Posts by Jonathan Richards 1

Predictive Dirty Dozen: What will and won't happen in 2022 (unless it doesn’t/does)

Re: AI transcription and translation improves massively

Is it good enough to output text about a WWII fighter aircraft called the Cutler 109?

Boffins' first take on asteroid dust from Japanese probe: Carbon rich, less lumpy than expected

+1 Agree

100%. It's just that that's an interesting intensifier that you used, there. Damn sure? No deities => no damnation!

Re: Or you could just look for cylon mitochiondria...

> There's sketchy evidence for earlier life but it's not cast iron

Could have been hot enough for cast iron life, I guess, but the fossils will have gone rusty after those damn plants oxygenated the atmosphere.

The dark equation of harm versus good means blockchain’s had its day

Re: Something will come of it one day

> What tends to happen is that a new tech appears, it takes time to find a use.

This is so far from the mark that its inverse is literally proverbial: "Necessity is the mother of invention".

AI-enhanced frog stem cells start to replicate in entirely new ways

Re: Self replicating bachtrian pac-men in my bloodstream

Bachtrian? Is that a composer with a hump? Batrachian!

Re: To paraphrase Arthur Dent:

> it is far deeper

I agree. This is in the uncanny valley between biochemistry (e.g. looking at enzyme-catalyzed organic reactions) and biology - examining the structure and behaviour of living organisms. I suppose that what I see in that video is just the complex cell wall structures organizing themselves into local energy-minimum conformations that resemble the assemblers. It's just very advanced crystallization. I guess it might have looked that way in the Primordial Soup, and look where that got us.

Nuclear fusion firm Pulsar fires up a UK-built hybrid rocket engine

Kind of the point

Rocket science seems to be much easier than rocket technology. Big stick go bang.

A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal

Re: A small percentage of the blame should go to the other RDBMS creators...

>no, a type, it was "bork it"

I do believe the word "type" there is a typo for typo. My day is complete.

In the '80s, spaceflight sim Elite was nothing short of magic. The annotated source code shows how it was done

Re: Joysticks, and levelling up

If I recall correctly, progression up the rating scale went in powers of two of the kill count, so it took just as long to go from Dangerous to Deadly as it did to go from Harmless to Dangerous. Well, I suppose one's kill rate increased, but not enough to make it possible for me to get past Deadly on a C64.

I've mentioned before that OOLITE does quite a good job of recapturing the feel of Elite while expanding its horizons a bit.

There's only one cure for passive-aggressive Space Invader bosses, and that's more passive aggression

Re: Voted with my feet

I think this elaborate way of avoiding the offending word is less fun than that rzcyblrq by the denizens of uk.rec.sheds back in the day. Any reference to jbex or similar obscenity was disguised with ROT13. It's remarkable how the brain adapts!

NSO fails once again to claim foreign sovereign immunity in WhatsApp spying lawsuit

Re: What's the best end result Meta can aim for?

> what can they hope for in the ruling?

The legal process isn't like a bran tub where you pay for a ticket and dip for a prize. The original complaint must state the relief sought from the court. As nearly as I can tell "WhatsApp sought an injunction restraining NSO from accessing WhatsApp’s servers, violating WhatsApp’s terms, and impairing WhatsApp’s service. WhatsApp also sought compensatory, statutory, and punitive damages."

Source: Case: 20-16408, 12/16/2020, ID: 11930616, DktEntry: 32 [eff.org PDF]

Calendars have gone backwards since the Bronze Age. It's time to evolve

Amen to all that

Of course, it's in the interests of exactly zero office software suppliers to make this happen. I suppose the ISO could consult and specify a data interchange format, but you can be sure that the implementations of the import/export processes would variably mangle the data.

I am reminded of a project in the MoD [1] to integrate a number of commercial off-the-shelf programs into a comprehensive project management suite, two of which (for reasons that will not become clear again any time soon) were Microsoft Project and (as I recall) a PM program from Artemis. We had to have a rule that managers would not export/import between the two, because the two programs fundamentally disagreed about how a calendar worked and what a task duration data point meant; a data round-trip between programs resulted in a project schedule that was irretrievably broken.

[1] Many years ago, now.

