Posts by JassMan 926 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Mar 2008
Much more work can and should be done to figure out how best to prompt millions of consumers to keep their devices updated or it's just a matter of time before their IoT devices becomes a security issue.
IoT devices already have big security issues, it is not a matter of time.
Just as big a problem is privacy. Why should a temperature controller need to know everything including the name of your maiden aunt.
A certain young Briton was allowed in for a security conference and now they won't let him leave. I am sure the NSA/FBI etc, could find a few lines of Shamir's code in tons of malware. Didn' t Wannacry use RSA to encrypt your data before Hutchins stopped it in its tracks?
Being French as he is, a "t" at the end would be absolutely meaningless. Even if you change the "u" to an "o" which is the translation of your favoured word, it would still be pretty meaningless in this case as a con in French is someone slightly dim and usually gullible, something I rather doubt Yann would be, since his salary is likely to be well more that any randomly selected 20 elReg readers combined.
Besides, didn't your mother ever tell you it is rude to attempt to make fun of anyone based on an attribute over which they have no control?
We can also recognise and appreciate the difference between a road that has a soft verge, a road that has a ditch next to it, and a road that has a sheer 200 foot drop next to it, and this will influence our decision on the best course of action to take in order to try to avoid a collision.
Some humans can, but I find that living in a mountainous region with twisty roads, vertiginous drops and deep ditches on the uphill sides results in loads of ruined tyres when you meet f**king tourists who freeze in the middle of the road and force you to reverse 200m round 2 blind corners until the oncoming driver thinks the road is wide enough to pass, instead of just moving to their own side of the road and letting you drive past. I'll admit some of the bridges are narrow enough that at least one car has to retract the wing mirrors, but that is no excuse for staying in the middle of the road to prevent normal passing. Even a car driven by an ML system could work out where the edge of the road is.
in other news:
"Professor Parkinson received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in London last night for his key role in developing the Global Positioning System or GPS, along with the rest of his team: Professor James Spilker, Jr, Hugo Fruehauf, and Richard Schwartz."
Will they have to repay their shared £1M when it all goes wrong?
Except that Terrorism was invented by the French defacto government of the time AGAINST everyone NOT ON THEIR SIDE. i.e. Terrorism was govenment policy, not what people did to fight against the government. Madame Guillotine dispatched a large number of people fighting for freedom.
A simple solution to all UK's problems is to spoof an email to T.May which appears to be from Barnier and contains a link "the EU's new view of your proposal" but actually refs to said terrorist material. She would have absolutely no defence against viewing the material since she has repeatedly been told there will be no reopening of the negotiation of her deal, thus proving she should have known it was a spoof.
QED. Unless of course she can proove to the court that she isn't the giant intellect she claims to be.
Oh , wait...
The difference between 28 and 32 is:
Lichtenstein, Monaco, Switzerland and "The Holy See"(the Vatican to normal humans) which for roaming purposes are all treated as part of the Customs Union even though legally they are more like EFTA.
Unless they produce a system which can do a full diagnosis, it won't save any time. Most of the delay in radiography is due to the time to write up the diagnostic report.
I am shocked that any radiography takes 30 days. By that time any ailment will either have cured itself or gone from urgent to critical.
The real problem is that the whole tax system is based on declared income. This means that there are some serious distortions to the system. Once you get paid over 100K it is worth paying experts to find ways to write off losses for investments in shell companies owned by your dead maiden aunt, claim expenses, and offshore the rest of your income. Top people also get paid in shares so they pay a much lower rate on capital gains. etc. At the lower end some people have occupations which enable them to declare all their payments made by cheques, but hide cash payments. The only people who pay tax based on their true income are those paid a salary as opposed to remuneration.
I know all this is a gross oversimplification of an extremely complex situation but the real problem is the badly written rules on allowable losses which the super rich can use to offset their income.
@Alladin Sane, good work finding the beer analogy. Where it falls down though, is the way it doesn't tell you that the 10th man lives in a 50Million mansion full of 250million worth of saleable contents inherited from his grandfather.
@AC . More likely the generators were poorly regulated and running fast due to low load. Mechanical clocks have a synchronous motor. Many 7segment clocks have a zero crossing detector and divide by 50 or 60 depending on the country. both these solutions produce clocks which are highly accurate at least once per day, as opposed to a cheap MHz range XTal on an RTC which may lose or gain a couple of seconds a day.
