Posts by Elongated Muskrat

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

The razor analogy is a good one

HP printers (especially inkjets) should be considered to be akin to those razors with disposabel heads. Made out of cheap plastic, with flimsy parts, and all the profit is in the consumables.

I'll get tired of saying it eventually, but if you want a decent printer, don't buy an inkjet, and certainly don't buy HP (they gave up making decent printers around the turn of the century). The same goes, to a certain extent, for Samsung and Epson, especially since HP took over doing the drivers for the Sammy ones.

Spend a bit more, buy a solidly built printer that costs more up-front but has cheaper consumables, and get a colour laser unless there is s compelling reason why you need to get an inkjet. Apart from the reliability of print heads (and the eternal clogging / cleaning cycle if you hardly use it), inkjet inks are seldom water-fast, meaning the slightest bit of damp and they run. I've never come across an inkjet printer that wasn't the work of our Lord Satan* himself.

*No I don't actually worship Satan, although I suspect HP executives may. This is for comedic effect, anyone interested in a religious discussion, please direct your comments to dev/null.

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

But if you then say "you've stolen £5," demand that £5 back, and pay it into your bank account, you do have £5 more. This was exactly the result of the Post Office prosecutions - the victims had to "pay back" the money they had supposedly stolen, which means a ledger somewhere must have shown it was missing, which in turn means a balancing entry somewhere must show where it supposedly came from. If this was not the case, then the Post Office ledgers would not have balanced, which I am assuming was not the case, unless they are not held to the same accounting principles that every other organisation is, in which case, why not?

My bad. El Reg's peculiar 10-minute window for editing posts prevents me from correcting it, but s/Venables/Vennals/g.

This just goes to show two things: genuine mistakes do happen, and you should correct them when you find them.

Re: How many fraud and theft cases in the 80s?

I'm pretty sure that GPs (and dentists) are special cases though. Hospitals are, as far as I am aware, owned by the NHS*, and the staff they employ are NHS staff.

*PPP contracts so beloved of the Blair government aside, whereby NHS trusts still have to pay private investors huge sums for the buildings.

Re: How many fraud and theft cases in the 80s?

It's just as unlikely that all 700 were dishonest as it is that none of them were.

This is not true.

Using some best-estimate guesses for the incidence of this sort of crime:

Say, for example's sake, that there is a small, but finite possibility that a sub-postmaster is corrupt. Let's put this at one in 10,000, which is probably an overestimate. From what I can tell from a quick search on a well-known web search engine, there are a little shy of 10,000 sub-postmasters in the UK, so statistically, we should expect one corrupt sub-postmaster, or possibly zero, or slightly less possibly two.

The chances of there being one corrupt sub-postmaster in a random sample of 700 is going to be something like 7% (1 in 700 out of 10,000). The actual odds are higher, because you would expect the investigations team, who were going hell-for-leather trying to find all these guilty sub-postmasters would almost certainly have picked up the one we might expect to see. So the odds of them finding one genuinely guilty party are probably at around 60-80% (let's say a probability of 0.7). The probability of finding 700 dishonest sub-postmasters are that figure raised to the power of 700, which is 0.7 ^700, which my calculator tells me is about 3.7 x 10^-109, or as close to zero as makes no difference. For reference, the number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be somewhere in the region of 10⁸⁰, so statistically, 700 sub-postmasters are 30 orders of magnitude less likely to be all guilty than the odds of picking the right random atom in the National Atom Lottery.

So, in summary, the odds of one of them being dishonest are pretty much infinitely higher than the odds of all of them being guilty, but it's still unlikely, because the figure of 1 in 10,000 is probably a massive overestimate of the incidence of that sort of combined greed and idiocy.

It does raise the question, though: prior to Horizon, had any sub-postmaster ever been caught with their hands in the till embezzling tens of thousands of pounds?

Re: A scandal of epic proportions

Ironic really, since Private Eye generally reports on what is actually observable (they tend to get sued if they don't), and Fortean Times, whilst its subject matter is generally considered to be "out there", typically presents it in a neutral fashion, without drawing conclusions. It's actually a pretty good read, and, having just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at the end of last year, must be doing something right, at a time when many print publications are dying out.

Incidentally, I gave up on my subscription to the New Scientist magazine some years ago, when I found the same subject matter was often being reported in the Fortean Times, at around the same time, if not earlier, and in a more neutral manner. These days, I wouldn't touch NS with a bargepole, since it is owned by the DMG, and I choose not to fund hate speech.

