Posts by Adrian 4

FCC douses America's net neutrality in gas, tosses over a lit match

Re: Take Back Control

Sadly, you may be right.

It will be interesting to see how they paint 2017 american politics as something to copy, though. Most people shake their heads, pass the popcorn and wait to see what the looneys will do next.

Please, please, c'mon, just... please, pretty please, just, like, please use our AI – Microsoft

Re: Machine learning....

I still don't understand what expert systems, machine learning, data mining and all the other fashionable technologies have got to do with Artificial Insemination.

Brit banks told to publish details of major incidents that stop punters' payments

But they're banks

'She emphasised that the FCA expected banks to deal with the authority “in an open, transparent manner” '

Good luck with that.

Kentucky lawmaker pushes smut filter law (update: maybe not)

@AC :

"I can think of some UK politicians who would do that "

Or not, if the person in question happens to be their friend / staff.

Trump to NASA: Fly me (or some other guys) to the Moon

Caveat

Was going to applaud this until I discovered it was just bribery to stop scientists going on about environmental damage.

"The government wants NASA to look outwards, but also wants it to do less work looking at Earth. The latest budget recommendations see NASA's Earth sciences funding cut by 13 per cent, leading the agency to cancel its involvement in some climate monitoring."

Language bugs infest downstream software, fuzzer finds

unhelpful errors

"information disclosure in NodeJS via error messages"

That would be a problem, I can see. I always thought unhelpful error messages were just the vendor's laziness, but it seems they're actually a security requirement.

UK lacks engineering and tech skills to make government's industrial strategy work – report

offshore resources

Hey, can't they get some suitable people from our friends in the rest of the EU ? Free movement of employees helps industry, you know. And by trickle-down, helps industry-friendly political parties.

Time to value our immigrants for what they bring to the economy instead of blaming them for out own failings.

La La La, I can't hear you: FCC responds to net neut concerns

Re: 'Neutrality' is nothing of the sort

@unwarranted triumphalism

<citation needed>

UK government bans all Russian anti-virus software from Secret-rated systems

Re: I guess NOFORN doesn't apply anymore?

If IRA was chosen as an innocuous and bland name that nobody would connect with bad things, it was clearly not done by anyone with any knowledge of UK politics.

Re: I guess NOFORN doesn't apply anymore?

If I wanted to use an AV to steal secrets, the first thing I would do is found a company that would be seen as trustworthy. Making it overtly Russian is just bad marketing (for that purpose). Russians have a good reputation for 'clever' stuff so it will only appeal to someone who sees it as good quality but has no particular axe to grind about what country it comes from.

If the spooks want to stop us using foreign software it won't be because there are suspicions about what it does with the data. It's far more likely that any such software is nominally American but very low cost.

It will be because they want to make sure that any spying that's done is done by companies they control.

Oracle rival chides UK councils for pricey database indulgence

Re: Thankfully x86 per core performance is improving

Why all this per-core rubbish ?

Why not just licence per-transaction ?

Google Chrome vows to carpet bomb meddling Windows antivirus tools

I've been using palemoon for a while, but it's getting increasingly difficult. It shows up bugs in gmail and slack (I hear you .. no loss ..) making slack unusable and gmail lose data.

The six simple questions Facebook refused to answer about its creepy suicide-detection AI

Re: What about trolls?

Ooh ! Trolling for trolls ? That sounds fun. I wonder how many I can catch and laugh at.

Re: Judging by..

"As compared to many people on the LEFT, who are genuinely "

But at least we have fully-functional capslock keys.

Tom Baker returns to finish shelved Doctor Who episodes penned by Douglas Adams

Re: Tom Baker will always be the Doctor

Tom Baker was a first class doctor. But the real one is Jon Pertwee for me.

Tesla reveals a less-long-legged truck, but a bigger reservation price

Re: 400 mile charge in 30 minutes isn't gonna to be easy - natural gas

Loading / unloading time is also potentially useful for recharging. Less useful for semi+trailer since the trailer can be loaded without the tractor, but if the destination is multi-drop rather than to deliver a trailer, it may spend significant time at the delivery points. Customers could provide charge power at those times, offsetting costs against the other transport costs.

$20,000 is a pretty small part of a large company's PR budget. For that they get bragging rights and plenty of publicity of the form 'Tesla's electric trucks in use at X Corp.'.

Someone told Google to nuke links to mean reviews of disgraced telco True Telecom

Streisand effect

True Telecom ? Never heard of them. Until now.

And since I can't read the articles and judge for myself if they're unwarranted rants, I'll assume that they embarrassed the company and were therefore likely true.

London mayor: Self-driving cars? Not without jacked-up taxes, you don't!

Re: I've never understood...

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

National Cyber Security Centre boss: For the love of $DEITY, use 2FA on your emails, peeps

Oops

Was I supposed to keep my email address a secret ? I've been giving it out to all sorts of people. Some of them even work at dodgy places like Hanslope Park.

Intel finds critical holes in secret Management Engine hidden in tons of desktop, server chipsets

So how do we know this isn't NSA trickery to get their backdoor updated ?

Massive US military social media spying archive left wide open in AWS S3 buckets

Re: Missed the Point

No one else thinks that's scary?

Yes, but not news.

Car tax evasion has soared since paper discs scrapped

Re: More to the point - how much has it saved?

I'm sure we can beat that. If we ever get the new benefit system going it will probably save less than 1% of the rollout costs.

How about that time Russian military used a video game pic as proof of US aiding ISIS?

Re: medieval terror-bastards - thumbs up on that one!

So, an english acronym. I thought they were against that sort of thing.

The Quantum of Firefox: Why is this one unlike any other Firefox?

Re: I went for the mobile version

Perfect. Long may they be banished.

