Posts by happygeek

Sorry, wrong end of stick error. Actually, I agree with you there.

That would be an even more slippery slope methinks...

Gary McKinnon, an unassuming 46 year old Londoner who suffers from Asperger's syndrome and depression, is an unlikely man to be making headlines the world over once again. Indeed, across the last decade McKinnon has almost seemed to be a permanent fixture in news media feeds online and off, a thorn in the side of successive British Governments and a man who divides opinion whenever his name is mentioned. Thinking of him as the man who, according to US lawyers, committed "the biggest military computer hack of all time" helps to put the reasons why into perspective.

Gary McKinnon, far from being some sinister master hacker, or indeed even a wannabe master hacker let alone a serious threat to US national security, is actually rather more correctly describable as a computer nerd with a UFO obsession. Sure, there is no denying, and McKinnon himself has not denied it, that starting back in 2001 and hot on the heels of the 9/11 terrorist atrocity, McKinnon somehow managed to access computers belonging to the US military and NASA. During a 13 month period from February 2001 through until March 2002, McKinnon apparently 'hacked into' 97 of them, including those at the Earle Naval Weapons Station where he is accused of deleting weapons logs and grinding the 300 computer network to a halt (by so doing paralysing munitions supplies for the US Navy Atlantic Fleet) as well as the US Army's Military District of Washington network where all …

Currently reading "The Abolition of the State" by Wayne Price and "The Grand Design" by Stephen Hawking, both in Kindle format on an iPad 2 (I can adjust the colour/contrast and sizing to enable me to read books again this way, had to dump my Kindle when my eyesight tanked earlier this year).

ROFL. I see no reason why the new JustinTimberlakeSpace will worry Facebook in the slightest. Please expand upon your response and explain why you think it will.

Free time, what's that?

Are you serious?

The UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has slapped the Greater Manchester Police force with a £150,000 fine (reduced to £120,000 for early payment) after a memory stick containing sensitive data about serious crimes was stolen from the home of a police officer.

The ICO has the power to levy such fines if an investigation determines that sensitive data has been put at risk courtesy of a lack of proper data protection being in place. In this particular case it must have been a very quick investigation, filed under the no-brainer category, seeing as the data was being stored on a memory stick which the officer had seen fit to take home with him. A memory stick which required no password in order to access the information held upon it. Information that was stored without any encryption being applied. Information which included details concerning in excess of a thousand people with links to 'serious crime investigations' apparently.

The breach occurred when a burglar broke into the home of the officer and the memory stick was amongst the items stolen during that robbery. According to the ICO, Greater Manchester Police officers regularly used such unencrypted memory sticks. This despite a very similar breach having taken place in 2010, the lessons from which were obviously not learned and which led the ICO to conclude that the police force was not properly trained with regards to data protection matters.

ICO Director of Data Protection, David Smith, insists that it …

Welcome

Yours was only accurate for a minute or two... ;)

Welcome back. Oh boy things must have changed here a bit since you were last active :)

Welcome Lara

@vinotd: "Do provide evidence of having done some work yourself if posting questions from school or work assignments" - them's the rules, please read them and then try again...

Well, the newsletter is out now so I have posted the results in the original competition announcement thread here.

Congrats! :)

Well, the votes are in, and we are happy to be able to announce that the winners are as follows:

The prize for the code snippet which demonstrated the most creative functionality goes to Tony Veijalainen, better known as that popular moderator pyTony for his Python snippet: 'Class based polynomials with magic methods'.

The prize for the most elegant code snippet is awarded to the mysterious L7Sqr for the C++ snippet 'Calculator using shunting-yard algorithm'.

And finally, the prize for the most efficient code snippet is heading in the direction of another moderator (which proves that DaniWeb mods really do 'walk the walk' as well talk the talk when it comes to coding) namely Mikael Persson, a.k.a. mike_2000_17 for his 'Scope-guarded lockable objects in C++11' snippet.

Congratulations to the winners one and all, and our heartfelt thanks to every single one of the DaniWeb members who took the time to both submit a code snippet and to vote upon them.

Welcome William

Welcome

What part of Yorkshire? Says the DaniWeb Admin who just so happens to live in West Yorkshire :)

<later> I see it is Wakefield. Not that far from me then, I'm in Halifax...

I was in Dredd (the orginal Stallone pile of pants) albeit fleetingly as an extra in the crowd scenes - I was one of the punky looking no-goods along the main street.

Not just you, just checked it and same here.

The results are in, they will be in the newsletter this month. Not sure if Dani wants to publish them here before that goes out or wait until after though...

