[Dave Rice]

Huawei being Chinese were always suspected of having backdoors to the Chinese military and were banned from US government projects. The rumour is the only problem was that the backdoors were put there because US spooks wanted to spy on everyone and the Chinese outfit was just doing what it was told.

Another story is that Huwaei actually knew nothing about it claiming it would be corporate suicide. According to Snowden the CIA had long compromised Huwaei’s corporate servers and had the source code so just put their own in.

BT actually uses Huawei for its C21 network and was criticized by HMG for doing so although HMG offered to evidence that there were any back doors.

So you can make your mind up if MI5 were removing Chinese and / or US spyware or introducing their own.

[Dave Rice]

I’m not sure diversification is the key, that after all is what Toshiba did. And Tesco. In fact Tesco couldn’t make their core business work outside of their home geographical area.

Many others are going back to their core competencies. Sometimes you think why on earth did X buy Y?

[Dave Rice]

Has it actually stopped?

My workshop PC update seemed to go OK, but on a reboot after the 4 blue squares the monitor went out of range. Luckily I have TightVNC installed on everything so from another PC I remoted to it. The resolution now only went to 1600 x 1200 and not 1920 x 1080 and it had set that, which the monitor couldn’t cope with (I’ve had these issues before with this KVM switch).

So I downloaded the latest drivers from AMD which let me create a custom resolution.

[Dave Rice]

Be careful of those crime statistics. There was a case in the local evening paper this week where a street in South Bristol was one of the worst in the country. Top crime by far was shop lifting. There are no shops in the street whatsoever.

Upon being challenged the online provider (forget who) says that some data may come from surrounding streets and there is a major shopping street close by. In fact the street is one of the up and coming areas where you may want to get in and crime is very low (apart from the shoplifters down the road).

@ Richard, Clifton has slipped down the hill and over the docks. Southville and Bedminster are now very much the area to be. Even St Annes is now desirable as it’s just on the limit of being able to walk to work in town. Bristol is now much cyclist friendly too.

[Dave Rice]

That’s the story as I heard it nearer the time it happened from a Brock interview. It’s the same basically just doesn’t mention the falling out. Take “it was uncertain whether Calvert would be taking part” as code for that. You’ll find that events, like Lemmy’s sacking, vary wildly depending on who’s describing them and when, but the gist is the same. This is a band that etas through personnel with many factions, especially at that time.

Found a picture of Bob with the swords.

There’s a good write up of what he got up to over the years Musicians and Mental Ilness, Part One: Robert Calvert http://tinyurl.com/kmgbfl6 See what he did in Paris just weeks before this gig, it was one of the things that lead to Simon House leaving to join Bowie just months later. The occupants of the Mercedes were the rest of the band…

Here’s the Paris incident in Calverts own words http://tinyurl.com/lbph7xu and (about 2/3rds of the way down) from the perspective of the tour manager at the time http://tinyurl.com/mz88ju6

It leads to another version of the Sonic Assassins gig which does ring true http://tinyurl.com/jwfmsha but another one here from the keyboard player http://tinyurl.com/mxtheja

Here we go, video interview with Harvey Bainbridge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usI2pwefhz4 the first 5 minutes is all about it.

[Dave Rice]

It wasn’t just me Les, remember the big mis-selling compensation? More than 5 million were mis-sold. Mine were bought before the cut off date.

Yours did well because the interest rates at that time were high and stayed that way for long enough, nothing to do with an agent. If you went direct the insurance company just trousered what would have been paid in commission. They weren’t better policies.

I know a few people who had them well before us did OK too. The problem was the illustrations were based on just that scenario, continued high interest rates. Various economic crashes did for that and pushed us into negative equity at one time too.

Bridging loans – I’m glad I never needed one, they never seemed to go well for those I know that did. The worst was a neighbour who got caught up in negative equity and had to move for work.

[Dave Rice]

Well you could sell the house to pay the capital at the end, but then you’d have no house and not enough money to buy a similar one.

Probably OK if you live in London and want to move elsewhere.

[Dave Rice]

Endowment mortgages are interest only with the capital paid off at the end by an endowment policy.

The scam (which we got heavily bitten by) was that the projected illustrations of how the policy would perform were deliberately flawed. Most of the first two years payments actually went to pay the commission of the agents who, as you can imagine, loved them. All that money up front.

There was no mention of a repayment mortgage at the time, that was old fashioned. Why would you do that when you could not only repay the capital but have a similar sum again to spend as you wished? Of course it was all a total lie and cost me over £20k.

[Dave Rice]

It’s a complicated formula, but this is a good DIY guide using Excel http://www.wikihow.com/Calculate-Mortgage-Payments

Note the bit at the end, the amortization schedule. EDIT – that’s the bit will tell you the monthly split of interest / capital.

Think of it like the opposite of compound interest. I’m probably going to explain this technically incorrectly, but it works for me ?

At the start your loan is say £50k and you pay the interest on £50k plus a bit to reduce the loan. So the next month you owe the interest on say £49.9k so the interest payment is less. If you keep the payment the same a bit more goes into reducing the loan again. So say the next month you now owe say £49.75k, so that’s less interest and more off the loan. And so it goes on until the situation is reversed and more of your payment goes to reducing the loan than paying the interest.

When I paid mine off I had to get a quote for that day and that day only. God knows how they worked it out as when the endowments matured I paid them in but they didn’t cover the interest they were meant to (which we planned for, but underestimated, by having a larger repayment portion than required). I kept the monthly payment the same when the interest rates dropped to further compensate for the endowments. We were on track to finish owing little to nothing, but redundancy sorted that out with 5 years to go.

