Posts by heyrick

New RFC explains how protocol developers can avoid building human rights abuses into the internet

Re: "New IP 'would enable mass surveillance' "

"People do very bad things on the Internet, and they need to be stopped, eg Huw Edwards."

Didn't downvote, but would like to point out that for all the bad that happens on the internet, worse happens in real life. Where do you think those pictures came from?

"Free speech shouldn't be allowed"

Free speech should be rolled back to its original meaning - you can call the king (or president, whatever) a dickhead without worrying about spending the rest of your life eating gruel because the recipient with the fragile ego stamped their feet in a dramatic manner. It shouldn't have ever become an excuse for justifying "I can shout louder than you", because honestly most of the shouting (also fragile egos stamping dramatically) is not worth listening to and it only serves to exclude the rational who don't want to have to deal with all of that nonsense.

"'freedom of expression'"

I don't know how it works in law (probably depends upon jurisdiction), but I consider this to be a separate thing. Freedom of expression, for me, would be that I can wear a shirt with the flag of Palestine (or, let's be fair, Israel (or Ukraine...)) and that is my way of expressing how I feel. But this doesn't give me any right to go online, or worse, in real life, and yell "wanker!" to whoever may be wearing a shirt with the other flag on it.

"with legitimate interests"

First hurdle, define "legitimate". This sort of thing gets real messy real quick.

Isn't this closing the door after the horse has not only bolted, but died of old age?

"In a worst-case scenario, protocols that leak information can lead to physical danger."

Forget unfriendly regimes and bad guys and instead ask if all the chattering telemetry built into modern devices might pose a risk for a woman going within a mile of an abortion clinic? It's depressing as fuck that in 2024 in the West we're even needing to ponder such a question, but that's where we are. And this RFC holds exactly no weight against the mighty currency symbol, for every data point you produce has a value (for them, not for you) and that will win over "don't be evil" any day.

The case for handcrafted software in a mass-produced world

There's so much of it that it's no longer practical to study it, restructure it, or fundamentally change it.

Linux began as one man's project that kind of blew up and took over the world. But if it hasn't, that would have been fine too because it was originally a learning exercise.

The problem with writing a shiny new OS is, well, it's a massive amount of work. It's something that is cropping up in the RISC OS world because huge chunks of 32 bit ARM assembler aren't going to do anything useful on 64 bit processors. Excepting emulation, it's going to pretty much need a ground up rewrite, which is a phenomenal task even for a dinky OS. But it's just like designing and launching any other brand new OS. There's a long period of nothing (while paid and bills need paid), followed by a lot of hoping that that nothing will become something.

Say what you like about how shiny Windows is, but it has survived many a year. Who is going to want to bet the company on a brand new OS which is unknown, untested, has no software, and may turn out to have architectural issues unknown at the beginning? And, of course, may take twice as long to write as originally planned (or three times if they try to get an LLM to assist). Or, maybe, the potential users will just be "meh" and stick with what they know and all that effort will have been for nothing.

I think this is why it's just a continual dance of fiddling around the edges and screwing with the UI to make it look "new".

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

Re: Conspiracy

Probably downvoted now, and in the past, because the average car has enough security holes to not need malicious people from an unfriendly state to install backdoors. Wasn't there a demonstration not so long ago of some researchers hijacking a "smart"(ish) vehicle simply by driving up beside it?

As for thinking that giving the government access to anything would be useful, think again. Their approach to dealing with "cyber" problems is the ICO, an outfit that isn't even worthy of having it's name spoken out loud, they're that useless.

And no, the government wouldn't bodge things because "think of the children" as was mentioned in another reply, because it's the government we're talking about. How soon, would you imagine, until the entire source code of all the firmware in all of the UK cars ends up on a USB key that was "mislaid" on the 10.40 to Penzance? Still, that's better, I suppose, than expecting some random minister (any of them) from having the slightest clue when it comes to computers. To give you an example of the utter technological cluelessness, here's a headline from 2018: Over 24,000 attempts to access porn sites from parliamentary computers since election

Oracle urged again to give up JavaScript trademark

Re: Would you give up your house...

"can I have anything in your home that you haven't used in a while?"

<looks around>

You'd be doing me a favour. Bring a truck...

How about FuckLarry? He can be immortalised in the best possible way...

"Dammit, this FuckLarry keeps crashing, I'm going to call up the FuckLarry console and see what the hell is going on with this FuckLarry code."

