Posts by Steve the Cynic

Governments could introduce 'made by humans' tags - legal report

Re: ASDA

My prize one was a medium-capacity self-checkout, complete with a conveyor to a bagging area. The conveyor was triggered by weight, and would rewind if it thought you had put more items on the conveyor than you had scanned.

It would also rewind if someone's inadequately-supervised brat (seated in a trolley at the next checkout) reached over through the non-existent barrier and bashed the conveyor.

Other retail checkout innovations of short duration include the Grand Union supermarket in Endicott NY, which in 1983 or so introduced voice-synth announcement of the prices of items as the cashier scanned them. It lasted about three months. I'm not sure why they dropped it - was it because all the voices sounded the same so you couldn't tell which till had spoken, or because the disembodied and clearly artificial voices were spooking people?

D'oh! Amber Rudd meant 'understand hashing', not 'hashtags'

Re: LOL

Sounds like you're proposing an extended version of the RFC 3514 EVIL bit...

BOFH: The Boss, the floppy and the work 'experience'

Re: Being on a placement myself...

" the decade-or-so of actual learning that you should have been doing on your own prior to that"

So I should have started learning about programming in 1974? (OK, yeah, my mother learned about programming *before* nineteen SIXTY four, on a LEO III no less, but you get my point, right?)

New plastic banknote plans now upsetting environmental campaigners

"triflouride"

Argh. Can't spell. That should be "trifluoride".

Re: WWF

"Do you think the WWF (wrestlers) have something to hide?"

Mostly that they haven't been the WWF since 2002... (Now called World Wrestling Entertainment, perhaps a better statement of their intentions, if not the results.)

"much, much worse things"

Chlorine triflouride?

Uber wasn't to blame for robo-ride crash – or was it? Witness said car tried to 'beat the lights'

Thanks. I was starting to worry that nobody had posted this.

Starman: Okay?

Jenny Hayden: Okay? Are you crazy? You almost got us killed! You said you watched me, you said you knew the rules!

Starman: I do know the rules.

Jenny Hayden: Oh, for your information pal, that was a *yellow* light back there!

Starman: I watched you very carefully. Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast.

"Curious what you think is "batshit insane" about US intersections"

Well, four-way stop is a reasonable thing, but I've seen a (very small) number of four-way yield intersections on American roads. And right turn on red is a classic, especially as it isn't universal. In New York (the state), it is permitted except where prohibited by a "No Turn On Red" sign; In New York (the city), it is prohibited except where permitted by a "Right Turn On Red" sign.

And there was the set of traffic lights I saw one time near the Capitol building in Albany, NY, with side-by-side lights.

And other gems, like intersections governed by flashing red in one direction ( = STOP sign ) and flashing yellow in the other ( = YIELD / Give Way sign ).

But they don't have anything like the Magic Roundabout in Swindon.

Miss Misery on hacking Mr Robot and the Missing Sense of Fun

Re: Halt and catch fire

"Also, who in their right mind would learn C on a C64?"

Well, I learned C on a TRS-80 Color Computer, an 8-bit machine of similar vintage (but having, at least, the advantage of a 16-bit stack pointer in its CPU...).

Re: Tech props only

"difficult to determine what is true"

May I disrespectfully advise you to avoid works like Kurosawa's Rashomon, then?

The whole point of an unreliable narrator is that he is, well, unreliable. Granted, Rashomon is a little different, in that there are (counts) five of them, and their stories don't match except in very, very broad strokes ("a samurai is dead" is more or less all we *know* for sure), but that just makes it worse. In the end, our view of what actually happened in Rashomon probably tells us more about ourselves than it does about the events in the story.

'Trash-80' escapes the dustbin of history with new TRS-80 emulator

Re: Dragon 32

OS-9 FTW, man. The C compiler for OS-9 was my first experience of C. I even patched the module loader to not check the CRC-24 when loading modules from files, because for one phase of the C compiler, it took so long that the stop-motor timer for the floppy drive expired.

And I have memories of having a problem with DP Johnson's SDisk, and phoning the man himself for tech support, and getting an updated copy of the module in the mail.

