Posts by Jason Bloomberg

Attack of the cryptidiots: One wants Bitcoin-flush hard drive he threw out in 2013 back, the other lost USB stick password

Re: Don't ever write down your password on a piece of paper

While you are at it, post it online so it will be there forever and ever.

Covfefe

Two wrongs don't make a right: They make a successful project sign-off

Zeros and Heroes

I have to confess I have never known what the rules are for the pluralizationalism (*) of words ending in "o".

(*) Have at it you Grammar Nazis of the Commentariat - It's my wilfully given gift for 2021.

What can the 1944 OSS manual teach us before we all return to sabotage the office?

Brlliant

May I be first to say, on this 1st of Johnson 0001, "Happy New Year". We should see how well it's going by the 1st of Farage.

Brexit trade deal advises governments to use Netscape Communicator and SHA-1. Why? It's all in the DNA

Re: 20 year old tech...

It's unlikely that they will diverge.

But how is Boris and his government going to deliver these supposed "opportunities" if they don't?

I fear this is a deal which will soon become no deal.

UK on track to miss even its slashed full-fibre gigabit coverage goals, warn MPs

Johnson's career

Can best be summed up as "over-promising and under-delivering".

He does both with great panache and a cheery smile which, I imagine, is why the vacuous love him.

The one with Cyndi Lauper's "Time after Time" CD in the pocket.

Atlantic City auctions off chance to hit Big Red Button and make grotesque Trump Plaza casino go boom

Re: The possibilities are ...

IWON2020

How to leak data via Wi-Fi when there's no Wi-Fi chip: Boffin turns memory bus into covert data transmitter

Re: Ever notice ...

Every time you see a headline about getting data out of a computer in some seemingly insane way, you can pretty much guarantee Bu-Gurion University is involved.

I knew it would be them before I even read the article. Pretty much one-trick ponies but it gets them a regular supply of free publicity.

Up yours, Europe! Our 100% prime British broadband is cheaper than yours... but also slower and a bit of a rip-off

Value for money

I'm not sure how one measures that. I consider I get VFM because the price I pay is fair enough for the service I get while paying more for higher speed wouldn't really be any gain for me. But I know others who would judge it differently.

Cruise, Kidman and an unfortunate misunderstanding at the local chemist

The over-reaching long arm of the law

I had a friend who was a bus driver. One day he found a carrier bag containing 'recreational drugs' a careless passenger had left behind. Told to follow company procedures when he was back at the depot he dutifully trudged off to the local police station in his lunch break to hand them in.

Where they held him for hours while giving him the third degree. The very obvious defence that "no dealer in their right mind would hand in their own drugs" cut no ice.

He was eventually released and, having lost a driver for an entire shift, company policy changed and the police were never bothered over dodgy finds ever again.

Exonerated: First subpostmasters cleared of criminal convictions in Post Office Horizon scandal

As well as addressing the consequences of these particular cases; we need to take a long hard look at the judicial system which allowed such grievous miscarriages to occur.

Useful quantum computers will be impossible without error correction. Good thing these folks are working on it

It's all beyond me

"It involves creating a cavity with two mirrors and bouncing photons back and forth so the light creates an interference pattern that represents quantum information.

The shiny monoliths at Utah and elsewhere all seem to be three sided. Perhaps we're being given a clue?

Scotch eggs ascend to the 'substantial meal' pantheon as means to pop to pub for a pint during pernicious pandemic

Re: It's all bollocks

If you ate seventeen packets of cheese and onion crisps or a dozen packs of peanuts, I defy anyone to deny that is not a substantial meal.

It's that 'more than one' which discounts a packet of crisps, bag of peanuts, scotch egg from being a substantial meal in its own right.

A substantial meal to me is one which leaves a very hungry me full enough that I wouldn't want to - and couldn't - eat the same again in that one sitting.

The other test is whether one would tell the waiter to fuck right off if it were served when a "substantial meal" had been ordered.

But we all know this pretend confusion is really about subverting the lockdown restrictions.

Mysterious Utah monolith mysteriously disappears without trace

Distracted by the shiny thing

Why is no one menthioning the rather obvious face carved into the rock?

Are we just meant to pretend it's not there?

It may date back to 1994 but there's no end in sight for the UK's Chief customs system as Brexit rules beckon

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

How about we dress it up as 'People were asked a question and those that answered gave their preference.'

How about we describe it how it was; where the options people had were to stay in the EU or to believe the Brexiteers when they lied about what the consequences of voting to leave would mean, lied about what they actually wanted, and never admitted they were playing a bait and switch game until after the votes were cast.

I will never accept the referendum as legitimate because of that.

One thing is very clear; the majority did not vote to leave the EU without a deal.

China prepares for launch of Chang'e 5 mission to Moon, which would make it third nation to return lunar sample

Re: Waiting for trump to tweet...