Elon Musk's assassination 'joke' bombs, internet calls for his deportation

Re: Jellied conspiracy

"I supposed you're going to suggest that They *had* removed it, but quickly put it back when you spotted and called out this "far-left" conspiracy"

Sometimes the forum glitches and posts can take a minute or two to turn up. But sure, it's easier to imagine some big global conspiracy rather than Cloudflare being an arse.

From this side of the ocean, both sides are a bucket of crazy.

How about you lot stop giving a shit about whether somebody is left or right, donkey or elephant, and start working out what is in the best interests of the country? Is that too much to ask?

Re: To Mars!

Ack ack ack ack. Ack ack ack ack. Ack.

Telcos scolded for unwanted erection of utility poles in race to wire up Britain

Re: Around Here

I recall chaos at a place I lived way back when. It was built at the end of the 70s. Everything underground. Telephone, electricity, and gas to each house.

Which, perhaps to cut costs, went in really crazy directions across gardens and such. There were manholes on the pavements, but when the lid was up and you look at where the stuff was running, it was like "wait, what?".

Of course, the plans held by the county council showed where all the utilities were supposed to go, not where they actually went.

How we found out? A rather large bang followed by a full evacuation as somebody was digging up their back garden to lay foundations for a conservatory. Thankfully the electrics were above the gas main so they had blown and tripped before the momentum of the digger punched a hole in the gas. Had it been the other way around...

...oh, and of course, for safety reasons they weren't supposed to put the two on top of each other like that. And they should surely have put some sort of plastic mesh stuff down to warn anybody digging that "here be dragons" before anything important got hit.

But most of all they were supposed to put them where the bloody plans said to put them.

"I'm paying $45/mo for 300/300 here"

I'm paying €52/month (or $58) for 2038 Mbit down, 546 up (rural France). Actually that's not entirely true, it is capped at 1GBit per device, I need to pay a tenner extra to have the full bandwidth... but this doesn't bother me as most of my devices use WiFi and that is the slow part.

Kind of mind blowing to go from two and a half megabit (0.7Mbit up) ADSL to fibre.

Re: quote: Isn't this liable to be a problem for disabled people?

"has seen Labour take the 'pretending to care about all this'"

I don't think there's much else they can do, given what the Tories left behind. At least Labour are smart enough to avoid using the word "bankrupt" as the markets would slaughter them. But reading between the lines of what they have been saying...

"This is Brexit Britain."

Yes, it's a shame everybody is trying so hard to ignore the fluorescent pink elephant in the lurid green tutu doing the can-can in the middle of the room whilst juggling bone china crockery...

"Unfortunately we no longer have enough staff to pretend to give a toss about your problem"

Or they've outsourced their "support" to somewhere where speaking and understanding English is not a requirement...

"nor enough cash to fix it"

I would like to think that blocking access for disabled people (and new mothers, etc) might dua fall foul of some sort of anti-discrimination/accessibility directive, but then I remember how useless the ICO is and have little doubt that the only thing that's ever going to see actual results is if one happens to refer to an obstreperous seven year old by the "wrong" pronoun.

Re: Like any other superhighway

Is this an American thing, the party line? I remember the phone we had when I was a child (40 odd years ago). Chunky rotary dial thing, pretty much the only model available but it came in different colours (ooh!). What I remember most are the horribly arcane tarifs which were based upon distance of copper travelled and time of day. You used to get a little booklet of backdoor codes to allow you to call somewhere that was physically nearby but on a different STD because dialling the full number like that was kerching!

How exciting it was when the "InPhone" was launched, which heralded the era of the dinky little phone plug and the idea that you could bugger off down to Woolies and pick a phone you liked the look of (anything, so long as it had a little green BABT sticker underneath).

We had our own phone number. Boarding school had a phone number (name of town plus 348 or 461 depending on junior or senior end!). Never seen or used a party line in my life.

"including where they partially obstruct people's driveways"

It should be legal to chainsaw the things when to do idiotic stuff like that.

"that they remove about 50% of the usable area of the footpath"

Isn't this liable to be a problem for disabled people?

I live in rural France and the phone lines are overhead, and quite prone to being buggered up by the local farmers and their complete lack of giving shits about the infrastructure (unless, of course, it affects them).