Re: 20 IF N=1 GOTO 10

"Missing 'THEN'?"

Many BASIC dialects (including the ones in the TRS-80 machines of all stripes) allowed IF ... GOTO without the "THEN".

Weirdly, the "standard" BASIC in the TRS-80 Color Computer didn't allow "LET". At the same time, the technical oddities of the Sinclair ZX-80 and -81 program entry system meant that "LET" was mandatory. That was confusing.

Re: Dragon 32

"6809 cpu IIRC"

You do, indeed, RC. In a sad, wistful sort of way, I sometimes miss my CoCo. Megabug FTW!(1)

(1) One of many contemporaneous PacMan "clones", way better than the Atari 2600 version. Featured a "synthesised" Japanese-sounding voice that screamed "Weeeeeee Gotcha!" when the aforementioned bugs caught the player, and a moving magnifier around you so it could have huge maps. And incidental music playing "La Cucaracha" (?sp) in between games.

Will it run Dancing Demon?

If not, useless.

Angular framework's grand ambition: Not breaking anything

Re: A platform built on sand

"That is over two *decades* worth of time where compatibility was maintained."

Compare that to a binary compiled in 1967 on a System/360. It can be run *directly* (not in emulation) on a zSystem today. Um. FIVE decades.

UK digital minister Matt Hancock praises 'crucial role' of encryption

Re: Can do. But shouldn't?

Be careful of the two kinds of encryption.

PGP encrypts your data with a symmetric cipher, IDEA, AES256, or similar. It generates a random key for that.

It then encrypts this key with the recipient's public key, or the recipients' public key, and the public key encryption system (RSA, elliptic curves, etc.) - these algorithms are monstrously slow - it takes as long to encrypt 40-50KB of data with a symmetric cipher as it does to encrypt the little packet of key information with RSA - so we encrypt the smallest possible amount of data with them. The holder(s) of the corresponding private key(s) can decrypt the symmetric key and use that to decrypt your data. Normally that's just the people you're talking to, but it could also be the alphabet soup agencies, if their public keys are embedded in your PGP or similar.

The alphabet soup agency must, of course, keep that private key totally protected.

Last point: ALL the information you need to reverse-engineer the private key is present in the public key, but there is NO practical way to recover it.

Inside OpenSSL's battle to change its license: Coders' rights, tech giants, patents and more

Re: It was all about GPL stealing code

"That is allowed by the BSD license"

OK, maybe, but that's not the point. The question is not whether the BSD-licensed original project is allowed (by the BSD license) to take in the modifications, but whether the GPL-licensed(1) modifications are allowed *by the GPL* to be incorporated into the BSD-licensed original project.

(1) This is neither the place nor the time to argue about whether "GPL-bound" or "GPL-encumbered" are appropriate or interesting terms.

UK Home Sec: Give us a snoop-around for WhatApp encryption. Don't worry, we won't go into the cloud

Re: Same script, different face

"he would have chosen a different car"

He would indeed. Of the type spelled "lorry". (Sounds facetious, but it's not.)

Ubuntu 17.04 inches closer to production

Re: Anyone else trip over that title?

Well I thought perhaps it was written in Headline rather than conventional English, and "inches" was replacing the more usual "Weirdword Wildanimal" format as the name of the release(1), but no, apparently it's still a weird word and the name of a wild animal.

(1) With the Headline English missing word being "is" in between "inches" and "closer".

DNA-bothering eggheads brew beer you were literally born to like

Re: Can't stand Cheddar?

When I lived in the UK, Sainsbury's would occasionally get in wedges of Mimolette, a very hard orange French cheese with a weird pitted rind.

Roll on a few years, and I moved to France, specifically in Ch'ti country, just outside Lille, which is the part of France where they *make* Mimolette, so I can get it any time I want it, in various ages and everything. Turns out that Sainsbury's only ever got in the "Ex Vieille" version.

Why do GUIs jump around like a demented terrier while starting up? Am I on my own?

Re: even worse...

A bit more ... intense than that, but you're pretty close.

Re: even worse...

I used to update Firefox a *lot* by accident. Typing in a form, Firefox pops the "update" dialog box, with "Update Now..." as the default button, next character I type is a space, bang!

