Posts by Toastan Buttar

AN0M, the backdoored ‘secure’ messaging app for criminals, is still producing arrests after four years

It's a similar situation to what the Allies faced during WWII after cracking the Enigma code. How do you apply the intelligence gathered from decrypted messages without alerting the Germans to the fact?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma#German_suspicions

This balancing act was dramatised in the film "The Imitation Game". However, unlike the film representation, it wouldn't have been up to the boffins at Bletchley Park to decide what intelligence to reveal or act upon - EVERY message that was decoded was fed upwards to the intelligence services / military command.

Smile! Uncle Sam wants to scan your face on the way in – and out

Re: Why not simply.

"It's not like you can't go to Canada if you want to visit North America.

Better country and better people."

As that Canadian rock band Rush once said:

Better people, better food, and better beer

Why move around the world, Eden was so near?

- "Territories" from the album Power Windows

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

Re: Douglas Adams it

Black Mirror: "Arkangel"

What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Apropos Dilbert cartoon

My favourite was the one where Asok was testing Dilbert's new pr0n filter.

The final frame was Dilbert saying "I hope that wasn't the sound of eyeballs getting really big".

Paraphrased from memory, because I can't look up old Dilbert strips anymore.

Trump promises protection for TikTok, for which he has a ‘warm spot in my heart’

Musk's people "Unbelievable at computers"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Re: Starting points (music-making software)

For me, any flavour of Linux has been a non-starter so far. This is because I have a completely virtual home recording studio running on a Windows 10 desktop box.

Almost all of the top-drawer musical applications and hardware have issues when trying to install or run on Linux.

Out of the mainstream DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations), only Reaper and Bitwig have decent native support for Linux. I settled on Reason (Windows / Mac only) as my weapon of choice many years ago, and it would be a real blow to lose the internal 'devices' which I have made integral to my workflow.

Mainstream VSTs / Plug-ins are another area which simply don't have much in the way of Linux support, either. The big names in the field like Arturia, G-Force, Cherry Audio, Native Instruments and u-he simply don't provide native builds or installation software for Linux. Some people have managed to create workarounds so that they can install using the appropriate Windows installer under Wine, but it seems to be touch-and-go whether it will work at all, or if a working solution gets broken by the latest update. On Windows, it's (pretty much) a trouble-free process, and most of the big-name companies have decent support departments and user forums.

Finally, even when you're running all your instruments, effects and recording 'devices' in software, the input and output sides of the studio (keyboards, knob boxes, audio I/O, MIDI I/O) require real hardware. Once again, finding a way to get hardware boxes to play nicely with Linux is a bit of a crap shoot. Sometimes it will be genuine seamless plug-and-play, while at other times you can be trawling through forums for literally weeks. By contrast, if hardware devices have a Windows installer, then you're (pretty much) home-and-dry.

Yes, my situation is a corner case and has no bearing on those who perform 'generic' tasks with a PC. But Linux is currently a very bad fit for hosting a virtual home studio. I'm content to put up with the slight grubbiness of the 'Windows Experience' for my day-to-day computing needs in order to have a smooth experience when I'm relaxing with my creative hobby.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Linux is not a good choice for audio applications

I admit that I have a minority use case, but here goes:

I currently run a Windows 10 desktop machine exclusively at home. My wife uses a Chromebook. I have had good experiences of installing Linux onto PC hardware over the past 15-20 years. I really like the streamlined simplicity of an OS which provides the interface layer between applications and the hardware, without any fuss.

However, my main hobby is creating music. In the past, this meant hardware synths / effects and perhaps recording and mixing in a DAW. Recently, I have made the transition to working completely In-The-Box, and I'm loving it. The main trouble is that the best selection of (high-quality) DAWs and plug-ins are targeted exclusively towards Windows and Apple platforms, with no Linux support. For various reasons, I'm not going to switch to the Apple universe, so I'm stuck with using Windows on PC hardware.

My DAW is Reason 12 (no Linux support).

I use paid-for VST instruments and effects from Arturia (no Linux support), G-Force (no Linux support) and Cherry Audio (no Linux support).

I also use many free-of-charge VSTs, which generally don't support Linux, and some are even exclusive to the Windows platform.

Now, I'm getting as fed up as anyone with how terrible an experience the Windows ecosystem has become over the past few years. Unfortunately, however much I'd like to change over to Linux, I'm really, really tied to Windows for the foreseeable future.

