Posts by Mike 16

Brit brainiacs say they've cracked non-volatile RAM that uses 100 times less power

Re: I'm still waiting...

You will find it filed under "Racetrack: memory (IBM?). It's all the rage, like MRAM which is, IIRC, Thin Film magnetic memory (as used in the early 70s), but "on a chip", or FRAM, again IIRC, Ferroeletric RAM (demonstrated at Bell Labs in the Mid 1960s) "on a chip". This whole "on a chip" thing is like patenting some 500 year old concept, but "on a computer".

Maybe I should look at SAW devices with integrated electronics to implement the EDSAC acoustic delay line memory "on a chip"

German scientists, Black Knights and the birthplace of British rocketry

German Scientists

There's an I.T. Angle as well.

Years ago I attended a talk on Konrad Zuse. IIRC, it was given by his son. Anyway, as Berlin was crumbling, Zuse managed to find transport for his computer (Z3 maybe?) by reverting to its original 'V" prefix. They left Berlin traveling in company with Von Braun, but decided to part company as the territory they were traversing was mostly patrolled by British troops, who Zuse thought might not be too welcoming to Von Braun for some reason. So he split off before the true nature of Allied attitudes toward German scientists was revealed. He ended up in Switzerland and a bit later offered the computer to the Allies, who declined because the guy they asked to evaluate it said there was nothing of interest. Apparently Flaoting point with hidden-bit mantissa,or a programming notation to ease development of algorithms were of no interest.

I believe that machine ended up at ETH where it was used for several years.

Rockstar dev debate reopens: Hero programmers do exist, do all the work, do chat a lot – and do need love and attention from project leaders

Re: Prima Donnas

@Henry Wertz 1

----

A "hero programmer" that knows they are one might be a real prima donna, or legitimately ask for more money or flexibility.

----

You forgot "High Strung", like the underwear designers, as Ray The K (Atari) considered game developers to be.

Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt (literally)

It's a jungle out there when it comes to conservation tech – but there's a cloud for that

Suggestion for staffing

"Primate Programming" (No, not the religious sort) :

http://www.newtechusa.com/PPI/contact-us.asp

Sadly, they have apparently disappeared (Tired of being Code Monkeys, or refusing to work for peanuts?)

but archive.org is your friend.

Academics call for UK's Computer Misuse Act 1990 to be reformed

Does the Vladivostok telephone directory still exist?

Or is the data-sharing agreement between the FSB (KGB,NKVD,OGPU,Cheka, whatever) allow you to just mutter "I should call Vlad" and your phone will figure out which Vlad you mean, given the time of day, your location, what you last ate and drank, and which particular constellation of keywords was in your most recent text message. Maybe also taking into account billboards on buses passing your location and the probability of you having noticed one of your known associates walking on the other side of the street.

In any case, how could any right-minded citizen countenance the untrustworthy fellows blabbing about exactly how that works?

Ollie and Mary?

Or was I the only one to be (mildly) curious whether the Ollie and Mary Whitehouse are related.

No backdoors needed: Apple ditched plans to fully encrypt iCloud backups after heavy pressure from FBI – claim

Re: But

Encrypting your stuff, either with a downloadable app or with something you wrote and have somehow gotten accepted into the app store without being modified in any way?

If it runs on a phone, it is subject to any shenanigans the manufacturer, with or without pressure from Law Enforcement (or criminal gangs) decides to pull. No exceptions. As Clive Robinson (Prolific and _sane_ commenter on Bruce Schneier's blog) often says: "The encryption endpoint must be outside the communication endpoint". That is, if you are holding on to the idea that a device that has unfettered access to everything you read or write, and a variety of communication capabilities, is _unable_ to just send the cleartext wherever... You're holding it wrong.

Of course, if your carrier has disabled USB/WiFi/Bluetooth access to the phone's data connection, as several have, (or the "secure device" has internet access on its own), you're just doomed.

Let’s check in on the .org sale fiasco: Senators say No, internet grandees say Yes – and ICANN pretends there's absolutely nothing to see here

No (R-xx)?

If all six senators are Democrats, the whole idea is dead in the water.

Any merits of the petition are irrelevant. The odds of any action supported only by Dem Senators even being debated (let alone voted on) while there is a GOP Senate majority are slim and none, and that's _before_ any brown envelopes are involved.

With no possible action on the horizon, a "petition" is completely toothless.

EU declares it'll Make USB-C Great Again™. You hear that, Apple?

Thank You!

For the reasoned response.

In my own case, as soon as I read the notion of a high-power DC ring-main I had a vivid image of some

"No need to call an electrician, I can fix this outlet" type setting their family up for ArcAGeddon.

