Posts by John Smith 19

Ewe, get a womb! Docs grow baby lambs in shrink-wrap plastic bags

"Now this is an extream example possibly but if this tech exists its not impossible a"

Actually if you watch the vid you'll see they've been very careful to note the tech is for Mothers at high risk of premature birth around the 23-24 week which is also the abortion cut off date

That said there are babies born considerably younger and the question may eventually be asked if it the technology could be extended backwards.

That however will be an ethical conversation that will await successful trials.

Remember this is V 0.2 tech at best.

No one's going to be running any GE super soldier programmes with this tech just yet.

And it's only taken 52 years.

There's a Life magazine cover from 1965 showing a picture of an "artificial womb" with a small fetus inside it (not sure if it was staged or real).

Like deep brain implants this seems to have been one of those technologies that the scientists of the time felt was somehow unacceptable to society and put on the shelf.

It's exciting to see people pursuing this once again.

Obvious SF reference would be JM Bujolds novel "Barryar, " although I doubt they've gotten round to considering the ability to apply in vitro treatments to the fetus that could be lethal to the Mother.

But WTF "1% of all US born babies are premature and the % has risen over the last 2-3 decades"

How does US compare with other countries?

Something is seriously f**king wrong.

Looks like a vacuum packed package to me.

Victory! The smell of skunkworks in your office in the morning

"and just enter the rotating pool of management that flows continuously between companies."

The Chief Executives & Senior Survivors club.

IOW the CESS Pool.

Swamp-draining Trump pushes ex-AT&T lobbyist to oversee AT&T mega-merger

"Wouldn't work. Twitler spends all his time golfing in Florida."

And they say snowflakes always melt in the sun.

TL;DR - He "drained the swamp" INTO his cabinet!

But this is excellent news.

All that's needed now is a full Cabinet meeting in a room with a smallish bomb in it. *

Signed

Americans for Democratic Anarchy. (Wiping out corruption in govt by wiping out govt).

*Although getting that much slime off the walls afterward could be quite messy.

After blitzing FlexiSpy, hackers declare war on all stalkerware makers: 'We're coming for you'

It's interesting. The hackers are illegal. The business is legally legal

Or at worst a Grey area.

But they make just-about-legal stalkerware (if they weren't a spouse, and who checks if the purchaser is or isn't they'd, definitely be a stalker).

Like anyone who's business involves either finding out (or protecting others from finding out) people's business they should expect to be hit and hit hard on a regular basis.

If you want to play in the more abrasive parts of the IT business you'd better be prepared to take a beating on security. It's not going to be "if" it's going to "when" and "how often."

HipChat SlipChat lets hackers RipChat

seems like quite a professional response to me.

Spotted a problem, advised customers, too action.

Rather than the "A few customers were affected. It's all taken care of. Nothing to see here" BS of people like Stalk Stalk.

For bonus points advise the library supplier of their fault.

Not a bad performance for a breach situation.

A bot lingua franca does not exist: Your machine-learning options for walking the talk

No mention of Scilab or SciCOS

Which is European and open source.

Scilab is the core system and SciCOS lets you set up the block models control systems (and other) engineers like.

And IIRC it can generate C/C++ code if necessary.

Scilab is here

SciCOS is here

Ex-NSA techies launch data governance tool for future algorithm-slavery

"Ex NSA" staff does send a very mixed message.

Skillz. Yes.

Trustworthy. TBD

Kremlin-backed DNC hackers going after French presidential hopeful Macron

So Putin want Le Penn to win?

Ah the love absolute dictators have for each other.

We're 'heartbroken' we got caught selling your email records to Uber, says Unroll.me boss

Re: once again Uber...Seems there is nothing too low or dirty for them to stoop to.

I think that's the unofficial company motto. *

*Or possibly "We are the underminers. We are beneath everybody, but nothing is beneath us."

The service is "complementary"*

It's not free.

*Complementary to us making money off you that is.

"Free" service owned by a company that does web analytics. How else was that going to work?

Northrop Grumman can make a stealth bomber – but can't protect its workers' W-2 tax forms

"Linkedin has ~56k Northrop Grumman employees;"

True, but as you point out they chose to appear and I'm pretty sure their SSN or personal phone numbers are on there.

Fine headline opportunity completely wasted

"Northrop Grumman admits "Equifax tax portal shamelessly probed deep by identity thieves" "

FTFY

But do we know they are identity thieves?

This is a pretty good start for anyone looking to identify and/or suborn staff on their classified projects.

Not auf wiedersehen – yet! The Berlin scene tempting Brexit tech

Should be a great place for NYC businesses.

First we take Manhattan.....

"She also said brexit means brexit. Lets see if that's true."

That's what they call in logic a tautology, like X = X there is no way it can ever not be true.

What it will actually mean will be decided over the next 2 years* **

It is semantically correct but syntactically meaningless. Like if X==X {}

*At least partly, depending on how much is actually negotiated before the "watchdog timer" times out.

**Other than a clusterf**k of epic proportions as about 42 years of EU regulations and the laws that implement them have to be gone through and at least some of them dealt with.

