Posts by Version 1.0

Vint Cerf suggests GDPR could hurt coronavirus vaccine development

RE: The owner of the data gets to decide.

Nice try, but in the world today the company using the data get to decide what counts as "malicious" use - remember "Don't be evil"? The GDPR has not been effective, it's just something that corporate lawyers work around... "That's not your data sir, it's our data, we collected it."

I suggest that we make it OK for everyone to share their personal data but immediately close down and jail any individual, company, organization, or political party that uses personal information in a way that any court decides was not intended by the person making the information available.

This would put the the legal devil on the backs of everyone processing the data.

If you don't LARP, you'll cry: Armed fun police swoop to disarm knight-errant spotted patrolling Welsh parkland

Re: Plague Doctors?

At least he didn't end up saying "Tis but a scratch"

Stop tracking me, Google: Austrian citizen files GDPR legal complaint over Android Advertising ID

It will fix nothing

You can reset the Advertising ID every time you turn the phone on but the phone is full of cookies tracking you without the Advertising ID. Users are just sheep feeding the advertising companies.

Briny liquid may be more common on Mars than once thought, unlikely to support life as we know it

"unlikely to support life as we know it"

So life could be there but it's unlikely that the first humans on mars will be able to catch it and eat it. But let's face it, who thought that there could be life living deep under the ocean on volcanic vents? The idea was thought to be just crazy 50 years ago - but not today.

Wanna be a developer? Your coworkers want to learn Go and like to watch, er, Friends and Big Bang Theory

Re: Correlation and causation

Happier workers are paid by the hour.

Users of Will.i.am's Wink IoT hub ask 'Where is the love?' as they're asked to pay for a new subscription service

TANSTAAFL

Maybe he should offer users a choice? Give them free usage but change the small print to allow him to sell every action to advertising companies? That's how we get "free" internet search services, "free" email, "free" web sites offering news etc... If he documents all the options that the world uses, I think everyone would be happy to pay a small fee to preserve their privacy within the services.

DBA locked in police-guarded COVID-19-quarantine hotel for the last week shares his story with The Register

Re: What a shit hole

Please read the history books and discover how we created Australia..

But note that the UK is now proposing the same thing. At this point it is just Quarantine Theater, Typhoid Mary would have sailed through modern quarantine efforts and gone straight back to work.

Fancy some post-weekend reading? How's this for a potboiler: The source code for UK, Australia's coronavirus contact-tracing apps

Another problem for the solution?

Contact tracing is an old technique for dealing with disease outbreaks - so now we are being told that technology can solve the problem? Maybe it can but we're going to have to test it first and show that it works before it's any use at all - right now it's just another idea with zero evidence that Bluetooth contact tracing in this form will medically function. I know that it sounds like a good idea and it's got a better chance than drinking bleach, but maybe we'll have a working app that actually provides the functionality that we need in a couple of years - or maybe not. No way to know for a long time.

Source code for seminal adventure game Zork circa-1977 exhumed from MIT tapes, plonked on GitHub

Nice!

I used to run the DECUS version on my PDP-11/23+ under RSX-11M, it was fun - I'll have to go look in the cupboards, I saw the map that I drew of the land about 20 years ago.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

MicroCloudy, it rains sometimes.

Apple owes us big time for bungled display-killing cable design in MacBook Pro kit, lawsuit claims

SNAFU

People think that because they are paying a lot of money for the equipment then it must be extra special good and well made. Sorry but that's not the case, the Apple software environment is good and very user orientated but the hardware is just hardware, made abroad in the same factory that builds the rest of the junk we all buy ... and replace from time to time.

FYI: Your browser can pick up ultrasonic signals you can't hear, and that sounds like a privacy nightmare to some

baa baa baa baa

We're just sheep in the eyes of phones and advertising companies, if we're lucky we just get shorn, otherwise we'll be served for dinner.

Australian contact-tracing app sent no data to contact-tracers for at least ten days after hurried launch

Re: Can't be explained by incompetence

Think about writing code to run in an environment where you have more than fifty different phone manufacturers hardware configurations and every user has their own unique set of applications installed and running ... OK, so "Hello Swirled" but be easy to do (oh shite, there's a bug there too) but writing a complex app to track all those different Bluetooth devices and getting to work securely straight out of the box in a short time is impossible. Essentially they have just demonstrated this.

Senior MP tells UK Defence Committee on 5G security: Russia could become China's cyber-attack dog

Hanlon's razor

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

Could this cyber shite be happening? Well it could be, but we could stop it by building our networks ourselves and doing a good job at testing them before they are setup - any stupidity would then be our own and we could learn from it. Personally my dislike of the 5G networks is that, if implemented, then our phone companies will be profiting by selling all our personal usage and location data before Google does. So it will be sold twice.