It hadn't been up two weeks when one of the twats tried to take a tractor with a muck spreader tank down the little lane and around a tight bend with the concrete electric pole on one side and the metal phone pole on the other. One was not going to survive. It was the phone pole they decided to crush, leaving it drooping precariously across the lane. A couple of days later they cut the weeds along the edge of the field and managed to hit the pole hard enough that it snapped the copper cable, which promptly got caught in the blades and yanked off the next pole down hard enough that it also brought the fibre down (but being tighter it didn't end up shredded). Came home to find the fibre nearly at ground level across the lane and the remains of the copper thrown in the lane like it was my fault the guy's a dickhead. I tied the fibre to the pole to hold it back off the lane as best I could and reported it all to Orange who eventually came and fixed it.

But, damn, I'm quite impressed with the fibre. Maybe it has metal braiding in the cable or something? The only downside is one needs to take bets as to when the next round of stupid will happen. It's almost time for the big harvesters to bring in the maize......

Prison just got rougher as band of heinously violent cybercrims sentenced to lengthy stints

Re: A warning message

Well, if he's smart some of the ill gotten gains will be stashed away for the future, so when he gets out he may still be able to live in a way better than those who worked their arses off.

China wants red flags on all AI-generated content posted online

Re: Down here in Oz, it's first come, first served

"A lot of it with little to zero return to the state."

Nothing for the state, but I'd imagine a healthy sized brown envelope to the one(s) who either passed the authorisation or failed to object.

Throwing money at people to make problems go away is a mere cost of doing business. When those people are the ones who are entrusted to look after the country on behalf of the citizens, that's when it gets insidious. And when there's no point in voting for a different group because they're just as bad, that's when it gets shitty.

Won't the internet be a nicer place

If it was this easy to avoid the machine generated drivel that spams the search engines and wastes everybody's time for the pittance in revenue generated by the embedded advertising.

I suspect, also, certain "newspapers" (note the scare quotes) may also have to write actual articles and not regurgitate "this utterly important person said blahblahblah on TikTok" style nonsense. Given the article quotes exactly what the screenshots already show, I would imagine this is a crappy bit of software making the article text.

RISE with SAP sinking year on year

Who is this Gartner that keeps on being quoted?

And more importantly, how is this any different to Mystic Meg? Determining what will happen in the future is "educated guessing" at best. Sure, there are trends that one might expect to continue, but reality is always willing to toss a spanner in the works: Covid, Russia, the Middle East, etc etc.

I stole 20 GB of data from Capgemini – and now I'm leaking it, says cybercrook

Re: Fortunately the value of generic data is vastly overrated

Luckily I have enough outbuildings that I can put stuff in a box, put the box into a big bin bag, slap a sticky label on it, and put it "over there somewhere".

God help me if I ever have to move, but it's not something that's even envisaged as a possible maybe. I like it too much here in the back of beyond.

Re: Fortunately the value of generic data is vastly overrated

"its easier, quicker and cheaper to buy more storage space than to spend a lot of time combing through existing storage to find and delete junk"

This. It's a lot less trouble to buy a new harddisc than to tidy up the crap that accumulates on the current one(s). Besides, that random kitten meme that I downloaded at half three in the morning three years ago...might be quite the thing that I need at some random point in the future.

"Incidentally, 20GByte sounds like a lot of data but it is not, its what could be downloaded over USB onto a budget phone in a credible amount of time."

Over WiFi on fibre, that'll take something like 5-6 minutes.

"at best its going to be a hard slog to figure it out, at worst its just going to be unredeemable pile of junk."

Upvote for this. Been there, sunk many teas, and in a couple of cases decided the best approach was to simply start again.

Actually, starting from scratch may in fact be the best approach, but that realisation doesn't tend to come after a lot of time and effort with the unredeemable junk, by which point you're not inclined to want to throw away all that work...

AI giants pinky swear (again) not to help make deepfake smut

Re: "non-consensual deepfake pornography"

I hammered that upvote hard for the final line.

Guess what I had to deal with yesterday. When I was done with that bucket of misery, I grabbed my pickaxe and dug a small hole. Felt much better afterwards. Kind of wish I could have taken the pickaxe to the computer of the twat that managed to create a chatbot incapable of understanding actual sentences.

What it says: Describe your problem clearly.

What it needs: "help", "broken", and other single word inputs, that it then proceeds to assist with by providing irrelevant bullshit that you already had to read in order to even get as far as the chatbot.

Japan to put a small red Swedish house on the Moon

Staying there for a while would probably give you one emotion stronger than any other.

Happiness. I'm increasingly of the opinion that humans suck.

Longing to go home.

Longing for a decent cuppa. I can imagine that the lack of atmosphere and low gravity would present serious challenges regarding brewing a perfect tea.