As I said at the start, I have a minority use case. However, even a tiny minority of the millions of Windows users throughout the world is a significant total in absolute terms.

How Windows got to version 3 – an illustrated history

Re: Love this....

"In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson is still worth a read, despite its age.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt

AI can improve on code it writes, but you have to know how to ask

Engineer's itemised bill joke.

This reminds me of the old joke about the retired engineer who fixes a huge problem for a company by turning a single screw through 90 degrees. He presents his client with a bill for £10,000. The client is shocked at the cost and asks for a complete itemised bill for the job. The engineer issues another bill in response:

1. Turning the screw - £1.00

2. Knowing which screw to turn - £9,999.00

I suspect that "knowing which prompts to ask" will similarly require a level of skill and wisdom which can only be gained through years of experience.

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Office Space

"I mean, what are you? You think you're some kind of, like, angel here? No, you're just this penny-stealing wannabe criminal man."

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

That's what I use Wikipedia for. I don't rely on it for 100% accuracy, but it will certainly give you a lot of references to follow up, should you require to be more thorough.

Try searching for information on the band "M" via Google (or any search engine for that matter).

Re: Not bad...

No! I'm Mrs Spartacus!

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

Re: Lightning fast

Unfortunately, it took you longer than an "Onosecond" to respond. (See Tom Scott 's "The Worst Typo I Ever Made" on YouTube).

That doomsday critical Linux bug: It's CUPS. May lead to remote hijacking of devices

"Two libraries, one CUPS"

I laughed so much, I nearly s*at.

If every PC is going to be an AI PC, they better be as good at all the things trad PCs can do

Re: Hamster wheels?

E-lev-en

The chip that changed my world – and yours

Re: It lasted 50 years, but history finally claimed it

As part of my job, I did some prototyping work on a Silicon Labs Busy Bee development board. It has an 8051-based MCU at the heart of it. It was great fun to program a device somewhat similar to a turbo-charged ZX81. The board had its own black-and-white LCD display, 64K Flash and 4.5 K RAM, with a pipelined processor core running at up to 50MHz! It could even be powered by a button cell for portable use. Specs you could only dream about in the early '80s!

I owe my career to the 1K ZX81

"A 1K tape-based monochrome machine with no lower case, sound or graphics doesn't look like much. But compared to no computer at all, it was magnificent."

And that's it in a nutshell. The 1K ZX81 actually gave you the ability to program a genuine computer and watch it carry out your instructions. Unless you lived through that period, it's difficult to imagine the thrill of that experience. A few brave souls (myself included) decided to roll up their sleeves and get into machine-code programming in order to overcome the speed and space limitations imposed by Sinclair BASIC.

To this day, I've been more drawn towards low-level coding. I'm fortunate to work for a company that specialises in embedded designs, mostly featuring low-power processors or microcontrollers. But without that early advantage of ACTUALLY owning a REAL COMPUTER in my early teens, who knows what path my career might have taken?

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Sound on the Speccy was only 1-bit glory!

At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form

Re: BASIC

BASIC was the native language of most home micros. However, more importantly, it was also the Operating System and Command Line Interpreter / Shell of those same home micros. If you wanted to load a game written in assembly language from tape, you would perform those actions through the BASIC command line.

An interpreted language like BASIC is ideal for getting your head round programming concepts for the first time. You can break into programs, examine the contents of variables and GOTO whichever line you want. All without recompiling or running under a debug environment. And generally speaking, you can't crash the system if you don't POKE about or use a machine code CALL.

IF you decide to get into programming, and start to feel the limitations of BASIC, THEN you should GOTO a software catalogue for your machine and READ about what alternative languages are available. Only a tiny subset of micro users would have done this back in the day.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of 1980s home micro owners went on to have a career in software engineering. LESS interesting to know is how many Reg readers started off their career by being exposed to BASIC on a 1980s home micro. A bit like comparing how many heroin addicts started off smoking pot vs how many pot smokers 'graduated' to using heroin.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

What is six million Brazillions in scientific notation? Is it larger than a googol?

What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell

Re: Missing type

"And if the weather is bad, are you certain you want to run outside even if it's just across the street?"

Only if it rains...

https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-04-30

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

Re: SCSI

I always pronounce it that way. That's why "an SCSI" in the headline sounded all wrong to me.

Register Lecture: Can portable atomic clocks end UK dependence on GNSS?

