* Posts by ravenstar68

21 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jan 2016

Who you gonna call? Premium numbers, but a not-so-premium service

ravenstar68

Re: Wrong number

You're mixing PhONE day with the Big Number change

On PhONE day in 1995 a 1 was added to many dialing codes so Coventry moved from 0203 to 01203

On the Big number change in 2000, Coventry became 024 with existing numbers being prefixed with 76.

ravenstar68

Re: Wrong number

No

All 02 codes are 3 digit codes with the phone - numbers becoming 8 digits. Existing numbers were then prefixed with numbers which is where the confusion comes about.

This also happened previously with the 011x dialing codes there are prople to this day who say the code for Reading is 01189 - it's not it's 0118

02 number ranges

020 London - exisiting numbers prefxed with a 7 or an 8

023 Southampton and Portsmouth (existing numbers prefixed with 80 or 92)

024 Coventry - Exisiting numbers prefixed with 76

029 Cardiff - Existing numbers prefixed with 20

028 Northern Ireland - Belfast numbers were prefixed with 90

I was a Telephone operator doing 100/999 for Cable and Wireless at the time of the Big Number change - it rankles me that 2 decades on people still say London is 0207 and 0208

Like a Virgin, hacked for the very first time... UK broadband ISP spills 900,000 punters' records into wrong hands from insecure database

ravenstar68

The password you are asked for over the phone is NOT your email password though.

It is a separate security word.

UK Supreme Court unprorogues Parliament

ravenstar68

Re: Ignorantia juris non excusat

How dare you knock Happy Talk - ROFL

ravenstar68

Re: Damning...

Unlawful != Illegal

Unlawful - Not Authorised by law.

Illegal - Forbidden by law.

In the first case - no statute exists forbidding Boris Johnson's proroguing if parliament, however the courts ruled that in doing so for such a long time, he's effectively denying Parliament the opportunity to hold the Government to account . In determining this they took submissions from John Major that drawing up a new Queen's speech need only take around 5 - 6 days.

And yes I know the controversy over the cash for questions proroguing of Parliament. However this Judgement will make it harder for this and future Governments to use this as a tool to get round blocks by Parliament.

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

ravenstar68

The scary face of the future is here?

I’m minded to suggest that the people in the Reddit thread be asked to read Fahrenheit 451.

In the book firemen no longer put out fires, but instead burn books, as over time more and more minority groups found certain things offensive. The thing is it’s not just books.

I’m minded of the Black Eyed Peas’ song’ Lets Get it Started. This was originally released as Let’s Get Retarded, and in the opening lyrics were the words “in this context, we mean no disrespect.” The title and lyrics was changed when the song was released as a single to no doubt avoid causing offence.

Do we really want to go down that road.

HTTP/2, Brute! Then fall, server. Admin! Ops! The server is dead

ravenstar68

Someone really needs a refresher.

I really dislike the wording of parts of this article.

HTTP and HTTP 2 do not “govern the application layer of the network stack”.

There's NordVPN odd about this, right? Infosec types concerned over strange app traffic

ravenstar68

"Yup, plenty of unique user information there – and that gzip string looks rather like the client is expecting to receive a payload from the server. Curiouser and curiouser."

I think you may be overthinking things here. Accept Encoding: gzip simply means that the user agent will accept a reply that's compressed using gzip.

For example if I have a website, I can use gzip compression to reduce the amount of data that's sent down the link. However the browser does need to indicate that it will accept that compression type, otherwise the web pages are sent in an uncompressed form.

Google Chrome: HTTPS or bust. Insecure HTTP D-Day is tomorrow, folks

ravenstar68

Re: Fuck Google, I will use HTTP when I want !!

You need to understand how certificates work.

The certificate system provides a chain of certificates which end with a trusted root certificate. The list of Trusted Root Certificates is kept on the local machine and updated by the OS.

However it's not the root certificates that are used to encrypt data, it's the actual server certificate.

So what you could do if you were that concerned is set your cron job to create it's own new certificate and than send a certificate signing request off to Let's Encrypt every 60 days instead.

The real problem with TLS is that not only do companies and institutions MITM TLS connections, but a good proportion of security software does as well.

While their purpose is benign, this IMHO is a bad choice by the security vendors as it means if your security software is indeed pulling a MITM attack - you lose the chain of trust.

Nunes FBI memo: Yep, it's every bit as terrible as you imagined

ravenstar68

Re: Really?

It should be pointed out that Fusion GPS was initially paid by the Washington Free Beacon from Oct 2015 to May 2016 to conduct opposition research on Trump and other candidates for the 2016 Election.

They were confident in hiring the company then, it's only when the Steele dossier was produced that they claimed Fusion GPS was unreliable.

