Posts by John Smith 19

Apple quietly launches next-gen encrypted file system

I did not know case sensitivity was a POSIX compatability requirement.

Very annoying.

But at least you've got a vendor neutral standard for a solid OS you can check features off against.

Xerox lays out BPO breakup plan

I still kind of like Xerox.

HP "We've got a woman CEO."

Xerox "So did we, now we have another one. But she's busy doing business."

And of course Xerox did not buy Autonomy, although I'm not sure if they were offered it.

But they didn't buy it.

Net neutrality victory: DC court backs full rules

In shock news...

Ajil Pai not offered lucrative short hours job with big Telco.

We only reward our successful minions.

Now let's see how this works out in the UK.

Surveillance forestalls more 'draconian' police powers – William Hague

" it ought to be decided through public opinion and a debate in Parliament"

Instead of by what iactually has happened, basically a faceless, uneleceted group of data fetishists.

This is not the "voice of reason."

It's a (slightly) less hysterical version of the "We must hand over our right to privacy (enshrined in the ECHR) to protect our way of life" BS.

Is Mr Hague a leaver, or a starer in the EU referendum do you think?

Boffins send encrypted quantum messages to spaaaace – and back

That's clever.

But I'd be more interested in testing quantum entanglement.

It's not so much security in space that's the issue.

It's bandwidth at range.

It's taken a very long time for the Pluto fly by results to be downloaded at <1200bps.

Net neut: Equal treatment of traffic doesn't mean equal service quality for users

*Sounds* quite good

Especially the bit about "zero rating"

Do I think some ISP's and content providers will try to game the rules given any opening.

F**k yes.

Why everyone* hates Salesforce's Marc Benioff

I wonder how many people realize "Ned Ludd" was just a createion?

Sort of a bot to blame the damage on .

Mars One puts 100 Red Planet corpses colonists through fresh tests

Now that's what I call car crash TV

or in this case Mars smash TV.

You may not like it.

But you know I'm right.

Don't go chasing waterfalls, please stick... Hang on. They're back

"to the CICS, DB2 and COBOL applications and that’s where it all breaks down,”

That's likely where all that twentysomething enthusiasm is going to come to a complete halt.

It's 2016 and somewhere out there a bunch of people are writing Accounts Receivable packages.

And at least one of them is failing.

Letters prove GCHQ bends laws to spy at will. So what's the point of privacy safeguards?

"The solution, I believe, is reform of the voting system "

Bo***cks.

This has nothing to do with how anyone was elected.

It has to do with a cabal of data fetishists for whom more data is always better and all data is best.

UK Home Office is creating mega database by stitching together ALL its gov records

not how *government* works. How the UK civil service works.

Seriously do you think May or any of her predecessor sock puppets Home Secretaries have a blind f**king clue what Haddoop even is?

This is again being driven by data fetishist senior bureaucrats for whom more data more cross referenced now is always better (for them) by definition.

Now some might be thinking "but it'll make it more efficient"

I say does the phrase necessary and proportionate mean anything to you?

Is a $14,000 phone really the price of privacy?

Has anyone repealed THE PATRIOT act?

I smell large volumes of BS.

Corporates can learn from criminals and spies. No, no, we're talking about OPSEC

The fact so much is obvious says how few people do it.

Sad really.

These big-name laptops are infested with security bugs – study

"vendor-incentivized crapware,"

I like that. VIC.

Sound right.

Because it is.

And vendor updaters?

I don't even know what a Windows Binary Table is.

New ARM designs clocked

But sadly no unclocked versions

Love to see that.

Oh, well.

Feinstein-Burr's bonkers backdoor crypto law is dead in the water

What is it about this woman

Who combines the nuttiness of Teresa May with the bonkers ideas of Jacqui Smith?

Is she the most Right Wing "Democrat" in the house?

Or just the most Right Wing one we hear about?

Data fetishists never sleep.

They will use any and every murder/explosion/blackmail case to insist that If they had these powers it would not have happened.

This always comes from the high level spook bureaucrats.

Find "Thomas Brian Reynolds."

Brexit? Cutting the old-school ties would do more for Brit tech world

"You got to ask yourself, cui bono? "

Always a good idea.

CERT warns of hardcoded creds in medical app

A genius plan. Again.

What could go wrong.

NASA: We'll try again in the morning after friction ruins engorgement

Oh dear, Mr Floppy?

Had to be said.

Thai bloke battles jumbo python in toilet todger thriller

Hmm. "Enter the Python."

