Posts by Scott Broukell

Oh dear, Capita: MPs put future UK.gov outsourcing in the spotlight

Keep Calm and Carillion

<see title> that is all.

PPI-pusher makes 75 MEEELLION nuisance calls, lands £350k fine

There need only be ONE telemarketing law - it's all illegal, now go away!

Microsoft wants to patent mind control

Re: Isn't any control interface ultimately a brain control interface?

@ Crisp - That's what they want you to think!

I thought of it first.

Surely this sort of interfacing is going to require an unfeasible number of "Are you really sure you want to do this?" dialogue boxes! Together with some "Are you really, really, really sure you want to do this?" - for the absent-minded and downright malicious. I mean thoughts travel so much faster than clumpy fingers on a keyboard etc.

Everything running smoothly at the plant? *Whips out mobile phone* Wait. Nooo...

JUST STOP IT NOW!

Perhaps this is an area which seriously requires a regulator, harsh financial penalties and vetting (of both equipment and software) - anybody caught using insecure hardware/software that does not appear on the `approved' list should be taken out and shot!

The Register Lectures: Deception, Spitfires and the end of the road….

Deception detection - It's a trap peeps! You have been warned!

Enjoy and have a beer (see icon).

Microsoft's 'Surface Phone' is the ghost of Courier laughing mockingly at fanbois

"I can't see it taking off" Nor can I, any attempt to do so would surely place far too much stress on those hinges. But I won't get into a flap over it.

UK.gov told: Your frantic farming of pupils' data is getting a little creepy

Settle down everybody, settle down, now, would all the year one boys line up on that side of the hall and all the girls on the other side please. Chop, chop, please hurry up. Now then, the girls will all get a pink barcode tatooed across their foreheads and the boys will get theirs in blue. Does anybody have any questions? Good, then we will begin.

UK lacks engineering and tech skills to make government's industrial strategy work – report

This is what more than fifteen years of turning further education into an industry to pump out peeps with degrees in hair dressing and video gaming results in. 15 years making every technical college in the land into a bright new glossy university and promising the world to young people without very much of a clue from either side. Instead of promoting the positively vital skills of engineering, construction, medicine, building, computing, nursing, heating, plumbing etc etc. It is these skill sets that should be held up as positive examples for young folk just as much, if not more so, than the output of Oxbridge institutions, or indeed any attempt to emulate them. Then running a continuing program within those industries whereby talent for higher management levels / all levels, can be nurtured and developed. The 'coal face' is where the real action takes place, it's just that we get distracted by the shiney shiney time after time after time.

Apple looks forward to wiping $47bn off its overseas profit tax bill – thanks to US shakeup

I can't really envisage such a large and global business putting all it's apples in one basket, no matter what bait is dangled in front of it.

Does UK high street banks' crappy crypto actually matter?

Shoulder surfing

This is something that bothers me, more so since, for some time, my local branch sprouted loads of 'user' screens, where customers are encouraged to login so as to perform regular banking tasks. These screens are so positioned as to make the contents visible to all and sundry across the entire vestibule! I am seriously considering taking along my own pair of clip-on bicycle mirrors next time, in order to keep a wathcful eye on any nosey blighter showing too much of an interest in my on-screen activity.

Mm, sacrilicious: Greggs advent calendar features sausage roll in a manger

Re: “Pie love thee, Lord Jesus”

Surely that should be "Lard Jesus" ?

Brit moron tried buying a car bomb on dark web, posted it to his address. Now he's screwed

Judging a book by it's cover

"He's assuming that because the guy is brown" And therein lies the problem, because if you were to open up any of us humans, be it with a machete, an IED or on the surgeons table, you will find that we are ALL exactly the same colour on the inside. Yet the wrapper is what gets our attention and not the shared contents. Quite when humanity, as a whole, will be able to get over this apparently built-in bias towards some really quite subtle external differences is increasingly difficult to tell, but I feel sure that the primitive tribalism and deluded religious belief systems which we continue to exhibit will keep us all held back from progress for some time to come.

'Screaming' man fined $149 for singing 'Everybody Dance Now'

Maybe he was also wearing a loud shirt in a built-up area.

National Audit Office: We'll be in a world of pain with '90s border tech post-Brexit

1990's - Paperwork

I'm fine with this. All those entering or exiting the country will be required to attend the port of entry/exit 8-hours prior to checking in so as to complete reams of paperwork whilst under the beady eyes of trained customs/border staff, every drop of sweat, however small, upon their foreheads will be duly noted and the paperwork cross-checked and sent to the basement for working storage/retrieval. In this manner a very careful and thorough check of whose is who, going where, can be fully maintained and I would defy any even slightly jittery ne'er-do-well, lunatic or devilish scamp to pass through with success.

Pulitzer-winning website Politifact hacked to mine crypto-coins in browsers

Wait, what . . . you mean to say that there actually is 'fact and accuracy' to be found in political speak! No wonder they won a prize for finding that!

