* Posts by Charlie Clark

12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

FYI: Your Venmo transfers with those edgy emojis aren't private by default. And someone's put 7m of them into a public DB

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Can someone tell me why Venmo is a thing?

the restaurant will not let you split it more than once.

Places like that would go out of business pretty quickly in Europe… and we thought the US was supposed to lead the world in "service"!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Can someone tell me why Venmo is a thing?

One big hurdle has traditionally been the ban on cross-state banking: banks have to apply for licences in every state they wish to operate and there are restrictions. Why this means that the credit card companies can operate is beyond me. Presumably, given the juicy fees (4% and higher) they can charge they've been able to lobby effectively for a cartel.

It's poorly regulated US systems that lead to all the Silicon Valley solutionism. Take taxis: in Düsseldorf (and in many other cities in Germany), long before the interwebs there were telephones with prominently displayed numbers at all the taxi ranks (so you could call one from a local rank if you knew the number) and a single number for calling a taxi. Fees and surcharges are standardised so you know what you're going to pay and service in the middle of the night is attractive enought for drivers. Adding location-based stuff to this infrastructure was pretty straightforward but we still get to be the German HQ for that Silicon Vallley überturd: Uber.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Can someone tell me why Venmo is a thing?

The German system also makes tipping pretty easy: you, or the waitress, work out how much you owe add on about 10 %, round up to the neares Euro. Pretty quick and means less faffing with change. So that $ 18.23 would be $ 20 - $22 depending on how you're feeling.

For payments, why would I ever use something that's decoupled from the EFT of the banking system which is guaranteed to work? If you do want an electronic system then I can recommend Revolut, because you can use a real card* and, as it uses TransferWise for international transfers, you can avoid those horrendous transaction charges when not using your own currency.

* As it's a London "FinTech" startup, which I trust about as far as I can throw, I use it as a pre-paid card. Support is a bit shit but generally works and the app does show the banks how these should be done. Better than the fucking "s-id" shit we're being forced to use! Still, at least Magisk now lets you use this on rooted phones.

Why are fervid Googlers making ad-blocker-breaking changes to Chrome? Because they created a monster – and are fighting to secure it

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Google has no real incentive in policing the store

Oh, I don't know. As long as it's a store and Google has the keys then Google can be held liable. It would just take a little of legislation to give regulators sufficient powers to make this so. And I am inclined to follow Google's arguments, or at least give them the benefit of the doubt, over this that the API is an exploit waiting to happen. They know only too well how easy it is to convince users to click through screens in order to get something for free…

It also wouldn't surprise me if Google isn't working on a GDPR-compliant ad system.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

You could argue that this is similar to the "enterprise-only" approach. You could introduce some kind of certification scheme where only certified extensions get access to the API. Leaves Google open to all kinds of challenges because it makes them the "gatekeepers", but would at least remove the uncertainty.

On a different note: are they ever going to do anything about the naming of extensions? There are currently 4 extensions with "u block" in their title and similar logos, at least two of which look like fairly suspicious fellow travellers. Quis custodet custodes?

HP CFO Cathie Lesjak didn't even read KPMG's Autonomy due diligence before $11bn biz gobble

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Audit trail

Nah, they just keep an eye on when their share options have vested…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: A kid at Christmas

Ah, yes, but who appointed him?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Oh my

Just for comparison of the sums that Silicon Valley regularly spunks on acquisitions: IBM's recent slurp of RedHat (10x revenue), Microsoft's bidding war with itself over Skype and Facebook's $ 20 bn "pocket change" purchase of WhatsApp.

Public companies are given enormous leeway for these kind of transactions and it is for the shareholders to decide if the approve of the actions of the board, which makes proving allegations like this of fraud all the more difficult.

Akamai on dragging 'em kicking and streaming to the edge: They might be public cloud giants, but we're, er, vids in

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Akamai argest distributed computing platform ?