Microsoft first started warning people that the there was going to be an important change to Windows' certificate requirements back in June. A change that is designed to improve security across the Windows platform by way of increasing the RSA key length to a minimum of 1024 bits for certificates used in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). That requirement change happens today, October 9th, but are you one of those people who, as Angela Gunn from Microsoft Security Response Center puts it, has "systems and applications that have been tucked away to collect dust and cobwebs because they 'still work' and have not had any cause for review for some time"?

If so, your time has come and those certificates will need to be reissued with at least a 1024-bit key from today in order to comply with Microsoft's requirements. Truth be told, you should actually be looking to at least double that to 2048 bits in order to meet security best practise minimums. Indeed, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) depreciated keys of 1024 bits or less way back in January 2011.

According to Microsoft, Security Advisory 2661254 (Update For Minimum Certificate Key Length) "impacts applications and services that use RSA keys for cryptography and call into the CertGetCertificateChain function. These applications and services will no longer trust certificates with RSA keys less than 1024 bits in length. Examples of impacted applications and services include but are not limited to encrypted email, SSL/TLS encryption …

They get a 'www.daniweb.com' tattoo in the middle of their forehead, it seems only fair.

@juliagarner "I writes for" and "I am also enjoys playing the guitar" are hardly great recommendations for the 'well made products' of the company you work for.

Samsung has fixed the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) exploit that could remotely wipe data from a Galaxy S III smartphone, but that doesn't mean the USSD threat is over: far from it in fact. According to some security researchers, 400 million Android device users are at risk from having their hardware bricked.

It's not just owners of the Samsung Galaxy S III that are vulnerable to this particular attack, or indeed just Samsung handsets at all as first thought. As is often the case, the discovery of a vulnerability leads to several new ways to exploit it and that's what has happened here. According to several IT security researchers, a new USSD attack variant is out there which works on a huge number of smartphones running the Android OS.

The new variant of the USSD exploit no longer worries about remotely wiping data from specific handsets, but instead now concentrates on killing your SIM card and bricking your expensive smartphone. The original exploit worked by tricking the owner into visiting a web page where a factory reset code inside an iframe was loaded via a 'tel:' uniform resource identifier. The dialer application on the handset will automatically execute the code, and perform a factory reset. Tricking, in this context, isn't just restricted to luring the unwary to click a rogue link but can actually also involve touching a rogue NFC tag (if the handset is NFC-enabled) or scanning a rogue QR code.

The new variant leverages a code which …

Am just editing a news story (How to disable SIM-killing USSD PUK attack that has spread to all Androids) and cannot upload accompanying image. Get the following: "A problem was encountered while attempting to move the uploaded file to the final destination."

Most observers base their observations on the fact that their own social circles have not made the move from other networks, notably Twitter and in particular Facebook. That's the real problem, until and unless Google+ can move beyond the growth in unused/hardly used accounts and become the primary network of choice, then 'most observers' will continue to be more clued up about real world success compared to statistical growth rates...

Most observers will agree that Google+ has failed to set the social networking world alight, and is far from being a thorn in the side of Facebook. However, now that Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed he's serious about search, could Facebook possibly compete in the Google hood?

The Facebook founder and CEO has gone on the record to insist that "Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer a lot of questions people have" and reveal that the social network is currently fulfilling a billion searches every day "and we’re not even trying".

Of course, the arguments have raged for years about how Facebook could leverage the information it holds and the most common response thrown into the mix is the perhaps a little too obvious one of advertising. Not that Facebook is ignoring the advertising income potential, but it's certainly not ignoring the evolution of search potential either. Zuckerberg has described the way that Google produces lists based partly upon keywords entered as "some magic" and warned that the online world is evolving and search engines have to evolve with it. People want to ask a question and get a set of answers, and that's where the "pretty uniquely positioned" quote comes into play.

Facebook now has a billion users, and is tracking what those members search for within the site. Zuckerberg has acknowledged that the News Feed feature at the heart of the Facebook user experience shouldn't be seen as just a window onto what …

@rait56 - and what does that have to do with this news story?

welcome aboard the good ship DaniWeb, Niv

Think of apps and you probably think of your smartphone. After all, Apple pretty much built an iPhone empire around the concept of apps and users of Android and Windows handsets are just as hooked. Truth be told though, and this 'Age of Apps' has spread far beyond the smartphone sphere. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the social media space.

Facebook is awash with apps, ranging from the useful to the useless. Many of them fall into the 'simply annoying' category, involving the distribution of games invites or high scores to the largely unimpressed and totally uninterested circle of friends of the user. Unfortunately, far more than is healthy have also come along and slotted quite nicely into the security or privacy risk category. Apps which pretend to do one harmless thing but actually perform a far more harmful other, be that leading to malware infection, spamming or phishing attempts.