I believe China is trying to steal the moon, one sack load at a time.

BBC picks SiFive RISC-V chip for Doctor Who programming-for-kids kit – with Jodie Whittaker narrating

Re: Timely rip-off

A $100 for a SBC? That's a bit rich isn't it? For the same amount you can get a full-blown Raspberry Pi 400 All-in-one computer.

It's not $100 for just an SBC. It seems to come with three crocodile-clip leads as well :)

But to be serious, while one could buy a Pi cheaper it's a different target market. And try running your Pi 400 on three or four AA batteries and seeing how long it runs for.

America's largest radio telescope close to collapse as engineers race to fix fraying cables

Farewell Arecibo

It doesn't look to me that there's any way to resolve the current situation other than to let her fall.

And let's hope that serves as a wake-up call for what else we might lose when we don't invest in maintenance and preserving what we haver. But I fear it won't.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledges £12bn green economy package

Re: How exactly?

you don't need a 1:1 chargers to cars ratio.

Possibly not but it seems to me that whenever anyone suggests we need far fewer chargers than cars they seem to forget that most people will be charging overnight, while at work or parked while shopping, and they'll leave their car plugged in for the duration preventing others from using it.

Extending driving range will help but not entirely if people choose to keep topped up in case they go through a rough patch when they can't access a charger. Having charging bays with time limited occupancy may help but will be quite inconvenient.

It seems to me they are rushing into this without knowing exactly what will be needed, without being able to answer fundamental questions on how it can be made to work. And, if it doesn't; there's no escape route.

Re: Not a chance !

I fail to see how anyone with any basic understanding of the work involved could realistically say that this will be done in 9 years.

I was assuming that's why they have a parallel plan to get people cycling and walking.

Mind you I might be be misunderestimating them. All their other delusional fantasies have tuned out just fine. Haven't they?

Images of women coerced by adult companies poison dataset popularised by deepfake smut creators

And, even if someone does look like the deepfake you were busy shuffling over the night before, that doesn't necessarily put them at risk.

The kind of people who would equate being in a porn film as giving permission for sexual assault are hopefully few and far between and likely don't care who their victims are anyway.

Halt don't catch fire: Amazon recalls hundreds of thousands of Ring doorbells over exploding battery fears

Re: Shows people don't read the instructions

+1

This wasn't a case about Americans (or anyone else) being so stupid that they didn't understand coffee can be hot. What McDonald's were selling was so much hotter than would ever have been expected, dangerously hot and injurious when spilled.

Like pop-tarts and toasties; "hot" does not cut it when "danger of scalding injuries" is appropriate.

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

That "switch the socket off before unplugging" came about because people could get their fingers behind the plug body and make contact with the live prong when trying to pull out a stubborn plug.

These days most live and neutral prongs are partially insulated but not all are. It's still good practice.

Trump's official campaign website vandalized by hackers who 'had enough of the President's fake news'

Re: A sign of the times

Trump is not actually particuarly dangerous. He's portrayed that way, but he's mostly mouth.

Seems to me he did a pretty good job of nearly talking us into a nuclear war over North Korea and it's not going so great with China.

It's not just what he says; it's how others respond.

His threats to wipe Iran off the face of the earth were the catalyst for them shooting down a civilian airliner.

Machine learning gets semi conscious... Waymo, Daimler vow to bring self-driving trucks to American highways

"Duel"

Life imitating art.

Don't upset the trucks. Respect a semi -- ooo-er, missus.

NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app is leaving some unable to access government self-isolation grants

Re: Might be on purpose.

I thought it was a feature. Instructions to isolate from the app are purely advisory, not legally binding, and I'm not sure there's any way to determine an individual has genuinely received such an instruction.

That means anyone fancying a small windfall could claim they were told to self-isolate and demand their free £500.

The government won't pay for school meals, seems to want to drown migrants in the Channel, so I'm not surprised there's no magic code for a free handout of cash.

And I'm not surprised that lying shit Hancock is lying again. This government has a full quota of world-beating lying liars.

Is Google fudging search rankings to benefit pages that embed YouTube vids? Or is this just another ‘bug’?

Clickbait

"Is Google fudging search rankings to benefit pages that embed YouTube vids? Or is this just another ‘bug’?

In fact, what was happening, the team found out was that anything loaded onto the page using an iframe tag, such as an embedded YouTube video, was simply discounted from Google’s PageSpeed tool altogether.

Well done El Reg - You made a Clickbait Victim out of me. Hope you are proud of yourselves.

We bought a knockoff Lego launchpad kit from China for our Saturn V rocket so you don't have to

Lego?

We were a Betta Bilda household which was I believe an Airfix product. Much more limited with building houses and castles the most it would really stretch to even with a vivid kid's imagination.

