Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Comment: Re:They don't appear to be used much anyway. (Score 1) 110

by Duncan Booth (#43043581) Attached to: Shorter '.uk' Domain Name Put On Ice
Anonymous Coward may be overstating things slightly, but there is an element of truth in what they wrote. Any large business in the UK will register both .co.uk and the corresponding .com: they need both versions to prevent domain squatters muddying their name. So for example if you look at major UK supermarkets: tesco.co.uk, waitrose.co.uk, marksandspencer.co.uk all redirect to the corresponding .com address, Asda let you use either at the top level but all subsequent links are .com. Only Sainburys do it the other way round and redirect sainsburys.com to sainsburys.co.uk.
Smaller companies though may not want or be bothered about protecting their name that way so they pick one or the other. Also international companies like Amazon and Google often use the country specific domains to provide a localised service.

Comment: Re:What's up! (Score 5, Insightful) 186

by Duncan Booth (#42155077) Attached to: Apple Claims Ignorance of Jury Foreman's Previous Tangle With Samsung
Because one of Apple's objections to Samsung's motion to have the verdict overturned is that the information was readily available so Samsung should have known during the trial and therefore they've missed their opportunity to object. If Apple didn't know during the trial it undermines their argument (whereas if they had known and not brought it up it would have been even worse for them).

Comment: Re:Firing in US (Score 1) 582

by Duncan Booth (#39642819) Attached to: Interview With TSA Screener Reveals 'Fatal Flaws'
I'm afraid your argument doesn't really hold water. In the UK an employer can fire someone without a good reason if they've worked for them for less than 1 year (2 years if they employed them on or after 6th April 2012), so there's no disincentive to hiring someone as you can quickly get rid of them if you find you've made a mistake. The protection only means that you can't get rid of them easily if the relationship turns sour further down the line. FWIW, Google's public data page gives US unemployment 8.3% (Feb 2012), UK unemployment rate 8.3% (Dec 2011).

Comment: Re:at the risk of sounding stupid.. (Score 5, Interesting) 228

by Duncan Booth (#39134447) Attached to: Secret UK Network Hunts GPS Jammers
Possible but unlikely. I think at the moment they are just jamming the GPS signal which is really easy to do. To redirect you to another location they have to provide fake signals that your receiver will think are real. You can do that but it requires more sophisticated equipment. New Scientist had an article about GPS jamming last year and one of the more interesting things they suggested was that if you could distort the GPS instead of just jamming it you could cause mains blackouts over large areas of the US. Apparently US power stations use GPS as the reference time signal to ensure that the different power stations keep their generators in phase, so knock a few of them half a cycle out of phase and the entire network could come down.

Comment: Re:For Google, Two-Factor Authentication (Score 1) 238

by Duncan Booth (#36921242) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do You Protect Data On Android?

Right now, before I've had my coffee, I can't think of any reason I'd want to log in to the web browser, either, though I'm sure there are cases. It's probably something to worry about on a case-by-case basis.

I use my Google credentials to access openid enabled sites such as StackOverflow. I think that's the main reason I need to be logged in to Google from my phone's web browser.

Comment: Re:For Google, Two-Factor Authentication (Score 1) 238

by Duncan Booth (#36918756) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do You Protect Data On Android?

For linking your Google account to your phone, turn on two-factor authentication. You can't actually use two-factor authentication to add your Google account to the phone, so you get the option to set up an application-specific password. Though nothing stops someone from reusing this password to access your mail, you can revoke this password at any time without affecting the rest of your application-specific passwords or your main Google account password. If your phone is lost, get to the nearest computer and revoke the phone password. Then if the thief does manage to extract your password, it's useless.

The catch with this is that for two-factor authentication you need the Google Authenticator app installed on some device which is probably your phone. So if someone does manage to break into your phone and extract the main password they've got all they need to get into your account. If you are very careful to use only application passwords on the phone and then you can revoke them all but if you use the main password to login to Google on the web browser then the two-factor stuff has added complexity but not a whole lot of security.

Comment: Making an easy task harder? (Score 1) 86

by Duncan Booth (#36567204) Attached to: Google and MIT Enable Task Transfer Among Devices
Some of the suggestions such as "perhaps you were viewing your destination on Google Maps and want to transfer that to your smartphone" are already trivially easy from Chrome or Firefox. Using Chrome to phone I can transfer my Google Maps view to the phone with a single click. Using the phone to take a photo of the screen sounds like just another way to make an easy task hard for the sake of flashy use of technology.

Comment: Who is going to run your apps? (Score 1) 403

by Duncan Booth (#33702016) Attached to: Should I Learn To Program iOS Or Android Devices?
So far as I know, you can't install an app on an iPhone unless either its a developer's iPhone or your app is in the store. You can install arbitrary apps on Android phones. If you want to write apps that will be of use to your colleagues or the students but not much use to anyone else then you may be best to learn Android programming just so you can distribute them locally without having to submit them to either app store (assuming of course a reasonable proportion of the potential users are using Android). Otherwise, if they're all iPhone users or you want to target both, you might want to stick with writing web applications (or use an environment like Titanium Mobile to develop for both).

Comment: Re:Causes problems with Android (Score 3, Informative) 48

by Duncan Booth (#32140992) Attached to: Google Resolves Gmail Name Dispute In UK
To change the user on an Android phone you need to go into application settings and delete the stored data for "Google Mail", "Google Mail Settings" and "Google Apps", Then reboot and the phone should prompt for your login details. No need to restore anything. At least that worked for me.

Comment: Re:@gmail.com has always worked anyway... (Score 1) 48

by Duncan Booth (#32140110) Attached to: Google Resolves Gmail Name Dispute In UK
No, there are other differences but they are pretty obscure. If you use Google AppEngine then if you have a Gmail address you'll find your Gmail name is reserved so that you can use it as an AppEngine site but nobody else can use it. If you have a Googlemail address your userid is still reserved in AppEngine but you can't claim it. Also when AppEngine first came out it wasn't possible to give a googlemail user permission to manage a site: you could permit a gmail user or someone with a non Google email. They fixed that but there have been several cases where googlemail didn't work quite like gmail on newly released Google applications.

This is for all ill-treated fellows Unborn and unbegot, For them to read when they're in trouble And I am not. -- A. E. Housman

Close