Posts by Gordon 10

GCHQ is having problems meeting Osborne's 2020 recruitment target

Re: Last time i checked

Surf?

3,000 kids' sketches to fly with exoplanet hunter

Has Cheops got a warp drive?

That binary system look a bit too close for comfort.

3D printers set for lift off? Yes, yes, yes... at some point in the future

Re: Consumer device?

Eh? Where did you get the impression that a basic 3D printer costs any more than a basic Lathe? there are a number of models under a grand.

Eat your greens, FCC tells ISPs with new broadband "nutrition label"

Certainly sir. We'll install it today and it'll be going rotten by the end of the week.

Did hacktivists really just expose half of Turkey's entire population to ID theft?

In fact most often:

:%s/hacktivist/wanker/

regardless of whichever ideology they claim to follow.

Your pointy-haired boss 'bought a cloud' with his credit card. Now what?

But I don't think any of this is new. Its why Central IT exists. The labels on the fads may change but not the actual work required.

Deployment is for amateurs, enterprise integration is why we're professionals.

Flying Finns arm octocopter with chainsaw

Landing that bad boy is going to be fun.

Ooops - there go the saw horses. Ooops there goes me arms.

Mines the one with a pinned sleeve.

Microsoft smells Musk, splashes on 'Mune' space program

Re: Sound of zero hands clapping

Depends if one half of you is in direct sunlight you are as likely to boil as freeze.

Done making the big stuff better? The path to Apple's mid-life crisis

Re: Yes, we've seen peak AAPL

none of which seems to have remotely impacted their share price.

Is the above meaningless in the grand scheme of things or sign of internal rot? Im not sure sure. What I am sure about is $150bn in the bank gives you a lot of leeway for mistakes and about-face's

Hell look how MS and Oracle have managed to endure with a fraction of that cash pot.

My prediction - Apple buys Tesla in the next 3 years, with either Musk bought out to run SpaceX or tipped to replace Cook and invigorate a mature product line with some monomaniacal special sauce, given that he's probably the closest living thing to Steve Jobs.

Elon Musk takes wraps off planet-saving Model 3 vapourmobile

@Neil

You do get that the infrastructure only has to increment as fast as electric car ownership right? Thats very manageable imo.

Hope for Hitomi after tumbling space 'scope phones home

Yea I thought Japanese lithium batteries were meant to be the good ones?

'Planet nine' theory boosted by Kuiper Belt Object with odd orbit

Anyone feel a pulp scifi novel coming on?

It came from planet X.....

Hortonworks fires up Centrica contract: Gassy client to probe users' usage

"the largest live operational HDP cluster"

Numbers please otherwise this is FUD/Marketing. I notice they deliberately only reference their own deployments, conveniently excluding all the CDH deployments out there. Which may or may not be bigger I grant you.

Paris coz she's easily impressed by big numbers.

Apple's fruitless rootless security broken by code that fits in a tweet

Not clear

From this sarky (ok its El Reg) write up whether the tweeted code requires root (I suspect it does).

In which case this is hardly the disaster its made out to be.

But "root user can bypass SIP" doesnt have the same ring to as a headline it does it?

Oculus Rift review-gasm round-up: The QT on VR

Re: Halfway house to VR:

Thats fixable in software - small null spot in the middle with some jiggle canceling algo's plus turning your head slightly turns your virtual view more.

Cosmic bonks, breakups led to birth of Saturn's moons as dinos died out

Re: Cosmic shotgun...

Gathering dust or charging up?

Met police commissioner: Fraud victims should not be refunded by banks

Re: Contactless fraud up by two thirds

@yoganmahew

Are these online criminals the AI's everyone's been warning us about?

Or maybe - just maybe @JimmyPage realises that the chance of having your CCV number compromised is more like to happen via physical access to your card, rather than a leaky online database.

Apple mulled gobbling its Brit GPU designers – but didn't like the taste

Shame

Pure generally make nice hardware let down by poor software imo. Could have done with a little Apple razzmatazz.

Union warns of second round of 'massive' layoffs at IBM in Europe

Re: Where next?

Cant they repurpose one of those backup tape carousel thingies?

A machine can win at jeopardy but cant hold its own cards? Something must be done!

Alternatively they could automate one of those card shuffling machines you see at casino's with the added bonus of being able to program it to "blow its wad" at the fleshies in the event of a bad beat.

What to call a £200m 15,000-tonne polar vessel – how about Boaty McBoatface?