I really enjoyed pushing the roof tiles together to build roofs. Which may explain why I got into embedded assembly language.

Virginia voter registration website falls over hours before deadline. The Russians? No, a broken fiber line

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond

In the UK it is continually proposed that we should allow voting by SMS, email, TV Red Button services, via ATMs, in supermarkets, anywhere and anyhow.

That's because those who control us aren't so much concerned about voter fraud than ensuring voter numbers makes it look like our alleged system of democracy is still legitimate. They don't care about who wins so much as ensuring the system persists.

As long as we can pretend we have democracy; all will be fine.

BBC Micro:bit with boosted specs and onboard mic to go on sale from next month

Re: Why BBC ?

The BBC spun it out into a separate foundation in 2016, as far as I can tell they only had the project for about a year after launch.

After all the problems and delays involved, the issue of CodeBug, it wouldn't surprise me if the BBC weren't glad to see the back of it. BBC Learning are still providing input into the foundation and the product remains marketed under "BBC" branding.

Re: Why BBC ?

This is a vanity project, they should have backed Raspberry Pi instead

It's a project born of the government's Make It Digital pursuit a couple of years ago. If the BBC had backed a commercial product like the Raspberry Pi rather than commissioning its own all hell would have broken out with people accusing the BBC of providing an unfair commercial advantage.

Facebook doesn't know its onions: Seeds ad banned after machine-learning algo found vegetable pic 'overtly sexual'

Should have gone to SpecSavers

I'd nearly finished knocking one out before I realised it was a picture of onions.

Someone not only created a comment-spewing Reddit bot powered by OpenAI's GPT-3, it offered bizarre life advice

"Fake story about a colony of humans living trapped underneath elevators"

Not so much trapped as choosing to live there, and not so much choosing to as it being better than the alternatives.

This case may be a made-up story but there are quite few "hidden communities" where one might not expect them, and it's easy to believe it's Fake News when it isn't, and of course to spin it the other way.

I have lived in squats, know some sleeping rough in parks and fields. I'd choose underground if I had to, and the best places are where no one cares to look. The thing one quickly learns at the rough end of society is there's safety in numbers, being amongst others suffering the same plight.

Britain should have binned Huawei 5G kit years ago to cuddle up with Trump, says Parliamentary committee

But he's right. Trump has no shame, no honour, and will do anything to cling to the power he has. His opposition has no effective means of countering him or that.

I don't believe Biden is as frail as made out but being the nice guy isn't enough. And I do feel the right-wingers are correct when they say Biden's attempts to appeal to the centre is alienating some on the left - More so outside the US where "left" actually is left of centre, not the moderate right.

But it doesn't matter anyhow. America has become so polarised and divided that it's now simply a vote for one tribe or the other. It's so polarised that I can't believe there is anyone with a cluon who did not make up their minds a long time ago which tribe they belong to and who they will be voting against.

It's now a numbers game. Which tribe has the most members, how many will vote, how many votes will simply disappear.

Remember...

We have always been at war with China, Russia, North Korea, Iran.

Rearrange and add to as circumstances dictate. I expect the EU will be added to the list come January.

Here's US Homeland Security collaring a suspected arsonist after asking Google for the IP addresses of folks who made a specific search

Re: Hmmm

Ah yes; the entirely lacking in evidence argument that "they did it legitimately this time means they won't the next time".

Sure, maybe they will try that, but having not done so is not proof nor evidence they will.

I am old enough to remember when "innocent until proven guilty" used to be a thing.

UK privacy watchdog wraps up probe into Cambridge Analytica and... it was all a little bit overblown, no?

+1

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US finds new Huawei to hurt China with new sanctions at top chip maker SMIC

Re: It's Amazing How Petty The USA & Fearless Leader Trump Can Get

The US should remember that the Chinese hold US debt as well being the source of rare metals used in some security enterprises and a quick jerk of those strings would be a painful lesson for Washington to learn.

The three unknowns are; when China will decide she's had enough, what she will do about it, and whether Trump can be removed from office before that happens.

The latter might depend on whether the military brass are looking forward to a global nuclear war or want to avoid that.

NHS COVID-19 launch: Risk-scoring algorithm criticised, the downloads, plus public told to 'upgrade their phones'

Re: At this time, what's the point?

The UK has had an extended lockdown and it hasn't led to the desired result.

Look at any of the graphs and one can see it was heading in the right direction. Lockdown was working.

That trend reversed as Johnson prematurely relaxed lockdown and infection spread has soared since taking more significant steps to re-open the economy, opening schools, the hospitality sector, particularly pubs and clubs, trying to coerce people back into offices workplaces.

It's been a game of two halves. Johnson was late on the field and fucked up badly. He's fucked up even worse in the second half.

