Posts by Andre Alessi
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Hard News: Meanwhile in Epsom ..., in reply to Jeremy Eade,
Sure but this truth hasn't stopped Epsom voters before. The Crazy gang just seems to roll on , let's hope not for too long.
"Sure he's a crazy racist and not terribly smart besides, but at least he doesn't want to raise taxes!"
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Hard News: Meanwhile in Epsom ..., in reply to Lew Stoddart,
The more critical bio of Banksie is by Noel Harrison, “Banks: Behind the Mask”.
So John Banks is Batman now? Well, he certainly comes across as someone written by Frank Miller...
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Hard News: Angry and thrilled about Arie, in reply to 81stcolumn,
Buses ? I’d rather walk…last time that happened I just got off in the middle of nowhere.
I have a tremendous, almost crippling*, anxiety about getting on the wrong bus. I'm OK with buses I catch every day, but ask me to catch a bus to a part of Auckland I've never been to before and I will spend every single moment staring out the window looking for landmarks and signs to try and determine whether I'm heading in the right direction, complete with elevated heart rate and tensed limbs (ready to leap into action at the first sign of heading in the wrong direction.) For someone who relies on buses to travel it's a fairly significant disadvatage.
* - What's the non-abelist word for "crippling" in this context? My internal thesaurus is momentarily offline.
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Speaker: The great New Zealand phone…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
they don't do that any more, right? Right?
Now it's 1234. Seriously. And that change wasn't made in response to the security breaches above, it was because of an upgrade to the aging voicemail platform, replacing it with a newer version.
However when someone dials in to the mailbox for the first time, it requires that the PIN is changed to something else before anything else can be done with the mailbox, and the mailbox also cannot recieve messages until this happens. This is the case for both landlines and cellphones, as the voicemail platform is the same for both.
Unfortunately, this was during the Gattung era and Telecom’s head PR person was at best unhelpful to deal with when he wasn’t just plain unpleasant. He refused to believe us until we gave some supplied details of a message left for him by his wife on his voice mail (no, we didn’t listen to the message).
Not remotely suprised by any of that, sadly. Telecommunications has always had its fair share of managers who choose to be wilfully ignorant of the nature of the services their companies sell, and how they can be used and abused. They're anti-geeks.
I'm still waiting patiently to hear the first real scandal involving the devolution of Telecom's provisioning tools to 3rd party providers (via Wireline.) It hasn't happened yet (that kerfuffle involving Slingshot/Call Plus last year was more about inappropriately providing unauthorised individuals with read-only Wireline access, not the stuff that could happen.) Those tools could be used in ways that make even the VM hacking we've seen seem minor in comparison.
Full disclosure: I worked at Telecom for a couple of years after the VM hacking story first broke. I wasn't involved in any of the discussions around voicemail security beyond what the entire company heard about it through company communications and the media.
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Hard News: #NetHui: it's all about you, in reply to Lilith __,
Beware children bearing gifts.
Beware children generally. Evil things in deceptive packaging.
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Hard News: #NetHui: it's all about you, in reply to Danielle,
Our Lord of the Finish Tablet
I misread that and thought for a moment we were talking about Juha Saarinen.
/not that sort of "Finnish"
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Hard News: #NetHui: it's all about you, in reply to 81stcolumn,
And if I have a dishwasher but never use it ?
"Lapsed" is the term, I believe. Or "non-practising".
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Hard News: #NetHui: it's all about you, in reply to recordari,
F&P: Pwning privilege since ages ago.
That's going on a t-shirt.
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Hard News: #NetHui: it's all about you, in reply to Danielle,
Does everyone else pack the cutlery tine-side down, or is that just my paranoia?
It’s the only reasonable approach. Dishwasher safety experts agree.
(I am so glad I finally got to use that link in a discussion. I’ve been waiting for over a year!)
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Hard News: #NetHui: it's all about you, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Sure, but having said that, we get pretty bored of having to explain these concepts to people who should know better. And from my perspective as a feminist blogger, few of the sites I write for are 101 sites, and that’s clearly stated – so it gets irritating when someone crashes into a conversation with no understanding of what, say, rape culture is.
I can definitely understand that and see the value in it. I think it's about context, ultimately-one person asks what rape culture means because they genuinely don't know and haven't gotten into the habit of using Google, another because they want to troll, and another because they're aware of what it means in general but can't see how it relates to that specific conversation. Figuring out which of those situations apply is a mammoth task, and I certainly don't envy yourself and Emma and Russell and others who have to do it.