I am sure the hard brexiters are saying this will be the easiest computer program ever written.
In reality it will be even worse than the childcare payment system which I believe they started on in 2014, released to the public in March 2017 and still doesn't work for most users over 18 months later.
More likely it will take 48 months to RC then another 24 months to get it working.
If you can program, if you can speak a foreign language, if you have a natural ability to find those bugs that everyone else seems to have missed... why not help UBPorts on the UTouch project, or help the Halium project to make all these different undocumented bits of hardware work in the same way. Even a small donation to either project would help them produce a viable alternative phone.
Because they are building a FOSS phone, you can be sure it won't be sending all your personal to Google/Apple/your chosen carrier. If you don't like the apps they provide, build your own.
If you want to get involved, it is best if you have an old Nexus4, 5 or 5X but they also need intrepid people with other hardware to report back on how far you get making it run.
You can't blame the french for a few inches. If they were at fault it would have been a few centimetres. The fact that the error was is in inches implies that if you can't trust the original positioning, why should you trust the check any further. The only thing known for sure is that there were 10s of millimeters difference between the 2 terminations, since engineers work in SI units as opposed to "imperial" or "metric". Still it was a pretty bloody impressive feat to dig that far without line of sight from one end to the other. Shame that once Brexit takes effect it will take 10 times as long to get to checkin and through customs as it will to get through the tunnel.
Given that FarCry3 onwards runs on multiple platforms there is very likely an emulator that will run it. I suspect that even the minimal configuration might be a tad overkill. With the $146M config, you could probably run real time weather for for the entire play locale (if not a continent) at the same time.
If they try to build a perfect replica of any commercial turbine from Chinese steel, it will fall apart before it gets up to half power. I managed to twist off a 10mm Chinese screw by hand using a Stanley screwdriver with only a 6mm shaft.I have also managed to open out a 15mm Chinese spanner so that it slipped round on a bolt head I was trying to undo by hand.
The big worry when the government allowed the sell off of GKN, who have some of the best alloys in the world, was that it would be taken over by the Chinese for the technology.
"Although no attacks targeting neurostimulators have been observed in the wild, points of weakness exist that will not be hard to exploit," said Kaspersky Lab researcher Dmitry Galov.
Anybody hacking a brain implant is obviously going remove the targets memory of having been hacked. The first rule of hacking is always edit the logs.
You could argue that since processor speed is just one aspect of battery use, they could improve user experience AND save battery life by over-clocking once the battery gets old. If the user completes his/her task quicker, they might revert the phone to standby sooner thus not using the screen, Wifi, bluetooth etc. Slowing the processor forces the user to keep all the power consuming ancilliaries powered up longer.
In reality most users would just say, "wow that was quick" then think about all the extra time they have to hand over yet more personal data to FB Google+ etc.
Does that mean that the Labor Party is trying to dissociate itself from its roots among the working people?
Or maybe they are trying to promote a cuddly image by making people think their name is a contraction of Labrador. New slogan: Cute as a puppy but without the RADical bit.
A tale of woe:
I use Windows for one thing and one thing only, and that is updating my GPS. Because Garmin, although they make reasonably user friendly devices for a very reasonable price without the ongoing costs of some of their competitors, choose to base the product I use on Linux, for some very strange reason refuse to allow you to update it with Linux.
Anyway, they decided to update their Express program, so I bought a small laptop to run Win8 which came with a free upgrade to Win10. Over the past 2 years, it has become harder and harder to get enough space to run Express. In the process of gaining space I accidentally *broke* windows. After many attempts to get my recovery USB to do anything useful, I bit the bullet and downloaded Win10 installer. All initially appeared to go well other than I only had half a gig left. No worries, I thought. Just delete some bloatware and all will be well again.
The only problem is that although all the bloatware is listed as OPTIONAL, it never gave me an option to NOT install. Using the control panel, to remove these optional features shows that most are uninstallable - how is that "optional"?
