By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Gripes moans and whinges, utilities, Broadband, Internet, iPhone, Microsoft, Apple on February 14, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Later this week two of us are driving a few hundred miles to HQ to be shown the new database which will be implemented on April Fools’ Day. A date which is inevitably going to be a joke when it’s something to do with new computers and software, all going live at the same time. Read more
Rated: 100% (3 votes)
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By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Gripes moans and whinges, utilities, Security, Microsoft, Apple, Uncategorized on January 17, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Is there anything worse than the hypocrites who insist on organic, forgetting the food miles their Scottish salmon cost compared with the line-caught mackerel from the end of the road? Then drive the X5 a half mile to little Matthew and Jessica’s Steiner school and never take a bag with them to John Lewis. Read more
Rated: 96.67% (6 votes)
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By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Internet, Microsoft, Uncategorized on December 12, 2009 at 3:24 pm
My boss was using my work computer to demonstrate to a new employee how to send files from Lotus Notes. She gathered the files together, a mix of Word docs and a couple of PDFs, then clicked on send. Several tens of minutes later the computer became operational again. For some strange reason, Windows XP, or the Dell Optiplex, cannot multi-task in the same way a Mac can. Data dribbled out, meanwhile locking out Notes. Read more
Rated: 100% (3 votes)
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By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Gripes moans and whinges, Microsoft, Apple on October 31, 2009 at 4:22 pm
A few weeks ago I took over the control of an ancient Dell and XP. For a Mac user from the days when PCs were still using the command line, this was a severe shock. Learning that 80% of the world’s computers are running XP made me almost cry in despair. Read more
Rated: 100% (4 votes)
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By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Gripes moans and whinges, Microsoft, Apple, Uncategorized on July 26, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Week 1 in new job. It appears that I was over-hasty in last week’s blog, thinking I couldn’t turn the Dell computer on. What had happened was I had entered a zone of anti-time. Read more
Rated: 84% (5 votes)
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By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in utilities, Internet, Microsoft, Apple on July 18, 2009 at 7:02 pm
New job day 1. I sat looking up at the Dell wondering how to turn it on. On the monitor is a button that looked hopeful so I pressed it to illuminate a tiny lamp on the button. After a few moments of waiting for something to happen nothing did apart from adding a tiny bit extra to my carbon overhead. The Dell remained a blue-black lump of lifeless plastic. Read more
Rated: 100% (5 votes)
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By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Gripes moans and whinges, Microsoft on April 25, 2008 at 11:52 am
Digital music is set to take another kick in the teeth. Have you got any tracks you downloaded from the MSN Music service? If so, think again because on the 31 August Microsoft are going to turn off the license servers. This means that which you bought with your hard-earned will eventually become nothing more than digital detritus on your hard disk. Read more
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
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By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Microsoft on October 18, 2007 at 10:34 am
The day after I left grammar school, in the summer before college, I started back at school but this time on the building site next door, constructing the school’s new extension. That job taught me a lot of useful lessons, such as how to drive a dumper truck, use F*** every third word and what page 3 girls look like.
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By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Microsoft on July 19, 2007 at 11:25 am
Alastair Crooke, the Director and Founder of the Conflicts Forum, has said that in his experience of negotiating with terrorists it is pointless to ignore groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, hoping they will go away. There is no nice, fluffy, occidentally inclined organisation waiting to take their place. It will be al-Qaeda who replace them and things will change for the worse. Much the same seems to be said about the adoption of Vista and Microsoft’s Open XML format.
Over the years there have always been headlines about such and such company abandoning Microsoft Windows, or Macs or Office. This time there seems to be more about firms deciding they are not abandoning Windows XP to move to Vista and there’s even an active movement to stop Open XML becoming recognised as an ISO standard.
Torpidity
In both cases the move
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By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Microsoft on April 24, 2007 at 11:50 am
ITPro and others have been crowing here about a supposed Mac vulnerability demonstrated at the CanSecWest conference. Get your facts right pur-lease.
There are a number of points the reporters missed out which rather change the whole scenario. Not the least that the cracking attempt was sponsored by Microsoft whose fanboys delighted in mis-reporting the supposed Mac hack.
So what exactly happened?
Much of the events have been kept secret but Engadget’s report here is more revealing than most, the comments following it tell the true story.
On the first day, a pair of MacBook Pros were set up with the competition being to access one remotely, get into the Users folder, open a file and act on its instructions. No-one managed to even crack into the Mac for the whole 24 hours. This was with just the simple on-board firewalls and security at factory defaults. Pretty much as most Mac users still use since they took delivery of their computers.
As the competition was to prove that Mac OS is as vulnerable as Windows, this rather defeated the aim, so the rules were changed. On the second day they made it easier. Hackers had to give a URL to the adjudicators who set the Mac to go automatically to the URL where the dirty deed was done.
Ah ha! So the Mac was vulnerable.
Well, actually no. What the URL used was an outdated Java routine that relied on an old browser plug-in. So the Mac itself wasn’t cracked. It withstood all attempts for 24 hours and even the “successful” hacker admitted it took them 9 hours on the second day. The item cracked was a third party plug-in, nothing to do with the Mac or its operating system which was never accessed. The winner only managed to access a user-level file once the door to the Mac had been left open.
Don’t forget there were two Macs in this competition.
The second Mac was set up the same as the first but with a slight change in the rules. To win, contestants needed to follow instructions in the file system root. To access this the hacker would have to gain administration and root-level privileges. Now that would have been something for Microsoft to crow about. Sadly for them, the bog standard Mac, running bog standard software at default settings repelled all attempts.
Macs by default, do not run at root level, it is actually quite a palaver to set up a root account. To install software or make changes to the operating system, Macs require an administrator password which gives temporary root access. Windows, on the other hand, does run at super user level by default (afaik) so once a hacker has opened it up, the whole computer is theirs. Vista has the “improvement” with its infamous warnings as depicted here.
Mac Users have got used to seeing strange downloads automatically appearing when they go to some websites. The resulting .exe files mean nothing to the Mac and are usually the result of going to sites where a message suddenly appears telling you your computer is vulnerable to spyware and would you like it to check things out for you. The download starts without permission but that’s all. On a PC it would probably join the growing malware, worms and viruses on unprotected computers.
But that’s old news.
+++++++++++++++++
UPDATE
+++++++++++++++++
Latest reports say it is a QuickTime vulnerability that allows a client-side Java error to execute arbitrary code when a Java-enabled browser visits a malicious website. Solution
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