I hate it when everything on the screen has hotspots that you have to carefully avoid to stop something unwanted happening.

Re: Everything's gone. Everything.

It immediately found adblock+, which is the only extra I use heavily.

Does seem a little faster than pale moon. I haven't used the previous version of firefox for a while so unsure how it compares with that.

The edgeless menus are annoying. I like to be able to tell which window is which. Fortunately most sites use a mildly coloured background but I would imagine some trendy minimalist site will look weird.

Computing in schools improved, but still needs major patching – report

Re: Same old same old

@Dr Syntax

Your syntax may be good but your acronyms need work. It's GPIB (IEEE-488).

UK Home Sec thinks a Minority Report-style AI will prevent people posting bad things

Great idea !

Home Office rubbing their hands .. once that's working then they could save money on judges and all that tat, and just imprison people automatically for the crime they're about to commit !

User asked help desk to debug a Post-it Note that survived a reboot

Immovable window

So how many of you have tried to move the monitor's on-screen-display with a mouse ?

Metal 3D printing at 100 times the speed and a twentieth of the cost

It's only got 2 thou resolution. So maybe 10 thou accuracy.

It's more a replacement for casting than machining.

Evil pixels: Researcher demos data-theft over screen-share protocols

Bizarre security

so .. you'#re saying RDP has a feature to block file transfer outwards yet still allows remote execution ?

Why not just ftp it ?

Facebook's send-us-your-nudes service is coming to UK, America

Watermarking

Maybe You could get a barcode printed on your skin. Then FB could just reject anything with that barcode.

Off-brand tablets look done, but big players are growing

Re: Been there, done that...

Was that the Transformer ? I bought the similar Windows version on the strength of it having USB3, but it hasn't worn out because I barely use it. Poor technical information has left it well behind in Linux compatibility, and I have little use for a version of Windows that can't cope with the screen resolution and leaves everything too small to read. This ought to be an ideal target for Windows 8/10 (touch screen, optional keyboard etc) but it's unusable. The first thing it needs is phone-like display zoom, which it lacks. You did well to choose the Android version.

Hardware has never been better, but it isn't a licence for code bloat

code bloat is not necessarily slow

Code can get bigger as it gets faster : the size doesn't necessarily slow it down. If it's handling a lot of alternatives, having separate code for each might be a lot faster than having a small, highly parameterised pice of code that does everything.

What causes bloat is the use of libraries and frameworks to speed development. Yes, they do speed it - providing they do what you want and you know how to use them. But very often, you're only using a small part of their functionality yet you get a large part of the baggage.

Two drones, two crashes in two months: MoD still won't say why

FFS

So the MoD can spend £20 million on drones and be unable to tell why they crashed.

And we're happy to let the police fly drones over populated areas, unlike amateur users, because what ? They're better trained ? Have better drones ?

When one crashes, as is inevitable, will they be able to determine why ?

Do we even have a report on the manned aircraft crash on that glasgow club ? Last I looked, they still hadn't come to any useful conclusions.

Car insurers recoil in horror from paying auto autos' speeding fines

Re: I thought my opinion of MPs could go no lower

I don't often want to upvote ledswinger, but today's different.

TV presenters don't know a thing.

Re: Try a sensible design?

Perhaps the idea of changing speed limits on the fly is just stupid ?

Google's phone woes: The Pixel and the damage done

Re: Pixel was impressive - Pixel 2 is an abortion

"What is it about phone design that forces you to remove the expandable SD card slot? Fucking nothing. Other than an Apple-style price gouge for more capacious models."

Microsoft FAT32 tax ?

Is the FCC purposefully screwing up US school broadband projects?

Re: Socialism

0.2bps ? Dang, that's slower than wet string. I sympathises, even BT aren't that bad.

Boss put chocolate cake on aircon controller, to stop people using it

Re: Reminds me

I wish to upvote this system more than once.

Re: From my .sig collection

"Now, aiming... that's the challenge..."

What do you think tape-changing robots were invented for ?

DJI Aeroscope won't stop drone-diddlers flying round airports

Re: "their entire system can be defeated by either covering the drone with aluminium foil"

It can be defeated even more easily by not buying your drone from DJI

US voting server in election security probe is mysteriously wiped

Re: WTF

They aren't THAT stupid. But they may be THAT cunning.

AI bot rips off human eyes, easily cracks web CAPTCHA codes. Ouch

Tell the website authors

I keep hearing about how Captchas are broken. But still they keep using the wretched things.

If the site gets so many visitors they can't evaluate a new user (clue: it's only necessary to moderate the first few posts), can't they afford a few more staff ?

And the street scenes .,, they're crap, too. Who evaluates them to find the correct answer ? A bot, I guess. Well, duh.

Credit insurance tightens for geek shack Maplin Electronics

Re: We need an alternative to the jungle monopoly

Or Conrad. They're Maplin equivalent in Germany, and own Rapid here.

Re: We need an alternative to the jungle monopoly

"Sainsbury's hope to add the range of Argos to all of their stores, whilst shutting down as many as possible of the Argos locations. its a huge gamble"

They experimented with having an Argos pickup in Homebase, then shut them down again within a year. Not sure what that was about - they didn't close the multiple local Argos branches so unlikely to save any money.

Google slides text message 2FA a little closer to the door

Why does it matter ?

Surely, if you're using gmail, you don't have any expectations of privacy ?

Not that I don't use it myself. I just assume some{one,thing} else reads it.

Boss visited the night shift and found a car in the data centre

If he could count to more than 10, he wouldn't still be a Windows admin, would he ?

ARM chip OG Steve Furber: Turing missed the mark on human intelligence

Re: Marvellous

Partially-Ordered Event-Triggered Systems

And a friday afternoon's worth for Andrew Brown.