Online media outstrips TV as source of news for the first time in the UK

So we've gone from broadcast news that used to attempt the illusion of impartiality by annoying everybody equally...

...to having people search out their own private echo chambers on opaque services that may well be bankrolled by foreign regimes (particularly those who would appreciate the downfall of your country).

Re: "TV remains more trusted news source"

"Nope. Not any more."

21 upvotes, 21 downvotes. Come on, one side has to win this!

Domo arigato, Mr Roboto: Japan's bullet trains to ditch drivers

"Germany is also very good at local rail"

There used to be a channel (3sat?) on the Astra birds at 19E that would broadcast late at night what looked like they just stuck a camera on the front of some random rural train.

I can't tell you how many hours of my life passed by (circa 2002-2005) as I enjoyed the scenery as these little trains trundled slowly along their routes.

Re: "199 mph"

"Nobody should be needing to commute by car."

Depends where you live. I drive to work, because I live very rural and the only functional bus is the subsidised school service.

Not only that, but I drive a special sort of car that you don't need a driving licence to be able to drive (Google "Aixam"). It's the bane of many a French driver, but it was decided that letting people like me loose with a Playmobil car was a lot simpler than pissing away money on public transport that would never be capable of turning a profit. Hell, the town where I live doesn't even have a bakery any more. The only library in my postal code (covers one small town and three tiny villages) is mostly for children.

So, "use public transport" is only an option where it exists, which isn't everywhere.

Re: An obvious step forward

The entire Rennes Métro, which is fairly new, was designed from the start so that the drivers two-car trains just go back and forth endlessly so there's a train every three(ish) minutes.

Even better, because the route goes by the big hospital (Pontchaillou) and the nuclear medicine is underground there, in order to keep the trains safe from the scanners (and vice versa), it comes up out of the ground to quite high up.

CrowdStrike hopes legal threats will fade as time passes since it broke the world

Re: License terms

That wouldn't fly over here. Hidden terms are deemed unenforceable. So the entire agreement should be available, and written in plain English (or French or German etc) prior to purchase.

Anything that wasn't fully disclosed prior to purchase is a "hidden term" and can safely be ignored (your consumer rights association or the EU ECC will back you up on that).

Pat Gelsinger's grand plan to reinvent Intel is in jeopardy

Re: Spin it off

Oh 'ark at you, posh git with this "sleep". When I were a lad we used to work twenty hours at t' mill and on Fridays when dad was too knackered we'd take turns with the belt to thrash ourselves.

Apple owes billions in back taxes over Ireland state aid rule break

"Until then, no phones, no email services, nothing."

Listen for the screaming of the stock exchange as cutting off a bloc with a larger population than the US would likely slaughter share prices in an irrational act of self harm.

I, however, would welcome it. Sure, there will be short term pain and plenty of chaos (who can read a map these days?), but maybe just maybe European providers will get up off their fat arses and start to provide services so that we are no longer beholden to the privacy-pillaging offerings from overseas.

Re: This won't cost Apple a penny

Wait, is this the same IRS that double taxes regular people living and working elsewhere in the world if they happen to be Americans?

SQL king Larry Ellison becomes sequel sultan with controlling interest in Paramount Global

<shrug> They've been running the original series on Legend. Not being overly familiar with the series (being a Brit I guess I was more a Space:1999 kind of guy?), I was watching a very bizarre programme set in a hippie commune. Kind of blew my mind when Spock turned up.

As for the other series, I guess it is like watching Friends. Seems like an interesting idea until one realises that it is 236 episodes over ten seasons. That's something like 86 hours. Sorry, life is too short...

Global powers sign AI pact promising to preserve human rights, democracy

Re: Great!

You think "Big Tech" shares the riches?

Great!

So the AI outfits will start respecting people's rights (copy rights, moral rights, likeness rights, etc etc) exactly when?

Of course the Internet Archive’s digital lending broke the law, appeals court says

"but I bet you don't believe that laws need overhauling to recognize the digital age we're living in"

Just to throw out a couple of random thoughts - why to we communicate with friends and family using ten or eleven digit numbers, yet a mere four is considered sufficient to protect our payments? Should a bank not be considered liable if it accepts card payments that happen in close proximity in two geographically distant places?

Maybe the current laws do need a tweak for digital age.

"but things like Disney should no longer happen"

First up, I pretty much agree with you, and I don't have a solution either.

However, I think the logic that a company would use is that they took this idea, this creation, and invested time and money in developing it into a "thing" which then became a marketable commodity.