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

Re: 800008

You had a table for Sexually Transmitted Diseases?? Urghh.

DROP TABLE Claps;

doxxed

> I'm a Senior PM and supposed to be a grown up

You're meant to be working, Gordon!

Waterfox: A Firefox fork that could teach Mozilla a lesson

Re: Open source closed devs

> find yourself having to recompile the kernel

This is a myth. I've tried out many distros over the years, and I can't remember the last time I had to recompile a kernel. I've had to compile a module for the WiFi dongle that I stupidly bought without checking to see if it had extant support, but that was my fault.

And even if you did have to recompile the kernel, you are extremely unlikely to have to edit a makefile. make menuconfig doesn't require dev skills, it just needs you to know what hardware you're rolling for.

Classic irritants

I've been using Waterfox Classic on KDE/GNU/Linux for several years, exactly because it supports the extensions I have grown to expect as part of my browsing experience.

As far as updates go, I find that when a new version is released, the update checker flags up for me that Waterfox cannot download the latest version. That's not a problem, really, it just means that I have to visit the website and grab the compressed tar file - as someone pointed out, if it's installed system-wide (mine lives in /opt) then root has to unpack the file, which is the sum total of "installation".

The other irritant is that Waterfox will (sometimes!) state on startup that it's not my default browser: it really is, and I've tried all the KDE settings I can find to confirm that, but WF isn't convinced. However, I can live with it, and I'll stick with it while I can. I can't remember the last time I lit up Firefox.

Trojan Source attack: Code that says one thing to humans tells your compiler something very different, warn academics

Re: why they added Vietnamese to the set

This was a fate somewhat narrowly avoided by Japan, too. The US Education Mission to Japan (1946) recommended that kanji, the characters adapted from Chinese writing, be replaced by romaji, the orthography of Japanese written with a Latin alphabet. This recommendation was based on little and outdated knowledge by the Mission members, ignored their terms of reference, and would have "invited the Japanese people to commit cultural suicide".

Ref.: The First United States Education Mission to Japan [pdf]

UK data watchdog calls for end-to-end encryption across video chat apps by default

Re: Oh....and about Diffie/Hellman (circa 1976).........................

> why do we hear nothing about it in the public debate ...?

Some useful technical discussion and onward links in this source:

Technically, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange can be used to establish public and private keys. However, in practice, RSA tends to be used instead. This is because the RSA algorithm is also capable of signing public-key certificates, while the Diffie-Hellman key exchange is not.

The ElGamal algorithm, which was used heavily in PGP, is based on the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, so any protocol that uses it is effectively implementing a kind of Diffie-Hellman.

As one of the most common methods for safely distributing keys, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange is frequently implemented in security protocols such as TLS, IPsec, SSH, PGP, and many others. This makes it an integral part of our secure communications.

Source: https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/diffie-hellman-key-exchange/

Judging by the way your face lit up, my inbox just got more attractive

Re: Henry!

Hmm. Alice, Bob, Charles and Eva think that those vacuum cleaner monikers are distinctly non-inclusive.

Florida man accused of breaking Mastodon's open-source license with botched social network launch

Re: Yet another "Oops!"...

> knows more about software licensing than anyone else in the world

What's Darl McBride doing these days?

Theranos blood-test machine demos for VIPs rigged to hide any failures, court told

Re: Appropriate

:q!

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Re: What's in a name?

Scenario: Joachim and Вячеслав need to draft a Secret Protocol. Вячеслав is in a hostile relationship with 阿部 and expects correspondence between themselves and Joachim to be targetted.

Are you keeping up?

Judge in UK rules Amazon Ring doorbell audio recordings breach data protection laws

In that case...

... you must ensure that your operation is GDPR compliant. See my post with link, above.

Re: Surely they have to go shopping?

I think everything that one needs to know will be in Domestic CCTV systems - guidance for people using CCTV [ico.org.uk]

That does not seem to place other people's property off limits, but says "[...] if your system captures images of people outside the boundary of your private domestic property – for example, in neighbours’ homes or gardens, shared spaces, or on a public footpath or a street [...] [t]hen the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA18) will apply to you, and you will need to ensure your use of CCTV complies with these laws.

