Posts by teebie

UK wants criminal migrants to scan their faces up to five times a day using a watch

Re: Technical question

It's "hostile environment" rather than "solution to some sort of problem"

Bloke robbed of $800,000 in cryptocurrency by fake wallet app wants payback from Google

$800,000 worth of virtual currencies

Should this be $800,000 "worth" of virtual currencies - I'm willing to bet that at no point would he have been able to convert it to $800,000 of money or legal goods.

Anti-piracy messaging may just encourage more piracy

"The anti-piracy campaigns can have the opposite effect and increase the misappropriation of protected content"

Certainly this is true for the anti-piracy ad which included music that they hadn't paid for (apparently not the "you wouldn't steal a car" ad, despite what I had heard)

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

So the paper says that sprinkling job add with ageist tropes would discourage older people from applying if any companies were doing that, but they don't know if any companies are doing that, because they didn't look.

That seems pretty pointless.

Re: Anon CVs

"a couple of sentences explaining roughly what you can do for us and showing that you understand both our needs and your capabilities."

That sounds more like a cover letter for a CV than a CV.

Tories spar over UK's delayed Online Safety Bill

Re: This isn't it, but something seems to be needed

"I wouldn't trust a single one of them to be able to navigate themselves through a sodden brown paper bag"

I wouldn't trust them to navigate themselves out of a small room that only had one door.

Even robots have the right to learn from open source

you can't legislate for novel use.... use of land/aircraft ...Phonographs/sheet music...radio/phonograph IP, internet/broadcast radio IP

There are plenty of counter examples, assault laws deal with tazers and pepper spray, harassment laws deal with online harassment, fraud laws deal with online fraud, libel with online libel, and employment laws (eventually) with uber.

Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

Re: What they do

"They also take code which other people have given for free, and sell support for it, do they not?"

The word 'given' is what makes this different from what Github is doing.

Tough news for Apple as EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: Micro USB

That is a really short amount of time to wear out a charging socket.

I think I know what the issue is, and offer a fix. When using a phone to happen a nail in, hold the phone by it's body, not by the charging cable.

Smart homes are hackable homes if not equipped with updated, supported tech

"Smart homes are hackable homes if not equipped with the latest tech"

upgrading to the latest tech may, at best, upgrade smart homes to not-yet-hackable homes.

Ex-spymaster and fellow Brexiteers' emails leaked by suspected Russian op

"what could disinformation purposes."

Is there any reason to believe it is disinformation? It looks like the interviewee is trying to imply this without giving anything to back it up

(I'm not says the leak definitely isn't disinformation, I have no idea. Spreading information to wind people up seems very likely, but I don't see where the idea that the info is false came from)

Amazon puts 'creepy' AI cameras in UK delivery vans

"This code uses machine-learning algorithms to figure out what's going on in and around the vehicle."

So the answers are fictional and there's no way to see how they were made.

TurboTax to pay $141m to settle claims it scammed millions of people

That much? Then I agree with the "Wow! $30 a person. Whoopee-doo-da." statement expressed about. I don't know whether I'd rather it was 250 (cheating costs) or 600 (cheating costs 3 times over). At 30$ Turbotax still made a profit with their scam.

$30 per person per year. Whether that's a good deal depends on how much Turbotax costs

Apple's return-to-office plan savaged by staff

Re: iHotel

Providing hotel rooms that look fantastic but don't even have a toilet would seem very on-brand for Apple.

Day 7 of the great Atlassian outage: IT giant still struggling to restore access

Re: Ah....remember....."cloud" is cheaper......

You can disable the keyboard shortcuts?

Wow, with a single unticking life just got a little bit simpler.

I checked if there was a 'be a javascript abomination' setting I could untick on the same page, but sadly there isn't.

Re: But but but....

"More expensive?

Sure.

More reliable?

Yes.

By a great many orders of magnitude."

...and thus less expensive, when you look at the big picture.

Govt suggests Brits should hand passports to social media companies

There was a supporter of this on daytime TV talking about how this was a good thing, because it would have allowed the police to track down her stalker quicker. Nobody raised the point that, after the first breach or insider attack, the measure would also make it easier to find stalkees.

Anonymous employee review site Glassdoor research: Tech companies dominate the best places to work

Re: I know my last company...

