See you after the commercial breakdown: Cert expiry error message more entertaining than the usual advert tripe UK broadcaster ITV came under the baleful gaze of bork over the weekend as an unexpected expiration left its online player shorn of those precious advertisements. Today's televisual treat was spotted by a Register reader, keen to enjoy the delights of ITV Player on his 2018 JVC Smart TV. Rather than seeing the same old adverts …
the company has said it "unifies all advertising channels – including TV, programmatic and social – across all formats and devices, providing marketers with streamlined, advanced media planning capabilities powered by in-depth analytics and proprietary audience data."
Something as useful for the Humanity as the Black Death
"Something as useful for the Humanity as the Black Death"
Oh I don't know - given some of the stupidity being shown by idiots crowding on beaches and protest marches during the Covid-19 Pandemic, the Black Death (and Covid-19) could be seen as a form of Darwinism in action.
Unfortunately Covid-19 has also hit a lot of people who don't need a smack with a Cluestick to realise gathering in large numbers and leaving their crap everywhere because taking it away or leaving it in a bin is too fucking hard for their tiny minds to cope with (yeah, I live in a coastal town that "enjoyed" the "benefits" of those assholes descending en masse and it makes me seriously consider petitioning my local MP to bring in retroactive birth control).
Also, it's important to name your children! It greatly increases their chance of dying horribly if you don't!
You may that most people have names, but the number of times it's reported that "A man, who has not been named, was found shot yesterday", or "A couple, who have not been named, died in a car crash yesterday."
KEEP YOUR CHILDREN SAFE - GIVE THEM NAMES!
Herman, it's even sillier than that.
Example that I just saw the epidemiological numbers on this morning and did some back-calcs to confirm:
If Australia had had the "catastrophic" COVID-19 death rates of the USA, we would so far be looking at a "catastrophic!sackTrump!" fatality count of around 10,000.
All countries routinely have "bad flu seasons". A routine term routinely used by the doctors and hospitals.
Australia's last bad flu season was 2017/2018, and 49,000 people died over and above the usual routine flu deaths. "Excess Deaths".
Bad flu: +49,000.
COVID-19: +10,000 and the screaming hysterical end of the world as we know it.
W.S.Gosset said:"Australia's last bad flu season was 2017/2018, and 49,000 people died over and above the usual routine flu deaths."
I'm half with you but those figures seem high - the UK figures I looked at for deaths attributed to flu over each of the past few years fluctuated between 12000 and 28000 a year, and this in a population of 65m vs the 25m in Australia.
Also, given the extra measures taken to combat this new virus (and that we've not yet had it for a year), complaining that the number of deaths mean it can't be that dangerous seems, well, a little bit like when people say 'nothing bad happened with the hole in the ozone layer so why did we panic and ban CFCs etc'?
(genuinely interested in the Aus stats - do you have a source?)
Re your apples& oranges point, I agree with you in general (I just put the quick large-scale comparo point in because it's also valid, as a lot of epidemiologists have tried to say, and as Sweden has proved: they stated 2wks ago they'd returned to normal population death rates).
That's why I started with the low-level medical reports and research, which I've been following since early March. Which all say max 0.5% mortality (0.1% for flu), ~0 for under-60yos (opposite pattern to flu), and that's based on garbage testing. Any time they do a blind wholesale testing of a population, they discover the virus has already smashed thru and is continuing, without symptoms (so not picked up in the normal testing/formal infection rates, so the 0.5% is over-inflated due to incorrectly low denominator).
And the measures are a bad fit for this virus. Eg, don't wash your hands/surfaces, wash your feet/floors. Even in COVID-19 Isolation Wards, ~0 virus on hands, doorknobs, or surfaces, but the floors and feet are soaked in virus (the original WHO report on disinfection pointed out you were better off rubbing your dry hands together than using sanitizer). Eg, open the schools and pubs but isolate the old & ill (heart & diabetes). 87% of Italy's deaths over 80yo, UK's deaths massively inflated due to the panic emergency evacuation of old & ill people out of the hospitals predicted to be swamped, into old people's homes etc, taking the infection with them right into the heart of the most at-risk. Etc.etc.
Hi W.S.Gosset, I'm the guy that queried the 49000 Aus flu deaths. Looks like article is from the Australian but it's behind a pay wall. Aus govt stats on excess deaths for 2017/2018 are way lower, flu deaths are way lower.
You said:
"max 0.5% mortality [for COVID-19] (0.1% for flu)"
So it's 5x, or 500%, as dangerous as flu except it's better at spreading, no vaccine for the vulnerable and no herd immunity so it'll rampage through the population.
So for a ballpark figure we could say that, if we did nothing, 60% of the population would get it and 0.5% die... so maybe 200,000 deaths in the UK and 234,000,000 over the world.
234 million seems high. Is my maths wrong?
200,000 seems low compared to where the UK is now... kinda like we've not done well.
My thoughts on the virus is that this isn't the 'big one'. Airborne like measles, deadly like MERS (30%?), lethal for the young like 1918 flu, mutating like the flu so vaccines have to be constantly developed each year. Society got off lightly with COVID-19.
