Posts by Camilla Smythe

Verified: UK.gov launching plans for yet another digital identity scheme

Re: I see another overly expensive failure on the horizon

Well spotted. Matt Warman spouted bollcocks [I like this accidental misspelling] during the passage of the #IPAct and used to review iPhones.

Billions in data protection lawsuits rides on Google's last-ditch UK Supreme Court defence for Safari Workaround sueball

It is self-evident that individual Class members would have had very different experiences, and those experiences bear directly on whether (and if so how) they can claim to have suffered any loss at all.”

It is self-evident that in implementing the tracking Google should have taken into account the maximum amount of harm that could befall an individual user and act to mitigate that possible harm for all.

FTFY

Cloudflare offers $100,000 for prior art to nuke networking patents a troll has accused it of ripping off

Re: It's not much but...

Oh, sorry link to document

https://register.epo.org/ipApplication?documentId=id00000005284788&number=US.2005046092.W

It's not much but...

Click links to find meaningful expressions,

US6954431B2

US8243593B2

US7012919B1

US6977932B1

Ignore Google and go to https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/

Enter numbers. Look for either the Global Dossier link which will give you a trail of documents. Look through documents for things like non-final or final rejections or opinions etc. See if they contain mention of any prior art that might be resurrected in order to challenge.

Also look under the patent family list and do a similar search on the numbers that crop up.

Unfortunately a cursory look does not appear to show much meat however generally you find that where an application has attempted to file under WIPO or EPO the reports tend to be more comprehensive and the applicant, whilst they have a US patent, gives up trying to pursue them under WIPO/EPO

However in this case only US8243593B2 gives a WO (WIPO) application

https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/036595594/publication/US8243593B2?q=US8243593B2

WO2006069044A2

WO2006069044A3

https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/036595594/publication/WO2006069044A3?q=pn%3DWO2006069044A3

https://register.epo.org/ipfwretrieve?apn=US.2005046092.W&lng=en

It's not much but they are going to reject claims 1-40 on the basis of lack of novelty and lack of inventive step, Page 4) of the document, 1) Statement. They also give their reasons same page 2) Citations and Explanations.

"Claims 1-40 lack novelty under PCT Article 33(2) as being anticipated by ZIKAN et al. in US Patent No 6,310,881 B1, hereinafter referred to as ZIKAN."

https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/022642825/publication/US6310881B1?q=US6310881B1

Best I can do you.

Spy agency GCHQ told me Gmail's more secure than Microsoft 365, insists British MP as facepalming security bods tell him to zip it

ISTR During passage of the #IPAct...

MP were warned by their constituents that privacy of communications with members would be subject to interception. Naturally the MPs voted themselves through an exemption. At the time the service was via another third party provider. For the moment I can't remember who, it may have been symantec, however I was aware and made MPs I was in contact with aware that that service provider scanned e-mails and visited links within e-mails to documents hosted on my own web server. I could link to such a document within an e-mail and within seconds or minutes of sending the e-mail a copy of the document was requested by the third party provider both from EU and US located servers. None of it is secure.

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

Graphics Cards

All PCs were configured from the same image and just used basic Windows drivers irrespective of hardware installed. One user would continually complain that their computer was running slowly and being employed by a big wig instant action was always required because a power point was due for a meeting in five minutes. Every visit showed that they had maxed out the video ram because 'Keanu Reeves', in black and white, was their screen saver leaving barely enough system ram to run wordpad. This was on a 1024x768 display. Every time it was demonstrated to them Keanu looked just as nice with more sensible settings. and the Boss got to their meeting on time... until the next time.

As mentioned all the configurations were the same but one day I made the mistake of installing the proper drivers on someone's PC and this actually opened up the reasonable opportunity to increase colour depths. It made little to no difference to how general company software displayed but the browsing experience was much better. Word got around and as it turns out the general interest was more driven by the fact that company profile photos looked so much better. So requests came in and during quiet times I'd drop by and make adjustments. Everyone was happy apart from one user who did not like their 'new' profile image and asked for things to be set back to 'normal'. Yes folks the person with a black and white screen saver of Keanu Reeves who still caused panics when their Boss was due in a meeting.

