Posts by Chronos

Brain brainiacs figure out what turns folks into El Reg journos, readers

Re: I need my pessimism

The LART stick, the Etherkiller and the blackmail fileshare are not to be mentioned to HR. Or at all, in fact, just like Fight Club.

I need my pessimism

It's an integral part of what makes me, me. I also need my scepticism, my bullshit detector and my immediate, reflexive and unrelenting response to anyone spouting buzzwords or inviting me to a "meeting," which is mangler-speak for wasting every bugger's time while trying to reassign credit for achievements upwards in the hierarchy of incompetence.

Quite aside from us being nobody's fools, these qualities allow us to navigate the fog that lays heavy and grey across the rolling, bull-pat littered landscape of this industry. Misanthropy, assumption that everyone is an arse trying to make your life difficult, a healthy aversion to giving anyone money for things that can be done in-house, never being at anyone's mercy for data recovery, being very stingy with permissions, having two-part epoxy for USB ports and having root would also be advantageous in this position.

IPv6: It's only NAT-ural that network nerds are dragging their feet...

And it's no good saying, as one commentard more or less did some time ago, if you don't understand hex you shouldn't be using it because most of the owners of those billions of nodes don't, never will and shouldn't need to.

That was, probably unsurprisingly, me. What I meant by that was that the internet protocol version should be utterly meaningless to the end user. If, on the other hand, you are in infrastructure, networking for a large organisation, router design or a hosting provider you really should have a grasp of hex words and how to split 128 bit addresses up by netmask. That wasn't a cue for everyone and her uncle Willie to go out and get CCNA qualified, it was a reflection on network people bleating about 128 bits being too hard when it really isn't, which is starting to sound like excuses.

Apologies if that wasn't made clear at the time.

Re: "the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4"

But you don't have to. As has been said time and again, you can NAT IPv6. Consumer kit should NAT IPv6. Just don't take the choice away from those of us who want to run services by sticking us all on CG-NAT v4.

Re: "the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4"

you would search for something via webcrawler and actually get a page of relivant results where as now you google and the first page or two are sites trying to sell you a product related to what it is you want to learn about....

Spot on. If it was so bloody good, ad men, I wouldn't be looking for firmware to fix its broken-arsedness.

The microsecond someone comes up with a web search that filters out the SEO chancers, coupon cretins and comparison sites, I'm so there. Remember, if they have to advertise it, you probably don't need it.

Re: Second class netizen

But since few machines ever need more than a few dozen of those ports they can effectively be considered as adding 16 bits to an IPv4 address field, which is what NAT does. It might be ugly for the purists, but it works.

FSVO "works." It doesn't play particularly well with SIP. FTP active mode is right out. Admittedly these are things that the average cat video consumer isn't likely to be worried about right now.

Yet there's the equivalent of the slowly boiling frog going on here. You don't really need an understanding of nuclear fission yet I bet you have it. Bringing us all down to the lowest common denominator is dangerous. Ignore the loss of functionality at your peril while it stifles future innovation and freedom of choice under the duvet of NAT.

I remain amazed that the folks on here can't see the potential problems of these second class connections.

Re: "the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4"

Have the academics forgotten that businesses exist to make money, not to ensure IPv6 adoption ?

Have the businesses forgotten that the Internet was created by academics to share knowledge and their bottom line is as much a concern as the excretory end of genus rattus?

Second class netizen

CG-NAT cannot be considered "Internet." At best, it's a glorified proxy. A true Internet connection is the full 65535 ports bi-directional.

We've only ourselves to blame. We've had two decades to address (sorry) this yet we're still arguing about what colour the bike shed should be¹.

_{¹ NAT vs a few lines of iptables code is starting to look a bit like barrel scraping for excuses not to deploy.}

Click this link and you can get The Register banned in China

Re: Communist leaders and their sensitivities

Supposedly Trump is slang for "passing gas" in UKistania.

Which is why I refer to said bewigged moron as "Arsenoise."

Sitting pretty in IPv4 land? Look, you're gonna have to talk to IPv6 at some stage

Re: Never!

"The real myth here is that NAT is some kind of firewall"

I don't see anyone here claiming that it is.

Okay, you got me on that one. Hypocrisy from my side, for which I apologise.

Re: Never!

