* Posts by frank ly

6077 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Ames boffins mix metals to boost electron velocity

frank ly

Interesting

"The electrons in topological quantum materials can travel close to speed of light ..."

What does that do to the mass of the electrons? Is it the electrons themselves that move at close to the speed of light or some phenomenon, supported by electron movement, that propogates at close to the speed of light?

Reusable autonomous swimming microbots soak up 95% of spilt lead

frank ly

Real world details

If they are self propelled then good luck in magnetically retrieving them from the sea or a lake. If you can get access to them for retrieval then why not just stir the contaminated water or pump it over a sheet of GOx?

Texas Attorney General charged in 32-bit 'eco-friendly server scam'

frank ly

Re: Sigh....

Some Texans Are Such Imbeciles? (Avoiding the other 'I' word so as not to offend you.)

SQL injection vuln found at Panama Papers firm Mossack Fonseca

frank ly

@Syntax Error & Patras Re: Fonseca

I'd hate to live in a country governed by your ideas about 'right' and 'wrong' or by your interpretation of what Nietzsche wrote. I much prefer laws that are written down for all to see and all to argue over.

frank ly

Re: Fonseca

They haven't broken any laws. They helped their clients to take advantage of existing laws in their client's jurisdictions.

America's Intelligence Transparency Council to meet for the first time … behind closed doors

frank ly

The Intelligence Transparency Council

You can see right through them.

Anonymised search engine page found on 'kid-friendly' search site

frank ly

"... internal testing during the beta testing period, ..."

Configuration control, code walkthroughs, release reviews, testing by an independent team ..... We've heard about that.

Former Microsoft HoloLens man: It's NOT about gaming

frank ly

Re: If that's their use case then its doomed

Exactly. Why walk around a large building when you can fly around it?

Even for real world scene overlays, I'd have thought that a simple head-mounted camera arrangement could be set up and fed to the computer for analysis, then have graphics overlay superimposed for feeding to the viewer.

frank ly

"... too ungainly for gaming, ..."

What does that say about the Occulus Rift headset?

'Fart detector' wins Chinese Physics prize

frank ly

If you move some distance away after you've farted, the robot would end up scratching its head instead of pointing at your backside.

P.S. Do the Chinese think that the pineapple is ugly or is this something that has been obscured in translation?

NBN shenanigans: someone wants broadband speeds hidden

frank ly

"... had to be confidentialised ..."

My response to this linguistic atrocity had to be self-censorated. Moving on ......

We need some kind of 'citizens statistics bureau' where ordinary people pool their meaurements of internet speed along with their location and the name of their ISP, etc., to be collated and published by volunteer statisticians and analysts. It should be possible to develop a simple application that does this, run by the user when they want to, that reports the results to a database. It's the only way we'll get the truth, about anything.

How Remix's Android will eat the world

frank ly

Re: VirtualBox?

I did a stand-alone boot from a usb stick and it got stuck at the bright, white, pulsing Remix-OS logo. This was on an old but powerful Dell Precision T5400 with an old Nvidia graphics card. I might try it on my more modern laptop tomorrow.

As far as I can tell from the website and instructions, you can do a dual boot installation onto an existing Windows drive or you can run it alone from a usb stick. It needs an option to install onto an empty drive.

Field technicians want to grab my tool and probe my things

frank ly
Happy

Re: An innocent explanation

I'm sorry Alistair. I didn't realise you were in story-telling mode.

frank ly

An innocent explanation

"My house is full of IoT devices, ..."

We're all hoping that this is because of your techno-journalist interests. (See many previous comments on IoT articles.)

Academics claim Google Android two-factor authentication is breakable

frank ly

Details?

"... a Man-in-the-Browser attack can be elevated to intercept One-Time Passwords sent to the mobile phone ..."

I'd have thought that the One-Time Password sent to the mobile phone could not be intercepted by a man in the browser, but that the password could be monitored when it is typed into the browser to gain 'authorisation' from the website that you're trying to connect to for full services.

As such, if you, the user, then gain authorisation to access services from that browser session, surely nobody else could use the one-time pasword for another browser session on a different computer from a different IP address? Isn't that the point of a one-time password?

As was mentioned, if you do have a 'bad guy' sitting in your browser with capability to monitor and inject data, then it's game over no matter what security you have in place for browser session authentication.

That naked picture on my PC? Not mine. The IT guy put it there

frank ly

The pictures and videos in my head could get me arrested in some countries.

Man pleads guilty for serving white hat with DoS, swearbot, sex toys

frank ly

Re: phishing?

A more mature response would have been for Nichols to bring a libel action against McCrew Security.

Windows 10 with Ubuntu now in public preview

frank ly

Well?

"When I typed "notepad", the system invited me to install Wine, a means of running Windows applications on Linux."

Did you? Did it work? Amazed minds want to know.

Megabreach: 55 MILLION voters' details leaked in Philippines

frank ly

Cynicism?