As for the Steele dossier parts of it have been corroborated by the intelligence services. and Carter Page was an item of interest as long ago as 2013.

Also bear in mind Carter Page has testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee and some of his testimony doesn't paint him in a particularly favourable light.

'WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?' Linus Torvalds explodes at Intel spinning Spectre fix as a security feature

ravenstar68

Removing Spectre mitigation in the patch - seriously?

So if I'm reading the article right this line just made me laugh.

"so it's preparing a patch without the problematic bits – the Spectre v2 mitigation"

Erm isn't the whole point of patching to deal with the Spectre issue. Launching a new patch without this makes NO sense at all.

Malware hidden in vid app is so nasty, victims should wipe their Macs

ravenstar68

Re: Perhaps developers should work offline

So what happened in the days BEFORE the Internet,

Erm well in at least one case you sent the cassette back to the software house and they sent you a replacement.

Acorn Electron version of Elite back in 1984 had a bug that crashed the game when you used the galactic hyperdrive. That really was the fix. I sent mine off using registered post.

Did ROPEMAKER just unravel email security? Nah, it's likely a feature

ravenstar68

Headline is scary but read up.

Ok I've downloaded the ROPEMAKER information from MIMECast.

Near as I can see, the attacker has to send a carefully crafted email in order for ROPEMAKER to work. It can't simply change the content of ANY email only an email that relies on a specific remote CSS file and has been crafted to take advantage of the changes to the remote CSS file.

I'm trying to figure out why anyone in their right mind would think it was a good thing to add to CSS, something that could actually change what was visibly displayed in an HTML document.

FYI: You can blow Intel-powered broadband modems off the 'net with a 'trivial' packet stream

ravenstar68

Re: I almost feel sorry for VM

Until the buyer comes back complaining it won't work because Virgin won't activate it.

ravenstar68

No one should EVER buy a Virgin Media modem from a third party.

I cannot stress this enough - Virgin Media will NOT activate any device that they have not provided to you DIRECTLY. You need to request your money back or report the seller to eBay.

One IP address, multiple SSL sites? Beating the great IPv4 squeeze

ravenstar68

Re: We'd have plenty of IPs

"NAT is now the standard for internal corporate use as it is the basis for first level firewalling."

While I don't disagree with the statement, NAT was not designed to be a firewall. It was designed to make the internet last longer.

The term "NAT Firewall", was I suspect coined by marketers.

UK's Virgin Media subscribers suffer fresh email blocking misery

ravenstar68

Re: Ammendment.

Terry6

I respectfully disagree

Virgin Media users get E-Mail provided gratis as an additional extra for their paid for services. as do most other ISP users. However, it should be noted that these free benefits can be withdrawn at any time (case in point Virgin Webspace) because it's classed as a promotional extra. The fact is that there are a host of other email options out there available to users, and BTW if your a business, even a small one, using a consumer grade email is bad on two fronts.

1. There's no guaranteed SLA should the service have problems.

2. Having your own email domain tied to your business looks far more professional than using a free service.

3. You get full control over which email addresses you use if you use your own domain.

4. Last but not least - it's a breach of the T&C's of most free email service to use it for business purposes.

5. Because of 4 if your business loses money as a result of email failure, you may be lucky to recover your losses. Certainly, VM would argue that they have no obligation to refund such losses.

ravenstar68

Looking at Daisygroup's SPF record - what a mess

12 DNS querying mechanisms - only 10 allowed

ptr - what on earth.

duplicate netblocks

Someone needs to go back and do their homework.

ravenstar68

Re: Huh???

For me, the spam filtering does work better than it did. Occasionally spam does get to my inbox but the majority of it does go to my spam folder.

The problem is that Virgin does also flag legitimate mail as spam. I get newsletters from ASUS, Creative, Samsung etc, and for a good portion of 2016 these were all ending up in my spam folder. (Note newsletters like these are not spam because you have a dealing with the company and have either failed to opt out of the newsletter or deliberately opted in (Note the preferred paradigm is that users opt in but it's not mandatory).

However other users reported e-tickets, hotel reservation e-mails, etc were being flagged as spam, and because Virgin opted for a default of reject spam, these were being returned to sender. Virgin only reset those defaults in Dec/Jan, meaning there was a lot of mail that should have gotten to people that didn't.

Virgin Media users report ongoing problems delivering legit emails. Again

ravenstar68

As a matter of fact it was. Not Virgin's though. I have a Google Apps account.

Hapless Virgin Media customers face ongoing email block woes

ravenstar68

Re: hmmmm

The problem is that Spam "companies" don't use the equivalent of their own telephones to send the misery they inflict on other people.