

And whilst you can do it from water, it is probably​ cheaper at scale to start with natural gas. There are two big problems with using natural gas for that. Firstly, it is far more energy efficient to just burn the gas itself. Secondly the waste CO2 kind of misses the point of replacing the internal combustion engine. That plus the fact it isn't renewable, that hydrogen is very hard to store, that it's energy density is rubbish and so requires liquefication (hugely energy intensive) and is way more expensive means it will never be a better fit in cars than batteries. It's only advantage over batteries is that you can get 300-500km range in a few minutes. There are other use cases where fuel cells do make sense, but not here.

Re: The Shawshank Connection

Edward SCSIhands

The FireWire

The Li Ion King

The Switch

The Terminal

Frozen

Re: What?

Ah. Then what you need is a cheap USB stick and ReadyBoost. That'll fix her up.

Re: using radio waves...

Good point. Out of curiosity, shouldn't 911 have some sort of redundancy to redirect calls to another call centre somewhere else in the country when the local emergency service isn't able to answer within a couple of rings? At least that's how it works with 000 down under. (Or is that just an unusual over preparedness by us to better handle the risk of a drop bear infestation?)

Re: Is it just me who is secretly applauding this...

We've seen this movie before somewhere...

The difference that i can see here is that PCs were never set and forget concepts. They had service packs, antivirus definitions and the like. But who, when purchasing their next light bulb, is thinking "how do I apply security patches? Whilst i don't condone vigilante hacking, it's hard to feel sympathy for an industry that has produced so much crap security with bad practices even at a 101 level (hard coded passwords, missing even basic user permissions, running unnecessary daemons with root access, the list goes on). Maybe some bricked returns will score some pretty rubbish eBay/Amazon reviews and will ward off bricks and mortar retailers from stocking such products. The iot industry (and I include car manufacturers here) need to understand that software isn't an engineer and forget enterprise, and if they can't learn the lessons of that industry then pull back and sell regular light bulbs/door locks/cameras/cars/whatever until they do learn those lessons.

I'm not hopeful though. Best security practice starts with collect as little data as you need to function, run as few services as is needed to accomplish that task, and run those services with as few rights as possible. This is the very antithesis of iot.

Re: We have this too

Warranty just means that the manufacturer must fix any issues at their cost (or refund or substitute where that isn't possible) for that period. It doesn't mean that your device is suddenly not protected under consumer law the day after warranty expires. It just means that you might have to pay for the repairs where those costs are reasonable.

For example, many cars come with 3 year warranties. If after 4 years a major component like the gearbox fails and you have had it regularly serviced and you didn't use it for motor sport then that would be considered a major failure well within the typical lifespan of such components and they are legally obliged to fix it. If the same happened after 10 years or if it hadn't been maintained according to the service schedule or if you had made modifications then they wouldn't.

Whether the manufacturer would comply with the law is entirely another matter. They would most likely push you around on the marginal cases and throw an NDA your way for the open and shut cases.

You know the problems and collapses were simply due to the builders having never seen a London bus.

Re: Flying foxes

<Pedant hat>

most of the world's most poisonous venomous snakes

</Pedant hat>

Re: Splunk

It's actually not bad if you ignore the marketing. Simple configuration on your servers to monitor your log4Xyz logs, Windows event logs, etc from disparate machines out there and you can do big data-esq mining on it all, find out which software/OS versions are being impacted by some specific exception (in pretty close to real time).

If I'm reading the JavaScript right, the attacker needs to know the hostname of the splunk server. In public facing servers that might be an issue, but it looks like it needs to be a targeted attack or mitm to be practical.

Wireless is shared bandwidth. So whilst you may get 100Mbps standing under the tower at 3am, you can forget anything approaching that on Saturday night when everyone presses play on their Netflix HD streams. The only way to ease congestion is to pop up more towers and reduce the broadcast strength of each and thereby reducing contention.

At least until it catches on fire.

Re: A platform built on sand

And the counter example of Windows Mobile where they forgot about​backwards compatibility between generations. Developers became disinterested in doing yet another port to a platform with nearly zero user base, then the available apps became a factor with the consumers in a death spiral.

Re: i hope this goes ahead and that there is a big explosion on launch

Apologies for the buzzfeed link but you get the gist.

Re: Re NickHolland

Agreed with FIA. You can't retrospectively add some requirement to check your email within period x.

Perhaps licenses could be written to authorise proxies in the event that you can't be contacted for an extended period or if you are known to have died. You could even stipulate the default proxy as the unanimous decision of the project foundation board to handle those who were never interested beyond the feature/fix they needed 5 years back. You just don't get to move the goal posts. Most open source licenses are written deliberately to make these sorts of changes really difficult.

Re: Zombie hard disk

> How about a blanket OS rule that shit apps can't grab focus unless the last user command was to launch that app?

I've written software that needs to grab focus (yeah we all claim that). In my case, it is in response to a biometric hardware events​, so you need the "interruptions" and you are pretty forgetful if you don't remember presenting yourself for authentication under a second earlier.

Just here to point out that Microsoft have made this harder to achieve over the years. Back in win 9x, there was a pretty simple call. It got abused. They then changed what it did in XP to flash the window orange and introduced some other method to do it. That got abused too. So i think they just dropped support for that. There is an always on top mode that the OS these days basically ignores too.

I'm not going to share publicly how it gets achieved, but it's a big waste of everyone's time but at least bofh would get a snigger. All they needed from the get go was a control panel applet where users could whitelist applications they want to do this and ignore the request from anything else.

Re: So does that mean...

Another way would be to have a collection of DNS servers configured locally that get round robin'd for each request, since profiling requires combining the pattern of DNS lookups from specific pages.

That, or if you're feeling like a real crazy cat, use an ad blocker and VPN.

> "it's no longer possible to prove that (for example) a hashed document is unique"

Agreed with OP. This is not the goal. It relies on the fact that the amount of hardware, CPU/GPU time, electricity and opportunity cost involved in "reversing" the hash back to the original bytestream means that a suitably resourced attacker wouldn't bother.

Whilst source code is much harder than a PDF file to hide junk bytes of your discretion so they remain unnoticed, it wouldn't be impossible to use comment blocks or constants.

Re: Is this still being used?

> Is this still being used?

What a weird question.

I assume you have ranked them in your head and have put git at #1. Out of curiosity, what would you put at #2 and #3?

Re: you heard it hear first

Just looking out for you dude. Whatever you do, don't click the "did you mean?" hyperlink!

Re: If you're truly brave...

They tried it a few years ago, but had to shut down the Eadon bot when the caps lock got jammed.

Don't mix up encryption with public access. The data being encrypted is about physical protection (eg if the laptop is lost/stolen) and to prevent MitM. It doesn't help if you configure your server to send it to anyone who asks.