India shows off new home-grown CPU – but at 100MHz, 32-bit and 180nm, it’s a bit of a clunker

RISC-V Pi

I am surprised Raspberry Pi haven't got into the RISC-V SBC game. They are members of the RISC-V Foundation and their associations with Broadcom and LowRisc has them ideally placed to deliver the first mass-produced RISC-V computer platform to a global market

It would be the perfect opportunity to ride the RISC-V bandwagon and make a tidy profit. If it includes a credible GPU it might even out-sell their ARM-based Pi.

Re: From linked Reg article:

I would have said "America". Or, more accurately, "Trump".

Trump's trade war economic terrorism has made other nations wake up to the fact that, when they are reliant on foreign countries who can impose sanctions and cut off supplies, their sovereignty is mostly imaginary.

In taking, what used to be merely coercive threats to invoke consequences if they don't play ball, to the next level, it has forced countries to address what will happen when they fall victim to US sanctions, having supplies cut off, or their economies disrupted.

Trump's strategy is deeply flawed; it will ultimately have the US losing what coercive pressure it has.

Have no idea WTF is going on with the Oracle-Walmart TikTok deal? Don’t sweat it, here’s our latest rundown

Re: Obviously

Since the debacle of the Tulsa rally, caused partially by TikTok users

I doubt registering to supposedly 'reserve tickets so those who wanted to attend couldn't get them' had minimal effect seeing as there were no tickets, no such reservations, which could lock anyone out.

It is more likely that Trump's own campaign manager - hyping it that huge numbers, greater than capacity, had already registered - had people not bothering to register or attend.

The one with the invite to the "Over-booked Day of Solitude festival" in the pocket.

We're not getting back with Galileo, UK govt tells The Reg, as question marks sprout above its BS*

Re: You are joking?

The most sensible reason for leaving was the intention for "an ever closer union", meaning financial and political union of Europe is the end destination, and the UK's wanting only to be in a free trade area, maintaining its political and financial independence.

Indeed. Which is why Brexiteers promised exactly that - "No one is talking about leaving the customs union", "Only an idiot would leave the single market", etc, etc.

They fooled enough gullible people to secure a small majority and only then revealed it was bait and switch.

Re: European Union

Why they don't just say "FU, you want out, yer out. That's a hard Brexit then"

Because they are not stupid enough to allow the blame for the consequences of our leaving to be hung on them, as much as Brexiteers are hoping for that.

They aren't going to allow the UK to claim the EU wasn't open to negotiations, was punishing us, forcing us out, or forcing us into the position we choose to end with. They'll keep the door open until we walk away.

It's not over until the UK says it's over and it will be the UK who has to take responsibility for saying that. Luckily for Johnson he has coronavirus to blame when Brexit turns to shit.

UK govt urged to bolt tough legal protections onto Arm and protect jobs – or simply veto Nvidia's £31bn acquisition

Re: Why sell Arm anyway ?

It's not only needing a US trade deal which will have our government not do anything but the entire Brexit thing.

Those "not stupid" who voted for it, who pretend they studied the issue in depth, weighed up the pros and cons, refuse to understand Brexit was a globalist's wet dream, and intended as such, where "we are open for business" means everything is for sale and ready for exploiting. May was applauding the sale of ARM as the shining example of that.

We all need to be lubing ourselves up and getting ready for the Great Brexit Shafting. We're America's bitch now.

Elecrow CrowPi2: Neat way to get your boffins-to-be hooked on Linux from an early age and tinkering in no time

The only thing you miss out on is GPIO and lower level hardware and things like that.

The Raspberry Pi Desktop distro for X86 includes the ability to link to a Pi Zero via USB and use its GPIO. A mere £5 fix for GPIO.

Upside down, you turn me, you're giving bork instinctively: Firefox flips as a train connection is missed

Re: Rotate 180

It is often beneficial to turn a display upside down for better readability when looking up at it rather than down as it would be on a desktop then have the software or display driver correct that. Viewing angle may supposedly be symmetrical but I've found that not to be the case.

That of course can lead to a crazy mixed-up upside-down world when things go wrong as appears to be the case here.

US ponders tech export ban on SMIC, China's biggest chipmaker

Re: The horse has bolted

And, of course, all the time China will continue to develop its own IP in chip design and manufacture. Given how capricious the US has become, it would be crazy not to.

Every time Trump tightens the thumbscrews in his adventure in economic terrorism he is letting China - and the world - know how painful dependency on the US can be.

It has got to be the ultimate driving force for removing such dependency and, when China's done that, the US will have little leverage left. Let's hope Trump has a plan before the tables get turned.

Let's hope that plan isn't World War III.

The Honor MagicBook Pro looks nice, runs like a dream, and isn't too expensive either. What more could you want?

Re: Decimated

deci isn't just a random Latin root, but a prefix with a mathematical meaning

"Decimated" - Fucked ten times over.