Thanks for your support Chronos. Unfortunately it seems stating facts is not a way to popularity. Perhaps it was the wording "with no NAT", which I should have phrased as "no requirement for NAT".

Having end-to-end addressing is also vastly more convenient for difficult protocols like SIP/RTP, IPSec, FTP and so on, without having to work around endless brain-dead ALGs and helpers that never work properly.

See my other reply to the accusation of wanting to turn Auntie Mabel into the BOfH when I said nothing of the sort. It seems we're going to have to become proficient in the sort of anal retentiveness QCs need to read and redraft proposed legislation if we want to comment on here in future - which sort of makes the transition to IPv6 seem like child's play by comparison.

Re: Never!

IPv6 supports everything IPv4 does. There's no need to make adopting it unnecessarily difficult by demanding people study long sysadmin courses just to set up their home network.

There, you just did it again. Please stop putting words into people's mouths. Nowhere did I say that home users will have to do this; the router folks can and should do it by default. It's utterly trivial for a consumer router to know which interface is the LAN and which is the WAN and construct the firewall with or without NAT to a safe default. Of course, they probably won't given the historical state of uPNP, WPS and so on being similar in quality and thought for the end user as a British Leyland car built in the 70s but that's not my problem unless and until I get a job at Draytek et al.

We, the El Reg commentards, are not consumers. If you want a discussion on consumer broadband, head on over to ThinkBroadband or Kitz where you will find untold thousands of like-minded users. The article addresses, therefore the comments are about, proper networking rather than consumer "hit generic chipset with a lump hammer until it sort of works, apply logo to /fs-overlay/var/www/images and ship" routers.

For the avoidance of doubt, nobody was or is saying that v6 doesn't support NAT, that NAT should be ditched on consumer networks or that it'll require at least a CCNA to set up v6 in the home.

Re: Never!

I don't see where HT said you must ditch NAT. What was said was that creating the exact same stateful filtering that NAT serendipitously provides is piss easy if you want to use globals on your internal network.

The real myth here is that NAT is some kind of firewall. If that were true, why do we keep seeing C&C channels tunnelling in and out of RFC1918 nets?

There's also the little "incompatibility" myth, which is shorthand for "oh fuck, we're going to have to do it properly this time" because you don't have the crutch of NAT being required to make your link to the outside world useful, which is what this argument really boils down to: We've all got comfortable with assuming there's a NAT layer there to do all your state tracking for you. Now you're going to have to write the dreadfully complicated few lines of firewall rules yourself. Mercy!

Cue the "I can't remember prefixes with hex words in them" wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Turn around, Capita: I'm trying but my pre-tax profits slipped 59%

What's this?

Oh, the smallest string quartet in the world, playing just for them.

It's not blood, it's ketchup. I had a sausage and bacon bin lid for lunch and it leaked.

FBI boss: We went to the Moon, so why can't we have crypto backdoors? – and more this week

Mr Wray

"We're a country that has unbelievable innovation," he said. "We put a man on the Moon. We have the power of flight. We have autonomous vehicle. The idea that we can't solve this problem as a society -- I just don't buy it."

Chris (and Theresa), here are a few facts for you:

1) Encryption is mathematics. If you let one entity in on the algorithm, you potentially let everyone in.

2) This behaviour isn't a problem, it's by design. We don't want to lose all semblance of privacy just because a few god-botherers and psychopaths have decided to misbehave. We, the people, wish to preserve our privacy.

3) Nobody trusts you. The scope for misuse of a backdoor into anything is almost limitless. You may be all good intentions now but in the future we may want to discuss you without you knowing about it. That's not conspiracy or subversion, it's democracy, a principle you claim to support when you want a vote or two.

4) Your record for keeping secrets when they're not yours is appalling. One visit to a motel with your "friend" and the USB drive with the keys to the world's encrypted communications is gone. Once it's gone, it never comes back and we'd have to re-work everything from scratch.

If those aren't enough, I have more. All of these apply to our (the UK's) very own Snoophenge, too.

BBC websites down tools and head outside into the sun for a while

Hottest day

Oh, poor souls! Meanwhile, here in the Grim North, AKA Nobodygivesafuckia, we've already had 30+C highs, once again proving, were proof needed, that if you don't live in the South East, you don't count.