But still, my parents are 70. Maybe a 3% chance of death? I'd really like it if they, and the people around them, would take care until we've got a vaccine.
I hope you & your loved ones stay safe, and stay well.
Take that is a down vote from you Gosset. I take my data from the ABS, lets see.
2017: https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by Subject/3303.0~2017~Main Features~Deaths due to influenza~5 : exact number, 1255, a significant increase over 2016s 464 deaths.
2018: https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/3303.0 : 3102 deaths (includes pneumonia)
Still rummaging through bins and my piles of KeepThis tear-outs looking for the article quoting numbers, which itself cited its sources, which seemed valid to me at the time of reading. And I'm fussy about that sort of thing. Ex-researcher.
Interrupted massively by the irritations of ordinary life requirements.
I remember folding over the corner of the page for later tear-out but don't remember tearing it out. Nasty feeling it's in a recycling dump by now.
Can't hit the library for old copies like I've had to do before because they're all effectively closed.
I did do a quick web scan on seeing your comment and saw the same numbers. I *have* seen that syndrome before on high-meme items and they were false (eg, NHS announcements of stats&numbers falsified by their own deep low-level data that they assume noone's thorough enough to dig for), but without the original source I'm not willing for something so trivial to put in the time required to re-establish the reality baseline. I continue to hunt for the hard-copy.
The key point, hammered by epidemiologist after epidemiologist, is that the hysteria is massively overdone.
Sweden being the blindingly obvious categorically empirical and heuristic example.
Oh but yes, that downvote was mine. Then thought to do a quick webcheck of your numbers and realised that regardless of facts your post was valid based on what you'd looked at. Problem: no way to remove the downvote. So, sorry about that.
Apologies. I am just so far past patience with the hysteria. And the deliberate lying to "prove" virtue memes. I mean, check (the most recent) Lancet-gate. Deliberate falsification of data just to try to make Trump look silly. Used to take YEARS for the memesters to get the confidence/arrogance to do that; now, what, 3 months? Luckily this one was caught out early and loudly, and in fact that treatment (HCQ+AZM) is being rolled out. _Centenarians_ ("with several co-morbidities") in intensive care routinely surviving.
Remember, up till now, just being an octogenarian 20yrs younger and reaching intensive care, COVID-19 was basically a death sentence.
Or to put it another way: the TDS psycho anti-Trumpsters are responsible for the bulk of the USA COVID-19 deaths. Since their political campaign quashed every medical group's willingness to risk their entire career by going with the experimental data rather than the meme.
THIS sort of thing is what gets me angry.
But yes, you're right: that's no excuse for me getting sloppy. I continue to hunt for my source document.
"Sweden being the blindingly obvious categorically empirical and heuristic example."
Of what, how not to do it?
Sweden currently have over 5600 dead attributed to COVID19 and over 77000 known infected, with a population of a little over 10,000,000, 1 in 15 tested. Deaths from flu last year (was a bad year too), 505 (2700 if you include pneumonia) out of 13575 cases.
Norway, population of a little over 5,400,000, has 255 deaths attributed to it and a little over 9000 known infected, 1 in 14 tested.
Denmark, population of 5,800,000 people, little over 600 deaths attributed, 13100 infected, 1 in 4 tested.
There's the other little matter about Sweden - not only is their death rate through the roof but it hasn't bought them anything - their economy is just as damaged as it would have been if they'd locked down.
It's almost as if economies are emerging properties of societies, not mystical deities to whom sacrifices must be made.
1) Countries do all these drastic things to reduce the pandemic.
2) Pandemic isn't as bad as it could have been.
3) Less informed Register posters say that things aren't so bad, and it's all mass hysteria.
It reminds me of "You tech guys panicked us all into paying lots for Y2K fixes, yet nothing happened", although in the Y2K case, we can laugh about that.
Not The Nine O'Clock News got there first!
I remember that programs on Ch4 marked with a red triangle promised much but delivered little. From the amount of fuss at the time, you would have thought the programs would involve all sorts of hairy (or shaved) shenanigans, but it was invariably some interminably dull foreign-subtitled dross with a flash of hairy minge half way through.
Too much information, Little Mouse.:-) Pray Continue. What did you learn about yourself with that noble experiment? Anything Insatiably Satisfied and therefore also Verged and Merged and Subsumed to a Practically Almighty Force Drivering Raw Hard Core Source Applications/SMARTR Program Promotions/Top Money Spinning Presentations ...... Virtually Copied From/To Another Quite Surreal Place.
Have you ever been there? In Another Quite Surreal Place, Basking in the Views Entirely of One's Own Choosing, or alternatively Spun from the Minds of Others as the case may be whenever gloriously smitten and besotted with quests and requests rewarded with Luscious Loving Acts with Virgin Team Players ? And where Practising the Captivating Arts for Full Bodied Asset Capture/UHD4k Recording is Default De Rigueur du Jour
Now that Thoroughly Modern Madam's Little Black Book and Film Archive would be worth more than just an enormous fortune or two, methinks. And many times more valuable again when and/or where the contents can be guaranteed and insured to never ever see the light of day again.