It sounds great until you realise that those 4000 locations are mainly in the top 10-20 countries, and America really dominates. Akamai does do some very impressive stuff but let's not kid ourselves that any of these companies really care about the other 5 billion in the world

Germany and South Korea go nuts for 5G while Blighty subsists on test bed crumbs

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Sorry, I should have been clearer: O2 in Germany.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Facepalm

Consider yourself lucky: I'm on O2's apology for a service. Sometimes it feels like there are only 10 towers in the whole country!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: So lets just get this straight

The real irony is that the costs can be offset against tax. Back in the UMTS days when over € 20 bn was raised in the auction, this meant that the Federal government got the cash, but this was essentially at the cost of the regional governments who took the writedowns.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth is really just part of the attempt to prepare shareholders for the lack of revenue as those "magical" 5G services fail to materialise and, hence, make any money.

Oh, and the government is mulling revising post-factum the terms of the auction, and breaking the approved 5G spec, by mandating a side-channel for the end-to-end call encryption. Which all just goes to show that there are cockwombles everywhere.

Meet the new Dropbox: It's like the old Dropbox, but more expensive, and not everyone's thrilled

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Dropping dropbox

Have you bumped up against the 3 client limit on the free tier yet?

Not really, no. If necessary I'd create additional accounts and share with them. But the general thrust of this announcement seems to be to sending the wrong signals. Even if I don't t listen to it very often, I don't want "The Wombles Album" to disappear from my devices because some algorithm thinks I don't need it any more!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Dropping dropbox

I've got a bit more than "fuck all space" because I got in early. But I've recently noticed how stuff is being scanned – I mainly use Dropbox to sync music and books between devices – and am not looking forward to preemptive DMCA notices on my stuff. Basically I feel I'm being told: if you don't encrypt it, you're inviting us to look at it. That's bad enough for private stuff, but totally unacceptable for anything business like. And the Yanks are trying to tell us we should worry about the Chinese?

NextCloud / OwnCloud looks like it could be sufficient for my needs. And NordVPN has started trailing its own encrypted storage. I guess we all need to face up to paying for service if we expect to be around next year. And the year after that.

Hongmeng, there's no need to feel down: It's patently obvious this is Huawei's homegrown OS

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I think Google is less worried about licence fees than about the licence conditions which essentially mandate the use of Google services on the phones and thus their ability to collect data from the users, unless we jump through all the hoops to opt out.

But I also think that Google is being smart in playing the upright, patriotic corporate citizen while highlighting just how disruptive the US policy is to US companies. They're possibly also back-channeling that phones without GMS won't be able to provide data from non-US citizens (because spying on US citizens is illegal, but "aliens" are fair game) as easily to the NSA as the current arrangement does.

Silicon Valley doesn't care about poor people: Top AI models kinda suck at ID'ing household stuff in hard-up nations

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Liquid soap is very common in Germany, probably because it's less messy than bars of soap. Fortunately, you can get refills in thin polythene containers. But then, seeing as one bottle lasts me more than a year i'm not that bothered about the plastic bit. As you note, recycling isn't that easy and currently not really financially viable. So most of the waste plastic here is also burnt as in combined plants, and the waste is less than one might imagine.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The best soap should have a pH below 6, which rules out the standard stuff, which leaves my skin dry and prone to breaking (I have to use rubber gloves for the washing up). Unfortunately, most of the liquid soaps also have all kinds of shit that you don't need along with the perfume that many consumers insist upon.

In many situations water is sufficient to remove whatever is on the skin. Where it is not, I do find the pH 5.5 soaps okay but have also used olive oil to remove oil and grease: will be absorbed quite quickly or can also be washed off reasoably easily.

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Scientific Linux?

Yes, it's not as if these places only employ boffins.

There are other "groupware" solutions out there, and no one should object to paying for some of the service. Be interesting to see if any of them see some traction after this.

Normally MS probably wouldn't care but the CERN name will echo far and wide. Someone's bound to get sacked for this.

Nope, we're stuffed, shrieks Apple channel as iPhone shipments enter a double-digit spiral

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Go

Sounds like a smart company.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Not really, because although the edge-to-edge OLED screen is not real innovation, at least IMO it's well worth the price premium over the 8.