Re: bring back DECCA

But guitar groups are on the way out, Mr Epstein.

Cubans launching sonic attacks on US embassy? Not what we're hearing, say medical boffins

In the event of sonic attack on your embassy

Use your wheels, it is what they are for.

Think only of yourself.

Junior minister says gov.UK considering facial recognition to verify age of p0rn-watchers

Shut Up and Dance (Black Mirror)

That would never be hacked by miscreants, would it?

"- I only looked at pictures and - "

"And beat one off on camera? That's what they got, yeah? Your hot little face, blurred fist, dick burping f_cking spunk everywhere?

"Your mum's gonna love that on Facebook, Twitter, Insta-f_cking-whatever.

"And her friends.

"All eyes on you, giving it that.

"Toss in the c_nts at work, calling you Spurty McGoo.

"Laughing at your come face, making it their desktop wallpaper"

Army Watchkeeper drone flopped into tree because crew were gazing backwards

I vote for a voice going "Weeeeeee!" when it takes off.

Excuse me, but have you heard the teachings of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Chr-AI-st?

Eighth Day

On the Eighth Day, Machine just got upset,

A problem Man had never seen as yet.

On the seventh anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, we give you 7 times he served humanity and acted as an example to others

Re: All true

Rainer:

"At least, his kids seem to have turned out well, unlike other billionaire's kids."

Yeah, he did a great job of ensuring that Lisa turned out well.

Boffins build the smallest transistor, controlled by an atom

More akin to a relay than a transistor

When the gate atom is in place and closes the circuit, is it persistent until moved back into the 'off' position? This could be a new type of non-volatile memory.

Will the defendant please rise? Utah State Bar hunts for sender of topless email

Hotlinking to image files

Google "The Man Who Goatse'd Myspace" for how to deal with people nicking your bandwidth.

Be warned, though. Some of the linked articles might actually show you the replacement image in question, so definitely NSFW.

Batteries are so heavy, said user. If I take it out, will this thing work?

MS Edit vs Edlin

My brother worked for a bank before retiring. During the '90s, he would sometimes have to demonstrate something on another department's PC (running some variant of MS-DOS and 16-bit Windows). I was visiting him one evening and he explained what he was going to demonstrate the next day, which involved editing a text file through the command line (it may have been CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT). He was reasonably familiar with the MS-DOS commands and EDIT, having a PC at home in those "pre-internet" days. However, I warned him that older versions of MS-DOS wouldn't have EDIT available - he'd have to use EDLIN instead. I gave him a quick tutorial on the basics.

Turns out that he did in fact have to revert to EDLIN. Thereafter, he was held in awe as some sort of programming guru by his banking colleagues.

RIP, Swype: Thanks for all the sor--speec--speedy texting

Re: Why type....

Glaswegian accent, trying to sound like an American so voice recognition software will work?

"Eleven"

Third NAND dimension makes quad bit bucket cells feasible

Fractional bits are pure madness

Using an integer number of bits per cell already leads to inefficiencies.

For example, in order to read a random page of data from a 3BPC flash device, the controller firmware has to perform the following steps:

1. Read the wordline at 3 different comparison levels

2. Store these intermediate wordlines in RAM

3. Perform a series of Boolean logic functions on the intermediate worldines to extract the noisy page of data and its noisy ECC bits.

4. Combine the noisy page and ECC data to extract the original, uncorrupted written data.

If your storage system spreads the ECC data between the three stored pages, then you must read the entire wordline at 7 different comparison levels in step 1. Store 7 intermediate wordlines in RAM. Perform 3 times the number of Boolean logic functions that you did in step 3 to extract all three noisy pages of data and ECC bits. Combine all three pages of noisy data and ECC to extract three uncorrupted pages as written initially.

Extending this to fractional numbers of bits per cell would necessitate reading MULTIPLE WORDLINES at MULTIPLE THRESHOLD LEVELS and applying bizarre Boolean logic functions to extract your noisy data+ECC pages. This ignores the complex maths involved in applying something like BCH to generate ECC in a fractional bit scenario. Yes, it's possible in theory, but in practice it's ugly beyond belief. The complexity (and hence cost) that this would add to firmware design and testing would swamp any possible gain in storage.

In short, you'd have to be certifiably insane to propose introducing fractional bits to commercial NAND devices.

"Genuinely, why is SLC called that?"

