Posts by smudge 1083 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2008
Many years ago, prior to the financial Big Bang, my wife worked for an old, traditional stockbroking firm in the City of London.
Antique furniture, all dark polished wood and brass, portraits of the founders and their successors (eg male descendants) on the walls, and over everything, the smell of privilege and of money.
One day someone said "Where's the clock?".
"What clock?".
"The 7-feet tall 200 year old £20,000 antique grandfather clock that stands in Reception.".
"Oh, that one. They came and took it away for repair the other day.".
No they hadn't. Some blokes in overalls had come in, waved a piece of paper around, and told the receptionist that.
It was never seen again.
simplifying the railway would also avoid the time and expense of proving it could safely operate at 360 km/h while avoiding the risk that testing might ultimately show the higher speed was not feasible.
Sounds like the sort of testing I'd rather not be involved in.
How exactly do they determine that the higher speed is not feasible?
I may be stupid, but I can't see how releasing a spectrographic image will "help the public understand the circumstances of an accident.".
Assuming that it is clear that there are at least two voices in the recording, then it would show that at least one person was conscious in the cockpit. (The other could be a voice alarm or an incoming radio transmission). That's all that I can think of.
Anyone know?
London’s Metropolitan Police – the UK’s largest police force – asked tech companies to give officers access to private communications data over 700,000 times in 2025 alone
That would be nearly 2000 times every day. That, frankly, is unbelievable.
Are we talking about 700,000 separate, discrete requests? Or does one request covering 100 people count as 100 requests?
About the only way I could believe it is if they have a system which automatically sends out one or more requests (eg to different service providers) every time an individual and their phone number or email is identified.
Ooops, nearly forgot - hi guys! Anything that tells you I'm in London, Folkestone, Rochdale or north Leicestershire (which is where my internet radio thinks I am) is wrong :)
...taking photographs of it was officially discouraged under the Official Secrets Act.
Really? I must dig out the old postcard of it that I have somewhere. I used to work in Fitzrovia, and the shops were full of such postcards.
Reason I bought it is that the photograph was taken from the junction of Rathbone Street and Charlotte Place, and consequently included the Duke of York, a fine pub in which I spent many nights and played many darts matches.
You know the country is on its knees when it cannot even make its own passports.
My wife and I have just renewed our UK passports, and it took less than two weeks from filling in the online forms and sending the old ones in.
With regular email upates to keep us informed of progress.
So, whoever is doing it, and wherever, keep it up!
There was a long sequence of CAPTCHA tests which were impossible (we want things that are the same as the reference,but had no relationship to the refetence).
Yup. Reference picture - aeoplane taking off. Other pictures - trains, elephants, and burgers. WTF?
Tried skipping the test - no luck, just repeated itself a few times. Eventually clicked a train, on the basis that it's a mode of transport, as is a plane. But an elephant can be, as well. Didn't work.
Eventually, after a different test - click all things that float on water - I made it to the login screen.
Using bog-standard Firefox on Windows 11, and have a driving licence, so didn't go further.
I thought these captchas helped train autonomous cars to recognise things? Bit worrying if they can't tell a plane from a burger, or need to know what does and doesn't float :)
these devices are equipped with hardware that identifies malicious traffic in the data channel, blocking the transfer between computer and display.
I'm thinking that it's a bit too late by then....
We're also told that the SilentGlass gizmos are threat-agnostic, meaning they are capable of detecting any kind of nastiness
Checks calendar - nope, April 1st was a while ago.
Ignores obvious comment about filtering out anything from/about the US Government.
Wonders how they can detect any kind of nastiness - including those not yet invented. And how it can let through all the stuff that you want, without labelling any of it "nasty".
Thinks we must be getting into Godel/Turing incompleteness/undecidability territory there.
Then remembers that Goldilocks is a fairy tale.
A lot of practices in these parts appear to use the same security card on a lanyard tech as banks use for their teller's terminals. A couple of minutes of inactivity the card has to be swiped again to unlock the terminal and applications.
Not in the NHS hospital I was in recently. The nurses would wheel round trolleys carrying integrated PCs, screens, keyboards... and smartcard readers. The system would keep them logged on as long as the smartcard was in the reader. It didn't time them out. The nurses, of course, frequently left their PCs logged in and unattended for long periods while they dealt with the needs of the patients...
He said AI is turning people into "passive consumers of unthought thoughts"
My irony meter has just exploded. Coming from the head of a worldwide, extremely rich organisation that demands blind faith and unthinking obedience from its users, sorry, customers, sorry, marks (no, not St Mark), this is a bit much.
