Posts by davenewman

Paranoid Android reboots itself with new Android 10 builds

Re: Phone makers PLEASE take note

You can get plain vanilla Android if you ignore brand names and buy a Chinese phone on eBay. My current one is a Cubot Max 2.

Kepler telescope is dead but the data lives on: Earth-sized habitable zone planet found after boffins check for errors

Re: He made one mistake

When the other plant gets close, does thread descend from the skies?

French pensioner ejected from fighter jet after accidentally grabbing bang seat* handle

Was the trip set up by people who will inherit when he dies?

As Zoom bans spread over privacy concerns, vid-conf biz taps up Stamos as firefighter in totally-not-a-PR-stunt move

Re: Alternatives

whereby is for much smaller meetings (unless you pay for a very expensive account). 6 or 8 rather than the standard 100 for Zoom.

Twitter takes away twits' ability to limit ad data sharing – after telling investors its own privacy settings hurt revenue

I checked twitter.com/settings/account/personalization on my UK account. They have changed the wording to additional information. But my choice of turning off all personalisation and data sharing still stands.

COVID-19 is pretty nasty but maybe this is taking social distancing too far? Universe may not be expanding equally in all directions

Since the universe is finite, could it be we are nearer one edge?

Things that go crump in the night: Watch Musk's mighty missile go foom

How can you do a 150 metre test flight of such a big rocket?

'Social distancing champ' Linus Torvalds releases Linux 5.6, tells devs to put health before next release

Re: Whatever for?

There are developers creating Alexa apps to remotely control Raspberry Pi devices, such as the Mugsy coffee maker (www.heymugsy.com)

Make haste slowly when deploying tools to cope with global coronavirus pandemic

We did it in 2 weeks

What did we do? Find services to run the Green Party conference online, quickly eliminate unsuitable ones, get a demonstration from two of them, picked one to go with and then set up a completely online conference in one week.

Unlike the consultants quoted in the article, it was not a case of creating new software or installing existing software on our machines. We just chose which software as a service offer to use. Nor did we try to integrate it with our existing software. We didn't try to set up single sign on. Instead we sent emails to members with a link to where they could register on hopin.to.

There were inevitable user experience problems as there had been no time to train anyone except the speakers and the digital support volunteers. But still 350 people took part on Saturday. We can an online video conferenced help desk all day, sorting out user problems as they occurred.

The big company mindset and rules prevents rapid adaptation to changes in the environment. Expect both the biggest and smallest to collapse over the next year.

India's tech hub Bengaluru tells IT outfits to send workers home as part of COVID-crimping action

Re: He made one mistake

Well there is transmission by touching surfaces, so cleaning surfaces removes one transmission route.

Like a Virgin, hacked for the very first time... UK broadband ISP spills 900,000 punters' records into wrong hands from insecure database

Re: Fuds

Sometimes the solution is to write a letter. They cannot prevent you posting to them.

Morrisons puts non-essential tech changes on ice as panic-stricken shoppers strip stores

Re: "throughput of goods is in excess of the usual Christmas peak"

8 oz of high quality coffee beans! Is that enough?

If it's Goodenough for me, it's Goodenough for you: Canuck utility biz goes all in on solid-state glass battery boffinry

Re: He made one mistake

The battery doesn't need to last a lifetime. Just enough years you don't mind putting the vehicle in for a service to replace the battery.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to save data from a computer that should have died aeons ago

The Sinclair QL was the business machine of choice for a while in Kenya. It was small enough to bring in a suitcase, avoiding the 160% duty and sales tax after President Moi had declared the only purpose of computers was to put secretaries out of work.

I wrote a 24 hour pedal kart timekeeping program on a QL - multitasking 4 68008 machine code programmes with a BASIC one for reporting.

Decent, legal, honest and searchable: C'mon, Ofcom. Let us check up on the ad-slingers ourselves

Re: An online, searchable ad broker activity database

Except during election campaigns, when advertising is included in the election expenses return.

You can book a time to examine election expenses returns at the local council.