My current home has traces of a former DC distribution system to living and dining rooms, the places most likely to have a (valve) radio. It was fed by an electrolytic rectifier from AC mains, so not quite the terror of "whole house DC, make sure you have exceedingly macho fuses".

Who says HMRC hasn't got a sense of humour? Er, 65 million Brits

Excuses

The robotics student who claimed his homework ate the dog?

WebAssembly: Key to a high-performance web, or ideal for malware? Reg speaks to co-designer Andreas Rossberg

Sandbox?

Let those who have never had to clean up around their cat's litter box decide how effecting sandboxing is.

Unlocking news: We decrypt those cryptic headlines about Scottish cops bypassing smartphone encryption

Awfully cheap?

Maybe Cellbrite is using the increasingly popular "Some telemetry data may be sent to the manufacturer for quality monitoring and product improvement" clause, which means that they get all the personal details the kiosk has ever seen on every phone it has "triaged". Should help them stay solvent even with low sticker prices. Works for ISPs, OSes, and social networks.

ICANN finally reveals who’s behind purchase of .org: It’s ███████ and ██████ – you don't need to know any more

As if I put someone in charge

@doubleslayer

--- As if I put someone in charge of an art museum and that person started selling off the artworks. ---

Let me introduce you to my little friend "deaccessioning".

It's always DNS, especially when you're on holiday with nothing but a phone on GPRS

text-parsing & forms software. In Fortran

I hope that was Fortran 4 or later. Lately I've been messing with some "legacy" (in the H.P. Lovecraft sense) FORTRAN2(-ish) code. I had forgotten just how close to completely uses A-format was back in the day (on a decimal computer, of course).

Valuable personal info leaks from Facebook – not Zuck selling it, unencrypted hard drives of staff data stolen

Free Appraisal

Vouched for by a Fortune 100 company.

Should make it easier to sell the data. Although that assumes that it was either an inside job (like most large crimes) or that some random window-smasher reads ElReg or Financial/IT media.

These are the droids you're looking for: Softbank launches Japan cafe staffed by bots

Whiz?

Anybody else a bit curious what it will be use for as cleaning fluid?

We've heard of spam filters but this is ridiculous: Pig-monkey chimeras developed in a Chinese laboratory

Re: Lots of us are chimeras

Virtually all, if you count the mitochondria (making us eucharyote/bacteria combos), no?

In related news, Apple has sued claiming some of the initial research was based on Apple proprietary techniques used in the Macintosh DogCow.

Internet jerk with million-plus fans starts 14-year stretch for bizarre dot-com armed robbery

A website with ridiculous defences...

Looking for more? How about:

http://loweringthebar.net/

(OK, not _only_ ridiculous defences, but stupid criminals, deranged lawyers, bizarre laws, well, really the name says it all)

(No connection other than satisfied reader for several years)

Advertisers want exemption from web privacy rules that, you know, enforce privacy

not a citizen of the USA...

Didn't you get the memo? U.S. law is applicable _everywhere_ (well, except certain government offices and the residences of various "friends" of course). If you disagree, we have some well-publicized Seals to make you see the error of your ways.

Homeland Security backs off on scanning US citizens, Amazon ups AI ante, and more

Bet they're still going to scan

Everybody. It's just that now when they are caught at it they'll fall back to "rogue employee" or "equipment malfunction"

Still awaiting a convertible leopard.

Oops! folk wisdom is apparently not infallible:

https://www.livescience.com/950-leopard-spots.html

(References Alan Turing, too)

Apparently a leopard _can_ change its spots, but only as part of the maturing process and not subject to voluntary control. Who Knew?

Apple: Mysterious iPhone 11 location pings were because of 'ultra-wideband compliance'

Ultra Wide Band

You mean like the spark-gap transmitter on Titanic?

Tricky VPN-busting bug lurks in iOS, Android, Linux distros, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, say university eggheads

BSD Stacks?

IIRC, the original official MSFT stack (not the various third-party add-ons and TSRs) was based on the BSD networking code.

Is this still true? More importantly, have they tracked bugs introduced in later BSD stacks and "ported" them to the MSFT stack? Or have they introduced their own, different, bugs?

123-Reg is at it again: Registrar charges chap for domains he didn’t order – and didn't want

Re: I had the same experience with 123-reg.

--- You could transfer the domains to another registrar with no downtime, and it would probably take an hour max. ---

Not if they are indeed part of GoDaddy. It took several hours (and chat, email, voice calls) when I moved off them a decade or so ago. And they still send me email once a year or so about how my (nonexistent) account has been suspended because they were unable to charge my (expired) CC.

Just say NoDaddy.

I'm now using DreamHost for domain registration and (light use) hosting. I have no idea if they are best, but they seem adequate, and not being GoDaddy feels like a major benefit.