Sounds like some kind of low rent chopsokey movie

Mine's the one with the John Woo back catalogue in the pocket.

IETF spikes government metadata collection with DNS request crypto plan

"the IETF community decided that pervasive monitoring is an attack,"

Because it is?

Metadata and traffic analysis, and the building of contact webs from them, have been the data fetishists secret weapon for a long time. Hence the NSA's reaction to the publication of "The Hut Six Story."

If we want an internet that protects freedom and privacy we can no longer treat the intermediate nodes as friendly, nor accept the paths of packets will not be tracked not because any one person threatens the state, but simply because the state can.

Which is also half the definition of psychopathic behavior in humans.

Pepper robot acts like real teenager, gets job at Pizza Hut

Is anyone else thinking "Get on the cart, toadies" ?

Actually for those who really want robotics to become science fact and not SF you are going to need systems that can read peoples feelings and respond to them.

Although the way supermarkets are going self service at checkouts will there be many human service jobs left for it to take over?

Don't tell the Cabinet Office: HMRC is building its own online ID system

"..will yield £1bn in extra tax revenue.."

Or they could just ask Bernie Eccleston to cough up his alleged £2bn in unpaid taxes.

Or in fact all the other people whose details they have been passed.

India launches hypersonic space shuttle precursor

This is a *long* way from being a launch vehicle. It's more like the X37b

IOW still likely to need a bloody big expendable rocket to get it anywhere.

Mind you it has tested TPS materials to M5

Handy if one were to (just for example) be planning to build a M5 cruise missile, would it not?

Likewise if you replaced that 6.5t test vehicle with say a 500Kg "physics package" that would probably have some other uses.

Galileo satnav fleet waxes orbital

Hydrazine. Nasty stuff.

Never really understood why SX went with it for the landing thrusters on the Dragon capsule.

Wayne Rooney razzles in X-Men: Apocalypse plug

Wayne Rooney is an X man?

Now that makes sense.

I spy a secret High Court: We're no 'star chamber', it says in 4-year report

Interesting no complaint upheld against the spooks till the Snowden documents started coming.

So no evidence to identify capabilities --> You're being paranoid. Dismissed. Next case.

Snowden documents --> Oh they were spying on everyone.

"Justice" as from the Humphrey Appleby play book.

Got $130,000 down the back of the sofa? Great. Grab an HP 3D printer

Not quite as s**t as the article made it sound. Lots of *potential* but not much up front

So it's more like a line printer or fax than most existing systems, which are more like 3d plotters.

Nylon to start but promise of conductive (2 thou wide) tracks and ceramics as well eventually, and the high end model has a cleaning station to clean all the unused powder off the finished article, yours for a <cough> modest $25k.

But as for "risked damaging” the brand" you are f**king kidding me, right?

You can be the cartridges will cost a fortune (supposedly they will supply 200l drums of the stuff) and probably maintain HP's 1 in 3 failure rate if someone does refill them.

Is uBeam the new Theranos?

Doing the maths never stopped Merkins handing cash out to plausible types.

NASP was started by a very optimistic report from the principal promoter investigator.

When the USAF actually had an independent assessment done they found he'd even got the properties of the air flowing through the system favorably wrong.

By then the USG had spent around $1Bn+ trying to make it work.

Perhaps this is the origin of the term scamjet?

Gov to pull plug on online ID verification portal Gateway in 2018

So you've got a template of what works and what doesn't

And they still can't manage to produce a better version

Non-police orgs merrily accessed PNC without authority, says HMIC

Wot?

No wheeel clamping companies?

No Scouting Assocation?

Seriously WTF is special about Thurrock Council.?

First successful Hyperloop test module hits 100mph in four seconds

Freight is toughter than you think

Are they talking pallets about 1mx1m or containers IE 8' x 8' in cross section?

One is relatively human sized, the other is not.

Lending Club CEO booted out for dodgy deals

"Innovations in digital finance,"

Mmm yes,

That's basically what a CDO was at the time.

Remember what they did?

If you want a quick, funny run down on what and how watch "The Big Short."

Kepler space telescope spots 1,284 new planets

So we can start putting some numbers on the Drake equation.

Excellent news.

Still waiting for any radio signals from some of those alien civilizations that should be out there.

Lauri Love: 'Britain's FBI' loses court attempt to evade decryption laws

It'd be interesting to see if UK courst could get a US hacker into them on this evidence

Because IIRC the bar to get a US citizen back to blighty is much higher.

The Blair/Bush extradition treaty.

