Posts by Adrian 4

UK Snoopers' Charter gagging order drafted for London Internet Exchange directors

Surely it would be 'safer' to have no such provision.

Then any attempt to infiltrate the network would require the security services to ask ALL the members, something they are unlikely to want to do.

Déjà vu: Euro Patent Office prez ignores yet another formal rebuke

Why no action from the administrative council ?

Here's the list of members of the administrative council. Perhaps they need to explain why they're not doing their job ?

https://www.epo.org/about-us/organisation/administrative-council/representatives.html

MEPs in 'urgent' call for new laws on artificial intelligence and robotics

"No matter how autonomous and self-learning they become they do not attain the characteristics of a living human being. Robots will not enjoy the same legal physical personality."

That's remarkably prescient of her. I wonder how she expects to distinguish them ? I can barely distinguish most M(E)Ps from robots already, based on their ability at creative thought..

It might be that she expects to discriminate on appearance, ethnicity or lifestyle. Which would be odd, since I thought we were trying to grow out of all that.

2009 IBM: Teleworking will save the WORLD! 2017 IBM: Get back to the office or else

It's a problem of insecure managers.

Some people like to have their staff workling all around them - even though that costs more and is less efficient - because the buzz of activity makes them feel something is happening and they're at the heart of it.

It doesn't matter to them that anyone with a job that requires some concentration is working at a tiny fraction of their potential.

Munich may dump Linux for Windows

Re: and this has nothing to do with

Indeed.

It's not important whether Munich *actually* retrains and changes again : it's sufficient to say 'Munich changed to Linux but by 2017 they were looking at changing back'.

Samsung battery factory bursts into flame in touching Note 7 tribute

Re: Ironic

Upvoted for poorly appreciated sarcasm

Intel's Atom C2000 chips are bricking products – and it's not just Cisco hit

Oh no, not again

Back in the dawn of PC time, I worked on an 8086 machine designed before everyone was expected to copy IBM. The 8088 and 8086 used a special intel clock driver, the 8284. We had loads of problems with them not oscillating properly ..

Big Tech files anti-Trump brief: Immigration ban illegal and damaging to business

I'd be a lot more pleased to hear this if they actually cared about the politics and social issues, rather than a cheap source of workers.

Brexploitation? Adobe gets creative with price hikes

Re: You can rebel .....

What stops you commissioning someone to write the extensions you need ? It would probably cost a lot less than an Adobe license. The critical thing thing about open source software is not that it's (usually) free, but that you, or your contractor, can extend it. They don't have to write from scratch.

Protest against Trump's US travel ban leaves ‪PasswordsCon‬ in limbo

Re: Alternatively...

Virtue signalling is merely a label intended to denigrate those who feel a need to align themselves with a particular stance. Using it as such marks you out as a person with a different opinion : it doesn't make their action bad.

Re: Alternatively...

I don't think it's the majority view that's nasty here. Just a few loud astroturfers.

We need to talk about Granny: She's way more likely to fall for phishing

Wow, I only get 4-5 a month. Why are Microsoft so much more helpful to them ? Have I upset them ?

Another factor might be that elderly people are more likely to be at home to take a call. These calls always seem to come on the landline rather than a mobile.

Human memory, or the lack of it, is the biggest security bug on the 'net

Re: Bad humans ?

I don't think we care that we can't identify someone we've never met before.

All we normally want to do is identify that it's the same person that set up the account, or the same person that a bank knows about, or the same person that lives at a certain address. Who that person actually is can't ever be proven : what matters is that the second and subsequent contacts match the first.

A password (retained secret) is fine for this, as are other tokens such as certificates. In some cases, that certificate needs to be verified by another party such as a bank.

Bad humans ?

Or maybe remembering a bunch of things that are intentionally hard to guess just isn't a very good way for humans to authenticate themselves ?

It's often a good idea to match the solution to the problem : if you need to do a thing often, choose something that you're good at.

What are humans good at remembering? Probably something involving patterns. Shapes, music, phrases. The problem there is that to enter a reasonably complex pattern, you need an interface that's good at it. Maybe that's easier to solve than trying to make your passwords rememberable but obscure.

Parliamentary Trump-off? Pro-Donald petition passes 100k signatures

Re: I'm actually quite cheered by this -

"like all political threads, this one has immediately descended into "yah boo sucks all your side are idiots/fools/deluded/morons/[delete"

That's hardly surprising. Both sides in a political match are pretty well always composed of idiots/fools/deluded/morons. If they weren't, they'd be doing something constructive instead, wouldn't they ?