Bake, you artisan sandwich eating property-obsessed snowflakes. Feel that? That's what not being in control of your life feels like: Inescapable.

_{Joking aside, the BBC could melt into an amorphous puddle of media luvvie nonsense and I wouldn't care.}

ReactOS 0.4.9 release metes out stability and self-hosting, still looks like a '90s fever dream

Re: Try out the UI

Tried it recently in a bout of nostalgia, surprised and annoyed to find extreme weird behaviour under Multi-monitor conditions.

Ah yes, I hit this myself. The differences between twinview, xinerama and doing it the Old Way™ makes Openbox very twitchy. In the end, I had to configure xorg.conf with a bigger viewport and configured each monitor separately on workstations with more than one connected. Once done, it just works. Using xrandr in user autostart scripts also worked but it required me to write conditionals for each workstation with multi-monitor to set the primary and layout, which just duplicated stuff that should really be per-machine anyway.

Yes, a slight amount of faff, yet you only have to do it once rather than every time a UI dev types a new line of code.

Re: Try out the UI

KDE just rocks! :-)

Well, perhaps. It all depends what your needs are. All software sucks to varying degrees, without exception. Allow me to present Akonadi as exhibit A: A database backend for a PIM which either dies due to schema changes on point releases or never starts, about as far away from the Unix paradigms of "everything's a file" and "one job, done properly" as it is possible to be.

At this point, I created my own "desktop" from Openbox, tint2, cairo-dock, tilda (you won't believe how useful a drop-down terminal is until you try one), some custom scripts and jiggery-pokery with Claws, Firefox, Libreoffice and Rainlendar2 for the productivity element. That was about eight years ago on FreeBSD¹ and the same desktop has followed my user data across several distros and is still running on Devuan today.

The UI's job is to facilitate interaction with the OS and to stay the hell out of the way. Fancy effects, wobbly windows, disappearing window decorations or non-obvious window buttons are cute for about ten minutes, at which point you need to get some work done and they're just bloody annoying.

_{¹ The move away from FreeBSD when everyone else was either flocking to it or trying desperately to escape Lennart's monolithic blob was a sad but inevitable one, given the number of pet projects being rammed down our throats. Again, the OS is supposed to sit there abstracting hardware and presenting consistent APIs rather than acting like a needy relative with ADHD demanding attention every five seconds. When you're spending more time frigging about trying to get new shit to either work or stay out of the way than doing actual useful stuff, it's a good indication that it isn't an operating system any more.}

Psst, says Qualcomm... Kid, you wanna see what a 5G antenna looks like?

Re: Stupid

28GHz is garbage for mobile.

I think you'll find that this "end" of 5G is actually focused (sorry) on FWA. 5G isn't all about the phombies wandering about waiting for the next pointless Tweet.

If Brussels wants Android forks, phone makers aren't helping

Re: I hope mobile phone companies are threatening to pull out of the EU

If mobile phone companies threaten us with "Andrex", I suspect it might be taken as a comment on the quality of their product...

Soft and unnecessarily expensive? I thought that was the premier league...

Bravo on the portmanteau. That's just soddin' genius.

How much do you think Cisco's paying erstwhile Brit PM David Cameron?

Re: BFH

Try harder. The PM is selected by the Queen. It's only customary that she asks the leader of the largest party, on the assumption that they have the best chance of forming a government. There is no requirement that it be the leader of that, or any other party. It doesn't even have to be a member of the Commons.

If she ever exercised that "right" or, indeed, any of the other constitutional "rights" she has as figurehead of state, the government would fall without question. The monarchy is tolerated because a) it intrigues Johnny Foreigner and b) would take too long to untangle from our constitution. Besides, Westminster has been cruising along on "Dieu et Mon Droit" for centuries as the basis for its mandate to govern. Good job it's in Norman French or the electorate might just twig what it means and decide to truly separate church and state.

Re: BFH

It's not evil, just unnecessary, autocratic, paternalistic, and places its own continued existence above any actual benefit for its so-called citizens.

That sounds like just about every "democratic" government on the planet except perhaps that of the Isle of Man.

Re: BFH

if Cameron had not given the referendum then he would have been out and ukip would have won a few more seats. possibly more seats than the liberals

So he created all of this disruption and probably what will be the worst financial crisis this country has yet to face since we had to get involved when that Austrian painter decided Poland¹ looked nice this time of year just to hold onto "power"²?