The iMac at 22: How the computer 'too odd to succeed' changed everything ... for Apple, at least

Re: Context of floppy disc drive

"-Floppy discs were unreliable." but zip drives weren't? (icon)

Lead times double on network cat Arista's hottest selling lines as COVID-19 disrupts supply chain

Re: Thailand has 3 cases today, USA had 25000

How do you defeat Covid 19? - the same way we deal with its relatives, building the ability to quickly test for the virus and it's antibodies , and generate a vaccine that anyone can get in a second or two regardless of their financial status.

We're a little while from this point but the evidence suggests that we're going to get there. Like the flu, it may mutate slightly to a different strain but we're been dealing wit the flu doing that for years now.

Essentially it will be defeated if countries decide to stop shouting at each other and simply work together to maintain vaccines to keep people healthy, even if they are idiots - if we had a vaccine today I would give it to Trump and Boris to stop them from infecting Biden and Starmer.

'A' is for ad money oddly gone missing: Probe finds middlemen siphon off half of online advertising spend

Re: Useful summary of the reason

Good read, it explains the way I've seen things for years - I was going to say that advertising is like cocaine but these days it's nowhere near as much fun. However the dealers and the middlemen make the money, the folks growing it get bugger all if they are lucky and the end-user is just a pocket being picked.

When advertising was first seen it was all about trying to publicize the benefits and advantages of your products. These days it's all about grabbing money, the quality and functionality of the products is irrelevant. If you think my comparison of cocaine to advertising is bad then look at the money that all the advertising companies like Google and Facebook make every day - it's all legal (and tax free) ... a mafia wet dream.

As Brit cyber-spies drop 'whitelist' and 'blacklist', tech boss says: If you’re thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness gone mad, don’t bother

LOL - you can tell a lot about the readers when you look at the upvotes and the downvotes for a post on El Reg.

I'm sure they'd be ecstatic to find out that the Government has gone with removing 'blacklist'.

If you are white then you can now say that the problem doesn't exist anymore, but if you are black you will still get shot if the cop thinks that you might be threatening them when you reach into your pocket for you drivers licence. You really think this solves anything for black people? It's a white solution.

Apple on 2020 so far: OK, so iPhone sales are a bit glum. Wearables, music, apps, vids to the rescue... almost

Apple fix coming soon

An update that drains the battery and a new phone with a bigger battery - sales will boom again.

International space station connects 100Mbps symmetric space laser ethernet using Sony optical disc tech

Maybe the ISS is only a short range?

We developed the tech for laser-disks at 1mm distances and now we've reached the ISS ... meanwhile we've been listening for alien radio communications for years and we have heard nothing - maybe we should be looking instead of listening?

What's worse than an annoying internet filter? How about one with a pre-auth remote-command execution hole and there's no patch?

Re: Huh

Code testing for years has always been to "show that it works" - never that it can't be hacked.

ICANN finally halts $1.1bn sale of .org registry, says it's 'the right thing to do' after months of controversy

Re: What's Really Behind This?

Or go to church and look at the children painted on the ceiling? Do we need to ban Rembrandt and shred all his non-PC artwork now?

In trying times like these, it's reassuring to know you can still get pwned five different ways by Adobe Illustrator files

Re: "This update resolves critical vulnerabilities"

And every time you update Adobe products they serve you an advert - so vulnerabilities are actually a form of cheap advertising and provide Adobe with your IP address and details of the applications that you are still using. No wonder they keep updating.

Cheshire Police celebrates three-year migration to Oracle Fusion by lobbing out tender for system to replace it... one year later

Open Source would solve this problem

Making the database open source would mean that all police departments would know that they were operating in the public eye to a degree - I'm talking about the code, not the data stored, but since the database structure would be public it would essentially "document" what was being stored, pushing the government towards doing the right thing and making it harder to be secretive about how law and order is supported by the information collected.

Process miner Celonis pushes out application tools to tighten up how they're used in anger

The PHB is going to go for this

While I can see that it could solve problems for a lot of situations, essentially it is putting the PHB on the path of avoiding have to think out any new methods or proposals. Corporate business management? There's an app for it now.

Prank warning: You do know your smart speaker's paired with Spotify over the internet, don't you?

Re: IoV

Have you been joining Boris's Zoom conferences on Internet security again?

Salt peppered with holes? Automation tool vulnerable to auth bypass: Patch now

I've not seen this problem before

A login vulnerability that exposes everything? When has this ever happened in the past? What a surprise, I can't believe that anyone would create login code and not thoroughly test it for remote access failings before releasing it.

Oh wait, I've been cleaning my system out with IPA alcohol, it seems to be disinfacting my memory, I'll get back to work, writing the code for our new corporate remote access login.

I'm doing this to stop humans ripping off brilliant ideas by computers and aliens, says guy unsuccessfully filing patents 'invented' by his AI

Re: "...only natural persons may be named as an inventor in a patent application."

The rational behind this stops you from filing a patent on something that your kid creates, "because I created the kid".

ATLAS flubbed: Comet heading our way takes one look at Earth, self-destructs into house-sized chunks

"reliable comets"

It's mostly due to everyone leaving their lights on at night, when we were kids you could see an entire sky full of stars, even the milky way almost every cloudless night. But nowadays there so much light that you can only see the moon and Venus most nights, occasionally a few other objects delivering Internet service. It's hard to even see the meteor storms most years - I haven't see a meteor in 20 years since I spent a few days camping in the middle of nowhere on the Mexican side of Rio Grande.