The CPS itself is a pretty dysfunctional organisation (mostly due to funding starvation), but even if it were functioning well, the DPP is not, and never has been, the one that makes charging decisions. In any organisation, those at the top do not hold responsibility for criminal wrongdoing for those further down. If one of an organisation's cleaners nicks a laptop, the CEO isn't responsible. Unless, of course, they were aware of it, and condoned it.

With the Post Office, it's a historical glitch that they can even bring prosecutions on behalf of the Crown. Unlike the CPS, whose sole function is to bring prosecutions for the Crown, this function would (or should) have been an exception for them, and there should therefore be a higher level of culpability for those in charge.

Having said that, I'm not sure Paula Venables is necessarily the one to blame, beyond what appears to be a level of incompetence. There were those below here who were conducting "investigations" and bringing these prosecutions based on scant evidence (and arguably much less than the charging thresholds the CPS applies). Somebody somewhere had made the decision that the computer system was infallible and therefore drawn the conclusion that these sub-postmasters musty all be embezzling cash, despite the lack of any direct evidence of this. An accountant somewhere must have known that those sums of money were appearing out of thin air, as there would have been no balancing ledger entries to account for them, and the investigators must have known that they were seeing a lot of similar cases where there was no evidence of any wrongdoing except a discrepancy in the computer system. There must have been a culture of "looking the other way" whenever anyone questioned any of this, and that almost certainly meant that there were people higher up who knew they were covering up wrongdoing. Hopefully the enquiry will uncover some facts here, and we will know who was genuinely responsible - and we might find it was Paula Venables herself. My money is on it being whoever was responsible for overseeing the prosecutions, in combination of whoever was responsible for overseeing Horizon from an IT perspective, possibly with some political involvement in the form of donations, and probably a cover-up extending to the IT operations of Fujitsu as well.

Of course, until (and unless) we do actually see evidence of what went on, this is speculation. What we can be almost certainly assured of is that a lot of that evidence was destroyed as soon as those responsible got a whiff that anyone knew of their wrongdoing.

Much as I dislike the Tories (for want of using a stronger word than "dislike"), they were not the party in power in 1999, when this whole sorry story began.

I think maybe one of the outcomes of this affair should be an overhaul of how political donations are made (to any party, not just the one in power), and how contracts are awarded. Now, it has to be said that under the Tories, there have been some particularly egregious examples of badly awarded contracts (*cough* PPE MedPro *cough*), so the system is clearly still not working (at least not working in the public's interest, it clearly is working for some people). This particular scandal is, I think, probably symptomatic of a wider culture of political corruption and back-handers, and one that is systemic, not confined to one political party.

First functional graphene semiconductor could power future chips

Interesting stuff

From what I can gather from the article (and I don't have the time or willpower to go and read the source paper), this is doped graphene on a silicon carbide substrate, and the SiC part is still required. I think if they could produce something to this effect with a scalable process and without involving silicon chemistry, this could really be a game changer. As I understand it, the large part of the complexity (and thus cost) of semiconductor production is the need to work with silicon, and silicon compounds, the chemistry of which is awkward, to say the least.

NAT, ATM, decentralized search – and other outrageous opinions from the 1990s

Re: Summary of the NAT Security debate....

I think, as well as the "security through obscurity" aspect, there is the theory of "attack surface", and the more layers an attacker has to go through to reach the attack surface, the more of it is covered.

If you think of the resource the hacker is trying to reach as a sphere, and each layer of security being a layer on top of this, but with some holes in it; the more layers you have, the less likely all those holes will line up. Some have more holes than others (so the NAT layer is probably mostly hole, and the firewall layer is probably only a bit holey). NAT could still conceivably help prevent some attacks, or make some harder, and because you don't know exactly what exploits are going to be used against you, the more layers of defence you have the better; even if some are pretty much ineffective, they may add a marginal benefit in combination with other layers against an unknown attack.

Re: Year End Reminiscing

That doesn't hold true, because it's a trivial observation that the cost of capacity decreases over time, and also that capacity increase on the internet is driven by two things (used to be just one thing): porn, and "influencers" video-streaming themselves. This provides plenty of bandwidth for all the lesser, proper, uses.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Think of the Grid!

I'd suggest that it's your American oven that is crap (in terms of energy efficiency) if it uses 5-6x the power to cook a meal than a British one does. Presumably, you have to open all the windows when cooking to stop your kitchen from being uninhabitably hot.