What a shining wit! That said, who was the credible alternative? Millipede Minor? Niggled Fromage? Turncoat Cleggy? Don't make me bloody laugh! All of the parties should hang their heads in shame after presenting this shower for us to choose from.

_{¹ Then they were handed over to the USSR after they'd basically kept the RAF flying with their bravery. No, I wasn't there, but I still feel terribly guilty because we treat Polish immigrants like shit without thinking about their families' contribution to our country's freedom, quite apart from xenophobia being just a bit mad.}

_{² See other comments for why this word was placed in quotes.}

Re: BFH

Our PM is elected by the voters of one constituency only. The Conservative Party members - few of whom are elected - get to decide who is PM. I have no say in the matter whatsoever.

Couldn't have said it better myself. No amount of buggering about with the electoral system (PR, FPP etc) has any effect on this fact at all. Nor does it change the fact that, whomever gets voted in by their party, the actual bills and changes are proposed, drafted and pushed through to statute by faceless, unelected civil servants who remain across governments - which explains why we keep coming back to this spying and encryption bollocks time and again on top of all the other utter tosh with which we have to live.

The elephant in the room, of course, is I cannot see a less worse system to replace it with unless we elect the MPs and the PM separately and get "none of the above" and write-ins on the ballot, which still doesn't tackle shifting Sir Humphrey from his cushy ministerial secretary role.

Re: BFH

This is the guy that overturned our entire foreign policy for 40 years to fix a problem with his own party. When he lost he ran away rather than fix the problem that he had created.

Sorry, sarcasm doesn't carry very well in text. I do love equal up and down votes. Reminds me of something, just can't quite place it...

Where, pray tell, did these opinions come from? Who had the far-right clamouring for isolationism in the form of UKIP (I still think that should be Britain's own AirB'n'B), Rees-Mogg et al? These populist opinions don't just fall through a crack in the space-time continuum. They come from the general public who, as a group, are only as smart as the most stupid member - an axiom which also applies to political parties.

As you rightly say, Dave's mistake wasn't his inability to predict what the flag-waving clans would do in a referendum or the probable response from Europe regardless of the result of the referendum, i.e. if it had gone the other way they'd be pushing for common currency, Shengen and political union because we'd voluntarily weakened our position as a special case sovereign nation.

Promising the referendum itself was the mistake and it was in his manifesto when he took to the polls to unburden himself of Cleggy. The general public responded on pretty much that issue alone Everything that came thereafter was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

All we got was a bendy Boris and our bus fare home...

BFH

...as they'd say on Bullseye. They might give him a bendy Bully.

Being rather unfair to Dave here. He was a far better slimy-lying-git-in-chief than The Old Grey May-or or Tony B.Liar which is, of course, damning with faint praise.

Doctor, doctor, I feel like my IoT-enabled vacuum cleaner is spying on me

More unfortunate naming fails

"Someone's spying on my diqee!"

That'll teach you for sending dick pics via social media...

Ah, British summer. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the internet is on the fritz

Re: Pick two from the trinity

To be fair to the digger driver - a lot of the conduits (especially out in the countryside) are not particularly well mapped. It's entirely possible that whatever GIS system they were using didn't have the conduit marked on it.

Oh $DEITY no, I wasn't thinking of suing some poor bugger trying to do his or her job. I was thinking more of the people with extremely thin spectacles on three times their salary who hang around in offices with titles such as "planning officer" or "civil engineer" who can't be arsed to even look for potential cock-ups because that would eat into "looking sophisticated drinking civet-turd coffee" time, along with the companies that allow them to do so with impunity while Ms digger driver is getting verbal abuse from the general public simply because she lacked the information she needed to avoid that duct.

In fact, Ms digger driver should get a bit of compo, too, for being left in the line of fire.

Re: Pick two from the trinity

Unlike yours, mine had a suspension that vaguely approximated the stiffness of blancmange.

On the Cortina I had in mind, that was quite an accurate description of the brake discs. It wasn't mine, I hasten to add. The one and only Ford I would ever consider owning is the long-gone Escort MkI Mexico.

Vauxhall took up the gage in the battle to become the manufacturer most likely to stop fitting steering wheels with the Vectra. So much understeer that you may as well give up cornering and become a Roman.

and I've driven my wife's Morris Minor..

