Posts by Elongated Muskrat

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

Re: Maybe he really doesn't care about the money at all

I'd suggest the Saudis want to invest in Twitter because it gives them access to Twitter's data, and thus makes it easier to track down and murder dissidents who try to use it.

Yeah, being a toxic wasteground of ignorance, hate, bigotry, conspiracy theorist nut-jobs and anitsemitism is a sure-fire way to make a success of anything.

Because, if you examine any of those people who loudly proclaim to be "on the right", in anything more than trivial detail, these are the things you are going to find.

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

Advertising has one of two effects on me: I can ignore or skip it, or I rapidly become annoyed and vow never to buy that product.

Obviously, there must be people out there with abnormal psychology who think "wow, great, I want one of those", but those people ain't me.

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

So I'm not sure why he would expect Twitter to provide that service to his business for free.

But that's basically the entirety of Twitter's business model: let people shout whatever they want to everyone in the world at 160 characters or less*, for free.

If it's not someone promoting a business, the vast majority is someone promoting themselves. For some reason, people want to consume that.

*They did eventually up it, yes I know.

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

He's the modern day Edison: steal a bunch of other people's ideas, make obscene profits from it, and then every gullible person on the planet will think you were a genius.

That's not genius, it's just plain old ruthlessness. There's more to life than just getting one over on your fellow man, although there are plenty of arseholes about who are yet to realise it.

200MP smartphone and first premium PC spearhead Samsung's pro push

Re: 200 megapixels?

I got the Xiaomi RedMi Note 11 5G, a pretty capable phone, with a decent camera and perfectly good performance. At less than a quarter of the price of these flagship phones, with their "high end" cameras. It serves my need, and it didn't break the bank.

I strongly suspect that nobody buying a "flagship" Samsung or Apple phone needs a very high pixel count in their images, and I predict that the vast majority are only taking pictures that are going to be immediately downsampled when they post them to Instagram, or whatever the latest social media fad is tomorrow.

The real "creative types" I know use real cameras. They know the important thing is the optics, and colour reproduction, not the sensor density.

Re: You're kidding, right?

Overcharging for less than you need is Samsung's business model.

They learned everything they know from Apple in that regard.

Need a charger cable for that? Sure thing, our proprietary one, made with trade secrets™ so nobody can copy it? For you, £50, mate.

To be fair, I wouldn't buy anything from either of those companies. The only Samsung devices I've ever bought have been a monitor that died after a couple of years, and a TV, on which only one of the three HDMI ports works any more, and the case is so badly made, the internal speaker causes it to vibrate loudly at certain mid-range frequencies. As for Apple, well, I've had a strong dislike of them ever since being forced to use one of their computers back when they were called Mackintoshes and were beige, and found it to be far less capable than the equivalent PCs of the time, and even back then, full of proprietary nonsense designed to tie people in. I know some people love them, because they "just work"*, but each to their own...

*Not if you plug a parallel-port Zip drive into their SCSI port (yes, they used the same connector). That one never worked again. The Mac, not the Zip drive, that is...

Apple sued for promising privacy, failing at it

The marketing department would have to repurpose their cocaine budget to pay for compensation claims.

After a couple of multimillion dollar claims, there'd be barely anything left for the weekend.

Re: Yeah, but nah

If I post something on Facebook, or Twitter, I do so in the full expectation that what I am posting is public. This is not comparable in any way with silent tracking of activity and its collection and collation without the user's knowledge or consent.

They will also have to claim that that data collection is proportionate and necessary to the operation of the app store, especially the aspect where it associates it with an identifiable individual.

Re: The Register trademark

Given Apple's reputed responsiveness towards journos from El Reg (or lack thereof), I think it's probably the latter, and deliberately so.

Re: Advertising can not always be called "marketing fluff".

In the UK, they will promise not to run that advert again, in that form; an advert that they will have not run for six months by the time the ASA attempts to slap their wrist. It truly takes a lot to fall foul of the UK's advertising regulator and actually get sanctioned in any meaningful way.

