Posts by davenewman

Self-driving cars will be safe, we're testing them in a massive AI Sim

Tested in reality before the simulator

Oxbotica has tested self-driving cars all around Oxfordshire already - on the roads. The simulator just lets other companies do their testing more cheaply.

DEF CON plans to show US election hacking is so easy kids can do it

Hack the politicians?

The only thing that will persuade the congressmen and senators to vote for better election security is to find their own sites have been hacked.

Capita still squats on top of the UK's software and IT services heap

Re: Chisholm trail

Since Cambridge has the highest proportion of journeys made by cycles in the UK, how can cycle tracks not be used? Any evidence for your claim that they aren't used? In Oxford, with the second highest rate of cycling, the cycle paths are heavily used to get past the standing traffic of those idiots who insist on bringing cars into the centre instead of using the park and rides.

Mamma Mia! UK film fans forced to Q as Vue's website craps itself

Buy at the cinema

You don't have to buy your cinema tickets through a website. You can turn up and hand over some cash.

OK, the blockbusters will be sold out, so you end up seeing a higher quality film.

Indictment bombshell: 'Kremlin intel agents' hacked, leaked Hillary's emails same day Trump asked Russia for help

Re: Shooting the messengers much?

> How gullible do you have to be if you let random posts on the Internet affect your decision on who to vote for?

There were proud boasts in detailed blog posts after the US Presidential elections claiming that their voter suppression campaigns tipped the balance against Hilary Clinton.

The Trump campaigners did not try to get more people to vote for him. They made sure that women who might vote for Hilary Clinton saw lots of words and images attacking her. They didn't vote for Trump, but once doubt was seeded in their minds, they didn't vote at all.

Open plan offices flop – you talk less, IM more, if forced to flee a cubicle

Monasteries had it right centuries ago

Small rooms to work in undistracted, cloisters to meet people serendipitously, and big rooms to gather together.

Cancelled in Crawley? At least your train has free Wi-Fi now, right?

For electric trains how about IP over the power lines?

Sysadmin cracked military PC’s security by reading the manual

Re: About 10 minutes later I was "cracking" some of the locks and interchanging them around.

It was actually the Sentate House. The fire brigade had to cut it apart to get it down.

That'll learn ya! Data watchdog spanks two Brit phone botherers

Re: Law and enforcement

Except for disrupting supply chains and swearing at businesses.

Facebook shells out $8k bug bounty after quiz web app used by 120m people spews profiles

Handreds of useful apps are held in a queue

At the moment, many apps used by thousands of people around the world have their access to Facebook's API suspended while Facebook manually verifies them one by one.

For example, NationBuilder.com can no longer link a campaign group's event to the even they put on their Facebook page. It used to be possible to promote the event on both places and come up with a consolidated RSVP list for people to check on the door. NationBuilder is used by hundreds of thousands of campainging groups, charities and political parties around the world to manage their volunteers.

UK.gov's long-awaited, lightweight biometrics strategy fails to impress

Add all the home office civil servants to the biometric database

And let them personally experience the problems of having your face in big database.

I bet then they will find a way to remove them.

Tesla fingers former Gigafactory hand as alleged blueprint-leaking sabotage mastermind

Re: He made one mistake

Back in 1995 I worked on a one year research project for the UK's Energy Technology Support Unit. At that time the Central Electricity Generating Board had calculated that they could take 1/3rd of their power from renewables without having the install energy storage. The processes used to manage the vast changes in demand over the day were enough to cover any drops in wind energy production.

Unfortunately, too many people have forgotten those calculations and refuse to redo them, just saying, without evidence, that we cannot use intermittent power sources. On top of that, we now have better energy storage systems and much, much cheaper solar cells.

The biggest economic problem is that we will soon have leave all the remaining fossil fuels in the ground, to avoid catastrophic greenhouse warming. At that point we have no choice to use any energy source apart from renewables. Some of them can be stored, such as the renewable growth of woodland (particularly with coppicing), biogas produced from sewage and seaweed, straw and catch crops. It may be time to republish Egon Glessinger's 1952 book, "The Coming Age of Wood".

G Suite admins need to RTFM – thousands expose internal emails

Because not everything people send is private. There are good reasons for a company setting up a public group, such as a discussion list with franchisees, suppliers or customers.

Who had ICANN suing a German registrar over GDPR and Whois? Congrats, it's happening

The court needs a technical advisor

Since the litigrants may try to bamboozle the court with technical inaccuracies, the court should employ a technical advisor - Max Schrems, of course.

Privacy group asks UK politicos to pinky swear not to use personal data for electioneering

How can we do canvassing if we cannot record political opinions

The normal way to campaign is to knock on your door and ask who you are considering to vote for. Then on polling day we remind our potential voters that it is polling day, have you voted yet?

