Posts by noboard

50 lines of Bash to bring a Wordle fan out of their shell

Re: Prior art?

You know that, I know that and the NYT legal department know that. Will that stop them though?

I think we all know the answer to that as well.

How not to train your Dragon: What happens when you teach an AI game sex-abuse stories then blame players

Bro

Brit builders merchant Travis Perkins opts for Oracle after ERP disaster with Infor

My money is on

"Yes you have access to one vCore, but this is running on a 128 core/256 vCore machine, so you need to cover those, as they could be used by your system, should it need to be moved"

"Oh and you also have to cover the cost of all the systems in the building, as you may be moved at any time, so theoretically you need to cover all those cores as well. Power of the cloud and all that"

"I see you took the multy location plan, so you'll need to cover all those cores as well, oh and I see this covers three systems, so multiply the current total by 3"

"So that leaves us at eleventy billion... per month"

"Yes I do have some sellotape and string, why do you ask?"

Anonymous: We've leaked disk images stolen from far-right-friendly web host Epik

Re: Hating hate is still hate.

You can be clever and stupid, they're probably attributes in different fields

LOL ;-) UK govt 2 pay £39m 4 txt msgs 4 less thn 2 yrs

Re: Sigh...

Err you do realise it was Labour who bailed the banks out as soon as it looked like rich people may become poor? The tories shouldn't be allowed anywhere near government, but neither should any of the main political parties. The sooner the electorate work this out, the better for everyone.

You're not imagining it. Amazon and AWS want to hire all your friends, enemies, and everyone in between

I always find..

The companies that bang on about being great and a great place to work, are the worst. I also laugh at companies that say they only hire the best, but provide low wages and atrocious working conditions. They can't be that smart if they had to get a job with a company like yours.

If you can't talk to someone about the job and work out whether they're suitable, you probably shouldn't have a role in filling the vacancy.

Apple scrambles to quash iOS app sideloading demands with 'think of the children' defense

Re: It's not Either/Or

The problem is you talk like the iPhone is secure. It isn't and it's unlikely it ever will be. So if the walled garden doesn't keep it secure, then what is its use?

Allowing side apps could increase the security of the iPhone, just like it can increase the security of Android phones. It can also be used to stop google and facebook snooping. Apple are happy to block others snooping, but they would hate to give up the control they have over their users.

NATO summit communiqué compares repeat cyberattacks to armed attacks – and stops short of saying 'one-in, all-in' rule will always apply

Re: Imagine

Hello

Thank you for your thoughtful response. It was reviewed by our AI system and due to the absence of "Rich people will get richer", your proposal has been denied.

No ports, no borders, no hope: Xiaomi's cool but impractical all-screen concept phone

Re: yabbut...

I was thinking the exact same thing. Stick it in you pocket without a screen protector and your keys will make short work of the screen. I can also imagine it being very slippy, so prone to flying off when picking it up.

Chromium cleans up its act – and daily DNS root server queries drop by 60 billion

Re: hang on

Any query that can't be resolved locally will hit the root servers for a definitive "go here and ask them". Obviously "corking cakes" never resolves and it probably makes a request for each letter.

UK Test and Trace chief Dido Harding tries to convince MPs that £14m for canned mobile app was money well spent

Those consultants

I remember reading an article by the BBC's Rory Celery Jones (keep reading) where he was asked to be a consultant for the NHS app. In fairness to him, he said he turned it down. Even he knew if it needed technical expertise, he should be at the back of the queue rather than the front.

I can't help but think, most of the other consultants would be just as unsuitable.

In wake of Apple privacy controls, Facebook mulls just begging its iOS app users to let it track them over the web

Re: "For once, Apple is on the side of the individual and not corporate interests."

"People buy apple because they are concerned about their privacy". That's a hill I would not want to die on.

Facebook have put this notice in to distract people from the apple notification. Here's some junk Facebook stuff to make you zone out and then you click the apple confirmation without reading/thinking about it. Facebook will lose some data from this move, but not a massive amount.

Apple emits emergency iOS security updates while warning holes may have been exploited in wild by hackers

Re: Once.....

I'd say a bug that allows someone to take over a phone by visiting a malicious website is a pretty big issue on your phone, you just didn't notice it.

Indian government slams Facebook over WhatsApp 'privacy' update, wants its own Europe-style opt-out switch

Re: GDPR

"moving from Facebook Ireland/EU to Facebook/US jurisdiction."

