* Posts by TheVogon

3511 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2013

UK to block Kodi pirates in real-time: Saturday kick-off

TheVogon

Re: Defendants

"do you not think that will have a knock on effect?"

Nope. Football will be negligible versus all the other streaming that's going on....

TheVogon

Re: Defendants

Most streams still worked just fine here last 2 Saturdays in a row....

I found that "Hotspot VPN" is a handy free way of unlocking anything else and works for Kodi on both Windows and Android. (The Windows Store version doesn't work - download it from their website).

The free version is limited to USA servers only, and pops up occasional ads on web browsing. Works just fine for video back to the EU though. A quick speed test showed 30Mb/S back to the UK - not bad for free...

TheVogon

Re: I take 2 things from this.

" and come pre-set with alternative DNS and/or VPN clients pre-configured,"

Already do. Try the "Mega" Wookie community build for KODI for instance. Several default service providers that you just need to insert subscription details for...

TheVogon

Re: Defendants

"I'd imagine the smaller ISPs might have a change in stance on this when they find non trivial % of their users all streaming the same content from a foreign server at the same time bringing the network to a grinding halt."

Like Netflix, Apple Play and Amazon Video you mean?

TheVogon

Re: Inevitable.

"most likely will form around a mixture of packet matching, deep packet inspections "

That's very very unlikely. It would require enormous processing power and would impact performance at a large ISP, and streams could simply use HTTPS to stop it. The article also says that no new hardware would be required and that the block is per server. It will likely be DNS lookup blocking and maybe IP filtering too. Using Google DNS stops a lot of the current filtering of TPB, Kickass, etc...

TheVogon

Re: Defendants

"because the ruling is in their self-interest?"

How is something that encourages people to use ISPs other than the big 5 that don't have these blocks in their interest?!

TheVogon

Re: Meh

"If the only thing this prohibits is feetsball then (at least in my case) i can carry on regardless!"

As opposed to hand egg that they play in the colonies you mean? Good luck using say Twitch on a Saturday afternoon then as some streams use that now!

imo the streamers will just switch to CDNs and other mixed services if they don't already use them, which a) have hundreds of servers, and b) carry so much varied content that blocking them would have way too wide an impact...

Head of US military kit-testing slams F-35, says it's scarcely fit to fly

TheVogon

Re: Oh wonderful

"This could end up being a more expensive fiasco than Brexit!"

Brexit will save us billions every year. It has hardly any cost so far....Our economy is growing 2nd fastest in the G20...

Google pulls Hezbollah YouTube channel after we told them about the drone ads

TheVogon

Re: The terror research initiative at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands

"Even in 500 euro notes that's 16,000 notes.

I doubt they sat and fingerprinted them all and checked every single print found so I call bullshit on that article."

They would presumably have been in standard bundles of 50. So only 800 to check...

TheVogon

Re: Seriously?

You are confusing censorship and preventing free speech with the fact that using a right to free speech in some ways can have consequences....

Free speech means that you can always publish and a court or other such body decides later if there was a problem. If you censor the publishing in the first place, that's not free speech...

TheVogon

Re: Seriously?

"It's not freedom of speech to allow propaganda, lies, promotion of hate crimes and terrorism and to make money from it."

Yes it is. Who decides what are "lies" and "propaganda"? The government? Just look at what Trump has to say on "alternative facts"....

Freedom of speech is freedom of speech. As soon as you start to put boundaries on it, you no longer have it...

TheVogon

Re: Seriously?

Extrajudicial killings?! Surely not. That would be the sort of thing only a terrorist state would do. And there are not many of those in the Middle East...

TheVogon

Re: I have a fix

I seem to remember that the colonies have sort of issue with pussies...

WONTFIX: No patch for Windows Server 2003 IIS critical bug – Microsoft

TheVogon

nb - To save sys admins who are still running this stuff hunting: FYI - IIS6 is not installed by default on Server 2003, and when you do install IIS6, WebDAV is also not enabled by default.

See https://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/4beddb35-0cba-424c-8b9b-a5832ad8e208.mspx?mfr=true

TheVogon

"Which is fine, however this is an exploit of an Application, not an OS. The fact that some class-1 a-hole at Microsoft (marketing) decided that an Application, such as IIS should be inexplicably linked to the Operating System"

What OS version / vendor would you recommend instead that comes with zero applications and has enterprise grade support?

TheVogon

Re: "not because of any technical reason"

"If budget is a concern, use Linux."