You could rewrite that whole piece to refer to organised religion, not to AI, and it wouldn't need much alteration at all.
You do realise that the people smugglers are mostly not in the UK, and even if we knew who they are, we can't just go and arrest them?
That's why we need more co-operation with European governments and then police forces.
"Taking back control"? Quite the opposite!
"Later this year, the digital driving license will be rolled out more widely, enabling people to store their driving license on their phone, making it easier and faster to prove who you are and your driving entitlements," GDS said in a blogpost.
Easier & faster? Than whipping my licence (with a 'c', not an 's') out of my pocket, and showing them my photo on one side and the classes of vehicle I can drive on the other?
Yer 'avin' a larf, aintcha?
if Hisense and TCL have conducted surveillance in the way the lawsuits accuse them of, they'd potentially be required to share all data with the Chinese Communist Party.
And if they were US companies, they would potentially be required to share all data with the US Government.
Which could be useful next time you want to mount an illegal military assault and kidnapping in another sovereign country. Even if Maduro is a nasty piece of work.
it turns out that 22,236 mi (35,786 km for snooty folks) is actually quite a long ways up. This has several implications:
Network latency is one.
Maybe you're too young to have experienced this one, but us oldies remember inter-continental phone calls where you said your bit and then left some dead time, waiting for the response.
Or maybe you forgot, and assumed that the other person wasn't saying anything, and you started up again, only to find yourself talking over their reply. Then they'd hear what you had started saying. So you'd waste precious seconds - those calls were expensive! - re-synching yourselves.
in cases where its cars have to decide how to proceed through a dark intersection, it may send an additional request back to Waymo HQ for confirmation that its decision is the correct one
How would Waymo HQ know?
Do they have live video of every intersection? But there's been a power failure....
Aye. So many opportunities for joined-up government thinking here.
Decouple the price of electricity from that of natural gas. Allow people and industry to pay the real price of their power. Cheaper electricity for the datacentres. "And also for the Jocks, though. Can't have that!"
Look at possible use of the small nuclear power generators that they have been talking about. Could be ideal. Although there are environmental considerations, of course, and it's not clear what the Scottish people's attitude would be. Are you completely anti-nuclear, or just against nuclear weapons?
BTW, "power too cheap to meter" originated in the US in the 1950s, applied to nuclear power generation. Large-scale hydroelectricity in Scotland goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, with smaller schemes before that.
it is estimated that about 84,000 phones are stolen annually
I was assuming that the digital IDs would be accessible via a phone, not actually held on one?
So, making the necessary assumption that effective user ID and authentication is in place, a phone being stolen shouldn't be too inconvenient. Until you get a new one, you should be able to look it up on someone else's, if you trust them.
"Currently, Ruter can disconnect the bus from the internet by removing the SIM card, as all connectivity to the network goes through this single point. This ensures that we retain local control if necessary,"
It's a bus. How many SIMs can the manufacturer conceal in it? Even allowing for the need for positioning for reliable communications...
Plus HOLD THE DAMN THING PROPERLY. It's a *****ing phone, hold it like a ****ing phone, not like a bloody spit tray.
The BBC this week interviewed someone who had had her phone stolen something like five times.
"Nowadays I keep it out of sight and only take it out when I need it.", she moaned. "That's not how it was meant to be.".
The worrying thing is that they let people like that vote, and breed.
Every now and then it sends out a stream of F1s, and a myriad of help pages start opening up on the screen.
The PC's fan (that's the thing inside the case, not a friend of Plod) starts working overtime, and eventually something breaks and it all stops working.
More electronic waste :(
At the time it said the two forces have used LFR to make 580 arrests over the previous 12 months.
The number of arrests is meaningless. They could all be innocent people.
What would be more relevant would be the number charged - on its own, and compared to the number arrested.
The number convicted would also be of interest.
Just need to keep track of which fingerprint prints you're using for each ID when enrolling it so you can print the right ones out when travelling.
The US system requires all of your fingerprints.
I imagine the EU system will be the same.
(Quite sensible, because it allows for fingers being damaged or amputated.)
Uptick for bringing up negligence.
Yes, there's an immediate problem to be dealt with.
Which must be followed by an in-depth investigation of how it happened, and prosecution of anyone who was negligent, refused to spend money on security, ignored the advice they were given, etc etc. Not just at the grunt level, but all the way up the management chain.
Comparisons could be made with the PO Horizon scandal. My understanding there is that the police are waiting until the public inquiry concludes - so as not to influence it - before deciding who should be charged with what.