"We will be using a different website for the election, especially for results reporting and that one we are protecting very well,”

Yes, you wouldn't want anyone interfering with the reporting of results of an election; that's the government's job.

Taking an artsy selfie in Stockholm? You might need to pay royalities

frank ly

It gets worse

Google, via their iniquitous Street View service, have published pictures of the front of my house and garden for all the world to see. My choice of curtains and their arrangement, the angle at which I park my car on the drive, the shape into which I prune the small tree, my choice of which weeds to kill and which to allow to grow - my entire artistic creation published with no thought to my intellectual and artistic property rights.

If this carries on, I shall cover the entire front of my property in tarpaulin and only allow people in to see it if they pay me a dodecaquid, or perhaps a thrup'ny bit; I need to consider the pricing model.

Ubuntu plugs code exec, DoS Linux kernel holes

frank ly

The only constant is change

The next LTS version, out soon, will be smothered in love and patches until 2021. However, due to improvements in the kernel, changes to the desktop manager, improvements to systemd, a new graphics engine and some cool new ways of managing your desktop wallpaper depending on which 'context' you're using your computer, it will have at least one serious flaw that won't be discovered until 2020.

Australia's broadband policy is a flimsy, cynical House of Cards

frank ly

Re: Magical Thinking

Australians in remote areas have been running telemedicine services for years. That has a serious latency problem though, since it involves a small plane and a doctor who can fly it. They also run 'teleeducation' services for remote communities via radio and postal service. Where there's a will (and a technology), there's a way.

Nest's bricking of Revolv serves as wake-up call to industry

frank ly

@martinusher Re: That's useful information

"... what I really want to do is just play music off a NAS device."

Can't the modern Pi type of devices play your LAN/NAS music files, with WiFi and battery operation into the bargain?

Going further, you can rent a Shoutcast server for $1 a month by Paypal that will stream at 192Kb/s (or less) to 100 listeners (but you'll be the only one listening to it, of course). All you'd need to do then is run a streaming player on a box at home and maybe develop a remote API for it so you can choose your music wherever you are, all under your control.

frank ly

IPV6, TLDs, etc

"That's why we need a DNS for IoT"

I thought that IPV6 would provide 'space' for many, many devices of whatever kind. Can't the existing DNS system accomodate a massive increase in individually addressable entities given that it seems that any number of new TLDs are now possible.

Huawei's P9 flagship: There's a lot to Leica

frank ly

My misunderstanding?

"But the second sensor is no Ernie Wise: they're identical and exceptionally strong sensors, with 1.25-micron pixels (smaller than Samsung's) letting in more light."

Surely, larger pixels 'gather' more light and hence have better S/N ratio. Have I become confused between dual sensors and dual lenses? I think I see two camera lenses side by side. I'll wait for someone to explain ............

Google's dream city isn't a new idea

frank ly

Dan Doctoroff

If only he had a PhD.

We bet your firm doesn't stick to half of these 10 top IT admin tips

frank ly

More tailgating

I worked on a large 'secure' site that had employee tracking by proximity card. If you tailgated and didn't offer your card to the reader, the system thought you were outside the area you were actually in, so it wouldn't open the door for you when you later 'swiped' from inside. You had to phone security and explain to them what you'd done. After the first lapse, the vast majority people always gave a scan before they went through a controlled door.

(I was sure that security had been given carte-blanche to act like sarcastic dickheads when they got one of those phone calls. It seemed to work though.)

Three million satellite snaps now free for all

frank ly

Re: Finally......

Don't you know about drones with cameras? Where have you been?

'Panama papers' came from email server hack at Mossack Fonseca

frank ly

Re: Why is it...

I belive that the 'red flag' limit is £10,000 when it comes to 'funny money' investigations.

I cashed in a long tern ISA style savings policy last year, for £12,000. I'm a UK citizen all my life with a UK bank (for many years) and a well known UK savings organisation. The savings people sent a cheque to my registered home address (they have to do that because of 'security' rules, no bank transfers.) I sent the cheque to my bank and they usually take 3-4 days to have the money in my account. It took two weeks and when I phoned up, the standard operator tranferred me to someone who told me it was being 'cleared in another place'.

This is where we are now. Ordinary people who have done nothing wrong have inconveniences dumped on them at every turn while rich people, corrupt people and criminals have various mechanisms available to them for making their activities easier.

As Paul Ab says below, I pay my builder/plumber/mechanic in cash and good luck to them.

Telstra hauls in Cisco, Ericsson, Juniper to explain TITSUPs

frank ly

Re: 15% increase causes overload?

Is there anybody in Telstra (or similar) who knows how to design a network like that? I'd have thought they'd subcontract it out to groups who do have the experience.

Top Firefox extensions can hide silent malware using easy pre-fab tool

frank ly

Re: NoScript = Tor browser bundle

A quick search tells me that Firefox is in most Linux distributions. So, Firefox users run Linux - obviously.

frank ly
Happy

Re: Alternatives?

Living on the Edge? They're going to give it extensions.

