Posts by Neil 44

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Re: Marketing

Isn't the implication that it would also produce "friendly fire" and take down our drones too?

EU gives staff 'burner phones, laptops' for US visits

Crown tattoos

Don't Real Madrid supports take risks too?

https://www.kpbs.org/news/politics/2025/03/27/deported-over-a-tattoo-lawyer-claims-client-is-not-a-gang-member

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

How can they wind back history?

We have a load of stuff that is stored encrypted already with tools that don't have back-doors.

We already have the tools that will encrypt without back doors.

How are "they" going to make us give up on the old tools? Will we have to decrypt and re-encrypt everything - if we even can (eg shaddow credential stores...)

Even if "they" say that all of the communications products have to have back doors (and that they won't talk to "old" versions that don't), then if I can send a file, I can send a file encrypted with the old tools that the authorities won't be able to read.

Even PGP for email has been around since 1991

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Compatible processor list too short

My work laptop has TPMS 2.0, but "only" a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7600U CPU @ 2.80GHz, 2901 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s) - which is not on the approved list. It works fine in Win10, so I don't doubt it also would on 11.

Wonder if they will give it to me when I retire (which will probably be before September) so I can just put a distro of Linux on it that takes my fancy (maybe even more than one!)? (or maybe bodge it so that Win11 installs...)

I feel a lot of hardware waste coming along - how does that play with WEEE?

AI revoir, Lucie: France's answer to ChatGPT paused after faux pas overdrive

Lost in translation?

"Cat I've farted", probably won't be appealing to the French!

(I heard tales that GPT telecoms equipment didn't sell well in French speaking domains for that very reason!)

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Exactly!

Brave browser : new incognito window with TOR.

Bob identifies as your uncle and I'm in Germany ( or Austria next time I connected)...

It may even put me in the land of the free (unless you want TicToc!)

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

How long before they are going to be able to target (and neutralise...) satellites?

On a more serious note: are the lasers green or orange so as to be able to distinguish the goodies from the baddies?

Starlink gets FCC nod for space calls, but can't dial up full power

The FCC does not regulate the spectrum globally!

1915Mhz in the UK has the entry

1.9149 - 1.92 GHz Mobile Spectrum Access Hutchison 3G

in the OFCOM allocation tables.

I'm sure there would be similar allocations in other countries that the Musklink uplinks would interfere with (or that would interfere with the uplink)

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

My wife's 10 year old Prius Plug-in still does about 9 miles on battery only (if the weather is reasonably warm - the ICE cuts in if you want the heater or if it decides the drive is too cold...)

Its almost enough to get into town and back home again but not quite.

The newer versions do 20+ miles on electric only

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Maybe Wiwynn wish they could slow down kit that is in dispute....

https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/18/wiwynn_vs_x/

Three, Voda promise £10-a-month or below mobile tariffs in bid to sway CMA on merger

Re: How about "No"?

European Roaming was why we moved from 3 to Smarty (who still provide it) - which now costs £7/month for 16Gb...

It pre-dates EE merging / being taken over by BT: Orange should not have been allowed to merge with One2One/T-Mobile which gave them a dominant position

Did you hear the one about the help desk chap who abused privileges to prank his mate?

Re: CP/M

Likewise for TRS80s there was DROSSDOS..

http://www.trs-80.org/news-from-kitchen-table-software-inc/

Telcos scolded for unwanted erection of utility poles in race to wire up Britain

Re: Like any other superhighway

And, of course, you couldn't phone your sharing party!

(Remembering having party lines growing up - and being shocked to discover that the owner of our party was killed in the Kings Cross fire...)

The fingerpointing starts as cyber incident at London transport body continues

Pro-Tyre also are claiming they were hacked yesterday - just when I'm trying to get some tyres from them!

BOFH: The true gravity of the Boss and the 3-coffee problem

Re: The benefits of caffeine

the drink of choice used to be Mountain Dew

AI Octopus predicts results of Euro 2024: It isn't looking good for England

Purple LED

That will have made the little purple LED flicker a lot!

Voyager 1 regains sanity after engineers patch around problematic memory

Re: Difficult to comprehend that...

Not sure what the processor(s) will be, but many of that generation (I'm thinking Z80, as that's what I learnt) traded "jump" space with functionality. Eg, the Z80 had a JR instruction was 2 bytes and could jump +-128 bytes. Whereas the JP instruction took 3 bytes - but could jump anywhere in the 64kb address space.