I remember one of my schoolfriends announcing that he was getting a television in his bedroom. This meant he told us he could watch all the 'red triangle' films on Channel 4 unimpeded by his parents. He watched the first one after he got the set and was deeply unimpressed. It was an art house film and there was one exposed (female) breast at one point half way through. Worse he'd missed it because he was bored and was channel surfing through the three other channels when it happened.
I had an old colour tv hooked up to my BBC Model B computer as the monitor. Meant I could also watch anything unbeknownst to my parents.
However, with HTTP Strict Transport Security your browser developers decided you are not allowed to bypass the error screen which proves to be extremely annoying/frustrating for responsible admins who still need access to that page in critical situations. Thank you very much Mozilla and Chrome for interposing between us and our jobs, you can't imagine how much hate this can bring against your developers.
> However, with HTTP Strict Transport Security your browser developers decided you are not allowed to bypass the error screen
That's not actually true.
In Chrome, when you hit that error page, type badidea and it'll be bypassed. Not intuitive though.
But, to be fair, it's not actually the browser's fault that you can't bypass the screen, all they've done is implement the advice in the RFC - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6797#section-12.1
I'm fed up. Mobile and desktop systems - and the programs that run on them are getting more "consumer friendly" - I.e. being dumbed down with more and more options removed.
In reality, that doesn't help the consumer at all. And they could make options morr hidden if they wanted.
1) Chrome, android - no longer able to permanently set to "desktop site" - why do designers of "mobile sites" think we are still using WAP-like devices? (Looking at you, Wikipedia) -- El Reg is one of the few notable exceptions.
Adding insult to injury, most mobile web sites don't let you zoom in on the page, whilst the desktop does.
2) Chrome - no longer able to disable that obnoxious thing that arses around with the url box when you try to edit it (causing you to have to make an extra unnecessary click to do it)
3) Chrome - stripping the "www" from the URL. Dumb dumb dumb assumption.
4) Email clients / web interfaces in general - doing more to hide the less spoofable information, and making "viee raw headers" even harder, if not impossible - to find.
5) Android - Particularly since version 5 - lollipop, becoming less and less usable as an OS.
More and more app-permissions being removed. Turning into an iphone clone.
My current systems are underpowered. I have the money to spend, and want to, but there is literally nothing out there to upgrade to.. (Fortunatel I can keep upgrading my unix systems, but... "it's the apps, stupid".
That's the thing that bugs me with ITV player, its exactly the same adverts each break, especially the one of what looks like a fugitive fleeing someone, across mud flats.
Back in the ahem....70's we had this one, which was played to the best of my knowledge only the once (Saturday Night) in it's entireity, every commercial break in stages to its conclusion.... around 9.45pm.
Icon & Ad- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH5rC1NJ-54
> That's the thing that bugs me with ITV player, its exactly the same adverts each break
All4 seems to be doing much the same at the moment, or at least, Apple seem to have paid them to absolutely saturate us with adverts for Greyhound (exclusive to Apple TV dontcha know). I hope the fuckers paid an absolute premium to over-advertise to the extent I'll definitely not pay to watch it now
If only Pi-hole ccould take out those ads and replace them with a pink triangle. Better still, over that picture of Ursula Andress walking towards the beach. Repetition would be a bonus. Crazy to remember how steamy that image seemed back then ...
Funnily enough, my pihole was briefly blocking some of their ad domains actually.
It led to some *severe* misbehaviour. You'd be watching Four-in-a-bed, and it'd come to an ad break. The app would sit there for about 30 seconds, fail to load the ads and then dump the episode back to the beginning.
Just to make it worse, if you tried to skip forward (having to guess where you were up to, of course) it'd try and load a new ad break...
If you opened the app on your phone (I was chromecasting) while it was getting stuck, sometimes it would recover and play the next bit.
There's all sorts of unfair angst hits these forums about developers and the quality they churn out, but the more I use All4, the more I think their devs don't get nearly as many complaints as they actually should. It really is packed full of irritating behaviours, including an occasional - but persistent - refusal to record which episode you last watched (problematic now that some bright spark collapsed all of F-I-A-B into a single monolith series rather than seperating by year like they used to).
But it's (usually) on the same network as devices that do have that data (potentially including a wide-open NAS in some households) and makes a convenient, and hard-to-deal with (for the owner) pivot point. And that's assuming that crooks are only interested in getting at your banking data - they're not, and are just as happy to enrol your TV into their DDoS service.
If you need help imagining a scenario
- Attacker manages to poison DNS for the advertising domain, or otherwise establish a MiTM position
- Serves up a video containing an stagefrightesque exploit
- TV opens reverse shell back to attacker's C&C and does whatever
With actual cert validation, the attacker would need to be capable of presenting a valid, publicly signed cert - not impossible, but presents a significant additional barrier. Without it, they can set up their MiTM using a snakeoil cert
Given the IOT industries famous lack of fucks for security, if anything, these devices need *more* care not less.
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