Posts by Andy 97

Google tells Apple to 'fix text messaging' in bid to promote RCS protocol

Green bubble of fail.

Perchance; would the metadata in this backup protocol (somehow) be available to Google's data warehouse?

UK Prime Minister, Catalan groups 'targeted by NSO Pegasus spyware'

Civil Servents must really hate Boris.

Someone at GCHQ needs to answer questions, under oath.

Someone at MI5/6 needs to answer similar questions, possibly with their final salary pension taking a 'haircut' if found to be wanting.

Why wasn't his personal hardware frequently audited?

This is a failure of him, his own staff and the security services.

Three Chinese web giants create streaming video 'standard'

Won't work.

There's a reason why nobody has created a global standard that everyone follows religiously.

Standards for streaming have been proposed and accepted before, each time publishers (following complaints from users) have chosen to actually scrutinize data from their clients' players, then adjust the standard to optimise their user experience based on reliable data.

If a user doesn't obtain a reliable streaming experience from a publisher, they will 'churn' and the cost to acquire a new user is high, whereas the cost to adjust a standard (encoding profile for instance) is minimal.

If, however, these 'giants' are proposing a closed garden standard, they'd also need to run the access networks and CDN infrastructure, globally.

Publishers will welcome this standard, in the same way someone (on a long-haul flight) would regret a dodgy curry, consumed the night before.

I bet they haven't addressed legacy users either, which would be illegal in some territories.

Indian PM calls on the world to save youth from Bitcoin

I'm sure Mr Modi only has the welfare of young people on his mind.

The other reason can't be anything to do with people 'stashing' undeclared wealth away. Unlike bank notes, you ban large denomination notes, expect people to dig all of the currency out of their floors or garden, head to the bank and change it into smaller bills; thereby allowing the internal tax people to discover who's hiding money.

Oh no!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-37933233

https://money.cnn.com/2017/01/04/news/india/india-cash-crisis-rupee/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/10/rupee-note-cancellation-panic-in-india-banks-500-1000

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the BBC stage a very British coup to rescue our data from Facebook and friends

Re: BBC

Your comparison of religious subs and television is interesting, but there's some technical issues too.

The main problem with your suggestion is providing content to the many millions of people that don't have access to a television with a CAM slot, cable or dSat. Significant numbers of people still connect their television to a UHF socket on the wall and not the internet. Not all televisions are compatible with a rolling encryption key system either.

Many would need to buy another box - do you remember what happened the last time they tried to force people to move to a centrally-controlled subscription model en-masse?

I note that you didn't mention advertising funded, but you'd already know how ITV, Sky, CH4, Viacom and smaller commercial publishers feel about that.

Re: BBC

The BBC isn’t perfect (by any test), but it beats the alternative by a considerable factor.

Of course, if you have another solution, I’m sure we’d all like to hear about it.

If anyone can explain why Jupiter's Great Red Spot is spinning faster and shrinking, please speak up

Expect the following:

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA

ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE

USE THEM TOGETHER

USE THEM IN PEACE

* Yes I know the spot grew in the story.

For the nth time, China bans cryptocurrencies

China really has embraced capitalism.

Someone, in President Eleven's leadership team is ordering a 180ft Sunseeker very soon.

Samsung: We will remotely brick smart TVs looted from our warehouse

Re: This seems normal

Data analysis companies that have their SDK added to streaming applications and television factory build operating systems for years.

During regular use, telemetry from the player is sent to a data warehouse, it's analysed, sold to other vendors and merchants, where it can be used to justify advert placement, commissioning etc.

They'll tell you it's to ascertain the quality of playback, but this is only the sideshow of what it's really all about.

How much data is gathered? Depends on the player, but even skipping playback or adjusting the volume can be captured.

Fun exercise: See what happens if you block address ranges you notice your device is sending to.

Phoning home.

May I recommend running Wireshark, or another network monitoring tool, then enjoy watching what your telly does (sometimes in standby).

Thief hands back at least a third of $600m in crypto-coins stolen from Poly Network

Residents of CCP despotic rule have been warned that their beloved leaders are 'cracking down' on crypto.

Suddenly an exchange in that very same locale is raided, huge sums disappear, some returned, so many questions.

Maybe some of the exchange transactions were instigated by high ranking members of The CCP? A quick call to President 11 and 'would you Adam and Eve it?', they're returned.

LOL ;-) UK govt 2 pay £39m 4 txt msgs 4 less thn 2 yrs

Re: Sigh...

What's the alternative?

While I understand people making a mistake (we all do) this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Public sector management operate with impunity, safe in the knowledge that there's no day of judgement if they really mess things-up.

An index-linked, final salary pension awaits, nobody will rock the boat and nobody will question upper management. Can you imagine if the people concerned worked for one of the cloudy (or OTT) companies? They'd be on their way home before mid-morning coffee.

The worst part is that it's all of us that will ultimately pay for the mistake (and their relaxed retirement), while scratching around to fund our own.