Driverless cars swerve traffic tickets in California even if they break the law

Re: Driver and insurance should pay

No, I am saying that the liability is generally limited in a way that it isn't for people.

If a person kills someone, there is clear liability, and the end result is usually imprisonment.

If someone dies as the result of corporate actions, it can be a whole lot muddier, and the result is often a large fine, with no individual held responsible. Corporations can, therefore, take the cost of human lives as a cost of doing business, as long as the company executives are good enough at covering their tracks so as to make it impossible to determine who is responsible.

Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

-Edward Norton, Fight Club

Re: Driver and insurance should pay

Follow-on question: has that ever happened, or is their liability limited?

It was apparently Robert Reich who said, “I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”

Re: Driver and insurance should pay

It's only a perversion of capitalism in the sense that this is what capitalism tends towards with no regulation. If the cost of doing business is lower than the money that can be made from doing it, and there is nothing to stop it happening, somebody will do it.

The problem is lack of regulation; if corporations are people, then they should face consequences for bad behaviour like people; the problem is that they are not bound by the same moral codes, or consequences, as natural people, so regulation is required to impose human ethics upon them. Bear in mind, as well, that many actual people in high positions in the business world are pretty obvious sociopaths, if not psychopaths, and the need for strict regulation, to favour people over corporations becomes more apparent. Sadly, the current direction of movement is in the opposite direction, which is why we have things like job insecurity, real-terms pay degradation, and ever increasing massive profits for corporate shareholders.

Now, of course, human nature means that any political system is open to exploitation, but this only highlights the point more: regulation is needed.

Re: Driver and insurance should pay

I don't know, did you read my post. The bit where I mentioned automatic driverless vehicles owned by a corporation. You know, ones without a driver. Good luck sending that summons in the post to NULL or to a corporation. Enlighten me, how does one imprison a corporation?

Oh, ok, they just have to worry about the damages then, so the only calculation they need to do is:

while (profit - (cost_of_running_over_a_pedestrian * frequency_of_running_over_a_pedestrian) > 0) profit();

Capitalism! Yay!

Re: Driver and insurance should pay

Yeah, because that's totally not a licence for rich corporations to run fleets of self-driving taxis that mow down pedestrians and they just pay the fines.

Capitalism doesn't solve problems, it just finds the cheapest unethical solutions to them.

NHS England published heavily redacted Palantir contract as festivities began

Re: Get rid of the NHS

The NHS isn't the problem, it's cowardly anonymous hard-right shills like you.

Re: Money for data

What I'm amazed about is that the NHS is giving data worth hundreds of millions

Not the NHS, "NHS Digital", which is a quasi-governmental body separate from (but with its tendrils within) the NHS.

Re: Money for data

Members of the phylum Porifera have demonstrated the ability to reassemble themselves into complete organisms after being ground into a fine paste (and even back into separate organisms for several pasted up together). I'm not convinced Peter Thiel doesn't know some of the same tricks as sea sponges, so a paste may not be going far enough. Applications of a strong bleaching agent and fire may also be appropriate.

Re: The NHS Federated Data Platform and Palantir: 7 key risks

Surely, you're not likening Peter Thiel to Sauron. Why, the very thought!

Re: The very point at issue?

This brings to mind my personal experience of piss-poor NHS data sharing.

Some years ago, I was unfortunate enough to experience a motorcycle accident. I was, however, fortunate enough for it to be at low speed, and my only injuries were to my pride, and to my shoulder, which was dislocated so neatly, that once the local A+E department had put it back the head of my humerus 4 or 5 centimetres back into its rightful position, there wasn't even any bruising.

Some months later, I received a letter referring me for physiotherapy with an appointment date and time. I hadn't expected this, and didn't request it (I didn't feel I actually needed it). I was certainly never asked if I wanted a referral. However, being a good citizen, I duly turned up at the appointment (sweaty and out of breath, because I'd been round the houses trying to find the right unsignposted entrance in the local hospital complex). The physiotherapist then asked me what I wanted to get out of the physio sessions, to which I had to express my bewilderment. My shoulder was absolutely fine by this point.

Decent communication and proper needs assessments could have saved me the bother of taking time off work, and, more importantly, could have made the appointment available for somebody else who actually needed it.

Re: Maybe

I'd be surprised if it was even transparent to X-rays.