Amazed it survived with that Lucas regulator. That's why most of them were positive earth, so the charged electrolyte that spewed out of the battery when the regulator welded itself shut was repelled, to some extent, and the cause of all the rot wasn't quite so obvious as the battery dropping to the floor through the bran flakes it had created where once was metal...

Can you imagine Lucas of old wiring up one of these posh milk floats stuffed with li-ion cells? Icon says it all.

Re: Pick two from the trinity

If you persist in your questioning enough, or merely dig the sodding road up, you'll find out that the GIS is accurate to a level that might be termed "reasonable guesswork".

i.e. "turn left at the Red Lion, Shit Alley is the second on the right, assuming you're in the right $VILLAGE of which there are three in relatively close proximity with the same name (Wales). Look for the shittiest excuse for a road surface in human history, there's a good chance it's ours."

One wonders if the old Ford Cortina would come in handy here. As many know, if the rear spring bushes were over a fortnight old, the 'tina would follow every single trench dug within the past century, resurfaced or not, like it was on rails. Made your bottom go like a rabbit's nose but could be quite useful for forgetful utility companies.

Re: Pick two from the trinity

You can bet sky will claim compensation

As they damned well should. Anyone, anyone who cuts a cable by being a blithering, incompetent idiot should be sued to oblivion - as should these utter arseholes who wait until a road has been resurfaced and then decide they need to stick in a pipe¹ or a cable, whereupon they replace it in exactly the same manner that necessitated the resurfacing work in the first place.

Bastards. Would it be so difficult to have a gazette notice akin to "We're resurfacing Shit Alley on the fifteenth of September, anyone wishing to lay pipes and cables needs to get in now because we're entering a two-year sod off we've just fixed it period."

_{¹ British sodding Gas, I'm looking at you. Our road has been resurfaced once in the 20 years I've lived here and fuck me sideways with a ten foot dildo if, within a fortnight of it finally being done, you twats weren't here making it lumpy again.}

Taps running dry for Capita? Southern Water pens 5-year managed service

Cockwombles.

Re: Missing the obvious

I am sure England will look like the opening scene from Blade Runner before anyone will really care about the Countryside.

I was under the impression that "countryside" was one of the long list of reasons to find yet another new Crapita CEO.

ME! ME! ME! – Intel's management tech gets a quartet of security fixes

Just kill it already

As title. This and AMD's SP is toxic tech and another pointless malware vector. Disable it by default and allow people to chose. Or is there some three-letter reason you two are shipping parts with this crap activated?

PayPal's pal Venmo spaffs your pals' payments – and yours

Brummie exiles...

Sounds like a Midlands term of endearment as in "Yo'm don't want to share all that, do thi, duc?"

The crowd roars and Ruckus joins in with 802.11ax kit

there's no way to say "shut up and don't ask again"

Half of me thinks this is a really good idea, having just seen the logread output on my own AP stuffed with "Client xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx not authorised to connect" entries. Then I remember just how narrowly focused these things usually end up being and wonder if it won't immediately turn into a DoS vector; spoof the AP's MAC and ESSID, send unauthorised probe killing packet of doom, boom, client thinks it's forever persona non grata.

'Fibre broadband' should mean glass wires poking into your router, reckons Brit survey

Battle weary

Let's not kid ourselves that the new-wave FTTP companies are all consumer kniggets in shining armour, please. These buggers are just extracting your renal secretions in a different way.

I have resorted to my default fallback of caveat emptor. While marketing are naming these technologies, they're always going to make it look more shiny than it actually is; fibre proper has been around for decades - I built Seimens OLTI boards back when 128k bonded ISDN was the broadest of bands - yet "Ultrafast fibre" is touted as a new, magical technology made from unicorn farts and bose-einstein condensates.

