Posts by Brangdon

DeepNude deep-nuked: AI photo app stripped clothes from women to render them naked. Now, it's stripped from web

For some people there's an extra frisson if it is someone they know, rather than a professional. There can also be a frisson if it's without consent. Some of this is about power, and about being naughty and transgressing boundaries.

A $4bn biz without a live product just broke the record for the amount paid for a domain name. WTF is going on?

Re: People's belief in value

Fiat currencies are backed by laws about legal tender. In the UK if you use sterling to pay off a court-ordered debt or fine, it is considered paid. So (some) people are compelled to accept it (under some circumstances) by the full weight of law. Cryptocurrencies don't have that property: they are entirely voluntary.

UK Home Sec kick-starts US request to extradite ex-WikiLeaker Assange

Re: It is all about a broken condom.

Not all. He's also accused of having sex with an unconscious woman, knowing she wouldn't have consented had she been awake.

Alexa, are you profiting from the illegal storage and analysis of kids' voice commands?

Re: hiding the TV remote

Finding a lost remote when I want to use it makes sense to me. Using controls on the TV is a false saving, because I'll need to find the remote eventually anyway. If I can't find it I need to order a new one, because the TV box only has the most basic controls. (And they're hidden, and I'd have to figure out how to use them.)

Break out the poutine! SpaceX flings triple serving of Canadian satellites into orbit

Re: The moon would be much better

Mars is a much nicer place than the Moon for humans to live. The Moon has no atmosphere. That means the radiation environment is much harsher. You can't use it to slow down when landing. You can't mine it for CO2 to make rocket fuel. There's less erosion, so Moon dust is more spikey. In addition, you have to cope with nightime lasting a fortnight, uncertain water reserves, and lower gravity.

Mars has enough atmosphere that you can use it to slow down on arrival (if you are big enough). While there it protects you from radiation, so exposure on Mars surface is similar to in ISS. And you can use it to make fuel to bring you home again. Day-night cycle is just over 24 hours, so you can use solar power and grow plants in natural light without needing 14-day batteries. Gravity is closer to what humans are used to. Mars has loads of water ice, and other minerals that we need. Perchlorates can be washed out easily enough.

The only advantages of the Moon are greater solar flux, and it's closer. Distance doesn't matter so much if you are staying a long time.

Money laundering and crypto-coin legislation could hurt open-source ecosystem – activists

Re: It is usually about 8 seconds,

After 8 seconds you don't know for sure if you have the money. It might disappear again later. If you are in a hurry with Bitcoin and you don't care about whether you actually get the money, you can accept transactions with zero confirmations, or use the Lightning Network. Or switch to a currency like Nano that is designed for speed and gets sub-second transfers.

A problem with MasterCard you missed is that they act as gate-keepers. They will refuse transactions to entities they disapprove of. This has included political organisations like WikiLeaks, porn merchants and the like. Some credit card companies won't let you use their card to buy Bitcoin. They are not a neutral intermediary. They have values which they impose on you.

NASA goes commercial, publishes price for trips to the ISS – and it'll be multi-millionaires only for this noAirBNB

Presumable the visitor can bring their own food. If it becomes a tourism thing, visitors might want better food than the astronauts get. In any case, NASA will want to encourage private companies to innovate on food and then maybe adopt those innovations themselves.

Re: moon as staging area

If you want to go to Mars, the Moon is a distraction. It is a much tougher environment with very different challenges to Mars, so you don't learn much. It costs about the same delta-v to reach. Transporting stuff from Earth to the Moon then from the Moon to Mars costs vastly more then just sending it from Earth to Moon. Using Lunar resources instead of Earth ones would eventually be good, but the break-even point will take a long time to reach. It won't be a good staging area for another 50+ years. Meanwhile we want to start the Mars outpost within 10 years.

Box shifting on the Moon? Lunar payloads on Amazon Prime

Re: All these damn small satellites...

Space is big. The chance of hitting a satellite by mistake is infinitesimal. Do the maths.