Re: Free movement of people

Isn't that exactly the thing that Brexit is meant to stop?

Yadda yadda take back control yadda yadda make Britain Great again yadda yadda

"Althouth it would take somebody pretty brave to check"

Although she does seem to share the German fondness for well made leather.

*Icon because of ongoing disregard for personal privacy. Amongst other things.

"Er, privacy regs and laws are the same across the EU."

No.

The regulations are.

The laws that implement them are not.

As El Reg has reported the UK DP law is so bad that the ICO refused an information request on the grounds that disclosure could damage the whole Brexit negotiation process.

"it'll be much easier to get non-EU skilled migration into the UK"

Given that 1/2 of the UK net migration is from non EU countries (the stuff the Home Office could control, if it wanted to and it's management were not a bunch of incompetent motherf***ers) what makes you think this is a problem now?

"I'd definitely recommend it, but it would be difficult if you didn't have a German speaker,"

And given the UK's tradition of s**t language teaching that is likely to remain so.

Dublin is likely to be preferred British option.

Alert: If you're running SquirrelMail, Sendmail... why? And oh yeah, remote code vuln found

"The bug is a classic failure to sanitize user input,"

You'd really think there was a library that took care of that sort of stuff for you by now, wouldn't you?

Filer startup Qumulo chosen to help tame the DreamWorks dragon

"Movie and TV SFX firms always seem to want more IT resources"

Back in the day it seemed the guys with that profile were the people who did geophysics simulation and imaging IE taking seismic survey data and reconstructing the underlying rock strata, usually for oil and gas deposits.

Once upon a time the goal was the fabled "Mega Korean Machine."* but I suspect we've long passed that limit.

*Koreans being the cheapest animators on the planet at the time.

Car hacking's dynamic duo offers to save others $1m in research

So open source CAN bus management tools?

If car makers insist on sticking everything on the same bus (not multiple independent buses) and allowing on air updates and giving the WiFi access into that network....

Perhaps they should not be too surprised that s**t can be made to happen (and may already have).

Wheather the world has heard the last of them on this subject is more interesting.

One has already left Uber, the other???

Dark times for OmniOS – an Oracle-free open-source Solaris project

"Its an obscure fork of a fork of an OS that never had much market share to begin with."

Which pretty much sums it up.

I guess the question would be what stuff was missing from the last Open Solaris release that people really wanted and far away are they from supply those things?

Uber sued by ex-Lyft driver tormented by app maker's 'Hell' spyware

"Unlike Lyft, Uber changes the tokens it uses..identify drivers, to prevent such tracking."

Was that before or after they realized that design could be used to track their competitors?

Before anyone in the UK gets too smug that this could not happen there Google the behavior of "Stagecoach" and deregulated bus services. Mrs Thatch's economic advisor (when this happened) wanted an owner operator model of buses like that he had seen in Chile.

Which explains the UK's 3rd world bus service.

In IT their bahavior harkens back to NCR when they were the National Cash Register company and their CEO's comment on "Competition" was "the best way to kill a dog is to cut its head off."

Nikon snaps at Dutch, German rivals: You stole our chip etch lens tech!

So Nikon a bit strapped and looking for the readies? Could be Polaroid Vs Kodak again.

And we all know how well that ended for Kodak.

Lyrebird steals your voice to make you say things you didn't – and we hate this future

Other than "Because it's a really tricky puzzle to solve" there are very few legitimate uses.

But plenty of illegitimate uses.

People will have to get a lot more suspicious of anything recorded on any media.

"Belief half of what you see, and none of what you hear" as Marvin Gaye sang.

While Facebook reinvents Sadville, we still dream of flying cars

"A preference was expressed for 3-4 flying cars"

They'll have to be very big flying cars to get everyone inside

Does he mean perhaps 3-4 seat flying cars perhaps?

SAP Anywhere goes nowhere, reaches commercial cul-de-sac

"but we will continue to support all existing customers…from the US."

So no calling the help desk before about 1300hrs UK local?*

BTW Charging a company for access to it's own data was SOP when the DVLC was outsourced to EDS and the Scots wanted to do their own data entry. EDS wanted to charge for accessing the records, and the SW update (IE reading from an RJE rather than a local concentrator) and IIRC for storing them in the first place. Keep in mind this is for a MF that's on UK govt premises owned by HMG

*or whenever the local HD is open for business. If they aren't going to go on trying to sell in the UK they are probably too stingy to run a 24/7 operation.

Forensic accountants appointed to pore over Post Office IT scandal

Remember phantom withdrawls and the banks saying they couldn't happen?

Anyone else smelling a similar whiff off this?

Script kiddies pwn 1000s of Windows boxes using leaked NSA hack tools

Does anyone but MS understand BITS?

I saw this thing running on a machine and thought "WTF is this taking up resources doing?"

TBH I get the feeling it's one of those ideas that is probably quite clever and deserves a wider audience, except no one else actually uses it.

"how long it will take for the next toolkit to get written then released out into the wild."