Of course you might think the problem was Keanu Reeves related. No doubt in black and white the added colour depth made him look much worse than wacking up the amount of system ram assigned to video. However whilst the user was happy with their profile photo with the old settings they now noticed that it was 'wrong' on other people's computers where the change was still in place. Fortunately although a strongly worded request was put in to fix this by reverting the changes elsewhere everyone else got to keep their shiny new improved colour depths by changing the colour depth on the users profile photo.

OVH data centre destroyed by fire in Strasbourg – all services unavailable

Looks good to me....

https://twitter.com/xgarreau/status/1369559995491172354/photo/1

Says OVH Cloud. Looks like a cloud. What's the problem?

Housekeeping and kernel upgrades do not always make for happy bedfellows

Bloody Experts

Yah Yah Yah. All of your horror shows about rm -rf and you don't know about -rm rf. Thick idiots.

FYI: Your browser can pick up ultrasonic signals you can't hear, and that sounds like a privacy nightmare to some

Re: Chinny reckon

Bonus points if your acoustic sampling frequency matches your data snooping frequency and moves it into your, higher, data grabbing frequency band.

Re: It's the microphone, not the browser

Nice hard acoustic reflective surface plus other stuff.

It looks like you want a storage appliance for your data centre. Maybe you'd prefer a smart card reader?

Fucking Idiots...

I thought the El Reg readership might have been better than this. Obviously the USB thing is an 'often bought with' item as like wot would be used by us in the kno for taking backups from the main product. You do take backups, don't you?

A paper clip, a spool of phone wire and a recalcitrant RS-232 line: Going MacGyver in the wonderful world of hotel IT

Hmm. 1982 Channel Four. Now our first programme. Countdown.

Produced and Broadcast from Yorkshire Television in Leeds. My first student placement was in part spent grovelling around under the floor in the MCR, Master Control Room, tracing and ring colour-coding 75Ohm video cables... the old sticky labels had fallen off and the documentation needed, cough, updating. The supervising engineer had recently self eliminated himself via a political power struggle and was working notice sorting this stuff out. We finished things up in time and the evening of the day before broadcast he called me to the end of one of the racks to proudly show me a boot sized DC powered electro-mechanical RF relay bolted to the rack. "This is where our Channel 4 feed leaves the building." he said with a big grin on his face. The next evening the relay went *clunk* and Richard Twice Nightly and Carol Vorderman burst onto the airwaves in Countdown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03c9vit5G4w 4:03

In case you need more proof the world's gone mad: Behold, Apple's $699 Mac Pro wheels

As any Fule Kno

Given similar minimal wear in/out time anything with castors on acts like a shopping trolley. Dude you just paid $700 to turn your Mac Pro into a shopping trolley?

Anyway someone needs to leap on the iTray desk market and produce something similarly shiny that your Mac Pro with castors can sit on whilst maintaining the same desktop height of your Mac Pro without castors with added does not fall off the edge of your desk prevention.

Dude. You just paid $1400 for a baking tray?!?

PC owners borg into the most powerful computer the world has ever known – all in the search for coronavirus cure

Just about to dip below rank of 1000

Was about 12,000 on the 25th.

Re: No CUDA No libOpenCL No GPUs :(

Tah. Used: sudo apt install ocl-icd-opencl-dev

Not sure what is going on but now I show 1 GPU slot and 1 CPU slot running. I had to mess about in config, override -1 on some settings to get the GPU up. Again no idea as to what it did. The only indication that the GPU is doing something is the progress bar is moving and the temperature has gone up from 50C to 67C even though GPU utilisation is stuck down at 3% when I wiggle the mouse.