Judge rejects claims Cloudflare should be held responsible for customers' copyright infringement

Analogy mismatch

The analogy between <fashion item> and <book> is that there exist saleable copies of copyrightable prototypes of both items. The wedding gown could very well be a copyrightable design, and people who want to have copies need to license the design. Similarly, publishers have to do a copyright deal with authors in order to sell copies of the book.

I suppose that the OP was remarking on the curious situation that a novel clothing design does not become 'a fashion' until it has been copied extensively so that many people can wear it. The book analogy would not be the situation where a book becomes a runaway best-seller, more as if a thousand authors started writing stories using the original characters and scenario. Fan fiction, come to think of it.

US nuclear submarine bumps into unidentified underwater object in South China Sea

Re: Hitting a container?

> if you're deep enough there is no light to see things, so there is no looking around

Another thing is that the thick steel pressure hull, and then the surrounding casing, are both pretty much 100% opaque to visible light, even if there's a lot of it outside. Naval subs don't have portholes.

Yes, sort of

One's super-carrier does have guns, but not the sort of naval weapon designed to take on other vessels, or shore bombardment. There are some miniguns, and a close-in weapon system for last ditch defence, but if something has got close enough to the carrier to be shooting at it, then the destroyer screen has failed. Perish the thought. HMSQE potency is almost entirely within the aircraft.

Chiptune to brighten your afternoon: Winning 8-bit throwback music revealed

Re: Just 42 years?

A shoebox...? in't middle o't road? That were luxury; our kid used to 'ave to write 4004 machine code on an old abacus dah'n t'pit.

Unexpected Strauss

> The Blue Danube

That was one of the most startling moments ever: I was playing C64 Elite at about two in the morning, and had gone through the grind of getting enough funds for the Docking Computer. The first time I used it, I nearly fell off the chair.

A most uncivil display in New York's Civil Court

Upvoted

Mainly for the splendid bravado implied by

> didn't have my phone with me

Enjoy while you can, this will shortly become suspicious behaviour, if not outright illegal :)

Linus Torvalds admits to 'self-inflicted damage' with -Werror as Linux 5.15 rc1 debuts

Hangover from the past

But.. but... I, J, K, L, M, or N as variable names are implicitly integer data types, and if I use long names, I run out of space on my 80-column cards...

Only 'natural persons' can be recognized as patent inventors, not AI systems, US judge rules

Re: Judge is right

@Neil Barnes

> ...actual person?

That's the exact meaning of "natural person", a term used to differentiate them from "artificial persons". The Legal Information Institute says

Artificial Person

An entity established by law and given at least some legal rights and duties of a human being. Corporations are the most common types of artificial persons.

By that definition, AI systems (not being established by law) are not any sort of person, which seems to me to accord with common sense.

Leaked Guntrader firearms data file shared. Worst case scenario? Criminals plot UK gun owners' home addresses in Google Earth

Re: On the other hand...

> you get kicked out of the field

... yes, and probably *by* the farm animal that you tried to suckle from.

British naval food doesn't look half bad... so we're going to try it out for ourselves

re. Which war?

My question exactly. I have to distrust Kev's opinions when (s)he uses the definite article in front of "War".

SCO v. IBM settlement deal is done, but zombie case shuffles on elsewhere

Re: The case that never was

> a cesspool of right-wing lunacy

Say, has anybody ever seen BIFF and DJT in the same room at the same time?

Judge dismisses objections to spaceport in Scotland from billionaire who also wants to build spaceport in Scotland

Vertical orbit??

All orbits are horizontal, in the sense that they're heading towards (and over!) the horizon. The only way a polar orbit is "vertical" is from the point of view of someone looking at an Earth map with a north-up convention (although south-up would also work, but you don't see many of them).

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Re: Sumption is wrong

> it's proper reference

*its

Muphry strikes again!