Shouldn't that be "stolen" and then dumped in the wild, like an unwanted kitten (or perhaps given the potential threat level a baby Wolverine)?

It remains quite extraordinary, given the NSA's awareness of computer and communications security threats, how it was even possible to acquire a copy of these applications in the first place.

Congratulations US readers. These really are your tax $ at work.

Admittedly mostly what they are at work doing is sending you spam, pwning your machines, slurping your data or just plain robbing you through online card fraud.

You must be so proud your country can field such top drawer malware writing talent on Civil Service salaries. For some it's still about more than money. It's about doing a solid job of work and a real sense of achievement.

Of creating a range of tools with which now almost anyone on the planet can screw up almost any PC on the planet.

Yey for that.

God bless America.

Canada says yes to net neutrality – and no to Trump advisor, eh?

And for fans of internet history let us not forget Henry Spencer

Who was one of the few people who was actually archiving this stuff when people thought the thing to do with usenet postings was to delete them after a few months.

And in person a very nice guy.

Canada has a number of pleasing features.

Pleasant scenery, much of which you've already seen if you've seen many US TV series.

US standards of living (in big cities)

European levels of crime.

An apparently higher "Social IQ" or to put it another way a lower proportion of Aholes.

And now it seems a sensible policy on net neutrality.

Stanford Uni's intro to CompSci course adopts JavaScript, bins Java

"Pascal had the same problem, great for teaching but crap for actually implementing"

Not entirely.

Embedded system were quite viable provided you could find a variable size that mapped to bytes and map the whole address space as an array.

IIRC the big issues with ISO Pascal were that you had to pass the array size to procedures, so array size was set at compile time and you couldn't right array processing libraries easily. The other was you could not take and store the address of a procedure IE pointer to procedures.

Being able to set up a "jump table" in a high level language is a very efficient way to call such things (it's basically the key implementation feature of EMACS) and while a compiler might well you collapse your case statement or 10 level deep If/then structure into it eventually it was damm handy to be able to just set it up directly. IIRC TubrboPascal did not offer this till V5.

"spend far too long debugging small problems that would have been flagged as compiler errors"

I'm guessing a lot of the time that would be a type mismatch.

Javascripts idea that the variables type is whatever the you want it to be that the function needs is very flexible, as long of course as what you think it should be matches what Javascript thinks it should be.

This smells like the PL1 implicit type conversion rules to me. Not a good smell at all.

I'd also suggest that for many people who've had to maintain it being "pearl like" is not an advantage either.

Biggest problem is the name.

File I/O in Javascript?

Spent a while trying to dig that out.

Handy hint. Real programming languages for actual applications involve

File reading and writing.

Printing (I know "printing is dead" yet printers, printer cartridges and paper still seem to sell well).

If these (apparently) simple tasks are buried deep in the manual my BS detector is going to start pinging like a Geiger counter around an anti-Putin journalist.

FCC greenlights small cell free-for-all in the US

I think that's a poor selection of pronoun

""Current and next-generation wireless broadband have the potential to bring enormous benefits to the US,"

Should read.

"Current and next-generation wireless broadband have the potential to bring enormous benefits to me,"

Just another little contribution to 'Ol Sweet Pai's future resume.

BTW this is like the David Cameron "Opt out" if you don't want to be filtered by your ISP BS in the UK.

US surveillance court declined less than 2 per cent of applications

"of a facility to be subjected to electronics surveillance "

Now if that "facility" is IDK, the main offices of an ISP or a backbone hub site...

No I don't think that means only 1752 people were being spied on.

By a very wide margin.

1752 warrants == 1752 people ??

Are we really sure about that?

Or is that 1752 ISPs?

"It required a crisis so that it could be enacted without examination or debate,"

Indeed.

It's more like like a trojan than a piece of legislation, infecting and mutating multiple other pieces of legislation and twisting them to help it.

This is indeed a data fetishests wet dream.

"702 of FISA,..critics have alleged..unconstitutionally target the communications of US nationals,"

Because it has?

"Sorry we can't filter out US nationals, we've hoovered up too much stuff to do that."

OTOH

"We can run a query on all the stuff we have hoovered up to which includes if they are US nationals"

"No we can't provide a count of how many of those entries exist in the database. It's too complicated."

9/11 was 17 years ago. It's time the hysteria it engendered is put to rest, along with Sect 702.

Can you make a warzone delivery drone? UK.gov wants to give you cash

This looks like a job for the MiS

Men in Sheds.

Aren't they who made Britain great?

FYI – There's a legal storm brewing in Cali that threatens to destroy online free speech

This ruling is likened to our FISA Court..I hope it never expands to anyhthing but espionage."

Most of us wished it had never even got that far.

Hard-pressed Juicero boss defends $400 IoT juicer after squeezing $120m from investors

Maybe they'd done better calling it "Juicy McJuiceMaster?"

On second thoughts.

Better name, still s**t product

Trump's self-imposed cybersecurity deadline is up: What we got?

I see you "I am not a crook".

And raise you "There is no White wash in the White House."

"Point Break," what a movie.