That would be the same Ireland that has continually supported Facebook, rather than protect EU citizens.

NHS awards £23m two-year deal to controversial Peter Thiel AI firm Palantir

Re: More evidence that UK will pull out of GDPR

Ahh yes, the EU that allowed the US to process EU data in a non compliant way, then after a court battle admitted it was wrong and came up with another way of sharing data that was still non compliant.

By all means call this government a corrupt piece of excrement, but don't pretend that the EU aren't the same. Both of them just want to be given money and not have to deal with the pesky people they represent.

It's happened: AWS signs Memorandum of Understanding for fluffy white services with UK.gov

Forget the discount

What happens once the three years are up> Given it's likely to take at least a year for a department to start using their services, is this a small discount and then whacking them with full price once the deal expires?

Elizabeth Holmes' plan to avoid her Theranos fraud trial worked out about as well as her useless blood-testing machines

Re: Hold on lads!

"Basic due diligence should have (and for most specialist biotech investors did) suggested something fishy before anyone opened their cheque books."

They did do due diligence apparently. KPMG got on it right after they finished with HP and Autonomy

Open-source devs drown in DigitalOcean's latest tsunami of pull-request spam that is Hacktoberfest

Impressive

You come up with a contest intended to help open source, which causes these projects to shut down for a few weeks.

Marketing strikes again.

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Crypto exchange cracked, Bitcoin burgled

Translated

"The company also promised that any losses would be covered by insurance"

which should read

"We need some time to clear up and get out, please believe there's a chance you'll get your money back for a few more days/weeks"

Brave takes brave stand against Google's plan to turn websites into ad-blocker-thwarting Web Bundles

Re: Prior art?

Hmmm will that be an effective blocking mechanism? If the filesize is > than 500k, display a message saying "This site is nothing but adds, do you want to continue?"

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Trouble at home?

As anyone doing kernal work wouldn't have an issue sending a plain text email, does anyone else believe what actually happened was he had a "moment" and forgot to send it as plain text. The type of silly mistake we've all done many times over the years, but means nothing. His partner has now taken this and turned it into a "He finds sending email in plain text a struggle", just for the sake of a PR blog post.

.NET Core: Still a Microsoft platform thing despite more than five years open source

"And how long would the open source versions of .NET Core, C# or F# last if Microsoft decided to drop .NET, as they have for so many other developer products - J++, J#, Visual FoxPro, Silverlight, Direct X etc. etc."

How is DirectX on there? As for the others, most of them should never have existed, so killing support quickly isn't such a bad thing. I'd be looking at the people that thought creating anything using those products, was a good idea in the first place ;)

Email innovator Hey extends an olive branch in standoff with Apple, tweaks code to make the iGiant appier

Re: A subscription fee for email‽

Err, I pay for my email. It doesn't get scanned and interupted with adverts that are no use to me. For the services I get, it's well worth the money.

No idea about this "hey" email though.

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

"That my annual income is less than Bill Gates makes in an hour isn't his fault and he doesn't need to be punished for it. That my income is multiples of the national average is again no reason to seek to punish me."

Bill Gates made his money with illegal business practices and that's the issue with billionaires. They're not making money because they are geniuses, they're making it by exploiting people and governments are doing nothing about it, as they're on the gravy train.

While people should be able to make money and be well off, no one has contributed anywhere near $2 billion dollars of worth to anything in the last few months, yet they're being rewarded. Bezos earned his money by forcing his employees to work in unhealthy conditions, for no extra money, not because he worked hard, or came up with some amazing new thing. Most of the billionaires are in the same boat, I expect that ability to exploit people/get away with crime, is what separates billionaires from millionaires.

Almost all heads of large companies earn multiple millions these days, despite having no experience within that companies core competency, they just know the right handshake. The fact is these days the people sticking things in pigs and knowing little else of value are earning all the money. The ones studying hard are earning less and less as the years go by.

Oh and people with no qualifications but doing jobs no one else wants to, should also be able to earn a decent wage. Horrendous jobs, or unsociable hours should bring more pay, but this has been all but wiped out as the people at the top need their millions for doing jack.

Zoom vows to spend next 90 days thinking hard about its security and privacy after rough week, meeting ID war-dialing tool emerges

Re: To be honest you can't blame people for going to Zoom

You mean make it even worse, from the article it's already pretty terrible for serious use.

Yo, Imma let you finish, but for the 6,000 people still using that app on a daily basis ... we have a question: why?

