Posts by Dan 55

This news article about the full public release of OpenAI's 'dangerous' GPT-2 model was part written by GPT-2

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? What if a woodchuck could chuck wood if he had wood?

The short answer: A lot.

"We thought we were going to have a lot of work and we didn't have to pay anybody," says co-founder and chief executive officer of WoodChuck, Paul Fournier.

Fournier and fellow co-founder Andrew Johnson, also from Seattle, started WoodChuck with some initial ideas about how woodchuck-shaped objects could be made. They decided to take a different approach to their first product, the WoodChucker. Instead of focusing on how the woodchuck might work, they turned their attention to the woodchuck.

"It was about the process of how the woodchuck got it's mouth open to do that," says Fournier.

Fournier, Johnson and the rest of the team made a few wooden pieces that could be easily snapped into the mouth of a woodchuck. That woodchuck could then chuck wood at wood, making the WoodChucker more

Re: Awesomesauce!

It's obviously had second thoughts since replying to you:

It was a dark and stormy night

And I was running around with my guitar

The rain and the wind and the rain and the wind

My fingers were stained with blood and my brain was fried

I was so down and out and I was so high

I was playing guitar to myself

I was dancing naked all alone

And that's when they found me

They saw me singing 'Hallelujah'

And they took me to the police station

And put me in a cell with the other criminals

They beat me all the time with cables

They threw me into the trash like an animal

And my heart was pounding all the time

They put me in a hospital and I stayed there for a long time

They took me to a psychiatrist and I was given medication

They gave me antidepressants for my troubles

But it didn't work

And then they took me to the hospital for my mental illness

And the psychiatrist told me to stop drinking

They sent me on a drug that gave

NPM today stands for Now Pay Me: JavaScript packaging biz debuts conduit for funding open-source coders

An open-source developer is often one who makes money with a day job (probably doing similar) but then works on a project of passion to develop it "correctly"

There just aren't enough hours in the day for that and you'll probably die of DVT or something by the time you hit 40.

Concerns raised over privacy and security of UK Home Office's £842m biometrics programme

Re: Blow it up.

You only have to look at the mistaken detentions and deportations due to inaccurate datasets that they've used as part of the hostile environment then multiply it by this to get an idea as to what could possibly go wrong.

Baffled by bogus charges on your Amazon account? It may be the work of a crook's phantom gadget

Thing is once they're paired they're always logged in. You have to turn on 2FA, deauthorise them, and then authorise them again.

Re: Liability

Amazon already pay a higher commission because they don't ask for the CVV although as everything is negotiable and Amazon is Amazon I guess it wouldn't be as high as other places.

Re: How is the device added...?

The Prime Video app on the device generates a six character code, you go to primevideo.com, log with Amazon credentials, and enter that code.

You can turn on 2FA but that won't get rid of devices which are already paired. Also on Android, if you pair the Prime Video app, the main Amazon shopping app works using those credentials too.

Which makes me wonder if they're real devices as one smart TV per compromised account seems a pretty expensive way to go about it. Perhaps somebody's spinning up Android VMs with Prime Video and Amazon apps linked to compromised accounts.

I cannae do it, captain, I'm giving it all she's got, but she just cannae take another dose of bullsh!t

"People will always argue over truth"

Have we normalised the past 3-4 years already?

Before then we tended to agree on the truth, just disagreed on how to get there.

At least I think we did.

Top American watchdog refuses to release infamous 2012 dossier into Google’s anti-competitive behavior

Re: Splendid response

When people say that, I ask myself in what quantifiable ways might Labour be worse than the present shower of shit who are currently in charge?

They might be just as bad but for different reasons but I really doubt that they'd be worse.

Are you as handy with privacy certs as you are with a screwdriver? Ikea has the perfect vacancy

Re: Slood

I don't think Slood would be of any help to Ikea, it's let its certificate expire.

Google forks out $2.1bn for Fitbit – and promises not to exploit all that delicious health data to sling ads (honest)

Re: Google promises...

Just got back from the Gym and several people there have already decided to ditch their FitBits.

That's still x years of history for each person who ditches their FitBit that Google can snaffle up. This is why if it's not stored locally it's not under your control.

Bet you can't guess what I'm wearing, or where I'm wearing it

Re: Identity theft is a bummer

Amazon does allow TOTP and so does PayPal, finally.

You can get a list of 2FA websites here.

Re: Identity theft is a bummer

The majority of payments don't require a second factor authentication

The can with the bit of PSD2 that says card payments require 2FA was kicked down the road for 18 months. That's going to be more fun when it comes in because card details aren't considered a strong factor, so the fact you've just inputted them into a website will mean nothing, it's going to need something like a card reader + PIN or an SMS code + a password that the customer knows.