Tesla books over $8bn in overnight sales claims Elon Musk

frank ly

Re: @ bazza

What is the fuel-energy conversion efficiency of a modern all electric car compared to a modern petrol driven car? By that, I mean how much fuel do you need to burn in a power station compared to burning in an IC engine for the car to travel a certain distance.

I realise that the comparisons are complicated by the fact that power stations can burn 'low quality' fuel so they avoid the refining costs and there are, of course, the transport and infrastructure costs of car fuel distribution. Has anyone done a detailed analysis of this?

When I start my car on an average UK morning, the first thing I do is turn the heating full on for a good 15 minutes. In the winter, it's front and rear electric defrost for a good 10 minutes and 50% heating/demist all the time. In the summer, I have the aircon running. I have a feeling that these conditions would invalidate the mileage range claims for any electric vehicle.

China enacts 'real name policy' for internet addresses

frank ly

Facebook comparison?

I don't think you can compare China's domain registration system with Facebook's user account name requiirements, because they are not the same area of operation. A better comparison would be with domain registration in Europe or the USA.

My little .com hobby domain has my name, address and contact phone number registered for it, as is required by the domain registrar. I don't know how rigorous they are in checking that and what would happen if I provided false details. However, since I pay monthly by credit card, I'd be easy enough to find.

Tay talks back: What made you think you beat me?

frank ly

"You taught me tautly ..."

The result seems to be tautology. It was good though, well done. (How about a version where Tay was only allowed to converse with Microsoft executives and staff? What would that be like?)

Blighty starts pumping out 12-sided quids

frank ly

But, but

Old people like me might confuse them with thrup'ny bits and be cheated by unscrupulous people. I don't like this modern world.

You can't dust-proof a PC with kitchen-grade plastic food wrap

frank ly

If you have lots of standard PCs for office type work in a fixed location, it might be a good idea to set up a positive air pressure area that was fed from a filtered air supply. In the HVAC industry there are massive numbers of different fans, filters, etc that could be used for this purpose.

Then again, for simple use, it might be cheaper to regard the PC as a 'wear-out' consumable and have data stored on LAN drives that are well protected.

frank ly

Re: Maybe metal dust...

I'm sure the storeman had a television at home which had a screen that was always clean as if by magic or, more likely, by wife.

You have to wonder about people who don't notice thick layers of crud on something they use, especially when it stops them using it.

The Register to publish Mindful Sysadmin adult colouring book

frank ly

Oh no!

Colouring in and around the keyboard keys would drive me mad.

Elon Musk takes wraps off planet-saving Model 3 vapourmobile

frank ly

Sedan (definition?)

That looks like a hatchback with a truncated (trunkated ?) back end. What is meant by 'sedan'?

(In the UK we use saloon, estate, hatchback, MPV as broad vehicle design classes.)

Reddit's warrant canary shuffles off this mortal coil

frank ly

re. The picture

It's not a canary, it's some kind of tit. Great or Blue (maybe), I'm not an expert.

'Planet nine' theory boosted by Kuiper Belt Object with odd orbit

frank ly

Re: Planet Nine?

Just let it wear clothes and call it Goofy.

Bash on Windows. Repeat, Microsoft demos Bash on Windows

frank ly

Re: How is this different?

Windows Hopes It's a Nice Emulator?

Adblock wins in court again – this time against German newspaper

frank ly

Re: $22bn

I hadn't realised that I've been taking bread out of the mouths of advertising executive's children. I feel bad about using AdBlock now.

Google fills BigQuery with public data, invites world+dog to play

frank ly

Re: $5

I already gave them bits of it over the past ten years. They've blended and repackaged it for me, which must be worth $5 a month.

William Hague: Brussels attacks mean we must destroy crypto ASAP

frank ly

Re: Huh?

"pre-paid phones that terrorists, human traffickers, and narcotics dealers often use to avoid scrutiny ..."

She forgot to mention paedophiles.

Oculus Rift review-gasm round-up: The QT on VR

frank ly

"The lenses fill with light."

That's the problem. Lenses are supposed to allow light to pass through.

Glum, depressed ... and addicted to Facebook, Twitter? There's a link, say medical eggheads

frank ly

I'm wondering

What's the difference between an egghead and a boffin?

Pothole campaigner sprays Surrey street with phallic paintings

frank ly

A lonely pastime

"... after spraying their penis images around the Surrey street’s notorious potholes ..."

He needs to get out more. Oh, ... wait.

Met police commissioner: Fraud victims should not be refunded by banks

frank ly

Re: HSBC

"... connecting through a device that has an address in one of the IPV4 private ranges (10.n.n.n 172.16-31.n.n 192.168.n.n) is clearly using a LAN."

Whatever the complexity/simplicity of your home LAN wiring and Wi-Fi, when you connect to some site outside your home then you appear to be coming from an IP address assigned by your ISP. Have a look at www.whatsmyip.org to see a clear demonstration of this. (Also useful for checking that your VPN is working.)