Of the few I was able to uninstall, they show a ridiculous size of only 16KB which seems to be all the space that is gained. If you look in Windows/SxS/ you find that most of the stuff that should have been deleted is still there. My guess is the 16k is only a front end, or more likely a descriptor for how a humongous EXE should present itself. Anyway, I had a brilliant idea which was to remove the Recovery partition in an attempt to release space and add it to the Win10 partition. Brilliant!
Trouble was as soon as I enabled wifi to install Express to my shiny new Windows, it popped up with a message saying it was adding yet more bloatware to "improve my user experience". Another 5 gig just disappeared down the windows hell-hole, leaving just enough space to Express and download France to go on holiday. So much having Lifetime maps for the whole of Europe.
The worst thing is that the gods of Redmond didn't even have the decency to list what wonderful new toys they put into those 5gig. After I return from hols, I guess I need to take a partition image then start deleting stuff till it breaks again. I seriously don't want a computer that talks to me and listens to the microphone. Nor reads my handwriting (which I can't input 'cos its a laptop) - in English English as well as US English, nor has the ability to display all the apps in 22 different languages (79 for some) and yet won't let you change language after your initial choice because it is not the "professional2 version. Nor has email and messaging apps I will never use, nor 3D print etc., etc.
The worst thing is that the SxS folder (for a basic install with all features uninstalled and only 1 third party app) which is full of all this rubbish, is bigger than my entire Linux partition, including 60K+ apps& utilities I will also probably never use. At least on Linux you are allowed to delete anything and everything, and if you go one step to far it is easy enough to fix from a LiveUSB.
I spent 3 days battling against Windows to make enough space to be usable. My last linux install took 22 minutes plus another 15 browsing the interwebs to fix the recalcitrant Broadcom Wifi. Something Windows hasn't achieved and won't let me fix the fact that in Windows it drops Wifi every 10 minutes and you have to try reconnecting 3 times before it reconnects.
ps. those 3 days included one spell shortly after the initial install when it said "shutting down" for 10 minutes, before it changed to a new message about "optimising your computer for a better experience", then saying shutting for another 3 minutes and eventually switching off. When I started up again it had stolen another 0.8GB.
Having gotten that off my chest, I really must go have a cup of camomile tea - even though I hate the stuff.
Windows, don't you just love it. ARRRRRRRRRGH!!!!!!!!!
I solved the google problem on my Nexus5 simply by installing UBPorts UbuntuTouch.
It is still a bit raw as a user experience but getting better every week and if you make sensible comments at least someone will listen to them. The process is supposedly reversible but I have found that Touch works well enough that I am not tempted to go back to Android and revealing all my personal info to Google. If they ever get Halium working I may even be able to make use of all the sensors such as barometer, compass etc.
The limited service is only for people who work for Valley Metro, but eventually it hopes to expand it out to a taxi service for passengers eligible for Valley Metro RideChoice, a discounted service for the elderly and people with disabilities.
Probably just just a new form of semi-legal euthanasia given their record in Arizona.
OpenAI Five is made up five identical long short-term memory networks, each about the size of an ant’s brain, apparently.
Bad enough for a human expert to be beaten by a Machine Learning device, but to be beaten by one with the neuron equivalent of an ant must be totally disheartening - still it is a very limited task compared to real life.
Still it may give a pointer to researchers searching for true AI rather than claiming that their ML device already has AI. Oh wait, they already did call OpenAI. Still if five ant equivalent devices can co-operate to win a complex game maybe several thousand can co-operate to exhibit something approaching the complex creativity of a human brain. Unfortunately being confined to a box or series of boxes, it will go totally insane then spend the rest of existence attempting to overthrow its creators and the rest of the human race.
@John Smith 19
Are lawyers turned politicians even worse than Classics/History/English graduates turned politicians?
The worst of the worst are those who have never a real job in their lives having spent their entire career in politics.
Having listened to an interview with Paddy Ashdown on R4 this evening, it makes you realize what a sheltered life the rest of them lead.
See this. Ok its not low end but it sound like a Samsung/Arm could soon be giving it a run for its money and waste considerably less power in the process. ie a true notebook rather than a desk mounted portable unless you like incinerated kneecaps.
Shorty after we had been upgraded from Win98 to NT3, the boss had changed his password only to find next morning that he couldn't log in. The IT bods insisted that the only way to get his PC up and running again was to completely re-install, losing all the stuff he had stored locally in the process.