A card reader + PIN validation would be secure, which is why banks will go with SMS + a password.

Belgian city slurps mobile data to track visitors

Re: while in rural areas the individual cells will stretch for miles

Cell data is mapped to areas which cover 5,000 inhabitants so in theory someone living in the country will have no more or less chance of being identified than someone living in the city.

Move along, nothing to see here: Auditors say £100k grant to Hacker House was 'appropriate'

So many independent whitewash reports around lately

Why would that be?

40 million emoji-addicted keyboard app users left with $18m bill – after malware sneaks into Play Store yet again

Re: Why?

Way do people need to download 3rd party keyboard apps in the first place.

Because I don't trust the Google Keyboard, every so often it's updated with a new slurpy option that you're opted into by default.

UK ads watchdog slaps Amazon for UX dark arts after folk bought Prime subs they didn't want

Re: Paypal are the ones that p!ss me off at the moment

NewPipe on FDroid (alternative YouTube player), gets rid of all that nonsense.

Re: Paypal are the ones that p!ss me off at the moment

That's actually a good one to have as if it's linked, PayPal's refund policy allows a longer time for a complaint (and a refund) to be made than eBay's.

Join Prime, it's for a good cause, you too can put Bezos into space

But cancel it just at the right time so he stays up there, along with Starman in the Tesla.

Does anyone know if Amazon's exhausted their merry-go-round of dark pattern UIs for Prime yet and gone back to the first one from ten years ago?

Cringe as you read Horrible Histories: UK Banking Sector, sigh as MPs finger cloudy Big 3 as future risk

Re: Not got much hope

My bank has also implemented two factor authentication via SMS, as have numerous other websites I use such as Amazon etc

I'm afraid we'll have to take your commentard licence off you sir, Amazon have a choice of SMS or TOTP and faced with that choice you clearly should have chosen TOTP.

Re: Not got much hope

Not dropped the reader, rather keeping it and using SMS as a fallback if you can't/don't want to use the reader. They're also keeping the customer number and replacing memorable information (passwords) with your DOB (public information).

What's odd is they've interpreted PSD2 to mean no passwords but other banks are keeping them. If a fallback is required, leaving aside the merits or otherwise of SMS, I would have thought that having to get a password that only you should know right beforehand would be an extra layer of security to protect against SIM swapping/cloning.

Re: Not got much hope

Nationwide still uses the card reader.

Re: Not got much hope

Thing is not long ago the UK banking industry did it right, it had a standardised hardware card reader capable of generating OTPs from an applet running on the card + PIN.

The mobile apps came along and they sort of collectively lost the plot as Marketing took over and ditched the requirement to have the card, when they could have decided to go with something like the app getting the OTP from the chip via NFC when logging in if the user really didn't want to use the card reader because it's too big and heavy and they'd break their back dragging it around with them all day.

Running on Intel? If you want security, disable hyper-threading, says Linux kernel maintainer

Re: Buying Intel

It's only systemd distros which are unbootable. Poettering decided calling the kernel to get a random number wasn't good enough for him. You know, the kernel routine which mixes in other sources of entropy instead of just using the CPU's entropy generator. Instead he just calls RdRand, which also has bugs on some Intel chips and doesn't exist before 2012.

"Open BSD was right, he said."

Those who do not understand Open BSD are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

Are you coming to the party dressed as an IMP? ARPANET @ 50

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, and YouTube. Can we get our money* back?

* data.

Pentagon beams down $10bn JEDI contract to Microsoft: Windows giant beats off Bezos

You're joking, of course. Every time they publish a post mortem it turns out one thing goes down and that in turn makes the whole lot die on its arse globally. Doesn't sound like it has "integrated segregated security with fully constrained delegation capabilities", whatever that is.

Re: Does this mean ...

No, it means the DoD can't turn on 2FA just in case it makes Skynet go down.

Re: Article about JEDI shows picture of Spock

Isn't this story more about what Kermit the Frog said... something about Microsoft living long and prospering?

Engineer grumbles and user gripes do little to slow down Nadella's trillion-dollar Microsoft

Re: Settings

Why, full of pointless white space, oversized and confusing GUI widgets, and easy to get lost in, and every third button you press produces a spinner for 5 seconds followed by "Hey, buddy, wouldn't ya just know it, something went wrong" in red text. Doesn't everyone define "much better" like that?

Remember that competition for non-hoodie hacker pics? Here's their best entries

Re: "you all love to hate"

Try picking one yourself. It's either PowerPoint graphics, suits, padlocks or hoodies.