Consider, for instance, Harry Potter. The creation of one woman. Which now has a bunch of films, spin off films, and vast amounts of tat (figurines, tea cosies, blah blah blah blah). So it's a little more complex than "the copyright ends with the creator".

All that being said, the only two words that I can think of for that damned mouse is "culturally abusive".

WHO-backed meta-study finds no evidence that cellphone radiation causes brain cancer

Re: The car and the steak....

"Point 3 Most these days are marginal vegos simply because of the cost of meat."

Unfortunately organic produce (that which has not been doused in all manner of nasty chemicals at various points of it's life) is also pretty damned expensive.

But, yes, the price of meat these days. Correction, the price of decent meat these days. You can get a whole precooked chicken for a fiver, but, yeah, might want to ask what that actually is...

Re: Sloppy

If someone's phone was emitting 600W, a wouldn't imagine it would do so for long unless it had a battery the size of a house brick.

Re: Sloppy

"and do not leak radio waves unless faulty"

Actually, some of the waves do leak because imperfections, building to cost, etc etc etc. It's a tiny amount, I think the rules are something like 5mW/cm² maximum (but I'm not a microwave tech).

Cheap and easy test - switch your phone to 2.4GHz WiFi and start playing something streaming. Put it beside your microwave (on the outside, obviously!). Put something tasty in the microwave and turn the microwave on in order to warm up whatever you're about to eat. See how long it takes for your streaming to stop, as the tiny amounts of microwave energy leaked are enough to mess with the WiFi. A metre or two so away you'll be fine, but right next to the microwave it's like trying to appreciate a delicate orchestral piece in an auditorium full of crying babies...

Re: Sloppy

"Who decided they were an expert in something they, by definition, have no qualifications in?"

Uh.... most of the commentards on the entire internet?

I hope the nanobots can repair human tissue. My back hurts, my knees hurt, my eyesight is progressively crappier... all part of the joys of turning into a crusty old git. But hey, if I'm full of nanobots they can fix up this pathetic corpse that I inhabit, make it work again.

Re: Dr WHO

Should add, last winter was the first time since 2019 that I had a cold. Everybody keeping apart, wearing our silly little masks, and actually bothering to wash hands properly put the kibosh on the seasonal colds and flus for a couple of years. Just goes to show what it might be like if more people gave a shit about others rather than thinking only about themselves.

Re: Dr WHO

"Was aware lots of idiots were locking themselves in their houses"

Fun fact - as a hardcore introvert, pretty much the only thing that changed for me was the need to have a stupid permission slip to drive to work. So it really didn't bother me to follow lockdown.

Recently had my summer holiday. Three weeks and the only people I interacted with was the postie a few times and a couple of checkout girls when I went shopping. BLISS!

Re: Dr WHO

There's worst things to swallow without question.

Sorry...uh...I'll let myself out.

Intel Arrow Lake to be made elsewhere as 20A process node canned

had been powered up and operating systems booted

Yes, but does it stay that way?

Amazon congratulates itself for AI code that mostly works

Does this mean my Amazon suggestions might start to become relevant?

And not idiotic crap like "You just bought a new shaver, we think you might like a new shaver" or "We think you would like a new dress for a little girl" (my order history being painfully indicative of a middle aged single male nerd whose only family has four legs and a tail...).

Key aspects of Palantir's Federated Data Platform lack legal basis, lawyers tell NHS England

Unless solution found, patients must be allowed to opt out in

There, FTFY.

Firefox 130 lands with a yawn, but 131 beta teases a long-awaited feature

Didn't downvote, but the bastards will track you anyway.

Try looking at how many cookies get set whilst their cookie pop-up is visible and telling you "We care about your privacy", oh bollocks, if anybody cared they would note the DNT header and not ask because I've already said no. If they cared the "Reject everything" option would be as simple as the "Accept everything" option. And on some sites, they ignore the "functional cookies" exception so they ask you on Every Single Fucking Page because they want to harass you into just saying sod it and accepting the cookies. And none of this is even counting the new business model of "pay for your supposed privacy".

A plague on all their houses.

"but everyone wants to be tracked like cattle, and therefore it should be the default!"

Well, given that recently far too many sites seem to think that privacy is something people should pay for, I can't help but feel that your rights and wishes don't count. Especially given that a place that is slimy enough to completely ignore the option of "advertising without the tracking" is going to track you regardless of whether or not you pay...

...the modern web is shit and we're all clickbait cattle.