I don’t have much of an issue with a company that doesn’t promise privacy to any extent whatsoever, using metrics in a legal fashion, within the context as laid out by common law.

I have an issue with it, if they don't get my consent first. And so does EU (and UK, for now) law.

Re: This is "normal" everywhere.

I don't know why you got so many downvotes. You have described pretty accurately how all those advertisers operate. Many of them have an annoying pop-up where you have to "reject all" (the tiny greyed out text next to the massive green "Accept" button which is deceptive enough in itself), but I'm sure plenty don't do this and just vacuum up all that juicy tracking data.

This is, of course, not right, or acceptable, but the internet is full of predators.

You can protect yourself to a degree by using various browser plug-ins, a Pi-Hole and all that gubbins. The bad guys are wily, though.

There is a clear line between data that is required for the functionality the user is expecting, and data that is collected for functionality "behind-the-scenes" that is of no direct benefit to the user.

For example, collecting name and address for a postage label is expected, and acceptable behaviour, collecting information about how long a particular user looked at an advert, and associating it with that user is of benefit only to the person thrusting their advertising in your face, be it Apple, or some other third party. Gathering advertising metrics that are used for statistical purposes and don't (and cannot) associate the "view" with a specific person are "acceptable", in that advertising is ever acceptable, but there is a clear difference.

GDPR has quite a lot to say about what is allowable when collecting data that has an element of personal identification to it, and just because Apple is a US company, doesn't make them (or anyone else) exempt from following the rules of other countries they operate within.

The onus lies on them to gain consent, which must be opt-in, not simply assume consent for activities which benefit them, and require the subject to opt out.

So, to answer your question, "When does the onus come on to the user to stop using something if they want privacy?" When the user decides they no longer wish to be opted in (which they will have explicitly chosen to do), then the onus is on them to opt out. At which point, the company must delete the data they have collected, and be able to demonstrate that they have done so. It is illegal to make the use of any service contingent on the collection of such data, if it is not essential to the purposes of that service, by the way.

Lockheed Martin demos 50kW anti-aircraft frickin' laser beam

And I can guarantee you that the A-10 (from 1977) is going to be a hell of a lot less speedy or nimble than a modern fighter. For example, the F117-A (which isn't even a current generation craft) is twice as fast. I seriously doubt that those have titanium plates bolted onto the bottom.

Re: slow enough for small arms.

Too tall, tank drivers would see it above the treeline and steer clear

It doesn't need to boil a litre of water (which has a much higher specific heat capacity than many other materials), it needs to make a big enough hole through the working parts of an attacking missile / drone / vehicle to cause a failure. A 1cm x 5cm hole through the fuselage of a missile and into the control systems or fuel tank would be enough to make it go off target or go boom. I seriously doubt there are useful missiles up there that have a thick fuselage, because weight is definitely a factor when launching things fast to go long distances.

Similarly, small off-the-shelf drones are going to probably have plastic or aluminium fuselages not more than a couple of millimetres thickness (and probably not even that), military drones and aircraft may be better armoured, but there is always the trade-off between weight and performance / fuel use. Nobody is flying fighter planes or bombers with centimetres thicknesses of armour on them because they would never get off the ground.

To be fair, fog probably doesn't contain much more water than "clear" air, it's just that it has precipitated into tiny droplets rather than being water vapour. The difference between warm humid air, and cold foggy air, is the temperature. Having 50 kW of photons pumped through you is likely to warm you up pretty quickly, and turn the latter into the former, if the laser is tuned to a frequency that is absorbed by water vapour or other common atmospheric components (nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and so on). I would actually anticipate that the laser might be at a wavelength that isn't absorbed by such things. Possibly near-UV.

Re: slow enough for small arms.

And, obviously, ankylosauruses for tanks.