That is a fundamental part of democracy in our voting systems. The purpose of political parties is to persuade people to vote for their candidate and then get people voting rather than staying at home. To do that, the small band of unpaid volunteers knocking on doors needs to know who is persuadable and who doesn't want to waste their time or that of the volunteers.

So a promise not to collect data on political preferences is pointless. It is fundamental to party politics and democratic voting systems.

You're a govt official. You accidentally slap personal info on the web. Quick, blame a kid!

Child molestation?

Has anyone thought about applying child protection laws to the Nova Scotia minister, the police and the Unisys administrators?

Politicos whining about folks' data rights ought to start closer to home

Voting is a public duty

Because of that, candidates have the right to communicate with voters as a matter of public policy. To do that they need data on all voters, so they get the full electoral register, not the edited version used in commercial marketing. Voting isn't compulsory, but voters have a duty to read, consider and decide whether to vote (and who for), so they cannot opt out of getting political leaflets.

That is what makes it different from commercial marketing.

The problem isn't collecting the data, but using it to spread different lies to different people. We need a law to make professional lying an imprisonable offence.

Sci-tech wants skilled worker cap on PhD and shortage jobs scrapped

Why does someone called TruthSayer keep repeating the lie, "The problem is the EU people who have settled here in tens of thousands, do not work now and claim benefits."

There are detailed surveys of EU nationals in the UK. A higher proportion are at work than the native born population, and a smaller proportion claim benefits. In tax terms they contribute more to the state than our own chavs.

Would you employ my brother, who left school on the Isle of Sheppey with no qualifications other than how to drink and fight, or a woman from Kyrgyzstan with two MSc degrees in both mathematics and psychology?

Trump buries H-1B visa applicants in paperwork

Why discriminate against people whose mothers gave birth in a different country?

Why should your place of birth be an employment qualification at all? It isn't one of your achievements, it is an achievement of your mother.

What is the economic or ethical justification for nationality to be used in determining who gets a job? We are all humans (or AIs) in one world. All humans are equal, nationality is an artificial distinction brought in to recruit soldiers to fight wars. It should have nothing to do with employability.

Fun fact: US Customs slaps eyeglass taxes on optical networking gear

Re: He made one mistake

Officials scared of Trump will do anything to prevent imports from Mexico.

2017 tablet market trended towards torpor

I have just got 6 Chinese phablets for £90 each to use in a training session. They are pretty fast, do 5 GHz WiFi and 4G mobile phones. Only problem is they all have the same serial number, so mobile device management software thinks they are all the same device.

Microsoft Surface Book 2: Electric Boogaloo. Bigger, badder, better

Couldn't Adam and Eve it

Since the Eve equivalent is half the price.

UKIP appeals against ICO request for info on Brexit data dealings

Open Democracy has been investigating this

Read http://www.opendemocracy.net/dup-dark-money and other articles to find out more about the shenanigans of laundering money to pay for data manipulation.

Hello, Dixons Carphone? Yep, we're ringing from a 2015 handset. Profits down 60%, eh?

I got a software update on a Chinese phone

I ordered a 4G Android 7.0 phone from a Chinese company on eBay for £80 (a THL). After turning it on, I found they had a software bug fix available to download, only 8 months after the phone was made.

Now that Chinese suppliers have warehouses in the UK, I order everything from them.

Google Drive ate our homework! Doc block blamed on code blunder

Re: GDoc sync

Use Insync. It converts Google docs to .odt on backup.

Is the FCC purposefully screwing up US school broadband projects?

Looks like the USAC is trying to get bribes. Need an undercover police investigation.

If you say it loud enough, Uber will sound atrocious: Super Cali juristic discrimination process

Uber is one company that has objective data on performance. So why not use it?

Tories spared fine after being told off by ICO for election telemarketing

Re: He made one mistake

If supporters of a party directly call someone and up front says they are calling for the party, then can try to persuade people. That is telephone canvassing. It is when another organisation tries to do it while pretending to be independent that breaks the rules. Were the GMB up front about who was calling and why?

Google faces $10k-a-day fines if it defies court order to hand over folks' private overseas email

Why is Google being fined for contempt of court when they have a pending appeal? Normally appeals put a stay on all decisions until the matter is finally settled?

FCC Commissioner blasts new TV standard as a 'household tax'

DVB-T2

Why not just use DVB-T2, like in most of Europe? Why does the USA have to be different?

Software update turned my display and mouse upside-down, says user

Re: I wonder...

Not even Iris Robinson?

Co-op Bank's users moan over online wobbles

Looking at Metro and Handelsbank.

Geoboffins claim to find oldest trace of life in rocks 4bn years old

Re: More fake news

Didn't he calculate the ages of everyone mentioned in the bible, add them up and come up with 4000 years B.C.?

Odd that the headmaster was in a Church of England primary school, as that church supports evolution, as do the Catholics.