Interesting. After posting I realised what I'd forgotten to say was: Apple is going to have work harder and harder to convince people that an I-Phone isn't just another phone, which is the kind of argument you're giving and hence, why you're prepared to pay that for it. I think you can see for yourself that Apple are finding it harder and harder to justify the high-end prices.

Personally, as someone who drops things a lot, I think that "infinity" displays are structural weaknesses just begging to be tried out, so I'd generally avoid them. As for aesthetics: the notch is a definite no-no for me.

Over the weekend I was with someone who's thinking of switching from Apple to Android. And, because she's not heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem, the switch should be fairly easy. Interestingly, she'd heard of Xiaomi, in particular about the quality of the photos…

Fears of the imminent demise of Apple are overblown but they are going to have to do some work to keep their nimbus: functional equivalence can be a real bitch.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Boot note: People who compare Apple phone to Android phones solely based on specs/price

I agree on this but I think this increasingly less the case. We're getting used to looking for a newer version of what we've got, ie. functionality over spec which has a dramatic effect on how we perceive value.

I use a Mac but have never been tempted by the I-Phones. My second-hand Samsung S5 is waterproof and doing just great on LineageOS: includes security updates from 5th June 2019. I never stream stuff but do sync music and pictures over the internet and, if I want to I can plug my phone into a TV or even just screenshare.

I might well replace the phone at some point this year but, if I do, it won't be with a flagship crammed full of stuff I don't need. Waterproof, good battery life, SD-card and a good screen and support for LineageOS is what I will be looking for.

As for your replacement devices: wouldn't you prefer to buy an I-Phone 8 rather than an X?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Sniffing

Apple notoriously avoids this. Like many premium players it prefers to destroy stock than let customers anticipate fallling prices. But you can probably expect to see more disguised price cuts through trade-ins and combi-deals. Although, as the article says, these have so far failed to create much excitement.

This Free software ain't free to make, pal, it's expensive: Mozilla to bankroll Firefox with paid-for premium extras

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Firefox's global market share dwindles ...

If XUL became unmaintainable, it's because Mozilla let it get that way in the first place.

Sometimes you have to admit that an idea wasn't that great.

It was Netscape at the time and then it became open source… Browser development was stalled for much of the first decade so that by the time it came round to working on a common platform for extensions, generally a good idea, none of the people who'd worked on XUL during the XML hype were around any more.

But all this is largely implementation details. I definitely agree that Mozilla dropped the ball for a couple of years chasing unicorns with things like Firefox OS and then aping Chrome's UI.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Firefox's global market share dwindles ...

Can't see much room for improvement on stability.

The move to one process per tab makes a difference there and I'm occasionally grateful of it when for some YouTube slows everything down. But, basically, the move away from plugins to native has given the biggest boost to stability.

YMMV but FF post-Quantum on MacOS is noticeably snappier than before.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

They could make a few bucks here with minimal effort. Heck I imagine a recent port to Windows XP would be quite trivial

Maintaining old software can often be a lot more work than many people imagine. And, I'm pretty certain that some of the more recent attack vectors would rip through some of the older browsers, because the problems with memory leaks were one of the main reasons for moving the parsers to Rust.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: OSS isn't Free Software

Don't charge for being a man? Doesn't really make sense, does it? And even slaves have a price…

In the age of serfdom English had different words for denoting different status, including "freeman". Other languages do, of course, have different words for "no charge" and "without obligation" such as gratuit and libre in French and kostenlos and frei in German. In English you have to use context to disambiguate.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: OSS isn't Free Software

Therefore people came up with local scripts which were supposed to edit your document tree locally.

This is a revisionist and deliberately simplistic interpretation. Javascript initially added some non-essential functionality to a static markup language. But by then the semantic aspects of the language had more or less been swamped by the graphic aspirations of HTML monkey and PHBs. HTML + HTTP opened a whole world to informational exchange. And the enviroment they ran on changed as they did.

I only read and write text/plain e-mails I'm not at all a fan of the SPAs (single page apps) but at some point we have to realise that we cannot put things back in the box. The openness of the web's underpinnings have revolutionised the dissemination of information and whether I think the approach is entirely right or not, it is understandable that it has formed the base of new UIs. While it has given us resource hogs and echo chambers and new robber barons, it has also enabled millions in ways that few if any foresaw at the time.