I'm also a little weary of chasing the numbers. On VDSL2:

Data Rate: Down: 79.904 Mb/s / Up: 19.999 Mb/s

Line Attenuation (LATN): Down: 14.2 dB / Up: 17.8 dB

Signal Attenuation (SATN): Down: 14.3 dB / Up: 17.5 dB

Noise Margin (SNR): Down: 3.4 dB / Up: 15.4 dB

Aggregate Transmit Power (ACTATP): Down: 6.5 dB / Up: 14.0 dB

Max. Attainable Data Rate (ATTNDR): Down: 81.264 Mb/s / Up: 25.194 Mb/s

To be quite frank, that's enough for me right now. What I would like to happen is Openreach being held responsible for fucking up existing lines when patching in new ones or buggering about with the cab. There should be Yakuza-style penalties for fat-fingering patch panels. Can we, just for once, make existing tech work properly and stably before we go gallivanting off on some wild chase for ever faster ways of watching a cat try to use a Lexmark door-stop,

Beer. When all else fails, when the bullshit is knee-deep, people want the moon on a stick and marketing won't STFU, it must be beer o'clock.

No, seriously, why are you holding your phone like that?

Re: What was that quote allegedly from Cardinal Richelieu again?

There's a lot of truth in that, but the academic evidence shows that "asset management" of vehicle batteries actually prolongs their life. I'm in the industry, I have a professional interest in these things, and I can assure you I was staggered when the research came out. But that's how it is.

Whether that's enough to make up for the failures of energy policy over a decade, well, that's another question

Very interesting, thanks for that insight. While I don't doubt that keeping cells active improves their lifespan, especially where they are kept from sitting at full charge for prolonged periods in the specific case of lithium ion cells¹, surely there are efficiency issues? Genuine question, not gainsaying your point.

_{¹ Roughly 85% charge is where they may be stored with minimal degradation. This has been known for years.}

Re: What was that quote allegedly from Cardinal Richelieu again?

probably buffering a bunch and sending them together

That's exactly how it will be done or, instead of a fat (relatively) pipe cellular link, they'd be using LoRa or similar for the last half hour usage reading which, unless you're running multiple flux capacitors, should fit into a float().

When I said "real-time" I probably should have said time stamped events. After all, they don't want to be snooping on everyone immediately, just a nice virtual paper trail to look back upon should the need arise and a great big database they can broker access to. With SMETS2, the central database multiple client structure is already there, ostensibly to enable competition in the energy sector.

So, regardless of the frequency of actual uploads, the data is captured in real time. Same data, less snoopmatics talking all at once.

Re: What was that quote allegedly from Cardinal Richelieu again?

Why would this have to be per-household rather than per-substation if that is its main purpose?

I suspect at least partly because of this 'leccy car fad they're expecting people to provide their own multi-kWh storage that they can raid because they've sold off public infrastructure and haven't planned for the future. The problem with that is every charge/discharge cycle is one more step toward the grave for the most expensive part in your unicornmobile, which is a good thing for the manufacturer and The Economy™ but bloody awful for the poor sods who have to pay for it and accept the feature disparity between grandiose milk floats and proper internal combustion.

I do hope everyone caught the "mandatory smart¹ elctrojalopy charge point in every new build" proposal. When you gather all the evidence together it becomes obvious.

_{¹ Monitors and reports energy used to charge, storage capacity and so on. They then know where all the big capacitors are. I give it five minutes until they start collecting geodata, timing and usage stats for road pricing through the same pipe.}

Re: What was that quote allegedly from Cardinal Richelieu again?

Nah, but it would have been a good excuse to make a cuppa and glance at the clock... hang on...

I'm very ashamed I missed that opportunity. Well spotted, sir. I worry that the AI won't take into account the water used to warm the pot, too :-)

Re: What was that quote allegedly from Cardinal Richelieu again?

Google DCC SMETS2 and inform yourseves on how it works, it's all public information.

Tell me, who is under contract to run DCC? Hint: It starts with Crap and ends in ita. That's how toxic this whole thing is.

Will no one rid me of this turbulent contractor?

Re: What was that quote allegedly from Cardinal Richelieu again?

:-) indeed.

Don't forget these are almost real-time readings, i.e. "meter point x started drawing 5.1A more at hh:mm:ss for a duration of 2.3¹ minutes." AI says you boiled the kettle with even more certainty because it happened during an ad break on the channel your "smart" TV also told the cloud you were watching. You used too much water for the two people who live in your house because AI says it should only take 1.4 minutes to boil the correct amount so you're either guilty of profligacy and eco-vandalism or you have a visitor. That's a rather mundane example. I have others just as easy to detect and much more embarrassing, especially if you add the card issuers' data into the mix.

