* Posts by TheVogon

3511 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2013

Exploding super-prang asteroid to pepper Earth, trigger deadly ice age – no, wait, it happened 466 million years ago

TheVogon

Re: Units?

Half whatever a truck is in Wales per linguine presumably.

Three UK slammed for 'ripping off' loyal mobile customers by £32.4m per year

TheVogon

Re: So, the American business model?

EE used to do similar by offering large discounts to a SIM only contract and then removing them once the contract expired. I previously had to threaten to go to OFCOM on the basis that mobile price increases must be notified in advance to get my increased fees refunded and the discount reinstated.

I am pleased to see that they have now ceased this and my 5 x SIMs @ 25GB data unlimited voice and texts for £12 each have now switched to monthly once the year has expired.

Congratulations! You finally have the 10Mbps you're legally entitled to. Too bad that's obsolete

TheVogon

Last time I checked, forests grew and it rained without the assistance of the rural population.

And rural properties pay way less council tax than similar urban properties - because rural property is cheaper - and are vastly subsidised by tax payers in the cities.

TheVogon

Bearing in mind that if this is really a universal obligation, 10mbits would seem to me entirely reasonable as a minimum entitlement at least for now as it would be the rest of us paying to subsidise better services for those that choose to live in remote locations.

Larry Ellison tiers Amazon a new one: Oracle cloud gets 'always' free offer, plus something about Linux

TheVogon

Re: Um

Just like it was unbreakable? Until it wasn't shortly after.

TheVogon

Re: Always free services

How can Oracle ever hope to sell anything based on "free"? They would surely be better off with remakes of the "it's reassuringly expensive" Stella Artois adverts - at least that would be believable.

Captain's coffee calamity causes transatlantic flight diversion

TheVogon

The push button cup holder tray on my computer doesn't seem to fit most coffee cups either...

TheVogon

Yes shocking that a device is such a position is not at least splash resistant. It would cost peanuts relatively speaking to the cost of the hardware.

UK ISPs must block access to Nintendo Switch piracy sites, High Court rules

TheVogon

Re: Quantify losses...

The "its free" model seems to work just fine for say Fortnite.

TheVogon

Whatever they do, I think it's more than just sinkhole the DNS requests. You still get "This is blocked by a court order" message even using Google DNS on say Virgin Media.

EE is apparemtly too small for these blocks to apply to them even though owned by BT and I can happily browse any otherwise blocked sites on my mobile phone if I don't have a VPN to hand.

TheVogon

Re: Quantify losses...

You need to see this video to understand the difference between copying and theft:

https://youtu.be/IeTybKL1pM4

TheVogon

Re: Aren't UK laws optional these days ?

Having to legally be a net contributor of ~ £10 billion a year to the EU budget? The EU courts being able to override the UK Supreme Court? EU restrictions on say VAT rates on different products?

TheVogon

Re: Let the whack-a-mole begin

Anyone capable of hacking a Switch will likely not have an issue bypassing such filtering.

TheVogon

Re: Let the whack-a-mole begin

And in useless once DNS over HTTPS is widely deployed. They will just stick the sites behind Cloudflare making IP blocks ineffective too.

New lows at Bose as firmware update woes infuriate soundbar bros

TheVogon

Re: Bose isn't alone with crap soundbars

I had a Sony 5000 too. For all their advertising bs as you say it sounds crap. Now have a Samsung with rear surrounds and it sounds like Atmos should.

TheVogon

Re: A grand?

You can still find people on AV Forums telling you that £200 HDMI cables make a difference. To a digital signal! Gullibility is a very profitable market apparently.

TheVogon

Re: "sound quality issues with flatscreen TVs"

I can recommend the Samsung HW-N950 as the best soundbar setup out of several high end ones I tried. There is a company selling custom made stands for the rear surrounds on eBay too.

TheVogon

Re: WTF does a soundbar need a firmware update ?

£700 quid for a soundbar without surrounds or sub and it doesn't even do Dolby Atmos or DTS-X ?! Pfffft.

Rolling in DoH: Chrome 78 to experiment with DNS-over-HTTPS – hot on the heels of Firefox

TheVogon

Re: Just How Trustworthy is Cloudflare

Yes it does. Numerous Trojans and adware hijack DNS settings for instance.

TheVogon

Re: Just How Trustworthy is Cloudflare

And a quick Bing finds https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/commitment-to-privacy/

DEVELOPERS

Search the docs...

1.1.1.1

Setting Up 1.1.1.1

What is 1.1.1.1?

