Posts by C. P. Cosgrove

Oregon city courting Google data centers fights to keep their water usage secret

But how much of that water is lost to the ecology of Oregon ? It is just being run through a system of pipes and released again. A common sight in the UK used to be pillars of steam rising from cooling towers attached to coal fired power stations and this steam was lost to the immediate ecology since the evaporated water seldom fell as rain in the immediate area but the majority of the water used was released back into rivers and such like.

Piping the sort of volumes referred to is not a trivial cost and the tax payers are entitled to be given the cost benefit data as they are the ones paying for it, and it would be reasonable to expect a commercial company to pay a commercial rate for its water supply but I fail to see how this affects the overall water supply in Oregon. It is possible that this water is no longer considered fit for human consumption but it is surely available for irrigation and similar uses. It is not as though it is being used for processing purpose as used in a chip fab or a steel works which do result in considerable contamination of the water used.

Chris Cosgrove

UK data watchdog calls for end-to-end encryption across video chat apps by default

Gilbert and Sullivan said "A policeman's lot is not a happy one.". That is as maybe, but what a hardship to have a requirement to get a warrant foisted upon them, it is so difficult to get a warrant. All they need to do is convince a Magistrate that there are reasonable grounds for suspicion and Magistrates tend not to take too much convincing.

Chris Cosgrove

38 million records exposed by misconfigured Microsoft Power Apps. Redmond's advice? RTFM

Ms. Barnes is just continuing a long standing tradition -

Shoot the messenger !

Chris Cosgrove

Audacity's new management hits rewind on telemetry plans following community outrage

Telemetry

Telemetry is not a subject I have significant problems with so long as it is restricted to how an application behaves and any possible negative interactions with the OS it is installed on. I have Audacity installed on both Win 10 and Linux and I am firmly of the opinion that it is a brilliant application. It is possibly - probably ? - not the application my ex brother-in-law would use, he is after all a professional sound engineer with his own record label, but for me it does everything I need.

It is probable that to an extent MS poisoned the telemetry well during the development of Win 10, but this was on pre-release development versions where, understandably, MS were watching almost every interaction with the OS under development. Once Win 10 went RTM most of this compulsory telemetry fell by the way-side and it is now extremely easy to restrict telemetry to the functioning of the OS itself, which is entirely reasonable. It is almost certainly true that MS could have explained this period of intense telemetry better and it is largely for this reason that there is still a tremendous amount of FUD about telemetry in general around.

Chris Cosgrove

Absolutely fab: As TSMC invests $100bn to address chip shortage, where does that leave the rest of the industry?

Arizona ? Fabs ? Water ?

I understood that a contributing factor in the World shortage of ICs was the drought in Taiwan which is impacting on TSMC production.

I understand that Arizona, USA, is largely desert so where is the water necessary for two fabs to come from ? Or is it another plan to grab a few billion in subsidies from Uncle Sam without actually doing anything productive to justify them ?

Chris Cosgrove

In YouTube's world, parental supervision means: 'Everyone sign in to Google, click once, and trust we get it right'

What age limits ?

While I am comfortably over the age of 18 I am not a regular user of YouTube. I find myself searching for tech vids from time to time in connection with what I do on BC and occasionally I watch the odd video for entertainment. I have a Google account but log-in is not automatic on my computer and I normally don't bother logging in on YouTube.

But I have never, ever been asked even to tick a box to certify that I am over 18, or whatever the age limit is. so how can they claim to be moderating the age of their users ?

Chris Cosgrove

Telcos face £100k-a-day fines unless they obey new UK.gov rules on how to deploy Huawei 5G gear in their networks

What if . . .

The UK Government eventually opted for a ban on Huawei kit because of heavy sustained pressure from the USA which was created by Donald Trump and for which nobody has been shown any hard evidence.

What if the incoming Government under Joe Biden decides to ease off significantly on the trade war with China and reverses the political decision to ban Huawei. What will the Johnson government do then ?

Will somebody think of the poor telcos ?

Chris Cosgrove

Google contractor HCL America accused of retaliating against unionized techies by shifting US jobs to Poland

Uh ?

I have been a trade unionist since I was 20 and spent five years as a shop steward. All I can say is 'More power to your elbows'.

Many of the HRT horror stories we read about in El Reg would be mitigated by union membership.