[Dave Rice]

The world didn’t do online banking and shopping before encryption.

Encryption units for use with voice calls are easily obtainable, both landline and mobile.

It’s another genie out of the bottle. You can force the big boys to compel via legislation, but to what end? It’d be playing whack-a-mole like so much internet related is. Making it illegal won’t stop the bad boys.

[Dave Rice]

Because the people with the power to stop it are clueless about such things.

Bear in mind that governments want even less security so they can protect us from pedophiles and terrorists.

[Dave Rice]

I think Dan’s on the Linux defensive. Nobody is blaming Linux, everyone is blaming the OEMs. As Ed argues, it’s hard to blame the user. Having said that there was an exploit used in the Ubiquti attacks and that is not cheap Taiwanese crap. It just shows that nothing is invulnerable.

As for auto updating, I have been reading in this months PC Pro about Virtual Box breaking after Linux updates in ways that Windows doesn’t. Ironically it’s because Linux is the “better” o/s model and VB has to rely on it heavily, whereas with Windows it has to provide a lot of it’s own “drivers”. The argument again is that this is all VB’s fault and not Linux, but if the likes of VB can’t manage it what chance is there of the cheap jacks doing it?

The problem with consumer kit is it needs to be extremely robust in all respects and that’s hard enough to achieve with managed kit. Add to that the pressure to make it cheap and you get where we are now.

[Dave Rice]

It’s a huge problem. The Linux we’re talking about is imbedded and internet facing.

It’s always been a worry that the cheap end of IoT would go this way, but until relatively recently even premium kit had generic authentication credentials.

Then you get exploits in even properly locked down kit like the Ubiqiti AirMax kit used in the attacks.

[Dave Rice]

That’s exactly what Hikvision kit does. You cannot use it until you’ve set a strong password.

New cameras can be attached to a DVR which then authenticates them with it’s own password, but that password is then the cameras password if you remove it from the DVR as a standalone.

A lot of the DVRs now have an Android like pattern unlock option too for local login.

[Dave Rice]

Depends if you start the 25 years again or keep the term end date as it is.

If you start again then you’ll be paying for 27 years, so the monthly amount may be less but you’re paying 24 more of them.

If you keep the term the same you’ll have only 23 years to pay off the amount so the monthly payments would need to be bigger.

I remortgaged twice when moving home, but only “started again” with the additional amount, so I had 3 mortgage end dates. That may only have been possible as the first two were interest only endowments – boy did we get burned badly.

I still have the original illustration for the first. Mortgage £17k, endowment would pay out £35k after 25 years. I think it managed £12k. The other one was even worse. A lot of the third (repayment) mortgage went to try and cover the shortfalls and we did over pay for years after the crash, but a large chunk of my redundancy went to pay it off.

[Dave Rice]

I did the Creators update last night, went fine.

[Dave Rice]

That explains the email from Ubiquiti on March 20th.

Ubiquiti takes network security very seriously and have fixed the authenticated command injection vulnerability for all affected products: airMAX, airGateway, TOUGHSwitch, and airFiber; please upgrade the firmware for your devices. Please update the firmware of your devices to the version listed below.
(UniFi, EdgeMAX, and AmpliFi products are not affected)

 

[Dave Rice]

As the guys have said, reinstall W10 using the media creation tool.

It will magically authorize even if you need to use a totally fresh HDD, just don’t ask me how but I’ve done it a few times.

[Dave Rice]

Jason – track 1-11 Over the Top will give you some idea of Calvert s genius. The whole thing is totally spontaneous. Brock and Calvert had had another falling out and Brock was actually playing on Christmas Eve with one of his local Bideford spin off bands, the Sonic Assassins (that’s where Harvey Bainbridge came from).

Calvert had gate crashed and jumped on stage. He started trying to take over, hence the cracks about “band of gypsies” and tried to get Master of the Universe going. He was totally ignored by the band and then started what became Over the Top. Luckily Brock records everything.

[Dave Rice]

@ Jason. Yes Dave Brock has been there from the start. It’s a long and sorry tale at times of falling outs, but it has always been a band that people drifted in and out of. I have tracks with Lene Lovich doing the guest vocals, and it worked! (Angela Android being one).

Rather than the new stuff I’d point you towards the “Bob Calvert” era as I’m sure you’ll appreciate his semantics and Brock was at the top of his game. All the albums at that time were on Charisma. Reefer Madness, Steppenwolf, Spirit of the Age, Uncle Sams on Mars, Robot, Hassan I Sahba, Death Trap, Quark Strangness & Charm, and Flying Doctor are stand out tracks still performed today. At the time they had a stage set called Atomhenge. Later in the set the gaps between the pillars were drawn up to reveal massive spinning mirror shards on which spots were aimed. I’ve seen Calvert in full Biggles meets Lawrence of Arabia gear throwing arabian scimtars into the stage during Hassan I Sahba. There were rarely dancers then, they didn’t need them with Calvert fronting.

At that time they had a brief stint as the Hawklords when Brock was trying a Jefferson Aeroplane / Starship type change. There is a band of ex Hawkwind members called Hawklords actively recording and gigging now that are well worth seeking out, but only Harvey Bainbridge is in common with the line up then and that was only at the very end. But they didn’t choose the name Hawklords to be associated with that era. They are more late 90’s Hawkwind in style and do it very well. Well they would, they were there at the time!

A lot of Hawkwind is free with Amazon Prime including the 1976  -1984 anthology called Spirit of the Age which includes the Charisma days.

[Author]

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