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

Re: Content

"Danger of dearth, 12,000,000 μV control voltage"

(dearth of having a working computer)

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

Re: One Of The Best BOFHs Ever

Could have been improved by bringing the robot up from the storage room in the basement...

Space mining startup prepping to launch 'demo' refinery... this April

Re: How does this work?

The elements might be "pure" as in not chemically reacted with stuff, but your average "space rock" tends to be a lump of lots of tiny grains that have come together. Individually, those grains might be pretty pure, but typically asteroids are conglomerates. Exceptions do apply, but those tend to mostly be lumps of iron/nickel, as iron is the limiting element for nuclear fusion in stars, so the element you get just before the thing goes bang. Heavier elements are created in supernovae themselves, and I think it would be wishful thinking to expect something made inside one of the universe's biggest explosions to come in nice neat pure lumps.

The biggest problem I see with the whole "space refinery" thing is scaling it up. Vapourising a few micrograms of material and separating it out in a vacuum chamber is a lot easier than doing that with even grams of material, let alone tonnes.

Re: How does this work?

The end-game, which is still very much in speculative sci-fi land, is presumably to be able to refine materials to sufficient purity for them to be useful, and then to use those materials to produce goods in situ for other uses in space.

For example, the major cost of putting a kilo of gold into orbit isn't the gold, it's putting it into orbit. The same goes for any useful material that might be in an asteroid, such as platinum or iridium, or even just plain old iron/nickel. If you had a use for those materials in orbit, it might make sense to get them from an asteroid. Of course, you also need fuel to get to/from that asteroid, retrieve the materials, bring them into a useful orbit, etc. But arguably, that could be done with solar-powered ion thrusters, if you're not in a hurry, as long as you can find suitable materials for reaction mass up there in the big black.

WFH can get you 40% salary boost in UK and US tech jobs

Ah yes, the Soviet Union, a great example of a rich nation, and as for China, take a look at the growing and increasingly affluent Chinese middle classes, and they started from a baseline of almost universal poverty.

As for the US approach of "a war on X"; none of the US wars on things have ever yielded a success. All this demonstrates is that declaring war on abstract concepts is a load of old bollocks. If anything, your political system is even more screwed and unrepresentative than ours.

The poor are, on the whole in the UK, poor because their income is low and cost of living is high. Minimum wages and regulation of essential utilities are well within the control of the government, but ours wants to go down the route of neoliberalism, with its concomitant deregulation and privatisation, which drives poverty. By the way, there's a reason it's called Neoliberalism and not Liberalism; a look back at history and what happened as a consequence of liberal economic theory might enlighten you.

20% of pensioners in poverty. Ok, quick google... 22% of the UK population as a whole are in poverty. That works out as 2% better than average. Ok, that's still not great, but it also demonstrates how easy it is to abuse statistics.

It's the government's fault that the average is shit poor in one of the world's supposedly richest countries. A government run by (checks notes) "the generation that came before generation X", if you don't like the term "boomers".

Re: Alright for now, but...

I think the opposite is probably true. I can more easily message one of my colleagues and ask if they have a quiet five minutes and discuss whatever, in confidence, over Teams, than I can in an open-plan office with walls that have ears.

Re: Alright for now, but...

The flip side to that is that distractions from loud and obnoxious colleagues are kept to a minimum when you aren't forced to share an open workspace with them. People can still collaborate via Teams, but doing it in a more structured way reduces interruptions, which in turn reduces coding errors and budget overrun. 5 minutes of distraction costs 30 minutes of productivity.

"Learning by osmosis" is another way of saying "picking up working practices from your co-workers rather than learning them properly," and in my field, people are just as likely to pick up bad habits rather than good ones. What is more valuable is having the time and opportunity to go off and research the correct way of architecting or implementing something. Google is pretty good at finding examples of best practice, and helping you avoid anti-patterns, as is Stack Overflow, which, if used properly, is a tool to find out how to do something, not what piece of code to copy and paste to get your project to compile.