The gift that keeps on taking.

Congress calls for change to NSA spying law

Funny Grassley didn't mention the Boston Marathon bombing in his little list of terror attacks

Oh wait

That would have been one where they had all that surveillance in place.

But did nothing.

Microsoft bods tell El Reg: We've re-pivoted open-source .NET Core

The task of a commercial software tools company is *not* to help you do useful work.

It's to so tie you to their systems you keep buying them.

If you do useful work as a result that's a bonus.

Six-year-old patched Stuxnet hole still the web's biggest killer

"Windows versions older than Windows 8 that have not applied the August 2010 patch."

6 years to patch your PC.

Wouldn't it be simpler to remove the PC from the person?

It's clear they have no idea how to use it.

Don't split Openreach, says BT, and we'll splash BEELLIONS on broadband and 4G

Cut them up and cut them up *now*

Every monopoly (and BT remains effectively a monopoly in the back end) knows knows the most important thing is protecting the monopoly.

And they will do and say anything to do this.

Review legacy code: Waking dragons is risk worth taking, says Trainline ops head

Re: dragon-free zones

"The crazy thing is that this would probably work. All you need besides the PPP is a guy who looks good in suit and can convincingly talk weapons-grade BS for a couple of hours with a straight face. "

Hmm. Yes I can think of a few of those.

"Oh, and be careful with the pricing. The package you sell must be insanely expensive."

I think they prefer the word "reassuringly."

So having found a bad design pattern they then proactively looked for other copies of it.

Something IBM Federal Systems learned writing the software for the Shuttle.

Part of the reason they were the the basis of the CMM.

Am I impressed?

Not really.

Stop resetting your passwords, says UK govt's spy network

So if you trust the security services with your passwords – and who out there doesn't?

As Edward Snowden has demonstrated the answer is of course in the UK the answer is no one

Robot surgeon outperforms human doctor with porcine patients

Surgeons *will* fight this tooth and nail to the bitter end.

They will cite speed. The machines will get faster. At some point they will be faster and more accurate than a human.

They will cite safety. The first 16 patients to repair shrapnel damage to the heart killed all the patients. However they were all pigs.

They will say it doesn't care about it's patients. And?

What they won't say is it makes skills they have have spent hundreds of $1000 acquiring reproducible and (ultimately) the only surgeons you will need will be those to develop new surgical procedures. A much smaller number.

F-35s failed 'scramble test' because of buggy software

@Wolftone

"Someone is looking at the F-14 Tomcat's, then looking back at the F-35 monstrosity and is wondering where it all went wrong.

Well the F14 was built by Grumman in NY state.

The F35 is built by LM Corp. The ba**ard child of a myriad of mergers in the US aerospace industry sanctioned (and I'm fairly sure encouraged) by the DoD to create a "national champion" because of fears individually they couldn't complete in the world arms sales market.

Much like what was BAe System was created by active encouragement of the MoD in the UK.

It's no surprise how well these companies like to work together.

Re: I think there is a wonderfull message behind this

"lead engineer"... not exaaaactly, rather he wrote the coding standards (decent ones, from what I gather) for the project:

http://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

141 f**king pages.

WTF?

The EU wants you to log into YouTube using your state-issued ID card

Estona, a country of 10m and virtually no IT infrastructure to speak of pre ID cards

About as close to an IT "Green field" site as you can get.

Former UK Home Secretary Clarke's favorite ID card example.

Yes, it's all in the details of how that system is implemented. .

The real question is do you trust your government? Because you're going to have to.

And do you trust the next one after that? And the next?

Revealed: The revolving door between Google and the US govt – in pictures

Let's see that for the British government. After all this is the UK end of El Reg

What, you can't

It's secret?

There's a shocker.

you could also do one for the big 5 accountancy firms and HMRC "secondments."

SpaceX is go for US military GPS sat launch, smashes ULA monopoly

To put this in perspective

ULA have an unbroken string of 100+ successful launches up to 24 tonnes to LEO

Ariane 5 has an unbroken string of 70+ successful launches up to 16 tonnes to LEO

So far SX have managed a successful run of 18 launches before CRS7 went bang.

Since then they have accumulated another 4 successful launches, with up to 113 tonnes to orbit.

I don't think Arianespace charge their government customers an arm and a leg for their special pixie dust "mission assurance."

US govt quietly tweaks rules to let cops, Feds hack computers anywhere, anytime

It's called "Extra terratoriality"

And only the US of A seems to be delusional enough to have it and to enforce it.