Re: Transparency

Not the NHS, "NHS Digital", which is a QUANGO set up on April 1st 2013, by the Tory government.

It didn't exist under the previous Labour government, so you can hardly try to claim it would have happened under Labour.

In fact, trying to make this, "oh, but they're all the same" claim is the usual sort of FUD one would come to expect from right-wing lie-mongers, to feed into the Daily Heil reader's mentality of "they'd all cut off my balls, so I might as well keep voting for the local Tory to cut them off."

If you can't stop being an idiot, at least try to stop being a useful idiot shilling for a venally corrupt hard-right populist excuse for a government.

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Re: "Has a paper trail saved your bacon? If so click here to send On Call an email"

Ah, yes, the old Tory Prime Minister solution: legislate that the problem doesn't exist.

Re: Jedes Schrift'l ist ein Gift'l

I was going to say something similar.

In English-speaking countries, we have the expression "coming back to bite you," which, I believe, alludes to mistreatment of a dog having eventual consequences.

More broadly, it means that if you do something wrong, or cut corners, your actions will "come back to bite you" (or, in the US variant, "bite you in the ass") and you'll regret it later. Basically, in the sense, that you might think you can get away with it now, but it'll catch up to you eventually.

Re: is 10x $$$ normal?

There aren't ten different physical providers.

If you're lucky you might find three using different infrastructure (e.g. fibre, ADSL, co-ax cable), but I doubt they'll terminate in the same address.

All the multitude of "providers" are, are resellers selling you access to the same length of copper between you and the local BT exchange, or access to their length of fibre / coax. 10 separate BT lines would all come from the same street cabinet, all be in the same bundle, and all go to the same cabinet in the same exchange, so would almost certainly all suffer the same fault at the same time.

Tesla to remote patch 2M vehicles after damning Autopilot safety probe

Re: a sticky brown smear

The former British Empire covers a lot of the globe, including, I believe, the country in which you reside. I don't know whether you were intentionally including yourself (ironically) in that statement, but jerkiness-of-knee is by no means a uniquely English phenomenon, but really part of the herd-mentality nature of humans.

I don't, however, understand how a post about the word-order of adjectives (which is a complex set of rules we subconsciously learn) is a knee-jerk. Have I missed something?

edit - per the British Empire; it once covered ²/₃ of the globe, but ceased to do so several decades before I was, or most of the people here were, born. Its relevance is really limited to an archaic reference. Anyone here who talks about it is an anachronism, and usually old and red-of-face.

I can forsee the next issue - driver suffers a medical emergency and engages Autopilot. Autopilot disengages, as it determines the driver is not behaving responsibly...

In this case, the vehicle should stop. A moving vehicle with an, at best, unconscious driver, is in no way safe.

Re: Autopilot may undermine the effectiveness of the driver's supervision

How does driving full-pelt into the back of a stopped emergency vehicle constitute "enhances safety", one wonders?

Also, why is it that the shills always post as AC? Space Karen, is that you?

Re: In Other News

The comparison to Edison is ironic, because Edison fucked Nikola Tesla over, and now Musk is fucking Tesla over.

If the company's namesake were about today, no doubt he would not be impressed, and if he wasn't a pacifist, would likely be working on a way to put several million volts of high-frequency alternating current though Musk from a distance.

Re: a sticky brown smear

Most people here will never have heard of an O-Level, my eldest sibling was in the last sitting of these, in 1988.

It's a Smear Campaign Against Musk

...are the words we'll be able to make out from the bleating fanboys.

FCC really, truly won't give SpaceX nearly a billion bucks for Starlink rural broadband

They argued that, yes. ISTR there was a matter of seaborne drones losing Starlink network connectivity at the point where they were approaching their target, so this argument does sound questionable. In the fog of war, it is hard to prove anything one way or another, of course, but it sure was convenient for the Russian navy.

The argument remains untestable, so phrasing it as fact is a bit of a leap.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

It's entertainment, because we are on the edges of our seats, biting our nails, waiting for the eventual comeuppance. It's remarkable that it has taken this long so far, but Americans do tend to stretch out series long after they have stopped being entertaining.

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

Probably one of the reasons certain factions are so keen to undermine the ECHR on the grounds of stopping the quantum immigrants who are simultaneously seeking asylum / taking our jobs / living off benefits / stealing our women / etc. etc., but in reality just want to remove rights from the citizens in order to enrich themselves without consequence.

Re: Has Elon ever considered...

