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User: Alain+Williams

Alain+Williams's activity in the archive.

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  1. Re:They fixed it? on Sunday-Morning Outage Strikes Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 1

    These outages seem to be coming along more frequently ... maybe there is hope!

  2. Re:"after five years" "£50,000 a year." on Police Refer Teenaged Crackers For 'Second Chance' Jobs at Cyber-Security Company (bbc.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    These were mostly kids with a lot of their future ahead of them.

    Who when a kid did not do something that now, with your older/wiser head, you would not now do ? We all make mistakes, which is why society (ie the law, etc) needs to recognise that, and allow people to grow into 'good' citizens (maybe after having paid a 'price' for misdeeds done).

  3. which might include the clever/obscure bit of code inserted by a NSA/GCHQ stooge.

    How long before this stuff is banned by various governments or they decide that running it is proof that you are a terrorist or similar.

  4. Shame, I'll wait until the Mate flavour comes out -- that is usable, something that I don't find Gnome 3 is.

  5. Re:Email and "experiences" on Google Makes Emails More Dynamic With AMP For Email (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 2

    Email should be 7-bit ASCII for security and stability.

    I am happy with Unicode UTF-8 encoded, there have been a few issues but not many. US-ASCII is not good enough if you want to write in German, Greek, etc, let alone Chinese or Arabic. But I could do without HTML, in-line images, colours, different fonts, etc.

    The trouble is that many just don't get it. There is someone who I have to email who's minimum size email is about 130KB as the idiots have decided that every email has got to have huge images attached. These are the sort who are going to think that AMP emails are a must have - and then blame us techies when things go wrong.

  6. Well, if you weren't paying for the storage then you have no right to complain. Keep your own backups!

    I sometimes wish that this sort of thing happened more often and that home PCs failed more often - then people might take the idea of backups seriously. But all that good reliability does is to lull people into a false sense of security so that, when something does go wrong, their loss is even greater, unfortunately.

  7. Re:Make sure to test it on... on Scientists Have Discovered a Shape That Blocks All Sound (fastcompany.com) · · Score: 1

    Please can we have these installed in shopping centers, lifts, waiting rooms, ... where the owners think it good to blast people there with people cat-a-wailing. I don't like it, many others also do not call it music.

    I am stuck in a hotel that had this racket assaulting me when I went down for breakfast. I was told ''Oh, we can't switch that off.''. I'm going to stay somewhere else the next time that I am in this area.

    Noise pollution: a plague of our times.

  8. and you will walk differently.

  9. Re:Why music ? on Starbucks' Music Is Driving Employees Nuts (www.cbc.ca) · · Score: 2

    Vote parent up. I find music played in pubs, supermarkets, sports halls, ... highly irritating and either do not go or do what I need to and leave as soon as possible. I agree with the screeching woman comment. If you asked me what music I would have: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, ... which I accept many would not like -- you cannot please everyone, so: just switch it off!

    Support Pipedown.

  10. We don't give a shit. A few might move overseas, most emailers are too thick to understand the laws - so we will read their email when we want to. Those who moved: we'll just send the cops round with a $5 wrench.

  11. Re:Maybe Google thought their users were smart? on Google Says the Built-in Microphone it Never Told Nest Users About Was 'Never Supposed To Be a Secret' (businessinsider.com) · · Score: 4, Funny

    Unless they suddenly good at lip reading.

    I assure you, Dave, that Google would never do that.

  12. Does the list include Senators ? on Proposed Bill Would Force Arizonians To Pay $250 To Have Their DNA Added To a Database (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If they want this then they should lead by example and be the first to have their DNA added to this database.

  13. Re:Which Linux users really care and why? on Linux Subsystem Files To Become Accessible via Windows File Explorer (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    I use WSL quite a bit on my work laptop. Why?

    - ssh and scp are easier to use from WSL

    And because it is running under MS Windows, the telemetry gets to send all your keystrokes, including passwords, back to Microsoft HQ ... lord knows where they go beyond that!

    If you want to run both operating systems on the same machine: install Linux first and run MS Windows is a VM --- it is much safer that way.