Often these gaff-prone boneheads will obtain a peerage (of similar honour) for their years steering their ship into the rocks.

Apple patches zero-day vulnerability in iOS, iPadOS, macOS under active attack

Of course, an update where 5 minutes really means 38 minutes.

Imagine your data center backup generator kicks in during power outage ... and catches fire. Well, it happened

Re: This would never have happened at a certain broadcaster I used to work for.

I remember that one.

Also remember the red-faced duty manager in the canteen after.

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Re: Sky

And they wonder why 'dodgy streams' are a thing.

They'll quote that they 'make significant investment in live sport' and that 'to keep the subscription cost to a minimum' they also need to run adverts too.

This is (of course) cobblers.

Get a Raspberry Pi and install Pi-Hole.

Rental electric scooters to clutter UK street scenes after Department of Transport gives year-long trial the thumbs-up

Re: Rental vs privately owned

The rental company will have all the personal data of the rider. Certainly their bank details if nothing else.

If they're an unpleasant type, riding around, knocking people over, it wouldn't take much effort to find them. Then there's the criminals who would see a £500-£1500 device as a new income stream. If they steal the scooter (as is likely to happen with private scooters), there will be no black market available to sell it-on.

Quite a sensible way to roll this out.

Nine million logs of Brits' road journeys spill onto the internet from password-less number-plate camera dashboard

Re: Massive invasion of privacy

True 'green' policies are highly authoritarian and always have been.

Ofcom waves DAB radio licences under local broadcasters' noses as FM switchoff debate smoulders again

Re: Puppy drowning in mud.

Agreed; small scale should be workable... Except, the next problem is getting the listener to retune their device. Unlike an FM station, a retune on a DAB receiver for most people is not a trivial matter.

If your small, local station is part of a large mux, you can be discovered by accident. But finding someone radiating 25W (horizontal) in a car would be miracle.

Puppy drowning in mud.

I've setup and run a couple of small radio stations, please forgive my dislike of DAB, but it is not fit for purpose.

1) DAB is not popular: If you're a small station, you'll need listeners to attract advertisers (or demonstrate success to your sponsors and donors).

2) DAB is expensive! To receive and transmit. You won't believe how expensive it is to get on a DAB mux.

3) DAB sounds crap! There's no argument, DAB sounds like a puppy drowning in mud (at times).

FM may be hissy, but if you employ some reasonable compression to the dynamic range, it sounds great in a car (or at home).

DAB just sounds crap, even the DAB+ nonsense, which many radio owners can't receive, thanks to their radio not being upgradable.

If you want to broadcast in the digital area, encode your output to for streaming, and compress the dynamic range to compensate and make sure you test the output with differing types of audio content. Listeners do not want to hear music that sounds like a 12yr old's YouTube 'rip'.

Sorry for the rant.

Poured your info out on a call to 118 118 Money? Bad luck. Credit provider 'fesses up that hacker nabbed customer service phone recordings

12 months?

The types of 'pond life' which accessed this personal data, certainly won't stop attempting to gain goods and services after just 12 months.

If I were a 118 customer, I'd be attempting to find a Rottweiler-like lawyer to mount a class action and annihilate them.

How can such f*ckwittery still be happening?

Our 'solution is killing us in a number of areas' IBM said about doomed £175m Co-Op Insurance project

I hope this gets sorted out quickly.

The Co-Op has no chance to match the might of IBM's legal assets and the people who will suffer will be the millions of ordinary members.

Pope tells his followers to log off for Lent

Re: Lent ?

Stop calling me Len ye little arse!

Vodafone: Yes, we slurp data on customers' network setups, but we do it for their own good

Re: BT does the same

*Not in a hostile tone* Do you have any proof?

I know they employ deep packet inspection to find Kodi-serving freetards and those who are stupid enough to seed torrent files on their home computers. I also remember they ran a service which harvested DNS enquiries (which they sold to a 3rd party), but this is new.

AI snatches jobs from DJs and warehouse workers, plus OpenAI and PyTorch sittin' in a tree, AI, AI, AI for you and me

Re: AI for "programming"?

Nearly all radio is automated already.

The presenter can record an entire show of voice links in under twenty minutes, often they don't even need to come into the studio.

They have no choice of music or anything else, and will only exist until someone can make an AI voice which doesn't sound like a 1980's Atari game or one of those crappy Youtube videos.

Fly me to the M(O₂)n: Euro scientists extract oxygen from 'lunar dust' by cooking it with molten salt electrolysis

Space Force!

You'd need a laser to get anywhere near that kind of heat without burning carbon.

I suspect any number of world powers would love a Moon-based laser to control.

Re: Energy

A nuclear reactor driving some lasers perhaps?

They'd also need to construct somewhere to contain the heat too.

In tribute to Galaxy Note 7, BBC iPlayer support goes up in flames for some Samsung TVs

Re: In defence of the Beeb

You said nothing illogical.