And of course for web sites, the solution for buttons moving around is for them to effing well bloody fucking declare the GDMF(1) size of all the GDMF(2) bitmap objects inside the img tags. And to declare how big tables are and how wide the columns are BEFORE sending down the first TR tag. Geez!

(1) Very rude FLA, equivalent to "deity-cursed incestuous".

(2) I'm not going to explain it again.

Trump's America looks like a lousy launchpad, so can you dig Darwin?

Re: Fuel + oxidizer = thrust

" as error tolerant as a rocket"

Seems to me that you meant to say "*intolerant*" here.

Squirrel sinks teeth into SAN cabling, drives Netadmin nuts

A colleague left some food in his desk...

And the mice that were already in the building found it, so he had a desk full of droppings and mouse wee.

We all laughed, but it did reinforce the message that your work desk drawers are not for storing food overnight.

I've Been Moved: IBMers in same division slapped with 2nd redundo scheme in 2 months

" IBM could reassign you to a new location, and would pay for all expenses."

They even had a business entity of some sort (I don't remember the precise relationship) that would buy the to-be-moved employee's house if the market was slow. You'd see houses in the realtor's listings that were noted as being sold by this entity - it meant they had been empty for some amount of time, among other things.

Um...

"Staff now jokingly refer to the company as I’ve Been Moved"

*Now*? Staff have called it that for a *long* time. Like, you know, decades.

In the early part of the 1980s, I lived in Endicott NY, home of IBM. The centre of the village (despite its substantial land area, it is incorporated as a "village") seemed to be composed entirely of IBM buildings, IBM staff car parks, and roads.

As a result, I got to hear *all* the dumb jokes about IBM, and "I've Been Moved" was one of them.

FedEx will deliver you $5.00 just to install Flash

Re: How does this work with an iDevice?

It invites you to download an app from the App Store , and use that to place your order.

Well, that's a first...

I broke out my iPad and went to fedex.com. It asked me to pick a location, that is, a country, so I told it the truth: France.

OK, it then came up in French, which is reasonable enough. At the top, there's a round French flag and "Français" -> tapped that and got a dropdown: "English". Tap. The page reloaded, showing English-language information for Fedex France.

So they get points for not confusing "my location" and "my preferred language", but not nearly enough to offset "we require Flash".

Our Sun's been using facial scrub: No spots for two weeks

Just a reminder, everyone!

If someone advocates the use of solar energy...

... he is advocating the use of energy from an unshielded nuclear fusion reactor!

(note icon)

'Clearance sale' shows Apple's iPad is over. It's done

Re: As I have said a million times

"The one thing iPads do still have going for them is that they are one of the very few tablets to have a usefully-shaped screen."

There is another thing, and it is actually the reason I bought an iPad (Mini 4) rather than any other sort of tablet: it's more or less compatible (usually more), from an apps point of view, with my iPhone.

It means I can download an app on my phone, and the tablet picks up a copy of the app automatically (unless it's a phone-only app).

"liked the screens"

Yeah, the iPads have *nice* screens.

Now UK bans carry-on lappies, phones, slabs on flights from six nations amid bomb fears

Re: Seems very restrictive...

"even late-model iPhones are larger than the allowable limits mentioned"

I read somewhere that the Plus models are bigger than the limits, but the non-Plus ones. So if you have a plain 6/6S/7, you're OK.

EDIT: comparing the limits in the article with the sizes published in the Unreliable Source, no, even the Plus ones aren't too big, just. (158 mm versus the cited 16 cm = 160 mm).

Microsoft's 'Application Verifier' bug-finder is easily pwnable

But but but...

You've been able to configure DLLs to be autoinjected for *ages* and *ages* and *ages*. It might not be important because writing to the relevant part of the registry requires (or should require) elevated privileges, but is it *hard* to get those privileges? "Oh, look, another UAC prompt stopping me looking at this porn. Where's the OK button?"

New iPad revealed. Big price cut is main feature

Re: Same Old Tricks?