COVID-19 cases surge as do sales of fake vaccination cards – around $100 for something you could get free

Re: Forgery

Just to clarify: the doctor in question submitted forged Covid PCR test results at the airport, not vaccination certificates. Same offence, different documents. I am not an immigration lawyer, but should she apply to remain in the UK at some point, I believe the criminal record will count against being successful. In fact, a criminal conviction (beyond reasonable doubt) is not even necessary: the HO only sets itself a balance of probability standard:

A person will not normally be considered to be of good character if there is information to suggest that any of the following apply:

Criminality

If they have not respected or are not prepared to abide by the law - for example, they have been convicted of a crime or there are reasonable grounds to suspect, meaning it is more likely than not, they have been involved in crime.

Source: Nationality: good character requirement [pdf]

Activist raided by police after downloading London property firm's 'confidential' meeting minutes from Google Search

Re: Really?

Maybe someone thought that robots.txt would be the answer to keeping the pages away from Google? I have to say that I thought so, right up until I read:

A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests; it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google. To keep a web page out of Google, block indexing with noindex or password-protect the page.

Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/robots/intro

Hey, AI software developers, you are taking Unicode into account, right ... right?

Nothing new under the sun

Good heavens! It's like these people never saw posters writing control codes into their Usenet contributions. Click up arrow now^W^W^W^W

Ad tech ruined the web – and PDF files are here to save it, allegedly

Re: The Register print version next!

Yep, I see the Joke Alert. The Print page isn't plain HTML, though:

jonathan@Odin:~$ curl -s https://www.theregister.com/Print/2021/07/20/pdf_html_debate/ | grep -A 1 "<script"

<script>

var RegArticle={id:216169,pf:0,af:0,bms:0,cat:'news',ec:['adobe'],kw:[["software",'Software'],["web",'Web'],["development",'Development']],short_url:'https://reg.cx/40A4',cp:0,noads:[],author:'Thomas Claburn'}

--

<script>var RegTruePageType = 'www print';</script>

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/20/pdf_html_debate/"><link rel=stylesheet href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Arimo:400,700&amp;display=swap">

--

<script>

var RegCR = true;

--

<script src="/design_picker/4c219a18bc536a8aa7db9b0c3186de409fcd74a7/javascript/_.js"></script>

<script async onerror="gpt_js_errored()" src="//securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/tag/js/gpt.js"></script>

<script>

RegGPT('reg_software/front');

--

<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js"></script>

--

<script>

(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){

This page has been deliberately left blank

Re: He's lucky it was just some t-shirts...

*matelot

French word, meaning matelot.

Former IT manager from Essex pleads guilty to defrauding the NHS of £800k

Re: Tears before bedtime

No, me neither, whichever end up.

Apple sued in nightmare case involving teen wrongly accused of shoplifting, driver's permit used by impostor, and unreliable facial-rec tech

Re: Justice

Is this really a thing now? "I'm not responsible for my repeated and widespread shoplifting, my brain made me do it?"

Re: It is not Apple or SIS who lied ...

What are Apple and SIS if not aggregated employees? Nothing is done except by employees of these firms; firms cannot lie, only their employees. IANAL but I firmly believe this is an ancient principle of the law: masters are responsible for the actions of the servants in their employ. Minimal research leads me to the insight that there is a distinction between employer::employee and principal::agent relationships, but today I am avoiding rabbit-holes.

Re: Apple and SIS have a qualified law enforcement privilege that allows them to err in store

> to protect wittiness and investigations

Oh, well, I'm all for the protection of wittiness, really. The more folk pitching in on that, the better.

Seeking an escape from the UK? Regulations aimed at rocket and satellite launches from 2022 have arrived

LOHAN?

It's been a long time; I guess nobody has the drive that Lester had to get the damn thing in the air.

Who gave dusty Soviet-era spacecraft that unwanted lick of paint? It was an idiot, with a spraycan, in Baikonur

Man, this spaceship is *late*...

> The decaying spacecraft have been documented over the years by trespassers venturing inside the structures.

Just waiting for a consignment of lemon-soaked paper napkins.

Man found dead inside model dinosaur after climbing in to retrieve phone

Re: Alternative explanation

> what else was the suggestion of drunkenness supposed to convey?

To me it conveyed the hypothesis of someone whose judgement was impaired by alcohol. I certainly did not parse it to mean that anyone deserved to die, and I find it odd that you did, tbh.

Facebook Giphy merger stays on ice after failed challenge to UK competition regulator

Re: prognostications

...and look, you did!