"I wouldn't be surprised if some large companies with a poor reputation (*cough* Amazon) even have internal security departments whose purpose includes finding people posting or saying negative things about the company in the press or online."

eBay say they don't normally do this https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/28/ebay_security_prison/

Log4j doesn't just blow a hole in your servers, it's reopening that can of worms: Is Big Biz exploiting open source?

Re: Businesses are simply not in the business of fair dealing.

"You can't keep inventory for sales "on-hand" when you can't GET the inventory to your warehouses because of problems with shipping or production."

That's...why you build up your inventory when everything is going smoothly, so you HAVE inventory in your warehouse when there are there are shipping and production problems

Thought NHS Digital's wind-down meant it would stop writing cheques? Silly you. It's gone on an IT buying spree

"And it really does give us that chance to make real what we say and put digital at the heart of everything the NHS does"

This is best read while imagining someone jabbering with terror in their eyes, because they don't understand what they are saying.

UK Test and Trace finding consultant habit hard to break: More contracts go to Deloitte and Accenture

The figures for 'testing' include figures for 'sending kits to Immensa, who did not properly test them'

Re: When do you shut down the covid-industrial complex?

You are comparing the death rate when spending a huge amount to fight covid and the death rate when spending a small amount to fight influenza, which isn't a fair comparison.

I'd be very surprised if the government has a plan for when to cut covid spending, but if there were a plan a reasonable starting point would be something like 'funding will be reduced to around the amount we spend fighting flu at the point when doing so would mean the death rates are similar to those for flu'

Lawsuit accusing Robinhood and Citadel Securities of colluding to stop GameStop shares from skyrocketing thrown out by judge

Thank you.

net income figures shows that they have reduced their losses throughout the pandemic. Which implies they are doing something right. With their cash reserves of 1.75B it may be enough.

GameStop annual net income for 2021 was $-0.215B, a 54.28% decline from 2020.

GameStop annual net income for 2020 was $-0.471B, a 30.03% decline from 2019.

GameStop annual net income for 2019 was $-0.673B, a 2039.48% decline from 2018.

"GameStop annual gross profit for 2021 was $1.26B, a 34.01% decline from 2020.

GameStop annual gross profit for 2020 was $1.909B, a 17.3% decline from 2019.

GameStop annual gross profit for 2019 was $2.308B, a 7.11% decline from 2018."

A bricks-and-mortar company making a billion a year in a pandemic doesn't need a new business plan.

Do not try this at home: Man spends $5,000 on a 48TB Raspberry Pi storage server

Re: '"how far can I push this before it gets silly". A true engineer'

'This misapprehension has caused every technician and fitter to be miscalled "engineer"'

...and a helpdesk full of "customer solution engineers".

A 'national security' issue: UK.gov blocks Nvidia's Arm deal for now, inserts deeper probe

"Nadine Dorries has quasi-judicial power"

Well, that's a sentence that belongs in a loading screen for a Fallout game.

Facebook's greatest misses: The five nastiest bits from recent leaks

"and that Facebook is not the main driver of societal polarisation."

"We are, at worst, the second leading cause of societal division" isn't the best defence I've ever heard.

Brave's homegrown search claims to protect your privacy but there's a long way to go if it's to challenge the big G

Re: Consent

By making a website publicly accessible you are consenting for the public to access it.

Bank manager tricked into handing $35m to scammers using fake 'deep voice' tech

The annual State of AI report is out

Is it a piece of A4 saying "There's still no such thing as AI. It's a load of marketing guff"

Brit MPs blast Baroness Dido Harding's performance as head of NHS Test and Trace

Re: Yes Boris isn't the perfect PM but...

Corbyn's has a tendency to prevaricate, and to listen to everyone - including experts. He'd be more inclined to trust the response to the NHS (the body behind the vaccination program, which worked) than outsourcing companies (track and trace, or accepting millions in exchange for no PPE, which didn't)

So I would imagine there would have been thousands of people around the country spending their time complaining about his dithering, whereas under Boris Johnson's leadership they are, instead, mourning their grandparents.

Re: turning up like a bad penny

The bar is subsidised.

I'm diabetic. I'd rather risk my shared health data being stolen than a double amputation

"Our data is already bought and sold for profit. And we love it."

It's a bold move to start an article with such an obvious untruth.