God save the Queen... from Donald Trump. So say 1 million Britons

Re: Ya'll can keep him!

Pretty sure we've already got a ban on him entering the country (UK) already. We have laws to deport people for hate speech. If May lets him in, she'll be an accessory.

Judge allows plan for Intel to reanimate McAfee. The brand, we mean

Re: Take notes.

5 downvotes ? Really ?

Justify yourselves, cretins.

National Audit Office: UK's military is buying more than it can afford

Re: What the MoD needs

Don't be silly.

The MoD only exists to keep those suppliers in orders.

Did you know? The FBI investigated Gamergate. Now you can read the agents' thrilling dossier

Who let the dogs out ?

The comments on this post are the most incoherent, unreasoned, poorly explained twaddle I have read on the Reg for years. It's like YouTube.

If you've got something to say, at least give it some context and explain your arguments. Don't assume everyone here has taken any significant interest in the subject. For most of us, this social media backbiting is completely off the radar : we've heard there's been an argument that shows up some men with excessively loud mouths and that's it.

Sysadmin chatbots: We have the technology

Re: BOFH

Clickety-click.

What AI ?

Stop replying! pleads NetApp customer stuck in reply-allpocalypse

Cc, Bcc and Reply All all have legitimate uses for small groups of people.

The problem is having a very large list that can be added to them : CCs should be filled in manually, to include a handful of interested people. But some misbegotten mail software (yes, Outlook, I'm talking about you) allows the use of huge files of recipients instead as some sort of idiot mailing list.

The correct way to set these large lists up is with group names expanded by a mailserver, and to restrict use of those names to people who have a clue.

Apple eats itself as iPhone fatigue spreads

Re: Apple shouldn't have continued with the Lightning connector

I hooe they don't adopt USB-C. It's a typical PC bodge with far too many contacts and the crudest possible way to make it insertable either way up. It does bring a bit to the PC's USB3 (more power, more speed) but it's a crap replacement for lightning.

'I AM TWEETING TRUTH TO POWER: AND YOU CAN'T STOP MY FACTS, MR PRESIDENT!'

Re: Har har

He's a patriot ? What sort ?

- Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel (Samuel Johnson)

- Patriotism is a maggot in their heads (Thoreau)

- Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious (Wilde)

- Patriotism is "the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers (Tolstoy)

Texas cops lose evidence going back eight years in ransomware attack

wtf ?

"It makes it incredibly difficult if not impossible to confirm what's written in police reports if there's no video"

So how does that strengthen the police case ?

Oh, the things Vim could teach Silicon Valley's code slingers

Re: Comparing a text editor to a web browser is a nonsense

The whole of Unix is an IDE. Why do you need another layer ?

UK.gov tells freelance techies to slap 20 per cent on fees as IR35 tax hike looms

Re: Both feet, and the ankles

In other words, the same as the financial markets. Small pay, big bonus.

Northumbria Uni fined £400K after boffin's bad math gives students a near-killer caffeine high

good recovery

" both excelled in completing their degrees."

.. followed by masters and doctorates in the succeeding month.

How Lexmark's patent fight to crush an ink reseller will affect us all

So how did the ink cartridges get out of the US ? Didn't they have to be sold bty the US company tro a distro ?

On last day as president, Obama's CIO shrouds future .gov websites in secret code

From a story in the Reg's related list :

"Additionally, Hourclé warns of the effect the policy may have on those without computers at home, as many public institutions which offer internet access are mandated to filter it by state or local laws and may block HTTPS entirely."

So will we have the situation where you can't use web access in a public library to connect to a government website ?

Rap for crap WhatsApp trap flap: Yack yack app claptrap slapped

Re: That's carefully avoiding another few issues, though

Denying access to contacts isn't very useful for these communication apps. What's needed is bunkered contacts - seperate lists for skype, whatsapp, emil, phone etc. This is directly contradictory to what those app authors (wanting to mine networking information) want and counterintuitive to the average user, who thinks he wants all his contacts together.

But I don't want a popup that asks me if I want to contact the person through SMS or skype. Nor do I want the app owners to spam my contacts list like LinkedIn. I'm quite happy to choose the communication medium first and the contact second.

Mozillans call for new moz://a logo to actually work in browsers

Re: Huh?