Re: Toothless regulators

Although I do like the way they have called out Government advertisements for not being truthful. The Dept. responsible claimed the adverts had been checked by Clear Channel - but they only check that it is legal and decent. They don't judge whether it is honest and truthful.

Ofcom measured UK's 5G radiation and found that, no, it won't give you cancer

Millimetre waves to come

According to past Register reports, there won't be any use of millimetre wavebands in 5G for a couple of years. So any measurements at the moment are of 5G masts working at frequencies close to 4G.

We don't yet know the possible biological effects of millimetre wave exposure. But as their range is so short, that won't be a factor except in conference centres and some malls where the 5G transmitters have been set up for high bandwidth communication.

Fire Brigades Union warns of wonky IT causing dangerous delays in 999 control rooms

Denied not refuted

To refute something, you need to provide evidence.

Otherwise it is just a denial.

Talk about high tech: Tens of thousands of Cali marijuana convictions to go up in smoke, thanks to algorithms

Shown on Click

There was a segment on BBC Click a year or more ago about the Code For America programme and interviews of people affected.

The virus curing the mobile industry's chronic addiction... and sparking an impressive algorithmic price experiment

Re: Expect the biggest fire sale ever

Fira Travelodge has gone down to €259.99 in 2 hours.

Day 4 of outage: UK's Manchester police deploy exciting new carbon-based method to record crime

Re: Buzzword Bingo

When I click on that, I am told by Chrome that it is not secure.

Billionaire pulls out of reality telly show that was supposed to find him a date to take aboard Musk's space loveboat

Re: "there was a part of me that still had mixed feelings"

It was his wife that objected.

That's what makes you hackable: Please, baby. Stop using 'onedirection' as a password

Re: D7xN$%4uO@S0

The definitive film on what you can do while waiting for a game to load.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL2NhhtIFPw

And if you turn to your left, you can see the walls of Amazon Web Services' vast server farm. And next to it, a gift shop and visitor center

Re: He made one mistake

I was hoping there really was a gift shop next to a server farm I could visit.

UN didn't patch SharePoint, got mega-hacked, covered it up, kept most staff in the dark, finally forced to admit it

GDPR breach

Did they report it to the Austrian data protection commissioner? As it affects EU citizens, even international organisations are subject to GDPR.

Use our stuff for free and sell your application? That's Qt. Time to give something back

The end of KDE?

The duke of URL: Zoom meetups' info leaked out through eavesdrop hole

When you are in a meeting, you can see a list of everyone connected. So you can kick out the interlopers.

CityFibre relieves TalkTalk of its FTTP sister biz for £200m – after Boris win blows away Labour's nationalisation vow

Re: FTFY

And Belfast, Oxford, York and Canterbury.

Step away from that Windows 7 machine, order UK cyber-cops: It's not safe for managing your cash digitally

Re: Upgrade from Windows 7

If you use Insync, it synchronises better with both One Drive and Google Drive from multiple operating systems.

We live so fast I can't even finish this sent...

Bonzo

I liked adding the Bonzo Dog Do Dah Band to the end. Vivian Stanshall once spent a weekend on our houseboat in Cambridge (obviously some time before he killed himself).

Starliner: Boeing, Boeing... it's back! Borked capsule makes a successful return to Earth

Re: Time Zones?

Baikonur cosmodrome is in GMT+6, Florida in GMT-5. Difference = 11 hours.

Uber forks out $4.4m to settle claims of rampant sexual harassment and retaliation in the Travis Kalanick era

The appropriate penalty is a forced sex change operation.

Apple sues iPhone CPU design ace after he quits to run data-center chip upstart Nuvia

Re: It would be nice

Or if Apple's contracts were judged to be contracts of slavery, so Apple would be guilty of keeping slaves.

You live where you live ... and ex-SAP boss Bill McDermott lives in a house like this

Why isn't this on the McMansions web site?

Here are some deadhead jobs any chatbot could take over right now

Re: Your list

I used to live in Balham. I ate at that cafe.

Congress to FCC: Where’s the damn report on mobile companies selling location data?

Re: Could some Journalist please...