13:33:14:<config>

13:33:14: <!-- Client Control -->

13:33:14: <fold-anon v='true'/>

13:33:14:

13:33:14: <!-- Folding Slot Configuration -->

13:33:14: <gpu v='false'/>

13:33:14:

13:33:14: <!-- Network -->

13:33:14: <proxy v=':8080'/>

13:33:14:

13:33:14: <!-- Slot Control -->

13:33:14: <power v='full'/>

13:33:14:

13:33:14: <!-- User Information -->

13:33:14: <team v='250966'/>

13:33:14: <user v='Camilla_Smythe'/>

13:33:14:

13:33:14: <!-- Folding Slots -->

13:33:14: <slot id='0' type='GPU'>

13:33:14: <cuda-index v='0'/>

13:33:14: <gpu-index v='0'/>

13:33:14: <opencl-index v='0'/>

13:33:14: </slot>

13:33:14: <slot id='1' type='CPU'/>

13:33:14:</config>

13:33:37:WU00:FS01:0xa7:Completed 10000 out of 500000 steps (2%)

13:34:14:WU01:FS00:0xa7:Completed 240000 out of 500000 steps (48%)

Yay!1!

https://stats.foldingathome.org/donor/Camilla_Smythe

Presumably only to download and return work files. My first download was only 4.5MByte. System monitor on my box shows no additional network anything whilst the thing is heating up my computer. Go for it.

No CUDA No libOpenCL No GPUs :(

OS Arch: AMD64

10:07:50: GPUs: 0

10:07:50:CUDA Device 0: Platform:0 Device:0 Bus:7 Slot:0 Compute:6.1 Driver:10.1

10:07:50: OpenCL: Not detected: Failed to open dynamic library 'libOpenCL.so':

10:07:50: libOpenCL.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or

10:07:50: directory

Ryzen 2700X 16 cores available. GEFORCE GTX1050

Linux Mint 19.3 How do I get the GPU on the case?

Broadcom sues Netflix for its success: You’re stopping us making a fortune from set-top boxes, moans chip designer

Re: Do Broadcom actually have any proof that Netflix are using their IP?

Don't they just ping them and see if the numbers match?

Microsoft's GitHub absorbs NPM into its code-hosting empire: JavaScript library vault used by 12 million devs now under Redmond's roof

See Post

"Looking further ahead, we’ll integrate GitHub and npm to improve the security of the open source software supply chain, and enable you to trace a change from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version that fixed it," said Friedman in a blog post.

"Looking further ahead, we’ll integrate GitHub and npm to improve the security of the open source software supply chain, and enable you to trace a change from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version that broke it," said Friedman in a blog post.

Hello, support? What do I click if I want some cash?

Unless...

Someone is actively nursing a version of XP in Virtual Box under Linux. "Hmm Windows Key R you say? That's OK, I've got a spare couple of hours."

Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this

What of Cloudflare Insights?

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033929991-Cloudflare-Browser-Insights

Not sure I like the idea of wank like that being associated with my browsing.

Departing MI5 chief: Break chat app crypto for us, kthxbai

Dear Home Secretary...

Dear Home Secretary,

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/26/mi5_chief_itv_interview/

"Current UK home secretary Priti Patel is firmly anti-encryption, with

the social conservative having banged on about paedoterrorists shortly

after her appointment last summer."

I run Linux. It comes fully loaded with all sorts of encryption stuff

and I can apt-get even more of it should I really care.

For less hardcore paedoterrorists this sort of stuff is also available

on the Interwebs assuming you have the right #hashtags.

https://gpg4usb.org/download.html

There is no need to use the encryption available from popular online

platforms and you do not gain much from asking them to cripple it.

No doubt any backdoors you care to introduce will rapidly fall into the

hands of undesirables.... such as the [HUGE COUGH] Israelis.

Don't mention this to Sir Andrew Parker. He used to work for MI5 and

apparently they don't trust you.

HTH

Faithfully

Assange lawyer: Trump offered WikiLeaker a pardon in exchange for denying Russia hacked Democrats' email

End Game.

Trump denies that he knows himself. In fact he just made coffee. Loser. Sad. He only appears with himself in photographs with himself so often because lots of people appear with him in photographs because he is so popular with himself. Most popular President ever.

Another week, another bunch of Windows 10 machines punched by a patch

Re: Just here for the downvotes.

Well.. yes. NX7400 Intel Celeron. Apparently it is Vista Capable. I did not want to underestimate things in case someone called foul. It does take a bit longer if I leave old kernels lying about.

Just here for the downvotes.