Foiled again! Brit military minds splash cash on killing satellites with... food wrapping?

And not for the first time - during WWII Bomber Command used strips of foil which were dropped in large clusters to confuse German radar operators, it was code named 'window pane'.

Finance sector is littered with vulns, and guess what – most can be resolved by patching

True enough. I suppose that when the banks etc begin to 'engage with their customers' regarding increasing amounts of compen$ation as a result of sloppy apps, only then will they get off their fat arses and actually do something about it (IT).

More data lost or stolen in first half of 2017 than the whole of last year

Re: You mean more detected loss?

My dear Cheesy, sadly, from such data, it would appear that overall we all lost more manage.

Farewell Cassini! NASA's Saturnian spacecraft waves goodbye for its Grand Finale

To be known henceforth as the Crashini Probe?

Boffins: 68 exoplanets in prime locations to SPY on humanity on Earth

In my neck of the woods the fuzz recently stopped a load of illegal aliens in a transit van, so I think they are already here, is that any help ?

France to tack weapons onto spy drones – reports

Ower dronz weel fart in your general direktion, ha!

'Driverless' lorry platoons will soon be on a motorway near you

@ wiggers - True, I should perhaps have said promote / push for, rather than imply that it would be solely up to the Government to do all the investing. As vehicle manufacturers have at last woken up to the development of electric / hybrid cars and lorries, one can only hope that with the right prodding they will take up the challenge and all rush in to take their market share in the new tech application of moving heavy stuff around. It's the Green electricity generation bit that needs a far far far greater push in the right direction, perhaps if vehicle manufacturers provide that growing vehicle investment, they will also put funds into generation. (No, too idealistic perhaps).

"ways of making the lorries more efficient, saving fuel, lowering emissions and improving air quality"

How about investment in electric lorries and green electricity production - just a thought. This platoon / convoy idea is not what UK road haulage either needs or wants from a user perspective, just a cheap means for those in office to brag about being 'Green' when it's a mere sticking plaster tinged with green. It's would seem an idea more suited to roads systems spanning millions of hectares of broad flat lands.

GPS III satellites and ground station projects get even later as costs gently spiral

Kernel - Thank you for that insight, it will however take me some time to tell my relatives about it.

GPSIII - mmm, does that mean your device gives you three possible locations for where you might be at any given time ? (just asking)

Cops harpoon two dark net whales in megabust: AlphaBay and Hansa

Oh botheration! Just when I had discovered the means to access the dark web - by turning the monitor brightness up to and beyond 11.

WannaCry prompts promise of extra cash towards NHS security

" ... patients a digital service that lets them see who's accessed their health records"

A digital service that allows world+dog to see world+dogs medical records.

There, FTFY

It's time for a long, hard mass debate over sex robots, experts conclude

Update Update

Now the cleaning lady has turned up and let herself in, something that is not meant to happen outside of my work hours! Anyway, they've all spent nearly two hours in the bedroom having a three-way and the cleaning lady is now drinking smoothies in my kitchen with a wistful gleam in the eyes and a big smile across her face!

Any way, I've phoned an old flame and she has agreed to let me move back in with her and, given the circumstances, we are most seriously going to make things work out for us again, phew! What a waste of money!

Update

I've just returned from work only to find that she has used the iThing squawk box and gone online to order a male Sexbot of her own, using my credit card details! Not only that, he's, well, bigger than me and, well, a lot bigger than me. She says its the only way she could be truly satisfied and they've now taken over most of the flat so that I am reduced to a corner of the lounge and the sofa! Please make it stop!

Would you bloomin believe it, my own Sexbot arrived just over a month ago and within two weeks it started dropping heavy hints and then came out with 'I have more respect for you as a friend and value that friendship more than any sexual relationship we might have'. I mean I know these companies all claim to make the things hyper realistic but that just takes the bloomin biscuit! It now stubbornly refuses to return to the factory and the company blames' user error' and say that everything is mechanically / electronically fine and that we just have to work through it between us.

Time to rethink machine learning: The big data gobble is OFF the menu

My thoughts are pretty much the same as many of the above. In other words one should very much heed the old axiom Garbage In = Garbage Out. Call me a cynic, but I feel the push of hardware vendors to sell ever faster, more expensive, boxen on which to run the new shiny shiny, must-have, ML / AI. An increase in the power consumption doesn't automatically get the promised results.

Sadly, there will come a time when that old axiom is long forgotten and no matter what output the machine gives it will be taken as shiny shiny silicon truth and as such it will trounce the individual human bean and rise to supreme dominance. <rant over = goes back to building off-grid shack in the woods>

NASA: Bring on the asteroid, so we can chuck a fridge at it

I'm not entirely sure that they Oort to do this. I mean if you piss off the baby asteroids then their larger siblings and otherwise related seriously large lumps of rock and ice might come looking for you!

UK Parliament hack: Really, a brute-force attack? Really?

90 . . mmm . . does that constitute a working majority in the house? Can we expect details of all policy matters under discussion to be emailed to every UK citizen at least 50 times a day. Is this how eGovernment works? Questions must be asked.