  14. Five becoming Six on Trump Directs Pentagon To Create Space Force Legislation for Congress (wsj.com) · · Score: 2

    Does that mean that they are going to have to rebuild The Pentagon as a six sided building of six nested hexagons each of which is six floors high ?

    Could anyone suggest a nickname for this new building ?

  15. result in another 30% more productivity ? :-)

  16. Re:Pro Password Recovery Guy Here on 8-Character Windows NTLM Passwords Can Be Cracked In Under 2.5 Hours (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    If you have knowledge of the corporate password rules you're dealing with (which SIGNIFICANTLY reduce the attack space) it's actually not uncommon to discover even a complex password in a couple of days.

    The bottom line is that everyone needs to use stronger passwords, and corporations really need to remove the impediments that reduce attack space.

    As an example, let's take a simple example where a keyboard has all the capital and lowercase letters, and numbers 0 through 9. There are 52 possible letters and 10 possible numbers - 62 potential characters. An 8 character password has 62^8 or 218,340,105,584,896 possible combinations.

    If I impose a rule that says you must have at least one capital letter, that more than halves the attack space because one combination drops from 62 possibilities to 26, and our new attack space is only 91,561,979,761,408.

    If I say you have to have one capital letter and one number, that reduces a combination from 62 to 10, and our new space is only 14,768,061,251,840 passwords.

    You are missing the point: if corporations did not impose such rules then most people would choose passwords that were entirely lower case; ie 26^8 (208,827,064,576) combinations. Any self respecting cracker would try all lower case before considering other possibilities.

  17. China is worse on How India's Single Time Zone Is Hurting Its People (bbc.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    it spans 5 time zones. Its kids must have even more problems.

  18. What do they use it for ? on Terabyte-Using Cable Customers Double, Increasing Risk of Data Cap Fees (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    There are a few theories above about high data usage, but does anyone really know, any surveys/studies done ?

  19. One for each eyeball ? on LG Will Launch a Phone With a Second Screen Attachment (cnet.com) · · Score: 2

    I can't see why else you would want this.

  20. AI is software so is not that hard for someone with a bit of money to get hold of and use. Yes: you need some expertise, software can be copied & modified to taste, the hardware is cheap & readily available. Who do they want to stop getting hold of it ? Easily obtainable & affordable by governments, terrorists & Bond villains.

  21. Purpose of tech ... on Mark Zuckerberg's Resolution Is To Talk About Tech's Place In Society (engadget.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    should be to make everyone's lives better (happier, easier, richer, less hassled, ...), not to make a few richer at the expense of everyone else.

  22. Nice but not unique on NSA To Release a Free Reverse Engineering Tool (zdnet.com) · · Score: 2

    Eg Ndisasm

  23. Wrong. It's not like the business doesn't have to track their transactions at the end of the month regardless of if it's paper or plastic.)

    There is an extra burden to them with cash: the cash in the tills need to be reconciled (counted, checked with total that the till thinks it should be) at the end of the day and then taken to a bank.

  24. I am aware of the costs of cash to business but that is not my problem (it is your cost of doing business).

    What they are doing is transferring the cost/effort of a small transaction to the customer, it is s/he who now has an extra card transaction that needs to be checked when the monthly statement arrives. I know some who do not check statements ... to whom I ask "how do you notice errors or fraudulent transactions ?"

  25. Where is the separation of functionality ? on Microsoft's Emergency Internet Explorer Patch Renders Some Lenovo Laptops Unbootable (betanews.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I could understand if a patch to MS-IE were to make IE not work with some hardware configuration ... but why should this stop a machine from booting ? This was a security issue ... it appears that MS has code spanning user & kernel space and, what should be, a user space fix is partly in the kernel. Presumably this is to try to squeeze a bit of performance, but all that it does is to produce fragile systems.

    Separation of different code modules that do different things is one of the really basic concepts in programming, it appears that this does not happen at MS. Why not ? What on earth are these guys smoking ? (Cue the MS apologists who will burble some sorts of excuse.)