Yes, there is a place for colleagues guiding and mentoring each other, and new hires may benefit from being in the office if they are very green and need constant supervision. For everything else, online collaborative tools and Teams chats and calls provide all the interaction experienced developers need. I'm not prevented from asking questions of my colleagues if I do it through dropping them a message on Teams, or via an email, it just means that their response will be at a time when they don't have their heads in something else, and is likely to be more considered.

If we're talking about which tech companies will be around in ten years' time, then it is going to be the ones that work with their employees to allow them to be flexible, which in turn leads to better productivity, and happier employees. Some will want to be in the office every day, some never. It turns out everyone is different, whodathunkit?

The tech companies that won't be around will be the ones run by the Elon Musks and the Alan Sugars of this world, who have a one-size-fits-all-fits-me attitude.

Ukraine slides closer to NATO with buckets of experience fending off Moscow's cyberattacks

No, it's because nobody wants to put nukes in Ukraine, it would be dangerous, expensive, politically unwise, and ultimately pointless, as the US has perfectly good long-range delivery mechanisms.

Re: re. nuclear weapons can only be considered against existential threats

That metaphorical high window is far more likely to be left open by someone in the Kremlin once they see that Putin is inviting an existential threat.

It's a metaphorical window, of course, Putin is far too paranoid to go anywhere near an open window, and the sort of people who would push a failed leader out of a window in past times have a lot of much nastier methods at their disposal, as Russian extra-judicial assassinations (and attempts) have proven.

I don't see any ships laden with nukes heading into Ukraine from the US, so that they can be stationed on Russia's borders. If this was the case, then Russia might have something to gripe about, although ti still wouldn't justify a land invasion

Of course, the US's treatment of Cuba isn't exactly a shining example of doing things right, but, as they say, "two wrongs don't make a right".

The root of the problem, is that Putin thinks it is, because at one point in the past, it kind-of was. Of course, if you back far enough, at one point, Russia was also part of Ukraine, but Vlad the Invader doesn't care about that.

Re: Spinning like the oozlum bird?

Ooh, a PDF from an obvious Russian troll, here let me open that right away. PDFs are never an attack vector.

What's that, a pop-up saying I need to log into my bank account right away, well I'd better do that then, even though they've spelt "user name" wrongly and the domain ends in .ru.

Re: Spinning like the oozlum bird?

So let me get this right, the reporting from RT, the Kremlin controlled Russian state propaganda outlet differs from what is being reported by others?

Well, bugger me sideways, really?

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

Re: The fundamental problem with the business

There's a balance to be struck between the cheapest location, and central London, though, because transport there is anything but cheap, quick and convenient, especially since the nearest actual affordable housing is outside London.

There are plenty of places that are both nice(ish), accessible, and closer to more "affordable" housing. Not that any housing is actually affordable in this country, but that's another matter...

Re: The fundamental problem with the business

They could probably convert the "Nightingale Hospital" at UWE which already has lots of lovely cubicles for them to work from, and which was only ever used for vaccinations, taking place in one corner of the massive space. It's within spitting distance of Abbey Wood already (or at least within spitting distance of that gap on the maps where there is nothing at all...)

Re: The fundamental problem with the business

Well yes, for the advertising industry, it is vital to have a presence close to where the cocaine can be procured. If all the advertising execs are together in a small area with lots of fancy offices, then it makes it easier for the suppliers to find them.

I'll stop believing that all advertising execs have a serious coke problem, when their output stops being something that would only not be excruciatingly annoying if you were completely off your tits.

Re: If you owe the bank...

"The Sweeney" is rhyming slang (Sweeny Todd = Flying Squad), not the same as Special Branch.

Re: So, his "genius" is mainly..

The parents that owned an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa? I think the details of where the money came from probably fill themselves in there.

Atlassian CEO's bonkers scheme to pipe electricity from Australia to Singapore collapses

Crazy thought:

Since Singapore itself is actually closer to the equator than Australia, why not offshore rafts with solar panels connected directly to the shore?