Assuming you mean licensing and not TCO - it's only free if your time has no value - and you don't need long supported OS version lifetime / enterprise grade vendor support...

TheVogon

"That's the joy of "tightly-coupling" applications with the OS - it makes upgrades so much more... exciting.

If you had written your applications in perl or php, do you think you'd be stuck being unable to upgrade to a later OS or a later httpd version?"

If you had written your apps in PHP they would have had a critical exploit far more often than on IIS6.

I'm not aware of any difficulties in migration to a later Windows OS from Server 2003. It still supports IIS6 features and management tools in the later IIS versions...

Ever visited a land now under Islamic State rule? And you want to see America? Hand over that Facebook, Twitter, pal

TheVogon

Re: The key word is Mythical

"Why take the risk? There are plenty of more civilised countries you could visit instead."

Yes, I hear North Korea is lovely at this time of year!

Although apparently their leader recently misunderstood the many references to a "big brother dictatorship" - and his claims of there is no big brother here only relate to a morgue in Malaysia...

TheVogon

Re: Stop spreading Lies

An alternative view of Bradford can be found here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/dec/21/bradford-islam-white-flight-segregation

and here:

http://www.ilivehere.co.uk/bradford-where-do-i-start.html/comment-page-4

Bloke whose drone was blasted out of sky by angry dad loses another court battle for compo

TheVogon

Re: Guns...microwaves

"I have still not worked out how this could happen, but it did."

Put a standard light bulb n a microwave oven. Similar cause / effect ...

TheVogon

Re: Guns...

"A shotgun loaded with birdshot isn't lethal to anyone if it is aimed up in the sky at a drone. If you're going to go around shooting guns up in the sky like cowboys and terrorists love to do, that's the safest option by far. No damage to people or property, "

What goes up, must come down. Unless it exceeds escape velocity. which seems unlikely...

TheVogon

Re: Cricket bats

"You will find they make them from aluminum in the colonies, not aluminium."

Yep, always good for a laugh at colonial ignorance to get them to name some heavy metals, Lithium, Sodium, Potassium, Iridium, etc. and then throw in Aluminium...

TheVogon

Re: What a colostomy bag...

"If you come into someone's yard & mount a camera on a pole so you can watch a child sunbathing, do you REALLY think the property owner isn't going to come out with a chainsaw to cut down the pole, a cricket bat to beat the shit out of the camera, & then offer to smash in your skull if you do it again?"

Sure, but I would also expect them to be arrested for assault and criminal damage and the court to order them to pay to fix said damage. They should have called to police to address the original issue...

Oracle doing due diligence on Accenture. Yep, you read that right

TheVogon

Re: They're both literally the best

"Maybe if Oracle then bought Capita and G4S?"

And maybe Sun / Java. Oh, wait...

TheVogon

It's not stupid - it makes perfect sense. What consultancy in their right mind would recommend anything from Oracle?! Therefore they want to buy their own consultancy...

UK.gov departments accused of blanket approach to IR35

TheVogon

Re: Stop taking the p***

"If they are being paid the same then they pay the same tax. "

No they don't. Tax on corp tax + dividends is not exactly the same as PAYE.

TheVogon

Re: Stop taking the p***

"Contractors get paid more, they need to, to cover the fact that they face risk, regular gaps in employment and need to cover their own holiday pay and pension provision. Fair enough, I get that"

No - that's because they are generally highly skilled and like all free markets - it's supply versus demand...

"It isn't however, an excuse to pay less tax."

Yes it is. They have a higher risk than a permanent employee...

US Senate votes to let broadband ISPs sell your browser histories

TheVogon

Re: It's all about money

There are presumably other options. Firstly try to always use https web pages or access pages via an https proxy. You could also use a VPN or a TOR browser.

TheVogon

Re: It's all about money

But this decision has nothing to do with Donald Trump?!

Lloyds Banking Group axing hundreds of jobs again

TheVogon

Re: Continued Cuts

"Soon it will be just the BOD and a Secretary. "

I don't see any functions there that AI and a coffee machine couldn't potentially cope with?

Microsoft loves Linux so much, its OneDrive web app runs like a dog on Windows OS rivals

TheVogon

Re: Red Bren's Axe

Presumably it switches to using Linux on the back end when you use it as a client...

It's happening! It's happening! W3C erects DRM as web standard

TheVogon

Re: If you can see it or hear it

Quite. I'm pretty sure this won't impact users of Popcorn time too much ( see popcorntime.sh for details ) ...