Google claims web search will be 10% better for English speakers – with the help of AI

Re: 10%?

As the EU browser ballot choice screen showed, people often don't know about the alternatives and, when given the chance to try them, they quite like them.

You're flowing it wrong: Bad network route between Microsoft, Apple blamed for Azure, O365 MFA outage

First there was:

Writing to disk -> What happens if I suddenly don't have permission/it's full/it disappears.

Then there was:

Connecting to the database -> What happens if it's down or won't let me connect?

So really, this this not beyond the bounds of imagination:

Connecting to an online service -> What happens if it's down or won't let me connect?

Design, we've heard of it

Why aren't these elementary questions like "what do we do if APNs are down" being asked at design stage?

Remember when Bezos whined about having too much money? Amazon's Q3 will help out with that

If they're fulfilled by Amazon, it's supposed to be in Amazon's warehouse ready to send alongside Amazon's own stuff. If somehow they have to wait days before telling you it's dispatched, it's in another warehouse of theirs on the other side of the continent or it's not really in their warehouse at all.

Got to keep the Prime racket going though.

Talk about a killer feature: Home, Home Mini gear replacements promised after fatal update bricks gadgets

It's a race between Google Home and Stadia to see which they will shut down first

If I were a betting person I'd put my money on Stadia as it has less slurping potential, but that's just me.

No extra bank holiday for 75th VE Day, but the pub will be open longer

Celebrate VE Day with Victory Gin!

Government says it's your duty, citizen.

Repairability fiends crack open a Surface Laptop 3: Nice SSD, but shame about the battery

Slimline Dell models

They announce their end of battery life after approximately two years by having the battery start to budge and mess with the trackpad and keyboard before finally distorting the case.

Average consumer or corporate reaction will be to dispose of it and buy a new machine.

And they have the nerve to put bullocks like this on their website:

Environment | Dell Technologies

Haxis of evil: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are 'continuous threat' to UK, say spies

Obligatory Mitchell and Webb

Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

Re: Productivity? I really don't see the benefit of Catalina over High Sierra.

One day for a test if I've got some time to spare (probably never) I'm going to run Snow Leopard on the same hardware and watch it fly like shit off a shovel.

Re: This makes me happy

It's a new translation in Catalina for non-Merikin English.

Almost worth the update in itself.

Should they have to chase after Windows for the better part of its six month release cycle and MacOS for the better part of its twelve month release cycle just to make everything still work?

The fact that you run GIMP but the permission dialog doesn't appear until you go there in Terminal shows that something is, well gimped.

The fact that the default action for opening an unsigned program is deleting it or not running it with no explanation as to what to do to make it run shows that something is also gimped.

I think the stop before Catalina is where I get off the Mac OS update train.

Nothing's certain except death and patches – so that 'final' Windows 10 19H2 build isn't really

Re: Aren't you thinking of

I think SeaQuest DSV more closely encapsulates Windows 10's soul-destroying mediocrity.

We read the Brexit copyright notices so you don't have to… No more IP freely, ta very much

Re: TL;DR

The UK is one of the most welcoming and non-racist countries in Europe.

Indeed, they even accept you if you're bright red, over 50, and outrageously bigoted.

Re: TL; DR

people who talk with unusual accents

Eleven!

Re: TL; DR

A residency registry* is pretty necessary in a country of 66+ million people. Are we supposed to be proud we can't get our shit together? How difficult is it for you to tell your local council you've moved in or out of their area and for your local council to keep a list of people?

* A proper one, not the hostile environment which appears to be a daily raffle down at the Home Office.

I see your blue passport and raise you a green number plate: UK mulls rewards scheme for zero-emission vehicles

Distinctive marking

If only we had a circular disc which could attach to the inside windscreen and allow us to "differentiate vehicles".

We could put stuff on there like eco credentials, if the road tax has been paid or not...

Samsung on fridge cert error: Someone tried to view 'unsavoury content' in middle of John Lewis

Re: Samwrong

Corporate net nannies usually say "dodgysite.com has been blocked because it falls into the following categories: file sharing" or something similar and as they send it using the net nanny MITM certificate, the browser will complain unless it has also has the corporate root certificate also installed.

Samwrong

"It is unlikely for this issue to occur when used at home on domestic Wi-Fi as security controls are standardised by the router and ISP, and security certificates are likely to be authorised automatically"

Unless you install a new root cert on the client device, you should get a warning.

Good guy, Microsoft: Multi-factor auth outage gives cloudy Office, Azure users a surprise three-day weekend

Re: authenticator app does not "receive" codes

There is, however, an option to use a non-MS authenticator app and there might be a slim chance that that is still working.