DNS over HTTPS

DNS over TLS

Supporting IPv6-only Networks

Privacy

Cloudflare 1.1.1.1

Cloudflare Resolver for Firefox

Fun With DNS

The Nitty Gritty

Privacy

Nearly everything on the Internet starts with a DNS request. DNS is the Internet’s directory. Click on a link, open an app, send an email and the first thing your phone or computer does is ask its directory: where can I find this?

Unfortunately, by default, DNS is usually slow and insecure. Your ISP, and anyone else listening in on the Internet, can see every site you visit and every app you use — even if their content is encrypted. Creepily, some DNS providers sell data about your Internet activity or use it to target you with ads. Cloudflare, in partnership with APNIC, runs 1.1.1.1, a recursive DNS service that values user privacy. Even though most Internet users have no insight into the Recursive DNS process or the entities involved in that work, there are legitimate concerns about how personal information collected through the Recursive DNS process are used or repurposed.

Cloudflare commits that 1.1.1.1 was designed for privacy first, and as a result:

Cloudflare will never sell your data or use it to target ads. Period.

All debug logs, which we keep just long enough to ensure no one is using the service to cause harm, of are purged within 24 hours.

Cloudflare will not retain any personal data / personally identifiable information, including information about the client IP and client port.

Cloudflare will retain only limited transaction data for legitimate operational and research purposes, but in no case will such transaction data be retained by Cloudflare for more than 24 hours.

Cloudflare will only retain or use what is being asked, not who is asking it. Unless otherwise notified to users, that information may be used for the following limited purposes:

Under the terms of a cooperative agreement, APNIC will have limited access to query the transaction data for the purpose of conducting research related to the operation of the DNS system.

Frankly, we don’t want to know what you do on the Internet — it’s none of our business — and we’ve taken the technical steps to ensure we can’t.

TheVogon

Re: Just How Trustworthy is Cloudflare

There are no real fully enterprise managed system concerns here. They can use group policy settings to force this off on imstalled browsers and do it at the network border if they want it but still see / filter what is being accessed internally.

For BYOD and guest WIFI I expect there are also solutions.

TheVogon

Re: DoT or DoH

How is that not a legitimate advantage?

TheVogon

Re: Just How Trustworthy is Cloudflare

At an educated guess it's just a starting point as they have presumably tested Cloudflare extensively. Once they know it all works I'm sure it will be selectable.

TheVogon

Good point. This should be done at the OS level not the browser level.

Any Linux gurus want to describe how to implement this on DD-WRT and Open WRT so every device in my house uses it?

Not that I'm a terrorist or a reader of alt.sex.hamsters.duct-tape but its the principle of the government forcing ISPs to record everything we browse...

Facebook: Remember how we promised we weren’t tracking your location? Psych! Can't believe you fell for that

TheVogon

Do they have informed consent to do this? Because if they don't then there will presumably be lots of hefty GDPR fines headed their way very shortly.

Microsoft takes ExpressRoute to orbit to sling Azure services at backwaters via satellite

TheVogon

" "fibre-like" performance"

Like a fibre ~ 70,000KM long presumably.

Microsoft's cloudy Windows Virtual Desktop: It fills a gap, but there are plenty of annoyances

TheVogon

Re: No.

4 servers = 4 single points of failure. A Hyper-V cluster is fault tolerant.

TheVogon

Re: Incomplete Software

Now at least there is a supported way of running Windows VDI on Azure with Office 365 / 2019 without having to pay for a VM for each user.

Not to mention that Onedrive caching works too unlike on Windows Server / RDS.

Google security crew sheds light on long-running super-stealthy iOS spyware operation

TheVogon

Re: Entire populations: State sponsored?

Chinese? Iranians? North Koreans? Or any ethnic group where the US could benefit from theft of IP like we know the US have done for decades?

Microsoft's only gone and published the exFAT spec, now supports popping it in the Linux kernel

TheVogon

I wouldn't think ExFAT revenue from Linux is significant

I think it costs 4 quid at retail to licence ExFAT on a Synology NAS for instance. Microsoft can easily afford to drop charges for Linux and that might even drive increased 3rd party licencing revenue.

Much better to do that and retain a non Linux licencing revenue stream for ~ another decade than risk it being replaced as many millions of Android devices already don't support ExFAT for instance.

TheVogon

Re: What if ...

Other than native support for:

FAT

FAT32

ExFAT

NTFS

REFS

and many others such as BTRFS via 3rd party drivers you mean?

American ISPs fined $75,000 for fuzzing airport's weather radar by stealing spectrum

TheVogon

Re: USAR ! USAR !

About the only good thing you can say about Americans and gun ownership is that owning guns makes it statistically more likely that you or a member of your family will die from firearms. Most likely their own. So Darwin Award status seems to apply.