Chris Cosgrove

Brexit travel permits designed to avoid 7,000-lorry jams come January depend on software that won't be finished till April

I mostly agree

As a former international haulage driver this sounds like one massive upcoming cock-up and I agree with almost everything said to date in El Reg on this subject. The people I feel sorriest for are traffic admins and managers in the distribution industries. The beta - sorry, the working software - is going to be released in mid-December. These folks are not going to see much of their families over Christmas as they try to get this to work. Still they do have an extra day to get it working, unless my memory plays me false the cross-channel ferries don't operate on New Year's Day.

However I do have one small annoying bone to pick with El Reg, but they are not alone in this.

" about 60 miles or 96km end-to-end"

'60 miles' suggests an error level of +/- 6 miles or 10%, '96km' suggests an error level of +/- 500m or 0.5%. Why not just say '60 miles or 100km' ?

Chris Cosgrove

'We're not claiming to replace humans,' says Google, but we want to be 'close enough' that you can't tell it's a bot talking

And . . .why ?

And just why are Google developing this ? They have no intention of using it. Machine or human, you cannot get a response from Google in any case, but then most of the people I see who cannot get any help for Google problems are, of course, not customers, they are part of the product.

Chris Cosgrove

Brexit border-line issues: Would you want to still be 'testing' software designed to stop Kent becoming a massive lorry park come 31 December?

"The Smart Freight app will be up and running for January 2021 to minimise any potential disruption and help to ensure that only vehicles carrying the correct documentation for Member State border controls travel to ports. We are currently working with businesses and the haulage sector to ensure that the web application is effective and simple to use."

That statement alone is enough to make me glad that I am a retired chauffeur routier. The contents of the rest of the article make me regret that I ever took up driving trucks in the first place. Having said that, I really enjoyed the several years I spent running around the highways and byways of Europe in the late '80's and early '90's, but then, with one exception - Calais was blockaded by fishermen - I always managed to get through Calais - Dover.

Chris Cosgrove

Anti-5G-vaxx pressure group sues Zuckerberg, Facebook, fact checkers for daring to suggest it might be wrong

Beyond belief

Like the poor referred to in Scripture, the idiots you will have with you always.

I know the US Constitution guarantees freedom of belief but this is ridiculous.

Chris Cosgrove

British Army does not Excel at spreadsheets: Soldiers' newly announced promotions are revoked after sorting snafu

Oh dear !

And to think that the two stripes I had upon my arm once upon a time perhaps should only have been one ( or possibly three ?) . Still, the fact that the very next day, after getting the second, I pinned my best mate's ears to the wall - hard - did no harm to my reputation in the regiment as a hard man.

Then MoD really got it wrong, they commissioned me !

Chris Cosgrove

Microsoft wants to show enterprises that Edge means business, rather than the thing you use to download Chrome

Don't shoot - I quite like Edge !

Forbye all the above, Edge is a pretty good browser. I certainly prefer it to Chrome if only because I can get it to run the way I want it to which is something I have totally failed to achieve with Chrome.

Yes, FF is my default, has been for years, but Edge is a pretty slick browser and as far as I can see works well and safely. I mainly use it on one US web-site where the GDPR notification has gone crazy. Instead of just coming up once when you log in it comes up every second page at the moment in FF, only the once you would expect in Edge. Since I am a Mod on that forum and am bouncing around from one page to another this is annoying !

Chris Cosgrove

FYI Russia is totally hacking the West's labs in search of COVID-19 vaccine files, say UK, US, Canada cyber-spies

Two points can be made here.

First, Governments have always spied on each other for both political and economic reasons. The only thing that has changed is the methodology, there is nothing new here.

Second, granted that in the present econoomic set-up whoever produces a working vaccine first is going to make a substantial amount of money but it can be argued on humanitarian grounds that this research should be open sourced. That would, of course, obviate the need for spying.

A beer because it is again possibble to go for one.

Chris Cosgrove

Forget biz insider threats for a moment – let's talk about partners turning rogue and installing spyware on phones

A real problem.

I am a moderator on Bleeping Computer and every so often we get topics started by people who are being surveilled by ex partners or lovers or suffering abuse in one form or another. It is not a problem that BC was set up to handle and apart from the obvious - change accounts, change passwords, report it to the police - there isn't all that much we can do to help.