And the development continues with WebAssembly and Houdini being particularly interesting.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: OSS isn't Free Software

How can you not confuse them? If you wanted to make a linguistic difference then using a different adjective would be a start: liberated or freed software would probably align better with the political ideology.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: stop adding features nobody wants...

Pocket is paid for shit, but I agree Sync is pretty useful and I actually like the idea behind Lockwise. Bringing back a minimalist RSS-reader would also be nice.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Firefox's global market share dwindles ...

The move away from XUL was explained in detail, not least the fact that there was no one willing to maintain it. I'm not a fan of the dumbed-down UI but the Quantum-based versions are faster and more stable. But if you want it back, you can always make your own fork.

Developers have to live from something and it's reasonable to expect Firefox users to be a bit more discerning. However, it has historically proved difficult to get sufficient users to pay for services in sufficient volumens.VPN + secure online storage might tempt a few away from current "free" services.

'Cynical and bullying' TalkTalk hackerhacker getsgets 4 yearsyears behindbehind barsbars

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Mens rea

Substance abuse is increasingly less likely to be considered as "mitigating circumstances" in many jurisdictions, but there is still the issue of intent.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Even though the courts are now more careful about arguments about "diminished responsbility" when "under the influence", the key difference in any case would be whether it was a single or repeated, and hence, premeditated.

Russian Jesus gives up food to meditate on how he can improve crypto messenger Telegram

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Terrible Article

I downvoted you for being off the mark (Silicon Valley fads) and then for being a snowflake. The body can use ketosis in extreme circumstances but it is not the norm and not something most people should been seeking to induce.

As for Steve Jobs, it's known, and perhaps understandable, that he engaged in a lot of quackery once he was diagnosed. Don't wish pancreatic cancer on anyone because the outlook is generally very poor, but quackery doesn't help either.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: How long can you fast for?

I delberately left that to the imagination! ;-) Somehow, it's depressing when so few of them have proper sexual fetishes.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

How long can you fast for?

A whole month is just about doable.

I think a whole month should doable for most people. Depends a lot on your BMI when you start but your body quickly switches over to using reserves. It's a long time ago but I did at least three weeks whilst at university and could still cycle the 10 km each way, though really strenuous exercise and hard work can become difficult. I think I allowed myself cups of tea and even the odd glass of ftruit juice but it was essentially an extended fast. Given my current weight I'm sure I could manage six weeks!

There's a nice article over at The Econmist about the current fads: apparently Oura rings are currently all the rage. But, I'm increasingly coming to think of some of these people as I do of professional athletes: most definitely not normal.

But of course the US and China's trade war is making those godDRAM oversupply issues worse

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Curency value ?

Watch for oil deals in roubles and yuan.

There's nothing in Roubles – that really is a basket case of currency – but Russia does do some energy trading with China without using the dollar. But the Renminbi is also not suitable for international trade because it is not fully convertible and hence not liquid enough. This is why the EU, together with Russia and China (and others who are keeping very quiet about it) is looking to setup EU backed and cleared SPVs for trading with regimes the US currently deem fit. But don't expect to read much about this as they'll be trying to keep as much as possible below the radar to stop the US pursuing even more aggressive policies.

As for renewables: China is already the largest generator of both solar and wind power.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Shoot foot, then head

The US certainly traded more freely than the USSR. Yes, it wasn't afraid to apply pressure or meddle or interfere directly (there is no excuse for Chile, Guatamala, etc.), but by and large it was successful in international trade because it played by the rules. Admitttedly rules that it helped to write and which helped cement the primacy of the US dollar (Bretton Woods) but rules that supported reasonably free trade all the same.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Shoot foot, then head

Presumably, if it hadn't been for Mao's own assault on the countries limbs through the GLF and the cultural revolution (what great benefits that brought to science in China), China would have made even faster progress.