Re: This is nothing new

Personally I would have gone for Railway Employees Club - The East Lancashire Region.

But then I've always been known for making an arse of meself.

Hand in glove: Google and the US State Dept

But Who did he stitch up to get this information?

Apple engineers rebel, refuse to work on iOS amid FBI iPhone battle

Re: It's likely I'm missing something.

why not try google and not being so wilfully ignorant? El Reg have done several good write ups as have others.

Investigatory budgets are close to zero when compared to what apple can throw at its iPhone division.

If there is a charade here is being perpetrated by the FBI who either aren't willing or incapable of trying a hardware based approach. Basically the feebs are trying to set a precedent so they don't have to go running to the NSA everytime.

Stevie Graham: Why I hack mobile banking apps

security through fragmentation vs an API monoculture

OSS wisdom would suggest the monoculture approach is safer - the many eyes hypothesis. Then heartbleed happened.

Trouble is that comes up against the vulnerability and risks of a monoculture - crack 1 api you've cracked every customer who uses it. The rewards go from compelling for 1 banks customers to irresistible for every banks customers.

Which one is safer? Flip a coin.

Labour: We want the Snoopers' Charter because of Snowden

Re: Typical self setving politician

Thats a rather disingenuous interpretation of his comments. He's saying part of the bill is a necessary consolidation of a whole raft of dogdily interpreted regulations. And he has a point.

1 bill = less loopholes.

One of the problems with the IPB its 2 things (sensible consolidation of existing powers + stoopid enhancement of powers)

if done properly the first is a good thing.

She's coming... the Chief Data Officer

Just what we always did - a waste of space and oxygen.

Watch six tiny robo-ants weighing 100g in total pull a 1,769-kg family car

Re: Mighty tiny car?

I've pushed both a car and moved 20kg bag of cement - I distinctly remember the car being harder.

If your ISP is selling info about you, that has to be opt-in, says FCC boss

Re: So the NSA are OK to have your data without your permission...

Righting one wrong doesn't have any bearing on the other.

The FCC has no power over the NSA. It does over telcos.

R you ready? Open source stats come to Visual Studio

so basically

MS have added R syntax highlighting in VS and are hosting a CRAN repo.

/Slowhandclap MS

UN rapporteur: 'Bad example' UK should bin the Snoopers' Charter

Its ok. He didnt tweet it. And hopefully the chances of May getting an airport named after her are exceptionally low.

Home Ebola testing with a Tricorder? There's an app for that

Re: DNA source

Dumb tbh. Did you even read the article - this is a specific test for specific viruses. It doesn't sequence your DNA.

You might have a point for the future but for now FAIL.

Re: With an iPhone?

And how do you know the iphone isn't an integral part of the kit? Especially since it doesn't have to be an iphone - any landfill android could be made to do the job.

Unless the only requirement is blue led for yes, red led for no, having a phone handle the comms and potentially a value add of important details on a good screen, plus ability to mail/phone/sms the data around it seems like the phone is a bit of a no brainer.

Plus not needing either a stoopid battery pack or a tether to a wall wart where mains coverages cannot be guaranteed. Pi's/Arduino's have their place. This aint one of them.

Dumb suggestion from a pi-boi tbh.

Brits still not happy about commercial companies using their healthcare data

way to go AC! you have really added to the debate.

I would rather say 2 things :

1. They either are genuinely ignorant of the way this data can be abused.

2. The genuinely dont care.

Maybe 0.001% are stooges. But not much more if the survey sampling has been done properly. Since it was sponsored by the Welcome Trust - who have a damn fine reputation - Im prepared to assume the sampling was good.

The last news I saw on this suggested all the people representing the privacy interests of the public had been quietly dropped from the Care.data MkII steering committee.

That tells us all we need to know.

Google gives ringing endorsement to US VPN providers with 'right to be forgotten' expansion

bollocks this is not about personal data

There is no 'personal data' in search results as personal data is currently defined.

Its about burying unwanted/embarrasing search results.

Eg reporting on court cases where the accusation comes up but not the acquittal.

Norman Conquest, King Edward, cyber pathogen and illegal gambling all emerge in Apple v FBI

Law enforcement cannot be trusted

The FBI has already shat all over their bed with borderline illegal use of stingray cell towers which by design hijack the infrastructure hundreds of ordinary citizens are using.

Give anyone this power it will be abused.