One popular security risk app type on Facebook over the years has been the 'profile tracker' which promises to reveal who has been looking at your profile recently. Of course, no app can do any such thing, but that doesn't stop people falling for the scam every time such an app is released. And it doesn't stop those people from being at risk of malware infection or account hijack either. As users of the popular social media micro-blogging service Tumblr are now discovering for themselves.

Just like Facebook, Tumblr users can install a …

Hi Jens, welcome to DaniWeb. I think you are going to enjoy it here :)

Welcome to DaniWeb heenah, I'm sure you will find DaniWeb helpful.

Welcome to DaniWeb!

Continuing the Lord of the Rings theme that I started with in the title of this review, I believe it is Gandalf who says "there is only one Lord of the Ring, only one who can bend it to his will. And he does not share power" but he sure wasn't saying it to the One|Cable. It exists to share power between most every kind of mobile device you own, apart from those that have a proprietary charging connector which are not made by Apple. As long as your smartphone, tablet, satnav, MP3 player, Bluetooth headset etc etc accepts either an Apple 30-pin, MicroUSB or MiniUSB cable connection then you are well and truly sorted for power.

All you need to add to the One|Cable is a power source, and so far I've used my laptop, an Apple iPhone USB 'plug' and the Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation Duo which I reviewed here at DaniWeb recently. This light and compactly designed unit, with the 70cm cable length retracting into one of those central 'pull at both ends to unwind and rewind' spools, is a seriously essential piece of kit if your mobile gadget collection is anything like mine.

So far I have successfully charged an Apple iPhone 4S, an Apple iPad 2, an Amazon Kindle Touch, a SanDisk sansa clip MP3 player, a Kensington KeyFolio Pro 2 Bluetooth iPad keyboard, and a Kensington Presentair laser pointer using it. The only …

Finished and the votes are in. Dani will be announcing the winners in due course...

See here.

Do provide evidence of having done some work yourself if posting questions from school or work assignments

Sounds very much like a homework assignment, which we do not answer unless the poster shows some kind of effort themselves. See the rules:

Do provide evidence of having done some work yourself if posting questions from school or work assignments

Welcome to DaniWeb, where I am sure you will find the help you are seeking.

I've never heard of 'pixpub web' but I would imagine the site has some sort of complaints process/system to remove copyrighted/illegal images. Have you tried taking that rather obvious route?

Ironically, eating out is something I do very rarely as it is so hard to find decent vegan food.

My diet is shocking currently though due to working away from home so need to work on sorting that out eventually

Diet is the one thing I do have going for me, being a Vegan and avoiding high fat food groups for good measure.

This is my current routine:

Walk past entrance to gym (which is located in the same converted mill where I rent an office) at 6am

Enter own office at 6.05am

Leave office at 1pm

Walk past gym entrance at 1.05pm

Repeat daily

Welcome to DaniWeb!

In which case, logo32design, I seriously suggest you scroll back to the top of this thread and read the postings from the start. If you still do not understand the voting system then I fear we will have to break out the picture book version of the explanation :)

willson1 and vkmigrate, care to support those statements? How is LinkedIn 'more powerful than Facebook' or 'the best platform' when it comes to site promotion. It's another avenue for promotion, no doubt about that, but a better bet than Facebook when FB has such a huge userbase and such market momentum? That's a big claim to make without any attempt to justify it...

My experience of Google+ is that the membership is mainly comprised of people who also use Facebook or Twitter, and took a look when the new boy in social media started up. They have not changed their primary usage patterns, and Google+ is not becoming a thriving community. It's something of a vicious circle: a social network needs lots of active members to succeed, new members join and discover there's not much going on so leave (or just dip in every now and then), the social network never reaches the required critical mass or membership momentum.

Facebook has that critical mass in terms of active members. It's where my friends are, and despite some also using Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ the only place that they are ALL together as a group is on Facebook. Consider that this is the same for the majority of social circles and that's a pretty hard nut to crack for any new service trying to break the stranglehold.

As I've stated elsewhere, Internet giant killing is not impossible (AltaVista, Netscape, MySpace etc etc) but neither is it easy. For now, Facebook is the primary player in social media but the clever money spreads the bet and has that pervasive presence that dmanw100 speaks of.

There has been plenty of talk about Facebook moving into the search space, and if there were a decent Internet search function integrated (with additional functionality for social media users) into the Facebook UI then it stands to reason that Google might get hit by whatever percentage of the billion FB'ers decided just to use that rather than jump out of their FB session.

Lots of ifs and buts and maybes, I admit. However, to state that it would be impossible for Facebook to kill Google is just as much of a stretch. Who thought that AltaVista would get killed, or Netscape for that matter. The felling of Internet giants is not without precedent.

So, you need an immediate answer to a question you have not asked. Is that right?

Then you don't get a solved thread point because the problem being solved and the thread being marked as solved are two very different things...