NASA? More like NASAI: Brainy robots 'crucial' to space exploration

And . . .

If we talk nicely to the AI machines they may just agree to take some powered human (in 'just add some water' form), along for the ride to find a suitable planet with said ingredient, so that we can spread the human colonization of the universe and broaden our mining and energy industry potential etc.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has resigned, says report

Kalanick irrigation

<see title>

Oxford profs tell Twitter, Facebook to take action against political bots

Democracy is also rather dependent upon people being able to think and make judgements for themselves. Or maybe it's just easier to follow the flocks as they sail by on social media. From youth I was always encouraged to, and still do, read a broad range of material (mostly newspapers, as mentioned above), and strongly advised to take everything with a pinch of salt. Salt is a vital dietary requirement but I can see that following the vast amounts of questionable material that is spewed out on social media would very likely only lead to potentially fatal quantities of said salt being taken. A vicious circle indeed, or maybe a vortex of democro-cyber-doom. Dangle anything in front of folks eyes (screens), these days and you will get many bites, phishing scammers know this very well.

We're not saying we're living in a simulation but someone's simulated the universe in a computer

Core Blimey !

I rubbed both my eyes for only a couple of minutes and achieved exactly the same affect. Does this mean that my brain and optic nerves combined have vastly more computational power than 9000 Gigaflopping GPUs ?!

(Note: aspirin and a brief lie down in a dark room are recommended for those considering trying to repeat my experiment)

Two hot Jupiters around two similar stars orbiting at similar distances look similar, right? WRONG

"And the sodium sulfide and potassium chloride precipitation is now getting heavy enough for the groundsmen to bring on the covers so there will be yet another short interruption in the days play" - some things never change where ever you are in the universe.

Boffins play with the world's most powerful X‑ray gun to shoot molecules

Re: I used to be a MALDI-TOFfer

Interesting, but isn't that the way that burger meat get produced these days ?

Internet of snitches: Anyone who can sniff 'Thing' traffic knows what you're doing

iTWATS

i - internet

T - Things

W - Without

A - Any

T - Twatting

S - Security

Flying robots are great... until they meet flying humans, anyway

I can't envisage humans controlling their own micro-aircraft, I mean, what could possibly go wrong. But I can image low altitude airspace being computer controlled and therefore the AI of each manned/unmanned micro-craft interacting with the central controller to avoid vertical/horizontal crossover incidents.

Then again, if and when the low altitude airspace of our towns and cities is to become populated with such devices, I very much think shall be heading off for a 'crofter' existence in the Hebrides.

French fling fun-sized fine at Facebook for freakin' following folk

So mistaken

No, no, no .... we was only sweeping up the teeny-tiny trails of user data left behind as they surfed the webs your honor. The merest crumbs of data left in the wake of a personal journey across the webs, yer honor. Nothing to be bothered about. I mean you don't want all those untidy itzy-bitzy bits of data left lying around do you, making the internet looking all untidy and that. It's good house keeping it is, that's what it is your honor.

SpaceX settles $3.9m shift pattern class action lawsuit

Working in such an industry you would think that keeping workers rested and fed would maybe reduce the chances of e.g. a tired and hungry employee failing to fit a safety widget correctly and hence, might lead to better outcomes going forwards, or going upwards and down again at the very least!

Amazon announces new Echo just as Microsoft's first Cortana-powered clone breaks cover

(post script)

On the other hand I am also tempted to develop an off-line AI assistant of my very own. I would call it the 'Rant-O-Bot' (TM) and keep it in 'My' shed. So that when the rest of the family are ignoring me by being absorbed in the latest drivel to come out of the Hollywood film industry, I could just tootle off to said private wooden structure, switch the thing on (in default late-night pub mode of course), and engage in a debate rich in profundities of almost certainly staggering proportions. Mind you, it would make more sense to just take the dog for a walk, again.

I'm tempted to buy all the available gadgets of this ilk and lock them away in the basement, where they can merrily chat away to each other, removed from all useful human activities.

US military makes first drop of Mother-of-All-Bombs on Daesh-bags

The president is reported to have found himself at the same time both very bigly impressed and also terrified at the specification for the MOAB. It is his understanding that it is capable of sucking all the hair out of the atmosphere.

<mines the one with 'Making Wigs for Dummies' in the pocket>

Aviation regulator flies in face of UK.gov ban, says electronics should be stowed in cabin. Duh

Re: Cabin security isn't about safety

@ Haefen - Dancing maybe, but don't forget the shopping, lots of shopping, lots of bargains, shop shop shop then fly and then hurry back for more of the same soon.

Half a million 'de-identified' patients records to be shared in Bradford

"safely stored at Bradford Teaching Hospital" - yeah, for at least ten minutes.

Point-and-pwn tool for posers dumbs down ransomware spreading

"Ransomware-as-a-Service" - I was under the impression that several major global corporations had upticked that particular box of tricks ages ago.