Posts by Christoph

Scientists unveil a physics-defying curved space robot

Gaining momentum in a curved space is trivial - just jump off a cliff

WhatsApp boss says no to AI filters policing encrypted chat

Other Disadvantages

The government enforced program on your phone will be optimised for thorough scanning, not for conserving your battery. You will have no control over it draining all the power just when you need your phone.

Not only can they expand what is scanned, they can update the program to do other things. "Oh, there's a terrorist threat, so we had to make it send all your messages to us in clear, together with your exact location at all times"

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

In the mid 70s we had a Wang computer that used an IBM golfball as its printer - they had stuffed a slab of electronics in the base to drive it.

Upgrading what might be the world's oldest running Linux install

" If you know of anything older, we'd love to hear about it."

Voyager 1 and 2

US EV drivers won't be able to choose vehicle safety alert sounds

Different sounds

I think there should be different sounds - to distinguish between a two person runabout and a massive container lorry. Match the sounds to the vehicle type.

FBI and MI5 bosses: China cheats and steals at massive scale

And you can believe what the US says - they are the world experts at hacking into other countries.

You need to RTFM, but feel free to use your brain too

Re: Measure twice, cut once

"After a run of these in the late 20th century, "some" training programs now emphasize that junior staff should be proactive and senior staff have to accept it."

On a fully laden, just refuelled jumbo jet at Tenerife, the junior staff didn't want to question the captain's misunderstanding of a radio message as clearance for immediate takeoff.

Some of the people in the jumbo that was taxiing up the runway in thick fog survived.

Aircraft now wait for departure. The word takeoff is used only for authorising or cancelling immediate takeoff.

Big Tech silent on data privacy in post-Roe America

Poison the Data

Do fake searches re abortion. Write bots to do the fakes.

Load the apps that report your location, then fake your GPS to drive to the abortion clinic every day.

Fill the bounty hunter's data stream with so much rubbish that they can't find the real information.

UK's Post Office shells out for SAP software it thought it had

Jail the post office managers for theft. If it's good enough for the entirely innocent sub-postmasters it's good enough for the managers.

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

Re: Must do better ...

And you don't have to pre-pay to use the steps.

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Re: If they were proper engineers...

Or in Australia, whose laws overrule the laws of mathematics.

Photonic processor can classify millions of images faster than you can blink

What it will actually get used for

"the technology has implications for a variety of fields"

Detect Image - classify as enemy soldier - shoot. All in a fraction of a second.

The only difficult bit will be the hand-waving cover up of all the false positives.

Taser maker offers electric-shock drones to stop school shootings

That. Was. The. Whole. Point. Of. My. Comment.

US police have Multiple Times arrived at a crime scene and immediately assumed that any black person present is the criminal, without bothering to ask first.

The control software will be easy - just fire on anyone with a dark skin tone. Getting educated while black.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Re: Easy to miss something trivial

The second edition probably did. But the building manager presumably just never thought of that - to him it was so obvious.

Easy to miss something trivial

In the mid 80s the building manager of the big office building had gone on holiday, and had left detailed notes on how to work the terminal that controlled the heating, air conditioning, etc. of all the building.

I got called in because they could not get the instructions to work. The instructions said to connect by pressing Ctrl and C. So they pressed Ctrl. And then they pressed C.

Immersion cooling no longer reserved for the hyperscalers, HPC

Re: "it eliminates the need for air-conditioning units to cool servers"

Ideally the heat would be used for district heating or similar.

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

Distrohopper's Digest

You could also look at Distrohopper's Digest

Lonestar plans to put datacenters in the Moon's lava tubes

Re: Coolings going to be a major problem.

"Imagine a future where racks of computer servers hum quietly in darkness below the surface of the Moon."

In space nobody can hear you hum.

BT: 'Quantum radios' could boost 5G network range

"particularly for the power-limited uplink from mobile device to base-station."

Presumably this implies that they only have to get them small enough to fit in the base station for them to be useful - they don't need to fit in the phones, at least at first.

Supreme Court urged to halt 'unconstitutional' Texas content-no-moderation law

Re: Gaping hole

"Here in the UK we have Article 10 the Human Rights Act (1998) on a national level (which in itself is only a backstop for more detailed protective legislation) and Article 10 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms providing two levels of protection and two courts we can go to."

Haven't you been keeping up with the news? Boris is going to repeal all that and claims he will replace it with his own version (but of course he's a habitual liar). So we will be at the whim of the current Home Secretary, who is panting to bring back the death penalty and has openly stated that she doesn't care if the person executed is guilty or not as it will still act as a deterrent.

Re: SPAM, SPAM SPAM SPAM!

Spam, scams, viruses, harassment, grooming, stalking, etc. etc. On the face of it that clause completely bans spam traps. We'll have to treat any email from Texas with the same suspicion as emails from Nigerian Princes.

Of course some of the right wing will be delighted that they can now freely drive off the net any uppity woman who dares to disagree with them.

Beanstalk loses $182m in huge flash-loan crypto heist

"it's game over"

It's a has-bean?