Re: Sticky Octopi*

I can still remember the streaks we put down a large conservatory window playing with them. Great fun and in no way worthless.

Bada Bing, bada bork: Windows 10 is not happy, and Microsoft's search engine has something to do with it

"One of these days someone, somewhere, is going to run a comparative test of the quantity/quality of search engine results by the Evil Google and the Saintly DDG and similarly noble StartPage. In the meantime, the myth will presumably continue to be perpetuated that DDG is in some way a credible alternative to Google when, in fact, it isn 't."

Err to say they're not credible is a bit much. Yes they're not as good as google right now, but for a lost of searching they're fine. I find DDG handles most of my general searching perfectly well, it's only when I want specific information, or a wide range of opinions that it comes up short. That's when I use google.

Oh and you have to remember to view more than the first page to get to some of the links, just like you had to do with google when they started up. If no one's clicking on the link, it's hard for them to increase the relevance.

Stiff upper lip time, Brits: After bullying France to drop its digital tax on Silicon Valley, Trump's coming for you next

Re: He's threatening Italy as well

as opposed to being in the EU who failed to reach an agreement when they tried.

Not sure what your point is.

And then there were two: HMS Prince of Wales joins Royal Navy

quick, to the downvotes

We strained our eyes with Lenovo's monster monitor: 43.4 inches for price of five 24" screens

Re: Vertical space rules

but can it play Crysis?

Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC: Howdy buck do you get a solid 60FPS in Rockstar's masterpiece?

Re: Just out of interest...

I've completed the Xbox version and the game is equal parts brilliant and idiotic. They have created a beautiful world and it does feel like the wild west when you're happily wandering about doing very little. However, try and achieve something and it can become a pain.

The developers have decided they want you to play the game their way and under no circumstances can you do anything else*. If the game engine was well designed, they'd probably get away with it, but it isn't, so they don't. It's *very* easy to walk into someone and cause a fight, this can reset the progress you've made on a mission. If you could get back to the location swiftly it wouldn't be so bothersome, but lots of times it's another 5-10 minutes riding your horse to the start of the mission and trying again.

Hunting the legendary animals can be fun, but multiple times I've traveled for ages, got to the location, only for a side-quest to kick off and scare the animal away. You then have to leave the area and come back later. More time wasted.

As I said I've completed the game, but I hate the thought of spending any more time in the game, as I'm fed up with wasting 20-30 minutes playing time through no fault of my own.

* As the PC game can be modded, the crappy issues may be fixed over time.

Re: And this, dear friends...

You obviously missed the articles about the Stadia game that needed patching before people could play it. I think they're going to make people wait at static screens while the game updates in the background. It's a bit like their claims of 4k, up-scaling a 1080p picture isn't real 4k and simply not showing the "Updating game" message, doesn't mean you don't have to wait for games to update.

Beware the trainee with time on his hands and an Acorn manual on his desk

Re: Oh, the joys

He's obviously the culprit

Infosec boffins pour cold water on claims Home Office Brexit app can be easily hacked

*sigh*

"These are controls like the app detecting whether the phone has been rooted"

One day people may wake up to the fact a rooted phone is probably more secure than a stock phone.

California’s Attorney General joins the long list of people who have had it with Facebook

"CEO Zuckerberg also continues to avoid visiting London, or anywhere in the UK, out of fear he will be arrested for repeatedly failing to comply with a request by Parliament to answer questions about Facebook’s actions, as revealed in the tranche of documents."

It's ok Zuck, if the law comes looking for you, you could always seek refuge in a friendly embassy. You'd even get a cat thrown in.

The sound of silence is actually the sound of a malicious smart speaker app listening in on you

There's an article on ars technica about this, along with videos showing it in action. I believe the password one plays the silence and then asks the user for their password, it then starts listening. I was very impressed (as I don't have these devices at home).

We read the Brexit copyright notices so you don't have to… No more IP freely, ta very much

Re: I am just going to ignore it and

‘Trade deals take so long because they can be hijacked by small groups in any one of the EU member state parliaments or even local authorities, leaving us at the mercy of every European pressure group.'

Errr so he's against the EU, as the above example shows why it's such a hideously inefficient entity. Much better to get rid of it and try again.

Ye olde Blue Screen of Death is back – this time, a bad Symantec update is to blame

Re: BSOD never went away

Once a week for me ever since our external support bods swapped out Kaspersky for Webroot. But they tell me it's not related.