Upvoted for the MacAdder reference. The most dangerous man to wear a skirt in Europe.

Re: They do it over there but they don’t do it here …. (Ooh fashion)

If Musk comes over here with his ads, he won’t stand a chance.

Oh no, he'll get told "don't run that ad campaign again in the same form" six months after it has finished.

The ASA have fewer teeth than the front row of a Rolling Stones concert.

Re: Volkswagen should have had these brilliant lawyers in 2015

Ah yes, the old "free man on the land in gaol".

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

Corporations pay corporation tax. People pay income tax. If the group of people doing business and holding onto the money isn't a corporation, then it is a group of people with money, that is subject to income taxes. In most places, income tax is at a higher rate than corporation tax (and in the US, for the amounts of money that corporations deal with, it would appear to be 37% vs 21%). Go for it, I'd love to see Musk's corporations all discorporated and him having to pay the equivalent taxes at a much higher rate. The same goes for all the others, such as Bezos, Zuckerberg, Trump, et al.

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

Why is it that people who like to harp on about free speech are always the first to try to restrict what others say about them, usually through expensive legal actions.

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

Seriously though, why does "the land of the free" not have a law against unfair dismissal, like a grown up, adult, country?

Even here in the Tory-run progressing-towards-the-far-right UK, employers can't just fire people for no reason without opening themselves up to a very expensive tribunal, and damages.

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

Over the years Musk has more increasingly become a cunt.

Is that the case, or has it just become more publicly apparent?

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

I think his rebuttal comprises, "I'm saying that I'm telling the truth, so you can't take me to court to establish whether I'm telling the truth."

Unfortunately for him, he is not the final arbiter of his own truthfulness...

Epic decision sees jury find Google's Play store is illegal monopoly

Re: Breaking up is hard to do x

Edison is actually a great metaphor for google. He invented hardly any of the stuff he claimed credit for, but used extremely mercenary business practices to ensure he was the one who got the credit, and profited from it.

Just like Henry Ford is a great metaphor for Elon Musk...

Re: Breaking up is hard to do x

What's innovative about Gmail? Yahoo's web mail existed 7 years before Google's did, and they were hardly the first.

Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers

Re: Carmack misses the creative packaging and other in-store marketing efforts of the era

I remember the box for the original Amstrad CPC version of Elite. As well as the game (on cassette tape), and the rather thick manual, it also had a quick guide for the keyboard controls, a poster for ship identification, and a novella set in the game universe ("The Dark Wheel").

To be, or not to be, in the office. Has returning to work stalled?

Re: 'the crucial knowledge that only comes from personal contact'

Exactly this. The bit about the lunch hour is also crucial. If I'm working from the office, my options here are to go into the town centre (I live in a city, but the centre is best described as a town centre, because it's that bad), queue up in a busy shop to buy an, at best, mediocre and overpriced sandwich, and then sit somewhere grey and crowded to eat something stuffed full of mayonnaise, salt, sugar, and low quality ingredients.

When I'm working from home, I can pop into the kitchen and prepare myself something healthy and tasty to eat, and do so in the comfort of my own home. I can also use that hour to go to the local independent shops, which are much more useful than the city-centre chain shops, and visit the bakers, butchers, greengrocers and fishmongers which are all within a 10 minute drive, rather than having to go to a busy out-of-town supermarket at the weekend, or in the evenings after work, to buy what is usually lower quality, and often more expensive food (especially fruit and veg). This gives me a much better work/life balance, which in turn makes me less stressed and more productive, while still having more free time, because I don't have to commute every day, or spend a chunk of my weekend doing a weekly food shop. It also means I'm healthier because I'm not eating highly processed food all the time and slowly developing heart disease and diabetes as a result.

But Sir Alan* thinks I should be in a city centre office, so he can continue to make profits from commercial real estate, and he's prepared to pay politicians to say so.

*One example, pick your capitalist rentier of choice.

Re: This Chestnut Again

Yeah, I never got paid any extra for it, just TOIL. I'd rather work the regular hours, and not screw up my sleep pattern, thank you very much.

Re: Remote

If a business doesn't require an "always on" VPN into the corporate network (with appropriate border firewalls), then they are already insecure by default. The internet is insecure, end of.

If you are on a VPN, then all traffic through your home router is encrypted, and you are using the company's DNS. It doesn't matter if it's a honeypot access point set up by a hacker across the street, the network layer can be as insecure as you like if the transport is encrypted.