Even so, I think the bigger problem with the Big Baby's™ current approach is how it is driving current trade partners closer to China. The US can still apply a lot of pressure through the dollar hegemony, so it's obvious that everyone is now working out how to work around this.

America didn't win the cold war because it had better spooks, but because it traded more freely. Still you can't expect Mr Short Attention Span to appreciate this.

The best and worst of GitHub: Repos wiped without notice, quickly restored – but why?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I'm not a fan of GitHub but the stuff builit around it goes above and beyond what Bugzilla and Trac provide. I think the bigger issue is relying on a free service for something that sounds a lot like professional work.

The e-mpire strikes back: Google appeals that $1.7bn EU fine for choking web ad rivals

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: I appeal to your better judgement

I can say I go shop and expect to be understood. But this is grammatically wrong because it is semantically wrong (grammar is subordinate to semantics). English, along with many other languages, has instransitive verbs that do not take direct objects and can, thus, be used without them.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

I appeal to your better judgement

The sentence The e-mpire strikes back: Google appeals that $1.7bn EU fine does not make sense.

Google can appeal against the fine, or to the court's better sense, or for a fair trial. This is why the preposition is necessary.

Powers of stash and rebase fall into the hands of noobs with GitHub Desktop 2.0

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Ignorance is not bliss.

Lots of Linux devs are presumably happy doing everything in the command line, or in the tools integrated into their IDE. For those that do want GUI VCS tools there are other options but the lack of a single GUI toolchain for Linux doesn't exactly make things easier for GUI tool developers.

It's that time again: Android kicks off June's patch parade with fixes for five hijack holes

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Great news

How about lodging a complaint with your provider? Or with your consumer rights organisaion? Or even a civil suit? The only way companies will change their behaviour is if they're forced to.

Church roofs? Nyet, say Russian scrap thieves, we're taking this bridge

Charlie Clark Silver badge

One of the incentives to replace copper cables with glass fibre is price of copper – significantly more lucrative than steel and usually in handy sizes that can be coiled for transport.

Dissed Bash boshed: Apple makes fancy zsh default in forthcoming macOS 'Catalina' 10.15

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: So, wait ...

Hadn't you heard that Lennart is going to take your init scripts away from you and replace them with something much easier to break?

zsh has fans on all kinds of OS and for most people the change will be minor.

Where's the cheese icon?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: "mostly compatible with bash"

Why is it literally so.

Musk loves his Starlink sat constellation – but astroboffins are less than dazzled by them

Charlie Clark Silver badge

OneWeb is even more ambitious. Still the problem, known as the tragedy of the commons, is well understood. Unfortunately, as has been demonstrated many times, we usually have to wait until resources are either depleted or polluted so much as to be nearly irrecoverable before we change our behaviour; and so far I don't see any reason why this nascent commercial exploitation of NEO will be any different.

The only thing we can hope for is that this satellite-based internet turns out to be the next great white elephant. The demand for mobile telephony and data around the world is being met almost everywhere by low-cost, low-tech solutions.

LibreOffice 6.3 hits beta, with built-in redaction tool for sharing those █████ documents

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Yes, I've heard from people working on standardisation that ODF itself is somewhat rudderless. MS has been reluctant in the past to support work OOXML but have recently really improved in this respect.

I agree with your assessment: lots of stuff works very well but there's a lot that the developers just don't care about. I work almost exclusively with XLSX so everytime I see worksheets set to 1024 x 1024 dimensions I know they're from LO. Sigh: it's an optional element so better left out altogether.

Coordinate systems in OOXML (used when positioning graphical objects) are a complete nightmare!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: OO performance?

Excel 2016 does contain significant performance improvements (fully 64-bit, multihreaded calcs) over previous versions, but use whatever works best for you. Not sure what you're doing with the CSVs subsequently but many people I know just use Pandas for the heavy-lifting and save to Excel for the manager-friendly reporting.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

it wouldn't surprise me at all if MS switched to ODF at some point – it's a better format – but politics will probably stop that happening. While I do think that, by and large LO has got reasonablly compatible with OOXML, there are still longstanding bugs in some of the code that the developers seem to have little interest in fixing.