Astronaut Tim Peake reminds everyone about the time Excel mangled his contact list on stage at Microsoft AI event

Not defending Excel but

"I'm still blaming that on the software, I imported my contacts address book in Excel and all the 9s got rounded up to 0s…"

Here's a tip Tim, don't use a spreadsheet as an address book.

DoorDash doesn't just pick up your food orders, it delivers your data to hackers, too

Re: (and, while you're at it, stop reusing passwords)

I agree, I was horrified when I tried to update my Microsoft password and was told the maximum length was 16 characters. This was a year ago and I don't think they've changed it yet.

Yet another reminder: When a tech giant says its AI listens to you, it means humans listen to you. Right, Facebook?

Staffed by people on minimum wage

You know the people listening in are on minimum wage and they'll also be monitored to make sure they're transcribing enough words, which means they just put any crap in and you also know management won't be checking they've transcribed it correctly, so....

The AI is probably dumber after it's had the data updated, then it was before. But we won't tell Zuck that.

Paris, because they've been at it so long, AI has probably reached her level. Love Island next year will consist of Amazon echo's and google home hubs.

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

Did he just threaten the USA?

“A major incident may well occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues,” he said.

Don't know about anyone else, but I read that as a threat.

Tinfoil hat anyone?

These boffins' deepfake AI vids are next-gen. But don't take our word for it. Why not ask Zuck or Kim Kardashian...

Re: Seems good enough to fool most people to me

"Why should anyone waste their time spoiling a ballet when it changes nothing and has no effect?"

On its own it has no effect and shouldn't do, but if everyone who doesn't vote spoiled their ballot paper it would have a very significant effect.

If you don't vote, nothing can be inferred from it. Not all people fail to cast a vote because they don't believe in the system, so you can't say X people didn't vote so the system must be broken. Having an election where a large proportion of votes were spoiled would send out a signal things were broken.

If 25% of the electorate spoiled their ballot and the highest candidate only had 20% of the vote, they would have a very hard time justifying the candidate should take up a seat at Parliament. Having 25% of people not participate can never be allowed to mean anything, as the meaning will be inferred by the people in power and we don't want that.

So if you want to change the system, participate in the current one, otherwise don't complain you're being ignored.

DXC Technology exec: What should our brand be known for?

"* Good, fast, cheap: we've heard of them"

I would go with:

Good, fast, cheap. Pick one, as long as it's not good... or cheap... and fast is looking dodgy too.

Uber JUMPs at chance to dump load of electric bikes across Islington

Where does the £25 go?

I hope it's to the council rather than Uber, but I fear it's a nice way for Uber to make some money for a change.

Zavvi tells customers: You've won VIP tickets to Champions League final! And you've won tickets, and you've won tickets, and you, and...

Thing is, as I never entered the competition I haven't agreed to any T&C's, so pointing to them won't do any good. I guess it all comes down to whether or not the email is a contract.

Not just people who entered the competition

I got the email as well, even though I haven't bought anything from them since 2011. My first thought was "this is the best scam email I've ever seen"

I can't say Mike Lynch knew about Autonomy dodginess, star witness tells High Court

Re: Popcorn!

I'll take some, will you accept an email from Zavvi saying you've won a competition you never entered as payment?

This is the Send, encrypted end-to-end, this is the Send, my Mozillan friend

Re: The devil with all this stuff is in the details

"btw, is this type of not-quite-anon anon of ANY practical use? (notwithstanding the actual service and encryption)."

If you don't think it's of any use, why are you posting anonymously?

Until now, if Canadian Uber drivers wanted to battle the tech giant, they had to do it in the Netherlands – for real

Re: Why Uber?

Because a taxi driver keeps the whole fare which is worked out on a meter that has been cleared by the local council, or they can set a pre-determined fare with the person. They then pay the company they may work for, so they can get jobs through them. In the old days the jobs would be put out on a machine and a driver could accept it or not. If they didn't accept it, they still had a chance at the next job and so on.

Now Uber take all the money and the fare the customer pays is worked out by code that's not monitored and the driver has no way of ignoring it and setting a pre-determined fare. Add in the fact if they skip jobs, their chance of others drops and you have a fairly significant difference.

Oh and taxi drivers also have to take a test to show they know the local area, not as important in the age of sat navs, but still useful when avoiding traffic. Not all cabbies care about getting you places quickly, but if you're a regular and nice, they will go the extra mile for you because they can make that choice.