Posts by Dan 55

Boffins laugh in the face of Twitter's API limits. Now they can slurp info to their hearts' content

A guess as to how long this is going to last

About the same time as it takes to put in a min() statement in a line of code.

10Mbps for world+dog, hoots UK.gov, and here is how we're doing it

if you stand on a road and say 'where is the water main here?', the water company won't be able to tell you.

Of course they can tell you, when all else fails they fall back to dowsing rods...

I believe they use utility tunnels in Germany and Switzerland and it runs like clockwork so it can be done.

Java-aaaargh! Google faces $9bn copyright bill after Oracle scores 'fair use' court appeal win

Re: "AT&T (C) can sue Stroustup (C++) because C++ has printf."

Why should AT&T should sue one of its employee working for the company benefit? AFAIK C++ was developed at AT&T Bell Labs.

Because he's left and he's got their proprietary super special secret-sauce API thus denying AT&T of billions.

Or maybe it wasn't just the API and had something to do with the fact that Sun/Oracle couldn't really make a useful mobile platform from Java ME. All those man hours to make a language which barely managed to faithfully reproduce Tetris.

Re: Still reeling

AT&T (C) can sue Stroustup (C++) because C++ has printf. Who can sue Oracle (Java) because Java has printf. Who can sue Walter Bright (D) as D has printf too.

Now that van Rossum (Python) thought he could rename it to str.format() and get away with it, as did Mozilla (Rust) with println, but the thing is they both of them were foolish enough to admit it's based on C's printf in their documentation, so they can get a sueball for their trouble too.

AT&T can't sue itself because C copied B, but I bet Martin Richards (BCPL) is laughing all the way to the bank, as he can sue them all.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to look at how CPL did it, maybe there's money to be made there too.

Repeat ad infinitum.

You can still write code to make use of someone else's API, but whether or not you can go and re-implement their API depends on the API copyright holder and their terms of use, as it should be.

Sorry, did you just post something as ridiculous as I did above?

India's prime minister accused of privacy breaches

"similar to Google Analytics"

Because we all know how fluffy that is. Even more so when the data is piped to the party in government.

Yo Google, I'mma let you finish, but China, I mean, Huawei's P20 is the best

Re: One thousand eight hundred and thirty five pounds...

Back in the day (May 2012), a 41MP Nokia 808 went for about 500 of your pre-Brexit British pounds, then there was a shoddy copy in July 2013 the form of a Lumia 1020 for 600 pounds. I don't think inflation since then is high enough to warrant a 3.5-fold increase.

Parents blame brats' slipping school grades on crap internet speeds

I guess if your kid is using Assassin's Creed for history class it's no surprise their falling behind!

Assassin's Creed Origins does have a discovery mode, believe it or not. YouTube link, because it's educational, innit?

How a QR code can fool iOS 11's Camera app into opening evil.com rather than nice.co.uk

goto fail;

Technically, the example URL is problematic because the backslash character while valid is considered "unwise," according to past RFCs. The recommendation is that it should be escaped or percent-encoded, which is to say represented using the characters "%5C" in place of "\".

[...]

The issue lies elsewhere, in the way Apple's software handles the initial "@" character. It's not clear exactly where this bug lies – because the relevant Apple code isn't open source – but the notification display mechanism and Safari handle the URL string in a different way.

The problem is that the escape character (\) isn't recognised as such in the camera display so the next character is treated as normal. If you gave it a URL with the escape character replaced with two backslashes or a %5C, you'd have much the same problem in Safari too.

Why no system library for normalising URLs, Apple?

UK smut overlord declares age checks should protect users' privates

Re: Time to install a decent VPN

You've changed your tune...

Fleeing Facebook app users realise what they agreed to in apps years ago – total slurpage

It won't slurp your contacts, text messages, call log, etc...

You have an off-by-one error.

Try also Metal and Hermit.

Re: well

Go and check the permissions. It's anything but Lite.

Disconnect/Ublock Origin.