Why does Linux never spend more than 5 minutes updating itself and is happy to hold off on reboots on the extremely rare occasions one is required. I mean... last time I moved up a version number that only took 15 minutes and I didn't really notice any difference. What are they doing wrong?

If you're running Windows, I feel bad for you, son. Microsoft's got 99 problems, better fix each one

99!?

Does it still reboot after downloading each one?

Google Chrome to block file downloads – from .exe to .txt – over HTTP by default this year. And we're OK with this

Move Fast...

... and break other people's things.

Who's got the WD-40? Owners of Motorola's rebooted Razr whinge about creaky hinge

Navigate to Audio Apps

Turn off 'Creak'.

Fixed!

Gospel according to HPE: And lo, on the 32,768th hour did thy SSD give up the ghost

SSD Auto-Bork

So they set a counter that kills the drive at the equivalent of an overflow?

Personally I give zero stuffs about it being unsigned or not or for that matter how big it is. They have still installed a mechanism whereby the SSD will Auto-Bork at their imposed time limit irrespective of how much life there might be left in the drive.

I have been advised that one way of extending SSD life is to over provision the drive. 16GB, use 12GB leave 4GB spare. I know not how much additional life time that might gain but the exercise is rendered pointless if the manufacturer wades in and Auto-Borks the drive 5 years before it was due to gasp its last.

WTAF?

Are you as handy with privacy certs as you are with a screwdriver? Ikea has the perfect vacancy

Re: Remember the electric screwdriver

Left and right corner desks? --->

Teardown gurus plunge screwdrivers into Google Pixel 4XL: Check out the speedy display from, er, Samsung

Thanks...

For giving a link to the iFixit article.

TalkTalk says WalkWalk if you've got a mouldy Tiscali email address, or pay £50 a year to keep it

ZEN?

Comes with a fixed IP address. Also sell Domain Names. Drop £36 on a Pi 3A. Sam Hobbs will tell you how to set up a mail server. Basically unlimited e-mail for Domain renewal per year. I've been doing that prior to and including ZEN for about 8 years.

BOFH: What's the Gnasher? Why, it's our heavy-duty macerator sewage pump

Re: Could be worse

Here you go...

https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/223650084253

Much shorter when you remove the code resulting from your previous searches for but plugs plus no-one else gets tarred with the same feather.

Linux Journal runs shutdown -h now for a second time: Mag editor fires parting shot at proprietary software

Granny's Portable.

Does HDMI support 405 line?

Experts: No need to worry about Europe's navigation sats going dark for days. Also: What the hell is going on with those satellites?!

I miss...

Driving into rivers.

Google's reCAPTCHA favors – you guessed it – Google: Duh, only a bot would refuse to sign into the Chocolate Factory

Welcome back Ms Smythe...

Please click all boxes containing the socks you wish to buy.

Delphi RAD tool (remember that?) gets support for Linux desktop apps – again

Had a chat with....

Someone selling VB and my head melted as they took me through the various options and price points. Had a chat with someone selling Delphi (IV) and was told £49.95 so I bought Delphi.

Biz tells ransomware victims it can decrypt their files... by secretly paying off the crooks and banking a fat margin

Re: Doesn't matter

Uhm... I have an old e-mail address that daily receives at least 10 attempts to deliver spam. Each one gets a 450 client host rejected, recipient unknown or similar. All the associated IP addresses end up as xxx.xxx.xxx.0/24 in IPTables via a scripted cron job. You would think that they might eventually get the idea but.... no. They just move on to different IP addresses that get added to the list. Did I mention I still have an old e-mail address that daily receives at least 10 attempts to deliver spam. No doubt tomorrow I will still have an old e-mail address that daily receives at least 10 attempts to deliver spam.

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

Use Kicad Instead...

Sure. Last time I poked at that it was dirt. OK... just for you...

Please take a look at the list of changes below. 195MB will be downloaded. 2.8GB more disk space will be used.

https://imgur.com/t6Qb5m2

That was a waste of 2.8GB of disk space. Fuck Off.