TheVogon

Re: Inclusion in free software

Presumably this will immediately be reverse engineered and various ripping addins will also be available....

Plusnet slapped with £880k fine for billing ex customers

TheVogon

Re: "I hate the fucking Eagles, man."

Because some people don't bother to read and check bank statements that are now often online only?

Microsoft cloud TITSUP: Skype, Outlook, Xbox, OneDrive, Hotmail down

TheVogon

All working for me too - and OneDrive.

BlackBerry admits dying BB10 is in pain

TheVogon

"For how much longer?"

For a fair while longer apparently. The Surface Phone is still coming although not soon - any likely some more Windows 10 Phones first - see for instance: http://www.droidreport.com/articles/4169/20170320/microsoft-surface-phone-reportedly-postponed-other-new-foldable-windows-10-phone-releasing-this-year.htm

TheVogon

"as Microsoft about their Windows Phone Horse"

Microsoft are still releasing regular mobile OS updates though... And still make phones.

Outgoing HPE workers stripped of gym cards and cushy remnants

TheVogon

Re: Beware of company 'benefits'

"Then they realised how tight the golden handcuffs were. If they sold up they would have to downsize."

Only because presumably they upsized when moving to the middle of nowhere...

SELECT features FROM bumf... What's new in MS SQL Server 2016

TheVogon

Re: I'm sure it's lovely but

" Mongo scales like crazy."

Because Mongo doesn't care if your data is transactionally consistent or even is committed to disk... For that sort of scalability you can just write to /dev/nul

TheVogon

Re: Oh wont someone think of the EULA

"when you are small and need to cut costs, Windows server is DEFINITELY NOT what you want in your data center "

That must be why all those small cost sensitive business run lots of *nix servers then. Oh, wait. They don't. They overwhelmingly run Windows and SQL Server!

Git sprints carefully towards SHA-1 deprecation

TheVogon

"is infinitesimally small. It's mathematically effectively zero."

Nope, can be calculated, not infinitesimally small, not effectively zero. But quite unlikely.

Linux, not Microsoft, the real winner of Windows Server on ARM

TheVogon

Re: dream on...

"Or MySQL, Oracle, DB2 etc. on your choice of one *nix or another...."

I meant Microsoft SQL Server workloads obviously.

nb - MySQL and Oracle run just fine on Windows Server. Can't say I have seen an install of DB2 in living memory to know. And Oracle at least is much easier to install / initially configure on Windows Server than on *nix...

TheVogon

dream on...

Lol at dreams about SQL on Linux in someway meaning the demise of Windows Server even though Windows Server sales are still climbing!

We already know it's a cutdown version to keep certain devs happy. Production workloads that need any enterprise features are going to need to run on Windows Server.

Bloke cuffed after 'You deserve a seizure' GIF tweet gave epileptic a fit

TheVogon

Re: What an asshole

Next time he should just say it with flowers - and send him a Triffid...

Microsoft kills Windows Vista on April 11: No security patches, no hot fixes, no support, nada

TheVogon

Re: well duh

"and no back-ported, er, "Telemetry.""

In case you were not aware, the Telemetry mostly doesn't apply to corporate versions of Windows....

TheVogon

Vista was extra crappy on RTM for several reasons, a) Microsoft under pressure from PC Manufacturers released a minimum recommended spec that was simply not adequate for decent performance, b) Microsoft made a screw up in the way the GUI was threaded that meant that a single application could effectively hang the GUI while waiting for it to do something, c) local and network file copy performance was generally awful, and d) PC manufacturers were really getting into the concept of paid crapware and systems were often running lots of unnecessary junk.

So on RTM if you bought a "recommended spec" Vista machine it really really sucked,

b) and c) were actually fixed by Vista SP1 - after which a clean Vista install was actually quite useable on decent hardware!

See https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709618(v=ws.10).aspx

Will AI lead to the rise of the love machines?

TheVogon

"plenty of usb dildo's that react to sound when live cams get tokens/donations"

Unless you have video proof, it didn't happen?

Smart sex toys firm coughs up $3.75m in privacy lawsuit

TheVogon

Wow, seems it's expensive to sit on your thumbs over security in this business...

Self-employed bear the brunt of Spring Budget with additional National Insurance contributions

TheVogon

Re: I'm a bit pissed off ......

"Why does that piss you off?"

It does me too - because it's not something the government needs to spend money on - so it's an unnecessary waste of my money as a tax payer. Especially the celebrating the vote bit. Maybe they could more productively waste the money on persuading arab countries to give women a vote...