After all, why should you have to close say your Facebook account because somebody is posting comments on it slagging you off ?

Chris Cosgrove

Oh crap: UK's digital overlords moot new rules to help telcos lay fibre in sewer pipes

Obvious solution

There is an obvious solution to the problem of fibre being cut by over-enthusiatic digger operators - site it some little way below a high voltage cable.

According to a friend of mine who blacked out Central Edinburgh on one famous occasion, to those who know the city he was digging a trench on the Mound just by the Art Gallery, 'You always know when you have hit a high voltage cable, there's a lovely blue flash and a bang !' !

Problem solved.

Chris Cosgrove

Facebook's cool with sharing the President's nonsense on its mega-platform – but don't you dare mention 'unionize' in its Workplace app

Uh ?

This is taking us back over 100years to the days of capitalism run wild in the USA. Carnegie would probably have approved. I know that trade unions in the US are regarded by many managers and proprietors as the leading edge of advanced left wing socialism but when the right to associate is enshrined in law ?

Having said that, about 40 years ago I suffered a short period of unemployment. Having signed on at the local job centre I was sent to firm in a nearby town who were hiring drivers, that was the trade I had signed on as, and when I got there I found a dozen or so guys standing on the doorstep. The converstation went something like this -

'Hi lads, whats up ?'

'We are the company's drivers'

'And . . .'

'We asked for the TGWU (the main Transport union) to be recognised for negotiation . .'

'Yes ?'

'So they sacked us all !'

Needless to say, as I was a member of the TGWU myself, I didn't cross the picket line and I didn't get an interview for the job.

Chris Cosgrove

Surprise! That £339 world's first 'anti-5G' protection device is just a £5 USB drive with a nice sticker on it

What 5G ?

I first saw this story on the BBC web-site this afternoon where, as reported, a member of the Glastonbury Council claimed it was a great device and that he had felt much more relaxed since he had acquired one.

This led me to check a 5G availability map or the UK and I don't see any 5G in the Glastonbury area.

Matter over mind ?

Chris Cosgrove

The longest card game in the world: Microsoft Solitaire is 30

And . . . There was . . . Ka -Boom !

Variously known as Mines or Minesweeper this was the other great time wasting educational game. Allegedly to improve Left/Right mouse clicking. Emabarassingly my wife got better at this than I was. Her record for the full size frame was 2 seconds better than mine.

So I stopped playing it.

Huff !

Huff !

Chris Cosgrove

Hooray! It's IT Day! Let's hear it for the lukewarm mugs of dirty water that everyone seems to like so much

Tea and the British Army ?

Juice, above, seemed a little surpised by the British Army's relationship with tea. Never mind quibbles about who drank tea in the Napoleonic era, when I had the honour of serving as a member of Her Majesty's Armed Forces during a fair chunk of the Cold War tea was the motive force especially on exercise when it was first boiled hard and then left to stew in a hay box for hours. But there was a very good reason for its popularity.

Have you ever tried The British Army's coffee ? Or at least the stuff that appears in ration packs labelled 'Coffee' ! It would turn anybody to tea !

Chris Cosgrove

US hands UK 'dossier' on Huawei: Really! Still using their kit? That's just... one... step... beyond

Quote - "Huawei's UK veep, Victor Zhang, said in a canned statement: "We are confident that the UK government will make a decision based upon evidence, as opposed to unsubstantiated allegations."

Would this not be setting a precedent by the UK Government and, presumably, the UK Civil Service who do not have a sterling record for going with evidence based decisions ? Just as an example look at the record on the 'War on Drugs'.

Chris Cosgrove

A short note to say I'm off: Vulture taps claws on Reg keyboard for last time

Best wishes for your future career !

Chris Cosgrove

Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold for $$$$ to private equity firm, price caps axed

?

"As just one example, it appears that both board and staff members are free to hold shares in companies whose value is closely linked to decisions that they make and that they are not required to disclose such holdings."

While I am not pointing the finger at any one person a set-up like that is virtually a licence for insider trading. Certainly it does nothing to prevent the possibility. It does indeed stink of corruption. And as for making a decision with such revenue implications at an administrative level rather than running it past the Board, the mind boggles !