Sure, the engineering would probably be equally horrible, but it doesn't involve trying to lay a cable through either difficult underwater geology, or through equally difficult jungle across half of Indonesia.

Re: Ok, but…

I'd much rather catch a lungful of methane in the case of an accident, than a lungful of ammonia. One is decidedly more fatal than the other.

Re: Ok, but…

What you need is a monorail...

Re: Sorry for stupid question...

To be fair, I don't think the full 4000km would need to be on the ship at once, you'd need a specialist vessel to lay the cable, but it could be supplied by supply ships, and connected as required. I'd be more worried about the weight of the dangling cable when they're over the deepest part of the ocean; if they're planning on going via the Banda Sea, that's about 7 km down.

Re: Sorry for stupid question...

If I remember rightly, AC power transmission losses are proportional to the resistance of the cable (obviously) and also inversely proportional to the voltage (which is why overhead transmission cables are high voltage), so it's not quite the case that a cable twice as long would lose twice as much power, as the voltage drop would mean a higher rate of loss. The way to counter this would be either to use higher voltages, and handle the issues that entails, which I believe are non-trivial.

The alternative is to use some sort of HV-DC transmission, which this probably would have, but then you have to have inverters and step-down transformers to make the power usable, and these have their own costs and energy losses associated with them.

As other posters have commented, it's almost certainly the difficulties in maintaining the integrity of the cables over this sort of distance, through a tectonically active zone, that would be the main problem.

EU infrastructure risk project to address potential climate, 'resource' shortage catastrophes

...and what you definitely shouldn't do is bin the plan that has been devised to tackle the thing that has been identified as the highest risk and most likely threat, in order to save money, because "it hasn't happened yet".

It's a bit like cancelling your car insurance to save money, so you can afford some beers to drink while you're doing doughnuts in the local Tesco car park.

The pandemic contingency plan did include things like replacing the stock as it expired, and storing it properly. Are you telling me it's a pure coincidence that this plan was cancelled in 2019, just at the time when our government were desperate to make it look like a "brexit windfall" existed?

The reason most of our stockpile had expired was precisely because it wasn't being maintained. Whether this was directly down to brexit, or just the lack of basic human-level comprehension exhibited by the tory government is fairly moot; it's all the same syndrome of lies and bluster.

A trivial internet search turns up several articles about how the preparedness plan was binned in 2019, such as this one:

https://www.thenational.scot/news/18515726.covid-19-boris-johnson-binned-pandemic-team-months-crisis/

which contains the following gem:

The Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingency Committee (THRCC) was designed to ensure the UK was prepared for a pandemic – but it was mothballed by former Tory leader Theresa May so the Government could focus on Brexit efforts.

Re: Choo choo

I'm hoping it is enough money for people to at least identify the main risks and write down a plan for what to do if those things happen. €11M Euros spent now could well be the alternative to spending €11Bn after the fact because you had no plans for things like evacuation, flood walls, security fences, and so on.

Mitigation is often orders of magnitude cheaper than remediation. (For instance, from an IT perspective, if you have a secure off-site backup, you don't have to re-enter all your customer details into the database by hand, or write off the business, when your server room floods or burns down)

1. Stockpile PPE as a sensible contingency, then sell it off as a cost-saving exercise and to get some quick income to make it look like brexit is working, just before an actual pandemic hits.

2. Then pass out contracts for quick production of substandard replacement PPE in a mad rush to your mates at overinflated prices.

3. Profit

edit - The Paris icon has been gone for some time. Can we replace it with a "Michelle Mone on a yacht" icon instead?

Twitter tweaks third-party app rules to ban third-party apps

Re: Plummeting sperm whale?

I have held off on giving it a further upvote, I hope others do too.

Dear Stupid, I write with news I did not check the content of the [Name] field before sending this letter

Maybe try being a new cross between an analyst and a therapist?

(this joke proudly stolen from Arrested Development)