Exclusive: Windows for Workgroups terror the Tartan Bandit confesses all to The Register

Stock Control System

Company ran one that allowed three concurrent users for the free version and was too tight to pay for a licence. Cue lone zombies walking about the place asking to use other logged in zombies computers or asking them to log out. Somehow one day the company discovers it has six concurrent users and non of them can log out or use the system even if they turn things off and on again. They end up still being logged in and the instances seem to be frozen. The real ones, all three, are running on a computer at the back of the stock room. The others are....

Dedicated techie risks life and limb to locate office conference phone hiding under newspaper

Lifting things.

"Hi. My Computer has frozen."

"Stick your hand up when I get upstairs."

Gets to desk. Lifts folder from keyboard. Kills multiple copies of PowerPoint... Including the one with the original scribbles on it. }:o)~~

Hi! It looks like you're working on a marketing strategy for a product nowhere near release! Would you like help?

Solved a problem in a product.

Explained to customer what problem was and how solution worked. Customer asks how sure I am so I say 50%. Customer expresses relief because all the other solutions that failed had been guaranteed to be 100%. Implements solution. Solution works. Other half of product goes up in smoke.

Who pwns the watchmen? Maybe Russians selling the source code for three US antivirus vendors

Is that...

$300,000 to fix it for them?

A day in the life of London seen through spam and weak Wi-Fi

I shall open my ManPack.

Fondle my plunger first.

OK... It is now Rubbery.

Please turn around and open your Cyber-Johns.

Click Click.

Your entry is too low. Please stand on your head.

Shuffle.

Your entry is too high.

My Head Handles are in the way.

Remove your Head Handles.

I will lose my Wi-Fi connection. The Dabbs will connect.

The Dabbs does not have a Wi-Fi Connection! I have cum. How was it for you?

Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz: Car hire biz demands $32m+ for 'defective' cyber-revamp

If Hertz need someone...

I'll have a dig in my junk mail folder. I get lots of e-mails from overseas chaps who say they are really good at this SEO stuff.

Old-school cruel: Dodgy PDF email attachments enjoying a renaissance

My latest batch of...

Caught you watching pron e-mails request that I copy and paste a bitcoin wallet address from a .jpg image because it is case sensitive. I assume everyone else has been getting the case sensitive part wrong so my new owners are trying to make stuff easier. I still haven't worked out how to copy and paste from a .jpg image. Any pointers? I seem to have already missed a number of deadlines so apologies to anyone who has received a collection of poorly focused images of me having a fap.

So you've 'seen' the black hole. Now for the interesting bit – how all that raw data was stored

Helium filled at high altitude.

Pffft.

Just stick normal drives in a sealed cabinet held at one atmosphere for half an hour to equalize prior to and then whilst they are operating. It's not Black Hole Science.

Correction: Last month, we called Zuckerberg a moron. We apologize. In fact, he and Facebook are a fscking disgrace

So... In Pizza Terms

Facebook gives you $5 to take part in their Pizza Marketing drive and not only does your Pizza cost $7.50 more but everyone else gets to pay $7.50 more for a Pizza as well.

Guess who's working on a health data-slurping digital tool? Bzzt! Nope, it's the UK Department for Work and Pensions

Try bunging in an FOIA request to the DWP about LIMA

Specifically asking about its design or other technical details. For example...

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/147047/response/357528/attach/2/Slater%20Response%20358.pdf

Additionally, any documentation that details how the LiMA system is designed is exempt from

disclosure under section 43 (2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. This is because, in our

opinion, the disclosure of the information under the Act would, or would be likely to, prejudice

the commercial interests of both DWP and a third party licensee of DWP.

That's right folks. LIMA is a commercial and commercially sensitive product. AFAIK, don't quote me, it was developed in collaboration with ATOS and/or MAXIMUS and they will not tell you about it because of commercial sensitivity... e.g possible profit base. More likely the system is so hopelessly broken that it says people who are dead are fit for work.

Now they want to do what the article suggests but place their hooks more deeply into personally sensitive information and no doubt if they do get access the result will be a commercially sensitive product that you do not get to look at.

I would suggest that if they are not going to be completely transparent about what they are implementing and how they are implementing it then they should be invited to go fuck themselves.