Ouch: Brit council still staggering weeks after ransomware bit its PCs

Radioactive ransomare

Isn't Sellafield in Copeland Borough Council's area?

Bless their hearts: Democrats want $40bn to spruce up America's bumpkin broadband

Many of these rural areas are full of Republican voters. So this plan will get support from rural Republican congressmen.

Baidu puts open source deep learning into smartphones

Re: "MDL can recognise a smartphone in less than half a second"

Hang on, if the neural network runs on the phone it doesn't have to send anything to a server.

Bing fling sting: Apple dumps Microsoft search engine for Google

In 2013 I compared Google and Bing's geolocation of thousands of house addresses in Oxford. Bing couldn't locate half of them, Google got all but 3%. So I got NationBuilder to change its default search and geolocation engine for the UK.

Silicon brains ready to plug into London

If you really liked to see us, you wouldn't charge so much.

UK Prime Minister calls on internet big beasts to 'auto-takedown' terror pages within 2 HOURS

We need bad bomb-making information on the Internet

So that people make dud bombs that just burn instead of explode because they couldn't calculate the stoichiometric mixture (plus a bit extra oxidiser) that any 3rd former chemistry pupil could work out, or many people in Northern Ireland pubs.

Facebook let advertisers target 'Jew-haters'

It was just an example

They could have picked any group that people hate. But having found one that targeted thousands of people they used that as an example, set up a small targeted Facebook post and wrote about it.

A thorough research project would have compared the number of people who self-identify as haters of someone. But to prove there is a problem with Facebook, you just need one example.

So the only reason to object to the choice of example is when the objector also hates that group.

As for search terms in Facebook employer fields, take a look at the number of people who type search queries in to the Google Android App Facebook page. There is even a video singing about those search terms.

Totally uncool California bureaucrats shoot down drone weed delivery

So what has the state of California got against rail freight? Locked containers on a train are safer than cars.

Sci-Fi titan Jerry Pournelle passes,
aged 84

JP versus other SF authors

Milwright said:

> Am I the only one here who thought his story writing dreadful, ill-constructed, predictable drivel only saved from utter uselessness by the Niven collaboration?

He wasn't anywhere as good as Arthur C. Clarke or the recently deceased Brian Aldiss. But his stories were good readable yarns.

> And the only one who found Chaos Manor a sink of ill-informed, name-dropping posturing?

You probably are the only one. Most of us found Chaos Manor as the light relief in a serious magazine we had to pay a lot of money for in the newsagents that stocked US imports.

Re: Science provides facts, you decide.

The IPCC is tens of thousands of scientists, not politicians. They work on investigating different aspects of the problem, then a group of a few hundred synthesise the research into a range of models. 97% of scientists agree with the consensus coming out of that meta-analysis. There is rational disagreement about what to do to mitigate the effects of climate change. But it is no longer rational to dispute the greenhouse effect (as any gardener would tell you) or that it is the direct and indirect consequences of human activity that is the overwhelming contributor to the accumulation of CO₂ and CH₄ in the atmosphere.

When Jerry Pournelle wrote about it, the science was less clear cut. In 2017 it is as close to a certainty that science gets. And in some of his novels, terraforming relied on creating an atmosphere to retain heat.

Google to kill its Drive file locker in two confusing ways

Use Insync instead

Some time ago I switched to using Insync to synchronise selected folders on my PC to Google Drive. It works much better than the rudimentary downloadable client that Google supplies. And Insync works under Windows, OSX and Linux.

Detox from your weekend kebabs with a healthy storage golubtsy

Recipes more interesting that the article

Who cares about the ins and outs of people in storage companies? It is boring. Food is much more interesting - as is drink.

Google, propaganda, and the new New Man

Then there is professional lying

as in South Africa, where a British PR company has been caught disseminating fake news to reracialise politics in South Africa.

Let's make professional lying (by PR flacks, journalists and politicians) an imprisonable offence.

If Machine Learning is the question, open source is the answer. Right?

People have been trained in Machine Learning since the 1980s

It was part of my M.Sc. at Kingston Polytechnic in 1988. Even then it wasn't new. By the 1990s there were simple systems to apply ID3 to your data. One of my students built a system to diagnose congenital dislocation of the hip in two days.

It is doing it at a large scale, and with more neural network layers, that is new.

Japanese sat tech sinks Sea Shepherd anti-whaling activists' hopes

Sea Shepherd submarine

Sea Shepherd should buy a submarine to shadow the whaling boats. Disguise it as a whale.

Uh oh, scientists know how those diamonds got in Uranus, and they're telling everyone!

Re: De Beers sponsoring the next probe?

This month's Wired has an article on producing large diamonds by chemical vapour deposition. Purer than mined diamonds. But each diamond takes 20 min. to grow.

Phisherfolk dangle bait at dot-fish domain

ISIRTA

Still a way to go to match the I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again fish puns sketch.