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Seems ok

The council of Hamelin Town found out that was a bad idea many years ago.

First Light says it's hit nuclear fusion breakthrough with no fancy lasers, magnets

Ludicrous speed

"The novel design of First Light's fuel target, though, may make it possible to produce significant amounts of fusion energy without accelerating the projectile to completely ludicrous speeds."

Paging Elon Musk.

Are we springing into a Y2K-class nightmare?

Re: Daylight Daylight Savings Time

ObXKCD https://xkcd.com/2594/

An open-source COBOL contender emerges

" Now they're dying off, and increasingly desperate COBOL users were previously appealing for volunteers to help."

So we need a load of old Cobolers?

Driver in Uber's self-driving car death goes on trial, says she feels 'betrayed'

Re: What year is it?

Today is September 10423, 1993.

Samsung shipped '100 million' phones with flawed encryption

Keymaster?

They had the Keymaster but not the Gatekeeper.

Russia 'stole US defense data' from IT systems

How much of the data the Russians found was stuff the CIA had previously stolen from Russia? Talk about pot calling the kettle black!

50 lines of Bash to bring a Wordle fan out of their shell

So who is going to rewrite it as 3 lines of APL - which can't then be improved because even the author won't be able to understand it.

Website fined by German court for leaking visitor's IP address via Google Fonts

Re: So if

There have been recent cases where open source code used by thousands of sites has been found to have a security hole. If you self-host such code you will not automatically get updated when the code is fixed.

You may never even hear about the problem - you might be running code that is years out of date because you forgot to check for updates.

Hardware boffin starts work on simulation of an entire IBM S/360 Model 50 mainframe

Re: Keep your eye on the (changing) ball

Good old self-modifying code - far more efficient, but for some reason frowned on these days. They even stop you writing to program memory!

Behold! The first line of defence for 25% of the US nuclear stockpile: Dolphins

Let's hand the dolphins control of our nuclear weapons. What could possibly go wrong?

Massive rugby ball-shaped planet emerges from scrum of space 'scope sightings

Jinx?

They've found Larry Niven's rugby-ball shaped planet Jinx.

Wifinity hands customers bills for Wi-Fi services they didn't want but used by accident after software 'glitch' let 'fixed term' subs continue

Bung em in jail for a fixed term - automatically renewed.

Assange extradition case goes to UK Home Secretary as High Court rules he can be sent to US for trial

"on Home Secretary Priti Patel's desk awaiting her decision on whether to extradite."

The chances of her missing an opportunity to bully someone are about the same as the chances of Boris stopping telling lies.

Re: Go whistle

The rape charges were brought to discredit him. There were major flaws in them.

Re: Two sides

No, he'd be in a US jail - that is why he skipped bail.

Re: Two sides

The rape charges were horribly flawed, and were only kept up due to the insistence of one prosecutor.

The standard way for governments to discredit whistleblowers is to make charges of sexual offences against them.

Galileo satnav system gets two new somewhat confusing satellites

And what's happened to BrexitNav?

China's Yutu rover spots 'mysterious hut' on far side of the Moon

It's the hut where the Ruler of the Universe and his cat live.

Chill out to the sounds of an expert typing on a variety of mechanical keyboards

This is the classic mechanical typewriter sound.

The ideal sat-nav is one that stops the car, winds down the window, and asks directions

Re: The make-up later on compensates like tech never can provide

No, no, the other left!

UK Treasury and Bank of England starting to sound serious about 'Britcoin'

Just exactly why is this needed?

Because obviously the currency we already have can't possibly work for electronic money transfers, so this new currency is desperately needed to, errr, um, oh yes - to hand yet more Sagans of real pounds to the consultants to create fake pounds.

Of course we've tried turning it off and on again: Yeah, Hubble telescope still not working

Make it last until there's overlap

It's critically important that Hubble is still operating for a while after the James Webb Telescope is fully operational.

If they can make simultaneous observations of the same objects, this will make it vastly easier to cross-calibrate the instruments.

So then the data in the Hubble archives can be fully linked with the incoming JWT data.

Jeff Bezos wants to build a business park in space

A tax haven that is out of this world

Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids

Fastbuck

Fits their mission plan

All I want for Christmas is a delivery address that a delivery courier can find

Re: Oh dear

I was at University when the Prisoner first aired. We were doing an experiment that required liquid helium to cool it. The gas that boiled off was collected in a large latex balloon, a couple of feet across. But the recovery system hadn't been finished, so the gas was then just allowed to escape.

One time I took the full balloon out of the lab and sent it bouncing down a very long corridor.

Someone came out of a door at the far end and saw this large white sphere bouncing towards him along the roof of the corridor.

Saturday start for NASA's Lucy probe on its 12-year quest to map Jupiter's Trojan asteroids

Near Jupiter?

"to visit eight asteroids near Jupiter"

The Trojans are at the L4 & L5 points 60 degrees ahead and behind Jupiter in its orbit. So they are as far from Jupiter as Jupiter is from the Sun.