The de-orbiting at end of life is done by the operator. It's a requirement for getting a license to operate. If they fail, the SpaceX ones at 550km will deorbit naturally after 5 years regardless. Higher ones take longer. There has been some discussion about using working satellites to de-orbit non-responding ones. Basically, you aren't the first to think of this problem, and the people involved are working to mitigate it.

Backhaul for internet connections is what they are for. The aerial is the size of a pizza box so they won't be serving mobile phones directly.

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

re: tragedy of the commons

SpaceX at least have a vested interest in the launch business and hence in avoiding space junk. They've also said they are addressing light and radio pollution issues. Some of this is already required to get a license to operate.

So, we don't have to wait, and aren't waiting.

Swedish prosecutors request Assange detention: First step to European arrest warrant

Re: Rape?

He's accused of having sex with a woman while she was unconscious, knowing she wouldn't have consented had she been awake. The UK courts have confirmed that would be considered rape in the UK.

NASA wheels out Habitation prototypes while SpaceX encounters problems with parachutes

Starlink launch was scrubbed

... due to high winds. There's another window 24 hours later (ie early tomorrow morning).

Get in line, USA: Sweden reopens Assange rape allegations probe

Agreed. Sweden should get priority for several reasons. Theirs is the more serious crime. They filed first originally, and only suspended because Assange fled to the embassy. Assange has already contested the EAW so if the new one is the same, there should be less scope for delays. And the Swiss statute of limitations runs out in a year or two, so if Assange does get sent to America he'll likely to be there so long that he can never be tried for the alleged rapes.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin unveils 'Blue Moon' lander, making it way too easy for manchild Elon Musk to take the piss

Ascent vehicle

It's worth noting that although they showed a crewed ascent vehicle, they aren't bidding for that portion of the NASA contract themselves. They can deliver one to the Moon, but someone else will have to build it.

So what they are actually offering is somewhat less than SpaceX have planned for Starship, except Starship will be 100% reusable from day 1, and can land 100 tonnes rather than 6.5 on the Moon. Both in the same timescale - arguably Starship is more advanced because it has a working engine and has done tethered flight-tests of a crude prototype of its second stage. Blue Origin don't have a flight-ready engine for their main rocket, and the engine for their lander has never been test-fired. The way things are looking, both New Glenn and Starship will likely make first orbit in 2021. New Glenn won't be reusing their second stage, and their lander is only reusable with ISRU which won't be available on the Moon for quite a while.

Re: Seveneves

To be fair, Seveneves is mostly set in space, where folk are more likely to survive. On Earth it mostly focuses on the people who remain responsible, go to work and get stuff done. It just doesn't talk about the ones who give up. And it's two years between getting notice of everyone dieing and it actually happening. I suspect a lot people would go back to work for most of that time. They'd still need to eat, so they'd need to get paid somehow. Not everyone has two-years worth of savings to live on. It's in the last 3 months before the event that society starts to break down, which gets mentioned briefly.

Re: CD is 100% failure

Actually, Crew Dragon is 100% success. It successfully completed an uncrewed mission to ISS and returned with cargo safely. I'm guessing the failure you are thinking of is the one that happened later, during a test mounted on a test-rig, not during a mission. Finding such failures is why they test. They were being cautious, so it makes no sense for you to criticise them for it.

It's unfair to call SpaceX loose cannons. We have no idea whether Blue Origin will be safer if/when they finally make orbit, because they've not done that yet, and what they have done is enormously easier. Their approach is not proven.

Re: Musk just hates it when someone else gets attention

Musk did make a tweet welcoming the competition, which The Register didn't report presumably because it spoils the story. It's hard to congratulate for progress because there wasn't any real progress in this announcement. It was just stuff they plan to do. The lander is a mock-up, the new engine has never been test-fired, the rocket they intend to launch with hasn't been built and uses another new engine that isn't flight-ready.

Key to success: Tenants finally get physical keys after suing landlords for fitting Bluetooth smart-lock to front door

"...require GPS to be enabled in order to use the Bluetooth functionality..."

Can someone explain this to me?