Trump Administration fast-tracks compulsory border facial recognition scans for all US citizens

Re: State border crossings, too

I first encountered the agricultural inspection stations about 1959. MedFlys were news maybe 30 years later. So I doubt that they were the impetus. If Doc Brown had an effective time machine it could perhaps have been better used _before_ they arrived en masse.

The point about "so many roads" could have some validity. The Rocky Mountains, Sierras, and similar do have the effect of funneling traffic through a very few crossings, making borders of any sort more cost-effective. In contrast, stopping all "smuggling" along/across the Mississippi River would be a lot tougher.

Re: State border crossings, too

@Prinz You must not travel much (at all?) between agricultural states.

At least California and (dimly recall) some of the mountain and midwestern states have these stations.

Or you may travel at the wee hours when (some of?) those border stations are closed (because of course all avocado and ferret smugglers are diurnal).

We took a shot every time Qualcomm said 5G, AI or mobile gaming in its Snapdragon 865, 765 system-on-chip launch...

Re: " 'desktop-level' performance"

I dunno. A few more revs of MacOS and Windows ought to lower the bar for "desktop level" to where a Mobile SOC (and some programmers who give a damn) could meet it.

Apple completes $1bn amputation of Intel's 5G modem biz, Chipzilla out of mobiles for good

Re: "Vincent Owners

Owners of original (pre-1955) Vincents, or the various bikes that use the name (much like Indian, or Atari)?

Astroboffins peeved as SpaceX's Starlink sats block meteor spotting – and could make us miss a killer asteroid

Re: Curiousity

--- Curious why twighlight is better than full darkness. ---

Very few asteroids are fitted with approved lighting, and many of those so fitted have long ago drained their batteries. That said, the discovery of such an asteroid would be pretty cool!

(not to say "Earth Shattering")

Irish eyes aren't smiling after govt blows €1m on mega-printer too big for parliament's doors

Frankly more interesting

Seriously off-topic, but many here seem as in love with printing as I (grew up next to a print shop, remember the Linotype machines, Heidelberg presses, and the arc lamp plate-burner)

If you are one of those, you might like:

https://linotypefilm.com/

PDF?

That would be a bonus for government.

Even if modern PDF readers correctly rendered old PDFs (A function MSFT apparently gave up on by the mid 90s for Word docs), it would still be convenient to quietly change a few "MUST"s to "SHOULD"s to "MAY"s to "MUST NOT"s, suiting changes in policy without the messiness of legislative debate.

Let alone official reports on whether we were (and had always been) at war with Eurasia or Eastasia.

(yes, these things would of course be digitally signed, so only one can play, and certificate expiration would take care of the copies some paranoid had squirreled away.)

Open-source Windows Terminal does the splits: There ain't no party like a multi-pane party

Tab Titles

Did anybody try

printf "\\033]0;My name is Tab\\a"

? (Asking for a friend)

'Ethical' hackers say: It's just hacker. To be one is no longer a bad thing

Left to their own devices

--- Ethical hackers only hack on their own devices or ... ---

Trouble is (and I say this as someone called a hacker by others before the media got hold of the term), there are fewer and fewer cases of _anybody_ actually owning the devices currently in their homes or on their persons (but definitely not under their control). Imagine the trouble Winston Smith might have gotten into for even trying to find the off switch on "his" Telescreen.

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: A quirky investigation into why AI does not always work

Re: The food example is perfect.

As voiced (roughly) by Hubert Dreyfus over fifty years ago: AI will not happen to a useful extent until a computer has a body with similar senses to humans. There is so much of what it means to be human embedded in our physical form that is ignored in "brain in a bucket" AI.

The result of our current path is that _if_ a general intelligence arise in a computer, it will be alien to us and vice-versa. (As one example, how we we teach it about pain without setting up some very awkward conversations with our future robot overlords?)

So how about we wander into the labs that are trying to communicate with our Cetacean or Cephalopod friends? Why wait until it's a matter of wondering if AI will understand us or nuclear weapons first?

Absolutely smashing: Musk shows off Tesla's 'bulletproof' low-poly pickup, hilarity ensues

I was looking more for

The TRUCKLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R35gWBtLCYg

Halfords invents radio signals that don't travel at the speed of light

Canned Worms?

https://zoomed.com/can-o-worms/

Apparently also available on Amazon (the site or the river, who knows?)

That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman

Re: Subliminal Messages

What with everything on the Internet today, you should look into

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1097

Although that refers to Telnet, perhaps the next HTTP standard could work it in. Probably save a couple meg of JS per page.

Moby or not Moby. That is the question: Docker devs debate fate of unloved rebranding

256K of 36-bit words?

A piece of modern software (beyond "Hello, Wor" run in that little?