Re: Most people do not care

Well, I guess we have to take this opportunity to get people delete their Facebook account account and apps. If they won't do that, at the very least uninstall/deactivate Facebook apps and install Tinfoil, Metal, Hermit or similar so their contacts are safer from the big slurp.

But let's face it, Android's local backup is still clunky, over-complicated, and incomplete. That's your contacts sorted out, what about the rest?

You should just be able to give a local (S)FTP/SMB drive and from then on it should be as easy and automatic as Google's cloud backup. But it isn't. Odd, that.

Re: well

You didn't install the Messenger app, but did you install the Facebook app or was it included with the phone and not uninstallable?

I bet the first thing it did was upload your phone number even if you had the foresight to disable/uninstall it, and if you decided to leave it there but not log in it's probably still adding to your dark profile, as they call it.

I think it's time each and every EU privacy regulator rip Zuck a new one, the day after the GDPR comes in, except the Irish one of course who knows which side his bread is buttered.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, off you go: Snout of UK space forcibly removed from EU satellite trough

Re: The Swiss are in it

I imagine it comes under one or more of the bilateral agreements they have with the EU, e.g. Science.

UK universities are currently staring over the edge of a precipice because there's no similar agreement.

(I didn't downvote.)

Re: The Swiss are in it

No reason the UK needs to leave. Just more petty politics.

Switzerland is in the EFTA. The UK has decided it won't be.

Re: From the department of bleeding obvious

"The nightmare of cake"...

UK.gov unveils cyber security export strategy – only thing missing is the strategy

Re: Why would anyone else trust UK cybersecurity firms?

Don't forget providers can be forced to install near-realtime not-really-backdoors, which the ECJ deems illegal.

Recording Industry Ass. says vinyl and CD sales beat digital downloads

Re: how are the poets are doing...

Do the RAII break out how much money was paid to the artists by each of these pie slices?

Yes, every time a new piece of music is instantiated.

Corking story: Idiotic smart wine bottle idea falls over, passes out

Re: It shows why freemarkets and capitalism work so well

Practically anything is more useful to society than this... whatever it is.

I didn't mention governments, but if you're talking about governments' track record, other governments apart from yours (which is probably the US or UK) are available.

Re: It shows why freemarkets and capitalism work so well

Well, there was the 6 million dollars of VC funding that could have been more gainfully spent on something more useful to society.

Facebook's inflection point: Now everyone knows this greedy mass surveillance operation for what it is

Re: "Imagine, if you will, a new Android phone....location data..."

I'll give you a tenner if you can find the location permission toggle for Play Services on Android 8.

Re: Limited resources

That's why they add value with the super secret special proprietary algorithm that they're not going to say how it works because it's so good and the competition might copy it.

Re: Regulators to the Rescue (of Zuck)!

Well the EU including the UK are rushing to pass laws equivalent to COPPA since that's what US tech multinationals have implemented worldwide and who's going to tell them now to make an exception for little old them?

Ex-ZX Spectrum reboot man threatens sueball over unpaid invoices

Yeah, cheers Retro Computers Ltd

For taking part of my childhood and wiping your collective arses with it.

Can't you all go forth and multiply now? People might even crowdfund you another £500,000 if you promise never to make another public statement again and never to co-opt part of computing history and sully it with your nonsense again, which is more than you've achieved with the £500,000 you've pissed against the wall.

Zucker for history: What I learnt about Facebook 600 years ago

So about that printing press

You still had to pay the printer to get published, he didn't offer to print it for free if you told him all about yourself, then later on you'd find out he'd sold all the juicy details on to other people while swearing to you that your secrets were safe with him if you ask him to keep them private.

Mozilla pulls ads from Facebook after spat over privacy controls

Re: Problem is Big-Tech is driven by Alpha-Male Sociopaths

I'm inclined to go for sociopath given the dumb fucks quote.

User asked why CTRL-ALT-DEL restarted PC instead of opening apps

Re: Feeling Old...

Those of us who had Amigas don't feel old as it just worked (tm).