Firesticks were on sale a week ago for £19, even with the terrible UI, they are better than ANY (so called) SMATV interface and they can even be side-loaded with more useful APK's.

Re: Sorry but...

Running Wireshark while your Samsung television is booting is highly enlightening too.

Much simpler to disconnect IP from the set and buy any HDMI devices (or better still) build one from a late model Raspberry Pi.

Uni of London loses attempt to block mobe mast surveyors from Paddington rooftop

If the UoL owns the building, wouldn't they benefit financially from the rental of their roof space?

All they'd need to do would be provide some legal documents and collect even more money for doing (basically) nothing.

This makes no sense.

UK culture sec hints at replacing TV licence fee, defends encryption ban proposals and her boss in Hacker House inquiry

Re: Hmm

Agreed, "premium" content commonly has ads-a-plenty.

Sport for instance, try watching a football match without seeing a betting company/Just Eat/more betting roll between the action. I pay top dollar for Comcast (formerly Sky) to slew shite at my eyeballs along with the content I actually want to see.

Oh, and no, I don't want to stream off some dodgy m3u8 file that was uploaded to a Usenet group.

'Technical error' threatens Vodafone customers with four-figure roaming fees

VF customer account database strikes again.

Hey, it's Google's birthday! Remember when they were the good guys?

I blame the freetards.

Not so easy to make a quick getaway when it takes 3 hours to juice up your motor, eh Brits?

By producing liquefied air and then releasing this as a gas, which drives a turbine.

The system can even work using existing petrochemical infrastructure and releases no "harmful" emissions. Highview has this working already.

https://phys.org/news/2013-05-energy-companies-liquid-air-backup.html

If you can't be bothered to read:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj2jTm0PtWw

Ohm my God: If you let anyone other than Apple replace your recent iPhone's battery, expect to be nagged by iOS

Re: seriously...

That's a big can of wriggling worms.

Brit couch potatoes increasingly switching off telly boxes in favour of YouTube and Netflix

Re: Not as comoplex as you might think

There's not much genuine anger; it's all being fuelled by certain newspapers, media organisations and rent-a-gobs.

Those (over 75's) that can't afford to pay get the license fee for free.

Showrunner?

Did you mean executive producer?

It's Black Hat and DEF CON in Vegas this week. And yup, you know what that means. Hotel room searches for guns

Why Vegas?

I mean, it's not like hackers will spend hours on the tables, take in a floor show or quaff alcoholic beverages 'till they puke.

We can all think of any number of other countries which are fun, easy to get to, you're not likely to get arrested by The FBI for something you said on a forum ten years ago and, probably cheaper too.

German patent hoarder IPCom fires sueball at Vodafone over 4G

There's many pensions invested in VF, perhaps you'd be better to wish for VF to stop being so crap to work with.

Bonkers British MPs rant: 5G signals cause cancer

Re: Do those loons even bother to research these things?

At lest nobody mentioned the "chem trails"...

Do those loons even bother to research these things?

As someone who's faced a community hall filled with enraged locals while attempting to explain how cellular systems work, I'm not surprised.

I am more surprised that it was Wales, which desperately needs better connectivity. You'd think someone was attempting to hold back progress...

I'd liken it to medieval times where they'd put elderly woman on the ducking stool if there was a crop failure.

We are Google, we are proud, English football is moving to our cloud

All sounds wonderful; finally we can all tell the replacement Google manager to "f disc, shut-down... shut-down, f disc" (or whatever the Unix equivalent is).

Let's check in with our friends in England and, oh good, bloke fined after hiding face from police mug-recog cam

I know, I find it confusing too.

Freaky photo flingers face fat fines for flagrant phallus flashing fun

Alliteration goes up to 11

The headline writer deserved several beers for this work of genius.

Gather round, friends. Listen close. It's time to list the five biggest lies about 5G

Someone needs to post this article on LinkedIn.

I now class 5G about the same way as I do for P.P.I insurance refunds and Brexit.

Marketeers, please stop!

Lend me your ears and AI will play with your brain: Machine voice imitators outsmart us

This is exciting stuff, but how long before people start asking Blade Runner-esq questions at the start of calls?

“A turtle was flipped over, it’s baking in the sun. You spot it, but don’t help, why is that?”

Only one Huawei? We pitted the P30 Pro against Samsung and Apple's best – and this is what we found

Does it have iMessage?

Brit broadband giants slammed as folk whinge about crap connections, underwhelming speeds

Re: Recommendation for a cheap, but decent provider

I'm surprised about the Netflix problems on Plusnet, [they] have peering with BT (Plusnets' parent company).

It's worth spending a few more pounds for a better provider, the bargain basement of ISP's are cheap for a reason and it certainly isn't because the directors have an altruistic streak.

Damn you BT!

My guaranteed 100Mbps connection currently pulling around 38Mbps.

Who signed-off on this guarantee?

I bet it was someone in marketing.

Should I sell my shares?