Possibly because there was a single /threshold/ voltage comparison level to determine whether a cell represented a '0' or '1' on read.

MLC (for 2 bits per cell) covers the use of three comparison levels to fully decode two stored pages.

This however does not justify the extension of the nomenclature to TLC for 3-bits-per-cell technology.

Why the industry didn't just call it BPC (Bits-Per-Cell) from the beginning, I'll never know.

Why Boston Dynamics' backflipping borg shouldn't scare you

Re: Boston Dynamics Scottish Department

The original northern English one is far funnier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttVhzzaPd_k

Let's make the coppers wear cameras! That'll make the ba... Oh. No sodding difference

Re: History of Digital Telepathy

To Harry Stottle. A wonderful piece of work. Have a thousand upvotes. I had the exact same thoughts about a month or so ago, but I do not have the gumption or the talent to put them together in such a way. Thank you for articulating the concept.

My extension to the idea was to have a central AI which had access to everyone's recordings, and which could 'join the dots' between various experiences of the same situation. If judgement was requested by any of the participants in an incident or dispute, then the AI would reveal the encrypted evidence as required.

I think most people would allow recordings 24/7 because every time an injustice was resolved, the benefits would outweigh any doubts.

A twist in the tale: A Messiah figure who decides from an early age that he wants no further personal recordings. Haven't thought through the implications, yet. Of course, there will be a million EXTERNAL recordings of his actions from other citizens, which could be stitched together by the AI. Unless he lives as a recluse.

Samsung to let proper Linux distros run on Galaxy smartmobes

"It's emulators all the way down..."

WINE Is Not an Emulator

90 per cent of the UK's NHS is STILL relying on Windows XP

Re: Yummy ransomware target

How very, very true! :)

iPhone lawyers literally compare Apples with Pears in trademark war

Re: Pear for Apple already in use for 10 years on Kids TV

Joke news.

Until today.

Base specs leak for Windows 10 Cloud – Microsoft's wannabe ChromeOS assassin

"When you're not connected, it's pretty much a brick."

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/28/microsoft_scroogled_campaign_shifts_into_new_gear/

Manchester pulls £750 public crucifixion offer

Make the price £666

Rather than £750

Londoners will be trialling driverless cars in pedestrianised area

Think once, think twice, think don't drive your car on the pavement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmwBLln_VdM

Dark net webmail provider Sigaint still in the, er, dark

"The service has run for years despite deanonymisation attacks by Federal agencies and OTHER hostile parties."

Says it all really. :(

You're taking the p... Linux encryption app Cryptkeeper has universal password: 'p'

Blockbusters

Could I have a 'p' please, Bob?

Will Wikipedia honour Jimbo's promise to STOP chugging?

Re: What to do?

If you feel that £20 is fair payment for years of free use, then you shouldn't reclaim.

I've paid into the fundraiser for at least the past three years, and I will keep doing so in order to keep it ad-free, if nothing else. It's one of my (if not THE) most used sites on a daily basis.

Apple’s macOS Sierra update really puts the fan into 'fanboi'

Have to disagree

Best. Dabbsie. Evar.

Several splutters and genuine LOLs will testify.

Don't want to vote for Clinton or Trump? How about this woman who says Wi-Fi melts kids' brains?

Re: Members of the the House of Lords agree

SG might well be right about the effects of online technology on brain development. But be careful not to suggest that she thinks Wi-Fi itself is a credible threat to anyone's brain development.

Good gravy, Toshiba QLC flash chips are getting closer

4 bits per cell tech is so last decade.

SanDisk had a 43nm 4-bits-per-cell (x4) die in production in the noughties.

https://www.sandisk.co.uk/about/media-center/press-releases/2009/2009-10-13-sandisk-ships-world%E2%80%99s-first-flash-memory-cards-with-64-gigabit-x4-(4-bits-per-cell)-nand-flash-technology

The ‘Vaping Crackdown’ starts today. This is what you need to know

Re: Regulation is sensible the article is not

"There will still be a negative imapct on health"

It's a 95% LESS negative im-ap-ct on health.

Signed

Don't normally 'do' online campaigns, but I found this a significant cause. Very few people in my extended family have ever smoked, and neither have I. However, I truly sympathise with those who attempt to quit for good, or who want to continue, whilst reducing the harm of their addiction.

If I could give you 100 upvotes for all your posts on this topic, I would.