Chris Cosgrove

Microsoft: Dynamics 365 to hook up online, physical retail... 'cos we love tracking so much we want it offline too

Privacy - what's that ?

Old saying seen in a bar - "In God we trust, the rest pay cash !"

I am fairly well known to the staff in my nearest supermarket, but their computers don't know me from Adam, and that's the way I like it.

Chris Cosgrove

Those fake spying cell towers in Washington DC? Ex-intel staffers claim they're Israeli

Why the surprise ?

I can understand the humour in the above comments but not the occasioinal touch of surprise here and the shock and horror expressed in a number of other publications. I would have thought the if the Director of Intelligence for the Israeli Government was not organising spying on the USA he or she would be falling down on the job.

As somebody else once said a while ago "It is generally easier to spy on your friends than your enemies. Further, you generally have a good idea of your enemies positions but you never know when your allies might change their minds."

Chris Cosgrove

Stop us if you've heard this one: US government staff wildly oblivious to basic computer, info security safeguards

Now I understand why there has been such a continuously negative response in the USA to any suggestion of introducing GDPR in any form there. Departmental budgets would be swallowed up paying fines !

Chris Cosgrove

Supreme Court of UK gives Morrisons the go-ahead for mega data leak liability appeal

An interesting case, Watson !

If I have read the article correctly then this appeal is around the extent of 'vicarious liability' in which case it has much wider implications than just the Morrison's case. The principal that 'an employer is liable for the acts of his servants' is firmly held in civil and commercial law and, having gone to the Supreme court, if Morrison's win this then everybody else in roughly analagous positions will be quoting this case as precedent.

Interesting indeed.

Chris Cosgrove

Astronomer slams sexists trying to tear down black hole researcher's rep

? ? ?

Is it any wonder I don't use any form of 'social' media ?

One word out of place, one remark that is outside currently 'correct' thinking or just one slightly inaccurate statement and you get rubbished - at best. I am fed up of hearing of people getting trolled for no good reason at all.

I am a moderator on a forum which is regarded as being well moderated. Two things which get very short shrift are trolling and spamming, both will get you banned in very short order.

Chris Cosgrove

Plusnet vows to shove a sword in members area 'White Screen Of Death'

Why ?

I am always amused that regardless of the numbers affected - whether it be a hundred or two, several thousand or several million - it is always "A small number of our customers have been affected."

Even when the forums, twitter, facebook etc. are full of complaining customers. Funny how much noise 'a few customers' can create !

Chris Cosgrove

Doom: The FPS that wowed players, gummed up servers, and enraged admins

It was great fun

I was doing an HNC in Mechatronics at the time and I think every computer in the college had Doom 1 on it. I can see the sysadmins' problems even if the students didn't.

It was great fun and the best thing about it was that it was a relatively small and simple game. Even on 486s, which is what the college was equipped with, it was quick to load. 5 - 10 minutes to kill ? You could have Doom up and running and be blasting baddies within about 30 seconds. I came back to it about 15 years later, v3 I think. Came on a DVD, about a 2GB install and took five minutes before you could shoot anything, and that was on a reasonable to good computer. It had lost the spontaneity and had become the preserve of serious gamers

Chris Cosgrove

SAP bug beatdowns, Apple gets nasty with Mac repairs, Struts woe, and more from infosec

re Apple

Huh ?

I know I live a sheltered life and I don't have any Apple products but I thought this sort of thing was illegal. Or is that only for us fortunate souls living - for the time being - inside the EU ?

Chris Cosgrove

Surprise! VAT, customs likely to get a bit trickier in a Brexit no-deal world

There costs to Brexit.

Somewhere, a long way back in this string of comments, somebody asked for concrete examples of increased costs for shipping goods to Europe. Back in the '90's I was driving a truck running around Europe and I experienced both sides of the 'Open Borders' decision.

Before 'Open Borders' it took between 1 and 2 hours to get through Customs outbound at Dover and between 4 and 6 hours in bound wherever, then typically the same on the return trip. After 'Open Borders' I collected and checked the paper work at wherever I loaded. The next time anybody looked at it was when I handed it in at the receiving office of wherever I was delivering. And, again, the same on the return trip.

So, a cost saving of between 5 and 8 hours of truck and driver's costs on each trip with 'Open Borders'.