Until the pendulum swings the other way and law enforcement officials are immediately jailed for their abuse of technology the only protection we have is to deny them that technology because it WILL be abused on a scale all out of proportion to the problems it solves,

It's rather like giving them guns training and culture that emphasises their personal power over the rule of law and then being surprised that a minority think it's ok to blow away demographics that they look down upon or are frightened of.

Essex cop abused police IT systems to snoop on his in-laws

Re: Why

Lots of uninformed commentardery on this thread.

Firstly he already had access to the systems - so calling it stealing is way off base, its improper access at best.

Secondly there is no suggestion he did anything with it.

Thirdly let the nerds who can say hand on heart that they haven't seen/found more that they should have been entitled to via DB/SA access cast the first stone.

Dirty data: Tech-heavy Thames Valley scores big in adultery index

Whats the percentage of Newbury

as its a damn sight smaller than somewhere like reading I would have actually thought that 800+ was a decent percentage.

I guess it depends whether you measure at lunchtime or after 5pm when the Vodafone hordes have departed to their commutes.

Investigatory Powers Bill: Spooks willingly entering the light?

Re: BBC "Analysis" on the subject...

Surprisingly even the commentards who haunt the BBC website and usually post messages with content that reads somewhere between Genghis Khan and a Daily Mail reader are almost 100% against this bill.

Foxconn spikes six-billion-dollar Sharp scoff – for now

bargepole

The large spate of dodgy accounting practises that have appeared from Japanese firms over the past few years if I were Foxconn I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.

BOFH: This laptop has ceased to be. And it's pub o'clock soon

Re: Quibblage

Alternatively you can know the charge in the cattle prod or the location of the cattleprod but not bot<BBZZZTTT>

BT, Sky, EE, TalkTalk and Virgin to appeal website blocking ruling

@readinthereg

Whilst I agree with your sentiment, your analogy breaks down.

The situation is more like the Post Office being asked to maintain a list of addresses it wont accept mail for. The package type or package contents are irrelevant.

Then the inevitable workaround for a punter is to use Tor or a VPN which is like posting using a forwarding address in a region where the post offices list is not checked.

Apple hasn't announced the new iPhone 5SE and pundits already hate it

Re: It's not meant to be a review

They are assessing the investment value of the company.

Making shizzle up to fool the gullible and justify their existence.

There fixed that for you.

Re: Budget .....

Hardware better - for sure, just don't forget a significant subset of consumers will pay a premium to be part of Apple's walled garden.

The value of a phone is measured in much more than its hardware. Especially if it's some shonky build of Android with a dubious upgrade lifetime. CM13 myself but I wouldn't recommend that to anyone but a techie.

Re: Those who can't, analyse....

Exactly judging the frequency I see them 'in the Wild' the 5c is doing quite nicely amongst those who like the apple ui and walled garden but who either can't or won't justify the price of Aplles latest shiny shiny.

Expect the new version to have Apple Pay and be possibly be delayed whilst they upgrade its cryptographic module to make it proof against FBI attacks. Assuming of course that the cryptographic hardware for Apple Pay doesn't already do the same job.

UK.gov could reopen Google's £130m HMRC tax deal, says Parliament

Hey Hillier

"We are not convinced HMRC has achieved this and it must work with overseas tax authorities if we are to see lasting and effective change in the international tax system,” added Hillier"

Hey Hillier How about legislating to fix the gaping holes in our tax laws and renegotiating our current tax treaties.

That's a politicians job not HMRC's other wise for all your pontificating you are part of the problem not the solution.

Meet Barra's baby: Xiaomi arrives with a splash

Re: Security Optional

Or that you have less to lose to Far Eastern spying than 5 eyes spying.

At least I have a choice to make with Far Eastern spying by not buying their products. No such choice with my own and allied governments.

Your xenophobia is killing us, Silicon Valley warns US Congress

Re: No surprises there then

One correction it's not their armed forces that are at fault - it's their politicians.

Bill Gates denies iPhone crack demand would set precedent

Re: To AC "7 years": A well thought out answer

One piece of software that once developed can be trivially changed for the next Iphone 5C ID the next time the feds come knocking.

This one request massively lowers the bar for the flood that follows. Before you know it you have your phone cracked for applying to an out of area school. (Happened in the UK with RIPA).

Goverment/Law Enforcement overreach is a fact they abuse every capability we give them.

NASA's Orion: 100,000 parts riding 8 million pounds of thrust

Re: The march of technology...

the amount of pork available?