YouTube banned many gun vids, so some moved to smut site

So what's stopping them moving to Vimeo or Dailymotion? The lack of apps on smart TVs/consoles? Dailymotion's possibly scatological name?

Five things you need to know about Microsoft's looming Windows 10 Spring Creators Update

Re: Long File Paths ?!

The file name length is limited by the filesystem. The file path length is limited by Microsoft's stupidity.

We sent a vulture to find the relaunched Atari box – and all he got was this lousy baseball cap

"It will do 4K video"

Why? 0.4K video would be about four times more than the VCS ever had.

Programming languages can be hard to grasp for non-English speakers. Step forward, Bato: A Ruby port for Filipinos

Nope, it doesn't work

Step forward Excel once again. Cell formulas and dates are language dependent as are the decimal, thousands, and cell separators in CSVs. It doesn't make things easier, it just makes a mess of everything if you send the file across a border.

Telegram still won't hand over crypto keys it says it does not store

Re: What about WhatsApp et. al?

Since Telegram's encryption is flawed, it probably doesn't matter anyway.

WhatsApp's two-way and group chats are e2e encrypted now although if you want privacy it's probably best to turn off the non-encrypted database backup to Google Drive.

Seen from spaaaaace: Boffins check world's oceans for plastic

Re: Remember back in the day...

"But politicians in Westminster have been more cautious amid lobbying by drinks manufacturers and fears from small shops about the administrative burden."

There you go. We were perhaps in danger of doing something sensible, but Westminster has saved the day yet again.

If only it were all plastic bottles.

How the hell do we even start to clean up microplastics?

Cambridge Analytica CEO suspended – and that's not even the worst news for them today

Re: Why is data on Facebook wide open?

He says he's a third party being used as a scapegoat.

Re: This could be the start of something beautiful

The BBC reporter saying Facebook had changed from a platform to sell products to a way to sell elections (or something similar) was a sight to behold though.

Screw luxury fridges, you can now run webOS on your Raspberry Pi

Your own open source non-cloudy actually secure smart home hub/UI thingy?

We need to talk, Brit Parliamentary committee tells Mark Zuckerberg

Re: About time

Start jailing the local UK directors until Zuk shows up.

Or do something he cares about, like a huge fine which will sort out the national debt once and for all. Although I guess last year Facebook officially had profits of thruppence ha'penny in the UK.

US govt's final bid to extradite Lauri Love kicked into touch

This is ghasting my flabber

a point of law raised by the Crown Prosecution Service, which acted on behalf of US authorities

Is this the way it's done with all extradition requests or is it something special for our special friends across the pond because of our special relationship?

BOOM! Cambridge Analytica explodes following extraordinary TV expose

Re: Proves nothing really

Well be a sweet and watch the C4 News item. It's included in the article.

Re: Proves nothing really

Is there anything they said that didn't happen? It was all recorded.

"His team of 120 is down to 3 people"

Another Facebook employee whose job it was to investigate data breaches also left. He went to somewhere where he could work with a clear conscience... Uber.

If Facebook is worse than Uber God knows what they get up to in there. No wonder they all walked, their job is completely pointless.

Re: I really can't stand facebook

There is an option in WhatsApp to delete your account. It might even work too.

US cops go all Minority Report: Google told to cough up info on anyone near a crime scene

Re: You are aware that...

Cell tower logs are not as precise as location services which gets data from GPS, nearby WiFi, and nearby Bluetooth.

Re: Possibilities

Because Google slurp anything and everything, in all their apps, because it's in their nature.

And that is probably why Google Play Services has no location permission toggle, you have to go to location in settings instead. Notice that that screen says nothing about Google Play Services' location permissions.

No, Stephen Hawking's last paper didn't prove the existence of a multiverse

Re: Awesome

Having more than one universe however, makes perfect sense to me. We're always blabbing about how unfathomably huge our universe is, but huge is such a subjective word, as our universe is only big from our perspective. In the grand scheme of existence, our universe may in fact be very, very small and in that context it's no great leap to imagine that if one universe could spawn, why not more?

Men in Black already has the answer to that.