Sueball claims Tesla solar panels are so effective, they started fires at Walmart stores

TheVogon

Indeed. Other articles on this mention visible defects on panels, loose wires and improper grounding. I guess the colonies don't have the same legal requirements for inspection, testing and sign off by a certified electrician that we do in the UK.

Outraged Virgin slaps IP trolls over dirty movie download data demands

TheVogon

Re: Shome mishtake shurely?

It would likely be by seeing who was "seeding" the torrent once they had completed downloading it. Seeding is usually on by default.

I.e. to mostly avoid this sort of crap and the usual suspects sending cease and desist letters to your ISP just disable seeding.

Azure consultant to sue Google for linking his cached pics to cloned site, breach of copyright

TheVogon

And how would said Azure Consultant force Monaco Telecom to use one?

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean Google isn't listening to everything you say

TheVogon

They cant be anonymised if the recording itself contains personal information. The GDPR fine for this should have a good few zeros on the end.

Microsoft tells resellers: 'We listened to you, and we have acted' (PS: Plz keep making us money)

TheVogon

Re: Maybe

And it still is really. If you can ignore the annoying messages then Windows works without activation. And Office Pro Plus works for 30 days extendable 5 times simply by executing OSPPREARM.exe

TheVogon

Re: Seriously

It's often hard to argue against money making / saving proposals without hard evidence of negative impact, but still surprised this one saw daylight. Regardless that there was actually a rebellion you would have thought having as many incentives as practicable to be a partner that has to retain X number of Microsoft certified staff and keep them busy was a no brainer.

Oracle told to warp 9 out of court: Judge photon-torpedoes Big Red's Pentagon JEDI dream

TheVogon

I can hear the world's smallest violin playing just for Oracle...

It's happening, tech contractors: UK.gov is pushing IR35 off-payroll rules to private sector in Finance Bill

TheVogon

Re: "This measure is expected to impact 170,000 individuals" . . .

No it won't. If contractors can't work as contractors then they will take permanent jobs. And as they tend to be the most highly skilled and experienced workers, if anything it would push the salaries of others down.

DoH! Secure DNS doesn't make us a villain, Mozilla tells UK broadband providers

TheVogon

Re: NIMBY

Surely 99% of people looking for stuff that is controversial enough to be blocked are going to be using a VPN for privacy so are probably not going to be inconvenienced by the blocks anyway?

I'm a fan just on the basis that the government can't track our web browsing any more.

Anyone know is there a solution for DNS over HTTPS on DD-WRT by the way?

TheVogon

Re: NIMBY

On a work network you can presumably control which certificates are trusted and still intercept the traffic anyway unless it uses pinned certs ?

Oracle goes on for 50 pages about why it thinks the Pentagon's $10bn JEDI cloud contract stinks

TheVogon

Re: Rise of the machines

If Trump has to remember it, it's probably 1234.

There's Huawei too many vulns in Chinese giant's firmware: Bug hunters slam pisspoor code

TheVogon

"and I trust GCHQs opinion more than I do of this security consultants firm"

Why? Have you seen the abysmal salaries that GCHQ offers? Any one good would surely work elsewhere.

We knew it was coming: Bureaucratic cockup triggers '6-month' delay of age verification block on porno in the UK

TheVogon

Re: RE: Anonymous Wanker

Do you need to be over 18 to have a VPN or use a proxy server now then? Otherwise isn't this completely and utterly pointless? Screw handing over any of my personal data to porn sites.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/brazzers-porn-site-data-breach-details-of-800000-users-leaked-by-hackers-a3338031.html

And if I understand correctly, verification involves scanning a passport or driving license and uploading it. Not clear what stops kids simply using someone else's documents?

Halleluja! The Second Coming of Windows Subsystem For Linux blesses Insider faithful

TheVogon

Because the Windows store is for consumers. You can install anything that matters directly from Powershell.

No backdoor, no backdoor... you're a backdoor! Huawei won't spy for China or anyone else, exec tells MPs

TheVogon

Re: quite sensible

But if they were forced to add backdoors, presumably they would also be required to deny it?

What's big, blue, and hands out pink slips? IBM on Thursday: Word spreads of job cuts

TheVogon

Re: you mean there are workers left ?

Have you seen the cost of running systems from IBM?

Like using the latest version of Microsoft Office? Love Offline Files? Not for long!

TheVogon

Re: The workaround is to not use Office

Microsoft's "Cloudy Software" works just fine offline too.

TheVogon

Re: Clouds rule OK!

You don't have to be online with Microsoft Office 365 or Pro Plus either. Although as 365 is licenced per user it needs to be online once a month to check your entitlement. Pro Plus doesnt though.