I suspect that international transport in/out of the UK will revert to the 'Before Open Borders' situation after Brexit, especially in the event of a 'no deal' scenario. And this is a real cost on every load in and out of the UK.

Chris Cosgrove

What do a meth, coke, molly, heroin stash and Vegas allegedly have in common? Broadcom cofounder Henry Nicolas

?

" after security staff at the Encore Hotel apparently found the contraband in his suite"

As Counsel for the Defence I have to ask how did this come about and on what grounds were security staff searching a guest's rooms ?

Sounds like unlawful search to me.

Chris Cosgrove

You won't believe this but... everyone hates their cable company: Bombshell study lands

Not going America !

Bloody hell ! I knew charges were high in the USA but . . .

Because I have Sky broadband and phone I just looked up the price for the complete Sky package, the standard rate - after any introductory offers - is £63.99/month which equates, according to Google to $83 + change, call it $84/month. And the median rate in the Land of the 'Free' is $186 ?

Like the suthor of this article I find it difficult to ascrbe such a price differential as anything other than the exercise of monopoly power.

Chris Cosgrove

How much do you think Cisco's paying erstwhile Brit PM David Cameron?

How much money ?

I vaguley remember, after all these comments, that the original question posed in the article was how much do think Cameron will be paid for his speech ?

I have no idea how much he will receive for these efforts, only that however much it may be it will be too much.

This after all is the man who is directly responsible for the whole Brexit mess with his almost criminal act of offering the Euro-sceptic wing of his party a referendum, with binding constitutional consequences, to solve a purely internal problem inside his own Conservative Party and, incidentally, to save his job. It is by no means imposible that this mess could lead to the break-up of the UK.

It is ironic, but in the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum one of the most tellilng arguments against independence was that only by staying in the UK could we guarrantee continued membership of the EU.

To use a colloquialism, Aye, right !

Chris Cosgrove

And his pay ?

I vaguely remember afer all these comments that the original question posed in the article was on the lines of how much should or will Cameron be paid for this speech ?

Frankly I have no idea, merely that however much or little it may be it willl be too much.

This is after all the man who bequeathed us this whole Brexit mess by his almost criminal act of offering the Euro-sceptic wing of his party a referendum, with constitutional consequences for the whole UK, purely to buy support over an internal Conservative Party problem. It is not totally unlikely that a possible consequence of this act of his could be the break-up of the UK.

It is ironic but in the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum one of the most telling arguments against Independence was that staying in the UK was the only way to guarrantee continued membership of the EU !

To use a colloquialism - Aye, right !

Chris Cosgrove

Y'know... Publishing tech specs may be fair use, says appeals court

Uh ?

I would have thought that law - or laws - is/are public documents and have to be public, else how can you be expected to have reasonable knowledge of them ?

I agree that not everybody requires, for example, a detailed knowledge of the Petroleum Regulations but the knowledge should be freely available to those who do need it. But the laws of a country or state should be freely available for public study and scrutiny.

And as for the argument that why should an institute make its regulations available for free, it is their duty to create these regulations and publish them. And if an element of financial compensation is needed to enable this duty to be carried out then it falls to the State to supply this. Such documents have the nature of a 'public good' and access to them should not be impeded by considerations of copyright or intellectual property, epecially if done either at the behest of the State or if essentially paid for by the State.

Chris Cosgrove

HMRC told AGAIN to toughen up on VAT-dodging online traders

And ?

On-line is fine for generic goods and I like cheaper as much as the next woman or man, but you can't beat brick and mortar stores for getting hands-on feel for some things. Unhappily this is getting harder.

But if cheaper means tax evasion somewhere along the line that hurts every one. Honest businesses go out of business and the individual tax rate has to be increased which hurts me !

Chris Cosgrove

Google weeps as its home state of California passes its own GDPR

Yayy !

Good on you, citizens of California.

Chris Cosgrove

London's Met Police: We won't use facial recognition at Notting Hill Carnival

98% failure rate ?

If I was the Chief Constable of the Met and It was established that one of my departments was funding a system with a 98% failure rate I would be asking questions about how it got approved.

That's equivalent to buying myself a nice shiny new car for the daily commute and then discovering it only worked on some random seven days in the year. I think I would be back at the dealer's very quickly looking for a full refund.