I wasn't saying that the quote applies to smart meters on their own but we're blindly giving far too much away. The above example is just two connected devices being extrapolated. Can you look me in the monitor and state in all honesty that someone, somewhere won't eventually put all this together if we continue to accept ever more leakage of data from our private lives?

_{¹ Numbers from nether region, natch. I'm not breaking out the formulae for boiling a sodding kettle.}

Re: They have a point.

Har har, yes, very funny. Only it won't make the slightest difference with that honking great aerial sticking out of it that you're not allowed to touch. I'm talking about the incoming feed line.

It's all tinfoil hats and paranoia jokes until the data leaks, isn't it? What was that quote allegedly from Cardinal Richelieu again? I forget...

They have a point.

About the smart meters, I mean. Anything with a transmitter in it that you can't turn off and transmits without your knowledge is called a bug. Can you sit there with a straight face and tell me some bugger, one day in the not too distant future, will not decide this data is so informative with a few tweaks and an "AI" to infer what's going on behind your closed curtains that it's a crime not to (here comes that bloody word again) "monetise" it and add a continuous development stamp to the consumer-fuckery section of their MBA? That's even before the sods at Snoophenge get hold of it, which will probably be in real-time.

"Some bugger" makes up a significant portion of the population, Some of them have to be working in telemetrics.

Montezuma's Revenge still too tough for AI, new Google Brain office, and other bits and bytes

“Every time a human or agent plays Montezuma’s Revenge, they are presented with the exact same set of rooms, each containing the exact same set of obstacles and puzzles. As such, the simple memorization of the movements through each room is enough to lead to a high-score, and the ability to complete the level.”

Yup, I could get Chuckie Egg II up to double figure levels with my eyes closed on the Beeb just by muscle memory and the sound of Harry's footstep clicks, which was sort of my party trick at school; yes, I was very popular - not - but it beat playing the Beverly Hills Cop tune on the black keys of a Casio or making my calculator watch print "BOOBLESS", things that seemed to be all the rage for the in-crowd at the time.

If I dug the Beeb out, assuming it still powers up and the Watfraud EPROM board still has the CEII ROM in it, it would probably take just two or three runs through to bring that 30+ year old muscle memory back. There is also a high probability that I would utterly fail on an emulator with a standard 105 key keyboard.

This is probably not intelligent at all, including when I was doing it as a snotty-nosed kid. Nice work if you can get it, though.

Forking hell. It's summer, and Windows 10 is already thinking about autumn

With all the issues ongoing - {Facebook, Google, Microsoft}=GDPR, Microsofts Windows 10 issues, continuous data exposure or hacking of personal information, then corporations are really taking the p!ss out of people. People are very much like sheep - ambivalent and ignorant to the reality.

...which is sort of what I was hinting at without standing on a box, pointing and saying it j'accuse style. How quickly can we get to 100C without the frog jumping out?

Is Windows 10 free on new PC's or do the vendors have to pay Microsoft ??? - seems to be a scam.

I think it's actually a huge social experiment. There are so many other options available. MacOS, Linux of all flavours from Mint to Slack, a Pi with Rasbpian desktop, the BSDs, hell, you can even run Android if you're willing to put up with it.

But no, people still run WinX(beta) and find all the bugs for the enterprise rollouts simply because that's what was pre-installed. That's like crapping yourself because in your pants is where your arse happened to be at the time. We'll probably find out the whole thing is a test to see how far a vendor can push its users before they sod off and find something that actually works.

Icon. Some of these people have to be Masochists.

Spidey sense is literally tingling! Arachnids detect Earth's electric field, use it to fly away

Flying nopes.

Yes, the nope-ocalypse is upon us. I shall be buying a bee-keeper's hat and avoiding open spaces. Oh wait, I'm a geek. Strike that last one as a change...

Every step you take: We track you for your own safety, you know?

"Safe place"

Now I get it. The tracker isn't in the van, it's in Jeff's smartphone. And looking more closely at the street map, it appears he's not in my back garden but my neighbour's, placing his delivery package in its "safe location" at the back porch.

Which is now not so safe as it has broadcast the fact that mateyboy has just put something there. With my security hat on, this is a potential vector, quite aside from the privacy of the worker delivering the packages.

Still, this is Dabbsy's column, so I shouldn't be so bloody serious.