At most the article argues for people with rare conditions to be allowed to share their data - which nobody is arguing against - so that there will be research into these conditions - but the article doesn't say how the first would lead to the second. Pharmacy companies aren't interested because there is no profit. University research is poorly funded. If there is a drug for common condition A that treats rare condition B then you still need a company to manufacture it.

Opt-out is the right approach for sharing your medical records with researchers

"societies whose people are willing to widely participate in public health measures like social distancing and wearing masks for the collective good have better outcomes. This is a lesson that translates to health data sharing."

In what way?

In an opt-out system there is an incentive to design the system well, in an opt-out system you have a huge captive audience, so don't have to care.

And anonymisation isn't always possible. 50 is fairly young for prostate cancer. If he's a new case then, combine that with Brian living in London and we've narrowed him down to around 3000 people (1700 new cases per 100k in people aged 50-54. 9 million people in London). Currently there are around 100 Brians born a year in the uk - it was probably higher in 1961, but I still think we have enough data to uniquely identify him.

Config cockup leaves Reg reader reaching for the phone

Re: Me too...

Write the where clause first.

Maybe run a select command with it first.

Then add the update/delete to the query.

Telegraph newspaper bares 10TB of subscriber data and server logs to world+dog

That seems like a lot of data.

'Extraordinary' pigs step in to protect Schiphol airport from marauding geese

Listen to the end of the song before deploying ever-larger animals

Yes, it did seem innovative when the old lady with the spider used it to solve her internal fly problem, but if you concentrate for just a bit longer you will find that she soon died of equiphagy.

Thatcher-era ICL mainframe fingered for failure to pay out over £1bn in UK pensions

Re: Fujitsu -- what else have they done?

Yes, at least the pensioners only ended up falsely empoverished, instead of falsely imprisoned.

Clegg on its face: Facebook turns to former UK deputy PM to fend off damaging headlines

The last time the lib dems had any power was when they were writing the agreement with the tories for the coalition. Then the coalition started, and they were scapegoats.

The tories would probably have agreed to a clause that said "we won't vote for anything that breaks one of our pledges". "The AV referendum will have to follow election commission rules" would probably have been harder to get through.

Dowden out, Dorries in: Is UK data protection in safe hands?

Re: Is UK data protection in safe hands?

I'm not sure your list of examples of when the EU quickly rejected the suggestion that there should be an European army supports the narrative that the EU wants to create a European army.

WTF? Microsoft makes fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job

Back to their old tricks

"Oh, did you get breached, well that's because you're using linux, if you bought a licence for our servers this would never have happened."

You can 'go your own way' over GDPR, says UK's new Information Commissioner

"I want to make data protection easy – easy for industry to implement at low cost"

It's easy for companies not to hoover up every piece of data they can find. Some of them don't seem to be keen on the idea.

Right to contest automated AI decision under review as part of UK government data protection consultation

Naive

I saw the headline and thought we were going to get more rights to challenge bad decisions made by AI.

The week must have tired my brain out.

McDonald's email blunder broadcasts database creds to comedy competition winners

Re: Really annoys me!!!

In particular, it seems they're pretty great at maintaining the privacy of their employees email addresses. And their work phone numbers.

Cops responding to ShotSpotter's AI alerts rarely find evidence of gun crime, says Chicago watchdog

"ShotSpotter has detected hundreds of shootings that would have otherwise gone unreported."

Did the spokesman continue with "...tens of which weren't imaginary"?

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

So, they have misguided beliefs, based on an assumptions that an archaic, Latin, legal document has force of law in modern times.

And the Procurator Fiscal will decide what action should be taken against them.

Google Groups kills RSS support without notice

"The Register asked Google to comment and we've not heard back."

Google have discontinued the Reply To A Journalist's Questions service.

UK data watchdog sees its approach to government health tech during COVID-19 outbreak as 'pragmatic'

Re: What?

Mandatory reporting means companies know that they are breached they will be found out, so they make at least token efforts to secure our data.

I may be being optimistic.

Nuisance call-blocking firm fined £170,000 for making almost 200,000 nuisance calls

"188,493 unsolicited direct marketing calls" "helped 12,000 customers "

Congratulations, that's an almost -1,500% success rate.

eBay ex-security boss sent down for 18 months for cyber-stalking, witness tampering

An excess of caution

"alleged involvement in a scheme to threaten and silence Ina and David Steiner:

Do you need the "alleged" after 5 people have pleaded guilty?