JR was your friend if you had either limited memory or code that needed to relocate as it didn't contain an absolute address

US senator wants to put the brakes on Chinese EVs

It has been reported that there are spare parts problems with some of the Chinese-made vehicles - to the extent that insurance companies are not wanting to insure them!

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-insurance/362519/exclusive-some-chinese-cars-almost-uninsurable-parts-and-repair-support

But the vehicles knowing usage and reporting back to who knows whom might be an issue in some countries - what is sauce for Huawei is sauce for BYD too...

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

Re: Oh yeah !

The only board members who would survive would be those who don't have phones that do wireless charging... (Or those who don't have mobile phones full stop!)

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

Re: Who are their lawyers?

I believe people born on the island of Ireland or who are first generation descendants of people born on the island of Ireland are automatically Irish citizens. They can apply for a passport proving that they are.

Second generation of people born on the island of Ireland can apply to be Irish citizens. I can't remember if their parents have to have claimed their passports for their application.

My mother-in-law was born in Ireland and my other half has claimed her Irish passport a couple of years ago in addition to her British one - so now she uses whichever is the more convenient!

The Land Before Linux: Let's talk about the Unix desktops

Even Microsoft had a UNIX!

Don't forget Xenix - which was a System III. We did have one machine that ran it...

Personality, I cut my teeth on Edition VII then System V on Interdata/Perkin Elmer/Concurrent minis rather than desktops. Then Masscomp came into the fold with more desktops running RTU ((Real Time Unix) which was a System V / BSD blend as far as superstructure

British railway system is getting another excuse for delays – solar storms

Re: "constructed digital models"

I'm sure, with appropriate negotiation and some funding, they could do a real-world test on one of the heritage railways that have reasonable lengths of line...

(it probably wouldn't be safety critical either as the signals and points are usually controlled by people rather than automation on heritage railways!)

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

The Register ....

.... is upgraded / rebranded to The Register-64

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's ejection sparks theories as odd as some ChatGPT output

According to ChatGPT, he's still in post

I asked gptchatly . com (which is ChatGPT without signing in)

"Who is Sam Altman"

and got back:

"Sam Altman is an entrepreneur, investor, and the CEO of OpenAI."

I suppose 2 out of 3 ain't bad...

3D printer purchases could require background checks under proposed law

Feeding the 2nd hand or grey market?

Will sellers of second-hand kit (eg eBay or its advertisers) have to perform these background checks?

Will the checks have to made by a seller in, say, New Jersey before they send a kit of parts for a 3D printer to an address in New York? Lots of people in that area do "inter-state" shopping often because of the variations in sales taxes...

IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you

C++

I remember the first C++ environments: the C++ *Pre-processor* took your C++ code and "generated" C code which could then be compiled.

The C code wasn't "human readable"

I'm imagining what the Java generated will look like and how non-maintainable it will be!

Re: Is it GOTO or COMEFROM

I seem to remember that ALTER was an implementation of what became GO TO .... DEPENDING ON .... on most later platforms.

Even that will be a challenge to convert!!

Maybe if my pension fund is a little short I should go back to my first profession : COBOL Programmer!

BOFH: You can be replaced by a robot or get your carbon footprint below Big Dave's

Nothing new here!

Jeremy Bentham (d1832) has been attending University College, London meetings for ages....

See https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/08/the-skeleton-of-jeremy-bentham.html

Dialup-era developer writes ChatGPT client for Windows 3.1

Remembering a long time ago - pre-PC era - to the TRS-80, there was DrossDos which tended to be insulting: https://willus.com/trs80/?-a+1+-p+2330+-f+4

A toast to being in the right place at the right time

Re: He's toast

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

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

No AI already

I'm surprised that they haven't already got AI in the office....

- detect someone being escorted towards a high window

- erase all the CCTV and other movements within the building automatically

- automatically open the window so as to not leave pesky fingerprints

- call the cleanup crew

The future of digital healthcare could be a two-metre USB cable

We get texts with links from our medical centre to join video consults.... Call it back from the phone and use the phone's cameras

I've also used #LiveDroid on my phone to be a handy wireless IP camera...

Ford in reverse gear over AM radio removal after Congress threatens action

Re: The only question remaining is ...

I seem to remember (also many years ago) driving Anchorage to (almost - got to North Pole!) Fairbanks and could hit seek and not finding any AM stations either!!