My hope is that all of that will become the past as the stark madness of the Obama years is eclipsed by a level of stupid you would not believe could exist.

FTFY.

Chrome dev explains how modern browsers make secure UI just about impossible

Re: HTML5 can do WHAT?!

"Guess you don't like full-screen video-on-demand playback, then."

I do, sometimes. But why should it need to be under site control ? What's wrong with a full-browser window that increases to full-screen when I press a button ?

Wintel part deux? Microsoft Azure first for Intel Clear Linux

Optimised for x86 ?

I should hope so. The ARM, MIPS, PPC, IBM360 etc. builds aren't likely to run too well on intel hardware, are they ? There again, I think you'll find most of the other distros already offer an x86 build.

ProtonMail launches Tor hidden service to dodge totalitarian censorship

Re: CERN

Well, fine .. so do you have a better suggestion ?

Microsoft Germany says Windows 7 already unfit for business users

Having seen far too many projects founder when they tried to use MS Access instead of a grown-up database, I'm not surprised there's nothing like it in Linux.

Microsoft Germany says Windows already unfit for business users

FTFY

UK's lords want more details on adult website check plans

Re: Any Ideas?

They might read books, too.

Burn all the books, to be sure they're safe from that.

Nadella calls for AI sector to move beyond 'worshipping' a handful of companies

Re: AI? I'd settle for for an OS that just worked...

"I don't have to put up with shit I don't want, but have to have because the cunts that put it on have used secret or hidden tricks to make sure their crap never goes away, even if I say I don't want it."

I used to think that, but then there was systemd.

Xmas software update knackered US Customs computer systems

Re: Welcome to Amerika

Won't the courier be stuck in Customs ?

Building IoT: Forget the vision, just show us how to build it

Pilgrim and Damon are pretty good. But really - an IoT conference without Alex D-S ? What are you thinking ?

Spotty battery life costs Apple's MacBook Pro its gold-star rating

Except they didn't remove the battery monitor. They just changed it from 'estimated time remaining' to '% used'. Apparently because their estimates of how much power you might use in the next few hours were wildly inaccurate.

A bit pathetic, but hardly the end of life as we know it.

Meet the Internet of big, lethal Things

Re: RXD Vs TXD

Perhaps if the manufacturer accurately and helpfully described exactly what the CAN bus data described, then the independent tinkerers would indeed be able to modify safely and usefully instead of making guesses. And I think that's what the EFF is trying to achieve.

Re: IMHO, any modified vehicle should become immediately unfit for the road...

Because anything manufactured by industry is certain to be built, tested and operating according to all the rules ?

And if the implementation is kept secret, how exactly could you be sure of that ?

Didn't work for emissions. Why should it work for anything else ?

Christmas Eve ERP migration derailed by silly spreadsheet sort

Re: consumer-focused digital candy bar phones

I think the canonical mars-bar phone was actually a Sony

http://www.tvfilmprops.co.uk/det/434/Sony-CM-H333-%5EMars-Bar%5E-Mobile-Phone/

Did EU ruling invalidate the UK's bonkers Snoopers' Charter?

Re: Living under a permanent caution

Not limited to the internet.

If the argument that 'it's useful' carries the day, it surely works just as well for recording phone conversations, facial recognition from CCTV, ANPR, and any other data you want to think of.

Firefox to give all extensions their own process in January

Are you serious ?

An application that hosts multiple unsynchronised data streams with a selection of external plugins and is a well-known target for malware .. and it was implemented in a single process ????

What were they thinking ?

Processes are cheap.

China gives America its underwater drone back – with a warning

No, it's something about 'the only winning move is not to play'.

DDoS script kiddies are also... actual kiddies, Europol arrests reveal

Re: Prevention campaign

Hit them where it hurts. Confiscate their phones.

Bluetooth 5.0 emerges, ready to chew on the internet of things

Re: This could worry the spies

If the probability of any two BT devices communicating is the aforementioned 85%, the probability of 3 in a chain is 72%, 4 is 61% etc. And then there's the path back. I don't think any mesh is going to be big.

Re: Old hat

I doubt it. Most current protocols have severe limits on propagation times intended to try to reduce the already over-long timeouts when it breaks. It's likely that a path like that (2-3 seconds) is too slow even if you have enough signal (you might have parabolics at both ends but the moon is the opposite of a parabola and spreads the signal out).