No, it is Ajit Pai's location data that needs to be published in real time.

ZTE Nubia Z20: It's £499. It's a great phone. Buy it. Or don't. We don't care

Re: But fuck it. It's £499. You could do worse

You can do a lot better ordering phones from Chinese companies on eBay. They ship from warehouses in the UK. Currently I use a Cubot Max 2 £140.

Antivirus hid more than 9,000 'cybercrime' reports from UK cops, says watchdog

I see they didn't inspect the 2nd biggest police force. Thames Valley.

Chinese customers to unfold their Huawei Mate X on 15 November

UK versus US meaning of moot

Moot in English means it is something worth debating at an Anglo-Saxon moot.

In American English it is not worth debating.

No one would be so scummy as to scam a charity, right? UK orgs find out the hard way

I came across two conmen who infiltrated a charity

They pretended to be economists. They volunteered to help the stand of a small institute at a Climate Change summit in Bonn. They gave passable speeches at a conference. One had taken the name of the CEO of a bank - but didn't look at all like his picture. Rather like in a spy novel, they had taken some pains to appear to be serious campaigning economists who had worked in the financial sector. They were so convincing I recorded videos of them for use in publicity.

They walked off at the end of the conference with the takings from the stall and the contact list.

Onlye later did the MD of the instituted find out that they weren't who they said they were. She tracked them down, spoke to one of them and got the money back. But they hadn't taken enough money to be worth charging with fraud.

They live very well as conmen targeting small organisations who aren't able to spend time doing extensive checks on people's background.

A cautionary, Thames Watery tale on how not to look phishy: 'Click here to re-register!'

That's why I get them to send me paper bills

I never trusted their IT systems.

Experts warn UK court digitisation is moving too fast and breaking too many things

Video links

Years ago the research showed that the quality of the video image made a difference. Specifically the quality of the image of the listener. The speaker could react to the body language of the listener, changing what he or she said.

Kiss my ASCII, Microsoft – we've got one million fewer daily active users than you, boasts Slack

Skype burried

Well Skype had been buried by better audio and video conferencing tools, like Zoom

GNU means GNU's Not U: Stallman insists he's still Chief GNUisance while 18 maintainers want him out as leader

Give up when you stop learning

Richard Stallman came to give a talk to a free and open software day in Belfast in the 1990s. Even then, his messianic lecturing manner put off many of the people from companies who were thinking of opening up their software. Luckily his effect was diluted by practical Irish speakers, so things went forward.

He is stuck in the attitudes developed when he first started campaigning for free software, decades ago. Since then we have learned a lot more about sexuality, mental health and society. Anyone who is still learning changes their attitudes and assumptions in the face of change. RMS has not changed with the times. So it is time to retire and hand over the leadership.

Three UK slammed for 'ripping off' loyal mobile customers by £32.4m per year

Re: O2 and 3rd Parties

I buy better phones for less from Chinese companies on eBay with UK warehouses.

You get better models than the ones sold here. I'm using a Cubot Max 2 at the moment.

HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some

CUPS

is all you need for printing.

But I do have a choice of printer drivers for my Epson Ecotank, one completely independent from TurboPrint.

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

Re: Nostalgia...

Ameol? No PowWow.

In Hemel Hempstead, cycling is as bad as taking a leak in the middle of the street

Oxford has it right

In two town centre streets, you have to walk bicycles between 1000 and 1800. Outside those hours you can ride down those streets.

Everywhere else there are cycle lanes and 20 mph limits to reduce injuries from motor vehicles.

Has Hemel Hempsted done that?

Oxford tried to ban busking and begging in a PSPO. So Mark Thomas came to town and built a beggar trap.

Whistleblowing saboteur costs us $167m bellows Tesla’s accountant

Isn't it time the courts named Elon Musk and his companies a vexatious litigant?

Audible hasn't even launched its AI-powered book subtitles and publishers have already fired off a sueball

On another site discussing this, they explain that do don't get the full text of what is being said. From time to time you get an automatic transcription of the speech that you can use as a place marker when navigating. It is not continuous.