"And WiFi is slower than my cellular connection"

That's probably the backhaul from the WiFi access point to the Internet that's at fault there. I noticed a *big* difference when I got fibre installed ("up to 20Mbps" replaced by "at least 200Mbps"). It's not *much* faster than 4G (possibly because my main use of it is separated from the AP by two walls), but does have the advantage of not counting towards my use of 4G data(1), although I got an upgrade to 20GB / month along with the fibre upgrade.

(1) There are still a few things that iOS won't do over cellular data links but will do over WiFi, notably automatic downloads onto the iPad of apps that I get on my phone, and updates to apps that are already on the iPad.

Large Hadron Collider turns up five new particles

Re: This is the stuff that binds Quarks together

"I thought we were talking particles not photons"

Purpose-free pedantry: Photons *ARE* particles.

BOFH: Don't back up in anger

"Me - No its not, it's a repeatability and conformity standard"

Somebody knows.

Many, many moons ago, I worked for a company that had 9001 certification. When I started, I had a brief session with the main Quality Manager, and he said essentially the same thing, that 9001 guarantees a product of CONSISTENT quality, not one of HIGH quality.

The quality manual (the book of company-specific procedures) has to state a quality goal, how it will be achieved, and how the company will track deviations from that target back to root causes and fix them.

If your goal is that 10% (with a +/- one percentage point margin) of shipped product is functional, and the rest is essentially fit only for landfill, you'll remain 9001 compliant as long as you ship 9-11% good product and 89-91% rubbish. You have to be able to find out why you've started to ship 12% good product and you have to FIX that because continuing to ship 12% good when your 9001 target is 9-11% good means you aren't compliant and will have to pay for more prostitutes to bribe the auditors.

(OK, the QM didn't mention the part about the prostitutes. That came from something my late wife said about the company she worked for at the same time - more than once, they "passed" their audits because they provided enough bribes, including prostitutes, that the auditors overlooked the lack of compliance.)

"like trying to hide an elephant in the dining room by throwing a tablecloth over it."

Nah, that's not an elephant, we just have strange tastes in dining tables...

House of Lords: Drone vehicles are more than just robo-cars, mmkay

Re: What about...

"What about DAV [disconnected and autonomous vehicles] or UAV [Unconnected and autonomous vehicles] ?"

Well, UAV is already taken... (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle)

But hey, we repurpose abbreviations all the time! When I was a student, SDLC meant Synchronous Data Link Control, and CB meant Citizen's Band. But what do I know?

Facebook, Instagram: No, you can't auto-slurp our profiles (cough, cough, border officials)

Re: Lol

" Facebook actually thinks that the folks who disregard large parts of the US Constitution will in any way be bothered by the T&C's of an online website."

Not at all. They are saying that the alphabet soups must develop the tools themselves, because the T&Cs of their sites, at least in theory,(1) bar third parties (not FB, not the soups) from building and selling tools to do it.

(1) Yes, I'm aware that there's a difference between "in theory" and "in practice".

Linus Torvalds explains how to Pull without jerking his chain

Re: git shit

@Tom 38

Saying that git is better than VSS is rather lukewarm praise, since a poke in the eye is better than VSS.

UK Home Office warns tech staff not to tweet negative Donald Trump posts

Re: Absolutely uncalled for...

"Some advice some political leaders would do well to heed"

I think you meant to say "*ALL* political leaders" in there.

President Trump-themed escort services may soon open in China

Re: Donald Trump-themed escort services

"a steak - well done, with ketchup"

That's ... barbaric.

FBI boss: 'Memories are not absolutely private in America'

Re: A real policeman once said

> a witness who does not want to testify can always say "I don't recall."

Yeah, I remember the case of one witness (perpetrator, even) who famously said that. A certain Lt Colonel of the US Marine Corps, in the 1980s, by the name of Oliver North.

Side note: My late wife was, at that time, enlisted in the US Air Force (I have had a complicated life. Don't ask.) She had a couple of observations on the subject of Olly North:

* In the USAF, the coverage of North's testimony before the Congressional committee made popular viewing.

* While the Air Force enlisted and the Marine Corps enlisted don't really get on well, it was clear that the USMC rank and file were deeply ashamed of one of their senior officers standing up in his dress uniform and putting on such a spectacle.