Chris Cosgrove

Signal bugs, car hack antics, the Adobe flaw you may have missed, and much more

Interesting photos

As a keen amateur photographer I took a look at the referenced article. Some very dramatic images there. But then I ran some of the grid references through Google Earth and was left wondering why on earth some of these cameras were there. A couple of the locations looked like it would take a minor expedition to install them !

This comes back to the remark about the Park Rangers in the article - 'Because we can'. More proof, if any more was needed, that surveillance has reached ridiculous limits. I am somewhere past the age when I am interested in making out with my girlfriend in some quiet spot but images like thes would give any young couple pause for thought !

Chris Cosgrove

Denied: Uber's request to skip to UK Supreme Court to appeal workers' rights

"Chair Rachel Reeves -

She also asked for information on when driver hour limits would be introduced in the UK, and what those limits would be, per day and per week, per driver."

They were introduced sometime in the 1930s and are known as 'The Domestic Regulations' and apply to all commercial/business vehicle driving not governed by the National Regulations which are derived from EU law. I cannot readily quote them as it is the best part of 30 years since I last had occasion to look at them but anybody using a vehicle for business related purposes - not leisure or domestic - who is not subject to the National Regulations is subject to the Domestic Regulations.

In any case is there not more recent regulation, again descending from EU law, on the subject of maximum hours working regulations ?

Chris Cosgrove

Google to annihilate online trolling with ... tra-la-la! Machine! Learning!

Goody !

Oh Goody ! This means that as a moderator on another forum I won't have to worry about trolls, spammers, moving topics to more relevant sections, soothing ruffled feathers, finding people who know what they are talking about to respond to topics, etc., etc..

I would drink to that except that I don't expect to be still around when I get automated out of a job ! I will let everybody else worry about the logic in that statement !

Chris Cosgrove

Oracle sues its own star sales rep after she wins back $200k in pay fight

The downside for Ms. Wilson is that if she wins this case, and consequently gets her back pay, she had better look for another job pronto,

Then again, I wouldn't work for a company that tried to screw me over commission due.

Blighty's Home Office database blunders will deprive hundreds of GB driving licences

Total xenophobia !

This fear of immigrants - illegal or not - sickens me. The UK is getting totally paranoid on the subject. I've been running around Europe first as a haulier and now as a tourist since 1990 and west of the German - Czech border, with one exception, the only place I ever have a passport examined is coming into the UK. And in 36 years I have never been asked for a driving licence !

All this type of action will do is drive illegal immigrants further underground and further into the arms of criminal organisers with even bigger problems consequently.

Chris Cosgrove

ISP GMX attempts the nigh impossible: PGP for the masses

re: How long until it's illegal in the UK?

OK, it's a fair cop, I'll put my hands up to it !

About twenty years ago I had a copy of 'The Anarchist's Cookbook' on a hard drive - briefly - and right at this moment I think I have two memory sticks with different versions of Linux on them on my desk at the moment..

Chris Cosgrove

Petulant Facebook claims it can't tell the difference between child abuse and war photography

Ummm . . .

In at least one sense of course this an image of child pornography. Children of whatever age and dressed or not should not be running in fear and panic from a napalm attack, they should not be subject to napalm attacks. This of course does not stop it happening in our enlightened approach to modern weapons of war. But then throughout the ages children have always suffered disproportionately in periods of warfare.

But it is also one of the most iconic and influential images to come out of the war in Vietnam and regardless of the violence inherent in the scene this lifts it to the level of an important historic document. The only other image I can think of that comes close is the one taken in Saigon at the end of the Tet offensive where a police officer executes a North Vietnam soldier. An action which in terms of the accepted laws of land warfare was entirely legal - carrying arms and out of uniform.

Certainly the image represents violence against children, but in the context Facebook were entirely wrong in trying to remove such a historically important image.

Chris Cosgrove

Milk IN the teapot: Innovation or abomination?

No way !

If you are a Squaddie coming off stag at 0 dark hundred cold, wet, miserable and, in a combat area, terrified then so long as it is hot, wet and sweet you will drink it with gratitude and without asking any unnecessary questions.

Otherwise - tea should not have milk in it at all !.

Chris Cosgrove

UK govt to launch a tech creche for military-focused startups

Ummm !

Am I not right in thinking that HM Gov and MoD have a track record in technological development ? And it's not a good one !

Chris Cosgrove