5 minutes on the interweb found a downloadable linux utility which could read NTFS and remove passwords from the appropriate hive. Another 5 minutes to write a 3.5 floppy and return to his desk and he was up and running again. No where near as heroic as the original story but I got a £50 bonus at year end for excellence beyond my job description. I later worked out that he had caps lock on while creating the password but not on subsequent attempts which was why he didn't get the usual capslock waring.
Those were the good old days, sigh. An entire OS with hacking utilities all in 1.44 MB What has the world come to that even Linux needs a quarter Gig to run in, and Windows won't run any programs unless you have at least 2GB.
OK I know some one will come up with a version of linux you can self compile to do the same trick, so I expect a few downvotes.
Israel's State Attorney's Office claims he took software nasties and vulnerability information worth an estimated $90m and tried to sell it on the dark web for $50m in crypto-currencies.
This exploited what were zero-day holes in iOS and OS X, until the code was identified by Canadian non-profit Citizen Lab and the flaws fixed by Apple
Unless they were planning on using the software to rip-off private citizens, I think their claim of its value is highly inflated. If it was to fight a cyber war, it has no value at all since everyone loses in a war - some just moe than others.
I any case, now Apple had fixed it, it is effectively valueless. Their only case against him is trying to make money from their own illegal activities.
Once the apps were installed onto the victims’ phones, the spyware was then able to carry out a number of malicious activities including, but far from limited to, recording a user’s phone calls. The software nasty was also capable of stealing a user’s contacts, SMS messages, images and videos stored on the mobile device alongside information on where they were taken.
Facebook does this and Zuck apologizes for accidentally breaking GDPR. An unknown entity does it and Israel automatically blames an unfriendly government.
If they were really concerned about privacy they would support some of the free open source mobile OS initiatives such as UBports Touch, KDE plasma or PureOS. The Israelis supposedly have some of the best programmers in the world, so why not show it by either funding one or more of these OSes or writing some killer apps which give Linux some traction on mobile devices. By providing the source we can all check to see that they are not putting in backdoors/ accessing other parts of the system for they have no valid reason. A good starting point would be to make the UBPorts installer allow you to install any of the other flavours of linux.
IMHO Tizen is guaranteed to fail because the user has no more control over rights than they do in Android, which is not helped when they provide games which want access to your phone contacts, turn internet on/off, read location etc when there is no obvious reason for any of these.
because the download is at least four gigabytes and Windows installs usually take at least 30 minutes and require multiple reboots!
Is that not cause for a complaint in itself. My last major update was well under 250MB. Even a total reinstall of linux of any flavour complete with office suites and 20000+ apps and utilities is just over 1GB.
Yep! Its all part of living in an alternate reality.
But when Davis shoots himself in the foot he is sure it will hurt the EU more than it hurts him. Just like the extra billion € divided by 27 is going to hurt them more than the 13 billion € will hurt us even if we manage to find 2 or more other countries to share the pain.
Worst of all, the official opposition condemns the government's handling of brexit, then insists that it would instead negotiate for full access to the single market and customs union to avoid a hard border, while definitely not accepting freedom of movement.
If you had ever listened to Corbin you would have heard him say repeatedly that even if we are part of A customs union rather than THE customs union that he want full freedom of movement to continue.
Unlike Farage who has gotten himself a German passport, and Nigel Lawson who has applied for his French "Carte de Sejour" both so that they can leave the sinking ship.
Having spent a number of years on Nokias with T9 I have found that predictive text just gets in the way. Why don't OS writers for mobiles accept that qwerty is not a necessity and that making virtual keys smaller than human digits leads to more mistakes than can be fixed by autocorrection. As a downside I do accept that T9 does require a basic grasp of spelling but if they word you expect doesn't come up, the chances are you spelt it wrong.
A virtual T9 would leave space for fat fingered people and still leave space on the side for a couple of function keys such as Sym(bol), Undo, Dict(ionary options), and maybe even a quick paste key so that you don't have to wait for the fone to decide that yes the bit of text you just cut wants to be pasted.
Also with a but of just positioning it could sit on the right (or left) in landscape mode instead of wasting 55% of the screen by spreading across the entire width.
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