Hey bud – how the heck does that stay in your ear? Google emits latest Pixel Buds, plus extra bloatware if you have the matching phone

It's installed on my phone even though I have never used earphones with the phone - but the app is busy using battery and memory. They need to rename it to the Google Toilet Paper App and then people will stop complaining.

I think that the entire app update process is part of Google's user monitoring - if your phone updates then Google know who's up and running and the update process can share a little data while nobody's looking, we just think it's "security" but most Google apps update every couple of days - could they really be written that badly that an update is needed that often?

Snapchat domain squatter loses comedy £1m URL sellback attempt

The guy who registered whitehouse.com originally was making about a million a year when he sold the site, mostly by serving adverts to bad typists.

There are plenty of sites with common names that post completely unrelated contents - do you really think that Boris owns (or should sue) the company running the Tory web site ?

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

Re: No login details or authentication of any sort was needed to view and search the live system

Blaming the bosses and sending them to jail isn't going to fix the problem - the data will still be collected and occasionally the PFY will forget to click on "Save" when the system is being reconfigured.

Quit complaining about this - the benefit is that everyone now can see what the government (and also the companies involved) are collecting. What's the chance that the data collection and processing companies are selling information to advertisers - "anonymized" of course but someone at this address recently drove to the local IKEA store ...

But maybe firing the police chief will have the bonus resulting in the replacement hiring a dozen PFYs to check security every day ... and work on selling the data to a few new social media companies.

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word

Re: Kerning

The "fix" is to write in 12-point font and make the period (sic) 18 point. It will look the same but almost double the space following.

Re: Kerning

If you are at school and writing a term paper that has to be 10 pages long then a double space after each full stop might save your scrawny little ass some days.

What's next?

will word decide that upper case letters are not necessary, removing the upper case characters would free up ascii space for more emojis.

Watch now the three UFO videos uncovered by Blink-182 star – and today officially released by the Pentagon

Gas leaks? Aliens flying powered by farts, is it just a large bird that ate beans for lunch?

Travel advice for the week ahead is just: STOP

Re: my registry is probably the thing of nightmares

"Windows was always fucked up. It should never have been allowed."

FTFY

We could have pwned Microsoft Teams with a GIF, claims Israeli infosec outfit

Re: So ..

So who's actually surprised? It's just Windows after all, we know that security has never been an issue for Microsoft, they are too busy adding new features and collecting data to worry about security.

Downvote this post if you believe that Microsoft cares more about security than collecting your data.

Dumpster diving to revive a crashing NetWare server? It was acceptable in the '90s

Re: Doffs Hat

It's an excellent example of what you do when you are kid starting out in IT, when you get to be an old fart you just order a new system.

Wake up, Neo: Microsoft mulls using your brain waves or body heat to mine crypto-currency while viewing ads

What's the next patent application?

File a patent to feed people beans and then reclaim the methane to generate "green" energy for the national grid? Beer might work too.

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

Re: Elevator interface

I wonder if this might explain the problems with the Post Office software declaring that post masters were steeling money? Maybe they prototyped it in a building with stairs and then installed it in a building with lifts?

We're in a timeline where Dettol maker has to beg folks not to inject cleaning fluid into their veins. Thanks, Trump

What is it about USians that they keep voting in complete morons - in fact Hillary got more votes than Trump but the Republicans have been redrawing the voting boundary's for years (it's called Gerrymandering) so you see a lot of states with a majority of Democrat votes but a majority of Republican senators and congressmen. For example Louisiana has a Democrat governor but Republicans hold majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.

Plus there's the Will Rodgers quote which has defined American politics for years, "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."

Word Salad? You mean like "Crazy Orange Village Idiot Disease"?

Billionaires showered with wealth as experts say global economy set for long and deep recession

Re: whenever governments grab MORE control...

And the rest of us are going to have to find the money to pay for all of this - everywhere governments that have bitched about the opposition spending too much money and failing to balance their budgets are now giving money out to their friends with nobody ever suggesting how we're going to pay for it.

Those poor billionaires will probably end up being just millionaires while the rest of us eat our cats and dogs and start cooking bat soup ... now where did this virus come from?

Work from home surge may work in Wi-Fi 6's favour, reckons analyst house

Re: Wired every time

I dumped cables after the tree outside the house was struck by lightening and every network port fried. I now run fibre and Wi-Fi.

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Re: Better

It's an excellent explanation of how crappy Windows is these days when I'm upvoting bombastic bob again!

Re: Bring back win98 UI

The GUI is one thing that just sits on top of the Operating System, users should be able to chose the GUI they want without caring which version of Windows is running.

Re: This is exactly what the internet was designed for

I agree, it's probably the video that started YouTube's popularity, Hippos Farting - I'm not going to watch that again.