Age verification biz claims no-payment model for 40% of Brits ahead of July pr0n ban

Re: content blocking

Pornography is the canary of censorship.

Airbnb host thrown in the clink after guest finds hidden camera inside Wi-Fi router

Re: Isn't this "news" really an advert for the "security researcher" ?

The coincidence is only amazing if such cameras are rare. They may be less rare than you expect. Most people don't find them.

Re: No shit!

I gather cameras are allowed provided they are documented. It's considered reasonable for the owner to want to check the customer hasn't trashed the living room without making a visit. I gather the Irish issue was ignored because it was considered a case of failing to document rather than hiding a camera.

Re: MOT

It's possible the driver doesn't know the MOT is failed, if nobody has told them. DVLA no longer send out reminders, unless you register for them explicitly.

Blockchain is a lot like teen sex: Everybody talks about it, no one has a clue how to do it

Re: It would help if..

It should be an immutable distributed trust-free linked list. The "trust-free" part is what makes it unusual, and inappropriate within a single company or a group of companies that trust each other.

It's May 2. Know what that means? Yep, it's the PR orgy that is World Password Day... again

Re: Is "it" the same thing as covered in the last sentence?

Depends. The previous sentence is "Numbers?", and "it" does refer to numbers and should probably be "them". The intended meaning is "71% don't require a number". This is consistent with 63% not having a minimum length and 72% not requiring a mix of upper and lowercase characters. However, your reading comprehension is such that I doubt you registered the "Numbers?" sentence at all, or didn't realise it wasn't a reference to the percentages, and you also missed that the sentence before that mentions password length as well as special characters. A password complexity algorithm would estimate the entropy of a given password, which is different to merely checking whether it contains a number.

So it's actually pretty coherent, apparent from the it/them grammar mistake.

Re: someone will come here and post as you

That is, it might form part of a social engineering attack that will leading to being compromised more seriously elsewhere.

Admittedly more likely on Facebook than here.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin successfully lobs another capsule beyond the edge of space

Re: New Shepard landing looks a lot more controlled and gentle

The Falcon 9 seems less gentle because it is too powerful. It can't throttle-down enough to hover, so has to time its landing burn such that velocity=0 happens when elevation=0, and then shut down. And this is because it has a much more challenging job, and so needs more powerful engines and as little weight as possible.

FYI: Yeah, the cops can force your finger onto a suspect's iPhone to see if it unlocks, says judge

Re: Doesn't compute

They don't have to say what their password is. They just have to unlock their phone with it. Hence no self-incrimination with respect to the password; it's not revealed.

Once the phone is unlocked, it can be searched, and that's not self-incrimination either.

Uncle Sam charges Julian Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion

Re: So, he was right then.

He was in custody in the UK for well over a year before he fled to the embassy. From 2010 to 2012. The US could have made an extradition request then, but didn't. That they have now shows there was no need to get him to Sweden first, hence his reason to avoid the European Arrest Warrant was bogus.

Re: 7 years or 5

The legal term for sex without permission is rape, not assault. In this case he's accused of having sex with a woman while she was asleep, knowing she wouldn't have consented had she been awake. He may not be guilty (and she may have been only half-asleep), but the accusation is serious and shouldn't be minimised.

Brit rocket boffins Reaction Engines notch up first supersonic precooler test

Re: an aircraft that can do it all over again on the same day

Elon Musk would disagree with you. Reusable two-stage rockets are possible, if you make them really big.

Re: people like Elon Musk who are sending the world down the wrong path

If by "Musk" you mean SpaceX, they are moving from kerosene to methane, and methane can be made carbon-neutral if anyone actually cares. Which they probably don't as the number of rockets launched is too few to matter.

VMware emits security alerts, Planet Hollywood chain hacked, SWAT death caller gets 20 years in clink, and more

Re: On the other hand

Although a greater chance of getting caught, if any random visitor can peek at your laptop. It's better not to be suspected than to be suspected and found non-guilty (whether innocent or not).