Firefox 52 kills plugins – except Flash – and runs up a red flag for HTTP

Re: Get HTTPS

In theory, but it would have to know roots which were NOT the one added to get the browser to stop complaining about the MitM's certificate. That's horribly important in a corporate environment. The MitM creates its own CA, then uses that to generate a certificate for each site you access. The IT department exports that CA and installs it in each corporate machine as a trusted certificate signing certificate (but not a CA-signing certificate). The plugin(1) would need to know that this CA is NOT one of the main root types.

(1) Good luck if your browser decides to not run plugins any more...

PS: I know how these MitMs work because my company's product can act as one, but it can be worked out by a careful analysis of how SSL/TLS works.

Re: Get HTTPS

Observation: look at the certificate information next to the URL entry box. The MitM can't use the server's real certificate, so it creates certificates signed by a mini-CA embedded within it. You can tell they are there because their CA is NOT one of the "normal" root CAs, and nor does it have one of the normal ones in its trust path.

If you get the same thing on your banking sites when you use them from the office, complain to your IT department, and failing that, to your HR department, and failing *THAT*, to a recruiter. (All these MitM systems have the ability to say "don't decrypt these servers".)

Or go full-on paranoid and get into certificate pinning, where the browser doesn't trust a site unless it gets the right server certificate. How you get hold of the "public" part of the server's certificate to pin it is a whole different story...

Scammers hired hundreds of 'staff' to defraud TalkTalk customers

The classic scam in France is dialling with a CLI on an 09XX prefix, that is, a premium number, and then hanging up. If the callee picks up, speak as if you can't hear them, even if they haven't said anything because you say "I can't hear you' as soon as they pick up...

If the callee calls back, big bill for the premium rate number...

Time's up for SHA-1 hash algo, but one in five websites still use it

Re: That's all I need...

"I've had that happen on a couple of sites but each one fixed it very quickly"

And when the "site" is the web interface to manage some piece of kit in your network? What then? Do you think it will be easy to get a firmware upgrade to fix the certificate?

Wearables aren't dead but apps on wearables might be

Re: 2nd Display

"I always wondered why there was this great desire to run apps on a watch. Surely the processing overhead will eat the device's battery?

"I always thought wearables/smart watches would be best as second displays for a smartphone for things like notifications, current fitness stats, etc. Plus, also, heart rate sensor for fitness tracking."

Pretty much this. When I first bought my fruity wrist computer, I did have a Solitaire app on it. Bad move. The screen is too small, and it guzzled the battery even more than the damned thing does anyway. (The Series 2 is a *lot* better about this, except that now I have a dual-core CPU in my *watch*.)

And you missed one app that it has that I find useful: remote control for the iOS music app, so the phone can stay in the pocket where it belongs. My overall list: time, date, fitness rings, next/current appointment from the phone's calendar, watch battery state, notifications, heart rate check occasionally, and the current temperature from the phone's Weather app.

Java? Nah, I do JavaScript, man. Wise up, hipster, to the money

Re: Java is absolutely crap for web applications

"Of course, neither of them are proper languages. We all know which one is. C++."

That's a strange way of spelling FORTRAN.

Re: Crippled C++

" Plus in job interviews they always ask about aspects of C++ buried away in the appendix of Stroustrups book so you need to know it all even if you never use it."

Guilty as charged: "Discuss this line of code:" with a single line of code, two words and a semicolon:

delete this;

(Not my place to answer it here, and it's about their understanding of things, not about a right or wrong answer.)

One IP address, multiple SSL sites? Beating the great IPv4 squeeze

Re: Simple answer

Two days before Christmas 2016, two guys from Orange (France) came to my flat dragging a reel of optical fibre and a Livebox 4. When they left, I had a new public IPv4 address (I've no idea if it changes), 200+ Mbps down / 100 Mbps up internet service, and a 2a01:stuff/56 IPv6 prefix. (No, I'm not telling you what specific stuff...)

OK, that's cool, but how hard did I have to fight to get this?

I didn't. I'd have had to fight to *stop* it. Yes, that's right. They almost forced it on me. And no questionnaire on what's inside my network...