I do wonder if Levis has complained about "Docker"

No wonder cops are so keen on Ring – they can slurp your doorbell footage with few limits, US senators complain

Hyper Local?

Around here (small town with rural on two sides), "local" seems to be interpreted as "shares one zip-code (Postal code)", which means coyotes and bobcats living 10 miles away could be counted as my neighbors (if they had a mailbox and some disposable income).

Video-editing upstart bares users' raunchy flicks to world+dog via leaky AWS bucket

Re: Because hipsters know best

-- If they are a British company, they still fall under GDPR. --

For a while. But the Big Johnson is going to fix all that, soon-ish.

Satellite operators' shares plummet as FCC plumps for public 5G spectrum auctions

Impact on reporting

Might be considered another good reason to shut it down. The way it seems most governments around the globe are moving, making it harder on reporters not controlled by said governments, _plus_ the extra cash from mobile operators, could be considered a "win-win".

And of course being able to watch HD cat videos (if within a few hundred meters of a 5G mast) is _clearly_ more important than finding out the tanks have rolled.

A bridge over troubled water: Intel teases Ponte Vecchio, the GPU brains in US govt's 1-exaFLOPS Aurora supercomputer

Godwin and Boris

--- It’s literally like Hitler and Brexit. ---

Wasn't the Leader more like in favor of a Bunion (Britain in Union)? I mean the one who steamrolled Chamberlain, not the one who has been renewing the fire insurance on the houses of Parliament.

Physicists are rather giddy after creating a rare type of laser using laughing gas

Seeing through clothes?

This sort of apparatus has been commercially available since at least the Eisenhower administration, if the advertisements in my childhood comics are to be believed. Santa wouldn't bring me one, though, and I expect the request was part of the reason I made the "naughty" list.

White Screen of Death: Admins up in arms after experimental Google emission borks Chrome

Full Disclosure

That disclosure will be written by team of lawyers who have decades of experience writing patent applications and End User License Agreements. Which is to say they will be completely incomprehensible to any person using actual English (or other non-legalese language).

As I have remarked before, Humpty Dumpty ("When I use a word...") is the patron saint of corp-speak.

In your face! US Senate mulls bipartisan federal law on police facial recognition use

The neighbors

-- I'm glad we were able to move to a wooded rural area where we can't even see the neighbors. --

You might need to be on watch for any neighbors that are coked-up wild boars.

Player three has entered Cray's supercomputing game: First AMD Epyc, now Fujitsu's Arm chips

Re: Multi-Physics

Well, there are at least Classical Physics (Newton), Biblical Physics (Joshua), Quantum Physics (Barnum), and Political Physics (your choice), off the top of my head.

To avoid that Titanic feeling, boffins create an unsinkable hydrophobic metal with laser power

Re: antifoul

--- the paint traditionally used on barns ---

is/was traditionally made from milk and blood (at least in some cultures, IIRC) The interlinked proteins provided the binder, and red came from the iron in blood. Both substances can be commonly found near barns.

What do you get when you allegedly mix Wireshark, a gumshoe child molester, and a court PC? A judge facing hacking charges

"Her computer"?

How many here work for firms (or government agencies) that consider the computer you were issued and which is maintained and updated by the I.T. department, to be _your_ computer?

Most folks have to content themselves with being "reasonably comfortable" with some corp/office nerd harvesting contacts and passwords or turning on the web-cam and microphone for giggles.

Microsoft welcomes ancient Project app to the 365 family, meaning bleak future for on-prem

Plan 9?

Why would they treat Project different than Windows? It will just be named Plan 10.

But will they "Go to 11"?

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

Dim Memory

I recall talking to one of these pioneers after he gave a talk on ARPANet history, and getting a bit more info about that message. Yes, this is hearsay and an unreliable memory at work.

As he told it, the issue was that (at least) one of the nodes involved had concocted the network interface to the OS with a slightly modified serial-port driver. There was apparently some sort of race condition in that driver, that had never been noticed, because the window of vulnerability was so short that it could not be hit with a max data rate of 9600bps (or whatever), but when the network interface had inhaled and digested a whole packet and then hit it with a slug of characters in rapid succession, "Bad Things Happened" (tm)

Stuff like that (from mods not anticipated by the original coders) has always been with us. Finding and fixing it in just a few days impressed me.

Franco-stein's on the move: Spanish dictator turfed out of decadent mountaintop mausoleum

Re: Teaching

@james_smith:

Do you recall the name of the book on origins of the Great War that came out after a bunch of stuff was de-classified because it had reached 100 years of age? I saw a generally favorable review in The Economist, but lost that issue and forgot the title and author. Considering how much today looks like the inter-war period, it might make a valuable lesson.