VP Mike Pence: I want Americans back on the Moon by 2024 (or before the Chinese get there)

Re: Moon versus Mars

Mars is superior to the Moon for habitation in almost every way, because it has an atmosphere, a reasonable day-night cycle, plenty of water and other resources we need, and gravity closer to Earth-normal. It's further away, but takes less delta-v to reach because you can use the atmosphere to slow down, and it's easier to return home again because you can use the atmosphere and water to make rocket fuel.

The Moon is closer, and has more solar flux. That's it. Admittedly being closer is a big advantage, especially if you just want to plant a flag, but it matters less if you want to found a colony (which is what SpaceX want).

Do Martians dream of electric Nimbys? Selling 5G needs steak, not just sizzle

Re: Nah, I'll wait for 6G!

Not reading the specs on a toaster is why so many toasters toast too small an area to cover a large slice of bread. My current toaster is about 30% faster than my previous one, which is nice, and worth reading the specs - before purchase - to find out. Other toasters I could have bought were slower.

If you're worried that quantum computers will crack your crypto, don't be – at least, not for a decade or so. Here's why

Re: What about black projects?

The work done at Bletchley Park remained secret for many decades, despite thousands of people knowing about it. Maybe the existence of alternate quantum computers will leak in 40 years too.

Re: If you need it kept secret

You have to make sure that, for example, your ROT13 encoder doesn't insert a header that identifies the output as being ROT13, because that can lead to known plaintext attacks.

Swiss electronic voting system like... wait for it, wait for it... Swiss cheese: Hole found amid public source code audit

Re: in the UK at least

Voting in the UK is simple because we only vote on one thing at a time. Each ballot gets its own piece of paper, and they are counted in two steps: first sort the paper into piles according to who they vote for, then count the number of pieces in each pile. Both steps are easy to do in parallel, so if you use counting staff proportional to the voting population it happens in constant time. It's also relatively easy to spot-check that no votes got into the wrong pile, or that each pile has the reported count. Basically, it scales well.

In America they vote on vastly more things. Not just president, but elected officials at various levels. Instead of each vacancy getting its own piece of paper, they combine them all onto one sheet. This makes it impossible to count manually using the UK method. That's why they use automated systems of various designs. (Not saying their system couldn't be adapted, eg by using perforated paper and splitting up the sheet into one strip per vote. Historically they've not done that.)

I've no idea whether the Swiss are like the UK or like the US.

Take Note: Schneider's teeny-tiny Galaxy VS li-ion UPS set to explode onto data centre scene

Re: Inflamable means flammable?

Spraying water is the recommended way of dealing with Li-Ion battery fires, to cool it down.

Musk is in contempt of court, screams SEC after Tesla boss brags about car production rates

Re: just trying to grab the spotlight

I think that was the part that hurt, because it's untrue. Whether or not the pod could have helped is unclear, and I don't think the cave explorer was qualified to say. (I say "explorer" because he wasn't one of the rescue team. He had explored the cave when it was dry and knew the phone numbers of the people who actually risked their lives in the rescue.) Either way, Musk had made it at the request of the rescue team, using their specifications, put a lot of effort into it and obviously believed it could save the life of the smallest boy (*). So to have the cave explorer say he was just doing it for PR, ie in bad faith, would have hurt.

Doesn't justify the paedo comment, of course. That seemed to be based entirely on the chap being a British man who moved to Thailand.

(*) - the rescue team had trouble sourcing a full-face mask small enough for the smallest boy, so the plan was to enclose him entirely in a pod that had its own air supply.

Password managers may leave your online crown jewels 'exposed in RAM' to malware – but hey, they're still better than the alternative

Re: Keystroke logger

A good password manager will use a secure desktop to enter the master password, which is supposed to defeat keystroke loggers.

Twilight of the sundials: Archaic timepiece dying out and millennials are to blame, reckons boffin

Or a wall. You can get wall mounted sundials. Eg http://www.merlinsundials.co.uk/vertical.html

Use an 8-char Windows NTLM password? Don't. Every single one can be cracked in under 2.5hrs

Re: correcthorsebatterystaple

The XKCD example already takes dictionary attacks into account. It gives 44 bits of entropy from 4 words, hence is based on a dictionary of 2024 words. As it happens, 44 bits isn't a lot nowadays. Bigger dictionaries will give stronger passwords, as will using more words.