Hey Siri, use this ultrasound attack to disarm a smart-home system

Access from outside?

Could you play "unlock door" to an ultrasonic transducer stuck onto a window so that people in the room wouldn't know the door was unlocked?

Seems a bit risky because I guess even a normal speaker set so that it would vibrate the glass to transmit sound would make a door very vulnerable

Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed

John Dear Tractors...

.... stolen from Ukraine spring to mind

What you need to know about the real-time capable edition of Ubuntu 22.04

Nothing new in "Real Time" Unix...

... Massachusetts Computer Corporation (Masscomp) (later merged with Concurrent Computer Corp) had it in the early 1980s on 68k hardware.... ("RTU" - which was a System V derivative)

New research aims to analyze how widespread COBOL is

Re: it lives!

To be fair to MicroFocus' Cobol, it could be configured at compile/run time to support a number of different dialects - in some of which the syntax of verbs were different!

The first 3 lines and the last were all optional!

Twenty years on, command-line virus scanner ClamAV puts out version 1

Re: It's on VirusTotal

There's a whole world of "experimental" signature sets for ClamAV - some of which VirusTotal may be using

BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons

The Baldric trajectory of intelligence...

There has been research on missing teaspoons...

https://institutions.newscientist.com/article/mg23030751-500-feedback/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1322240/

AI detects 20,000 hidden taxable swimming pools in France, netting €10m

Solar pool cover

You can get solar blankets for pools that are black (they are usually blue...) - that ought to fool the AI!

Fibre broadband uptake in UK lags behind OECD countries

Re: It's all about cost

Do you pay a "line rental" on top of that?

My FTTP is £26 in total all in with Vodafone with a static IP and a landline number....

Re: It's of no interest to me.

We have noticed it when we have been trying to have 2x Zoom/Teams/Skype/Webex/... calls at the same time for work/volunteering/etc. My wife has spent A LOT of time on Teams calls for work in the last 2 years

Up to now I've had to schedule round her meetings or participate on Zoom by phoning in (stopping my phone using WiFi). A single video-capable call uses 0.4 - 0.7Mbs upload and that's all we had and even then it wasn't very reliable.

5G is unlikely to ever reach rural areas!

Emergency phone connections....

Something that has come up locally is the inability of FTTP to support an emergency phone in the event of a power cut...

The area in question is in a valley and doesn't get mobile coverage (on any network) reliably - so that isn't a reliable alternative.

There are stories that "someone" - don't know if it is the fibre provider or the phone service provider - has to provide a battery-backed solution (that's assuming that the fibre hasn't broken as well!), but I've not seen any evidence of it...

(I admit our new ONT and router are both plugged into a UPS which will keep them running for a few hours!)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-59564480 has reported the issue in the North East with Storm Arwen

Re: Doh!

We have an "XO" phone line, so no fibre to the cabinet as the exchange is about a mile away - but we have just had FTTP installed by OpenReach : so much better than 6Mbs/0.5Mbs!

Only problem has been keeping our 25-year old phone number (Vodafone sales got it wrong and suggested getting a new number then porting the old to the line when its all working - which technically they can't manage to do) - but changing numbers will drop all the spam calls about our solar panels, insulation, domestic appliance insurance etc (not to mention unexpected internet activity being flagged up!)

I started the project for the 42 premises involved in October 2020. We had the relevant number signed up by the end of Jan 2021 with vouchers issued. OpenReach came and strung the fibre between the poles and dug up the drives of the 3 houses that were fed underground by direct buried cables (including mine!) and a section of the verge to connect up a couple of poles that were again fed by direct-buried feeder... Just after Christmas they were pretty much finished (give or take one rotten pole that still hasn't been replaced - so the people off that pole still can't order!) and we could order. Order placed and installed and working on 20Jan2022.

Not sure how the grant situation will play out as I'm pretty sure there were 2x voucher holders served by the "still not working" pole. It does have the fibre distribution hubs tied to the bottom of it, so at least when they replace the pole, it'll all be installed and good to go

Nobody cares about DAB radio – so let's force it onto smart speakers, suggests UK govt review

Re: Dab is dead

Thumbs up for the iRiver H320 - Rockboxed?

(I think the CF disk replacement in mine has fallen out of its carrier - must get around to taking it apart and fixing it!)

Re: UKGov Nonsense as usual

Along with Caroline, North Sea International you mean? Or do you mean BBC Radio London?