I find multi-word English phrases much easier to enter into limited devices than random assortments of symbols. The latter I have to look up and enter one character at time, where-as a word like "horse" I can look up once than enter the whole word from memory. Even "ihpcrbtmplm" would make me stop to think for each letter. Not having to switch to weird symbol keyboards helps too. These phrases are also easier to tell other people, eg if they need to know your WiFi password.

Redditors start flinging Pooh after mega-forum takes cash from Chinese behemoth Tencent

Another issue is that their algorithm favours short-form content in busy sub-reddits. This is because long-form content gets pushed down the list before people have time to vote on it, so good stuff disappears before it has acquired enough votes to stay at the top. Short-form content gets its votes quicker so is able to keep its place at the top longer. Hence the site tends to drown in images.

From Red Planet to deep into the red: Suicidal extrovert magnet Mars One finally implodes

Re: I was wrong

Something similar has been done, by C4's Space Cadets, albeit to Low Earth Orbit rather than Mars. Since they were only going to near space (as opposed to outer space), they weren't weightless; the gravity loss was only 30% which was easily compensated by gravity generators built into the ship. Cadets were carefully chosen to maximise the chances of them believing that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadets_(TV_series)

NASA's Opportunity rover celebrates 15 years on Mars – by staying as dead as a doornail

Trumps second terms ends in 2026. Getting to Mars by 2026 would be feasible if they used SpaceX and/or Zubrin's Mars Direct, and had unlimited money, and really pulled their finger out on developing Mars habitats etc. Not feasible using NASA and SLS. If they cancelled SLS it might not need much extra money. The real problem here is politics.

The SpaceX plan has 2024 as the date for human arrival. They probably won't make that, but that's partly because they don't have the money or other resources (eg, priority access to range). Allowing them another two years makes it much more likely. If we were in a Seveneves type situation, threatened with human extinction, we could do it in 8 years for sure.

Starship bloopers: In touching tribute to Tesla shares, Musk proto-craft tumbles – as Bezos' Blue Origin rocket lifts off

Re: the slew of pink slips issued to Space X employees recently

SpaceX is large company. They need to clear out the deadwood from time to time. Note they are hiring new people at the same time.

Also, some of those let go would have been working in carbon fibre, which is less needed now they are switching to stainless steel. There are a host of other factors too. The whole point of reuse is that you need less labour.

SpaceX haven't had many DoD contracts. They get government money from NASA, and nowadays most of their business is commercial.

Re: floating back to terra firma using three parachutes

Parachutes don't scale. SpaceX tried landing a Falcon 9 with parachutes in the early days. It didn't work. They had no choice but to switch to retropropulsion for Earth landings if they are to reuse the booster.

Parachutes work for the capsule because the capsule is smaller. That is, it works on Earth, with a dense atmosphere - on Mars, with a thinner atmosphere, parachutes work for small probes but larger ones need retropropulsion too. Same issue: parachutes don't scale, and the point at which they become impractical depends on atmospheric density.

China's really cotton'd on to this whole Moon exploration thing: First seed sprouts in lunar lander biosphere

Re: I would like to see the aims of the experiment.

I mostly agree. A crucial area is how development in lunar gravity compares with development in Earth's gravity and micro-gravity. I'd expect it to be much closer to the former than the later. There are a lot of things that go wrong for humans in microgravity and I hope they don't also go wrong in 1/6th g. I don't know if this experiment can shed much light on this.

Spektr-R goes quiet, Dragon splashes down and SpaceX lays off

Re: Stainless Steel?

Apparently carbon fibre is stronger at room temperature, but steel is stronger at cryogenic temperatures and a lot stronger at high temperature, so steal wins overall for this application. It is a very specific type of steel - apparently SpaceX have their own foundry now, and developed a new alloy for the engines.

The steel is a good conductor, so they'll be able to use active cooling instead of a heat shield, which saves some weight overall and is also better for reuse.