Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

UK takes first step towards criminalising driverless car hackers

Re: The number of laws we have...

But all those existing laws only apply in the UK.

We need a new law that also applies to hackers in N. Korea or Russia

April Fool: FCC finally bothers with Puerto Rico as chairman visits

Re: Embarrassed to be American

4.3%" sounds - pretty low, actually.

Try: nearly 1 on 20 of people in your country can't phone for fire / police / ambulance

Apple's new 'spaceship' HQ brings the pane for unobservant workers

Re: The Resurrection is under way

I wonder if the building will achieve sentience before Apple Manglement?

There is a weird Michael Chrichton type sci-fi thriller about an AI building management system that starts killing people - odd that it's by Philip Kerr who mostly does Nazi era Germany detective-noir

(Unless there are two Philip Kerrs and I'm being an idiot)

Shock poll finds £999 X too expensive for happy iPhone owners

Re: I agree.

It is too expensive.

If people aren't buying it because they can't afford it then it's obviously not expensive enough.

The whole point of an iPhoneX is to show people you can afford an iPhoneX - that's wasted if peasants can buy one on credit

US Army warns of the potential dangers of swarming toy drones on US soldiers

Simple solution

Have every US soldier wear a bluetooth transmitter with a unique ID.

Give a list of those IDs to the Chinese drone makers who can program the drones not to attack those targets.

Rhode Island proposes $20 porn tax. Er, haven't we heard this before?

Re: Blocking "offensive content" is impossible.

so either they block all of Wikipedia or pay fines.

Project Gutenberg has just done this with Germany.

German law bans Nazi books, PG doesn't want to go through its content and decide which books to block - and open the can of worms of every city council in every country in the world having its own list - so it blocked access to the whole project from Germany.

I can see a few US 'news' outlets being happy if wikipedia was blocked

Re: Pay to watch paedophilic porn?

Is the pronography on my computer disabled?

No you pervert it's just regular porn !

UK data watchdog's inaugural tech strategy was written with... *drumroll* Word 2010

Re: Office 2010 is sometimes preferred over the later versions

But can Office 2010 accomodate all the new innovations in intra-office memos in the last 8years?

Re: in fairness

I'm defending my Office2010 install against the hoards of IT support - it's the last version of Excel that doesn't do cutesty little fruit machine animations when it updates a cell FFS

Reddit 'fesses up to just a little Russian reaming

Reddit?

Is anybody on Reddit old enough to vote?

Wait until the investigation shows the Russians tried to infiltrate 4chan and motifakes

Re: "Trade wars are good, and easy to win"

Until you discover that there is something they need that you don't produce - and which your suppliers now won't sell you.

Re: Exceptionalists always have issues with reality and nonsense

I don't - but I'm from Yorkshire and so I'm obviously better than everyone else.

Good luck saying 'Sorry I'm late, I had to update my car's firmware'

Strangely, I like my computers to not do anything unless requested.

So you would be happy with a botnet of millions of home devices crashing infrastructure until a million owners all conduct their own failure mode analysis and initiate their CAPA policy framework before deciding to update their hacked device?

'Quantum supremacy will soon be ours!', says Google as it reveals 72-qubit quantum chip

Re: The three states of Schnroedingers Cat

But all alive cats are in a superposition of states of "asleep" and "bloody furious"

Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

Re: What about Power Failures?

Compaq used to run an ad 20+ years ago of a cluster when you destroy one server (shotgun, drop a safe on it, wrecking ball etc) and the system keeps goings

Hey girl, move a little closer. 'Cause you're too gun shy. Hush, hush, bye says Pai

Re: Deal

So this is the Russian equivalent of the Cadet Corp or ROTC - not quite the same as being given an Ak-47 as a prize for finally graduating kindergarten

Re: Keep in mind, Pai *is* a lawyer and you'd think this migh thave been part of his induction

Or he knew that the photo of him accepting the gun it would be on the front page after every future school shooting or everytime some politician blames the internet for gun violence.

This gives him a face-saving way of refusing the NRA 'gift' because he is too honest

UK peers: Is this what you call governance of facial recog tech? A 'few scattered papers'!

Unfortunately you wont be nicked - that would allow you to question the evidence.

You will just be misidentified and go on a database. You were "seen" (to p=0.05) at a demo against an arms fair. You end up on a no-fly list or suddenly don't get that job at a firm that gets lots of government work.

Knock, knock. Whois there? Get ready for anonymized email addresses after domain privacy shake-up

Re: I'm all for it

So at what point are you a real web publisher who should a public address and "just a individual website" ?

Re: I'm all for it

So should different rules apply on the internet?

Can companies and publishers decide that it is outragous that the address of the manufacturer of something you bought be available to you or the address of a newspaper office be available to complaints

Spotify wants to go public but can't find Ed Sheeran (to pay him)

But even when they do pay the record companies they don't hand it over to the artists.

One record company has been sitting on Moody Blues royalties for 40years claiming that there is a dispute over the original lineup

Euro Commission gives tech firms an hour to take down terror content

Re: Discuss

Iceland Air - Terrorists or Freedom Fighters

Dog poop droppers - Terrorists or Freedom Fighters

Fly tippers - Terrorists or Freedom Fighters

Re: Who determines who is a terrorist ?

Fortunately once free of the Orwellian Euro superstate we will have the wise guidance of Amber Rudd to protect us. Free of any interference from some court of human rights.

Brit military boffins buy airtime on HD eye-in-the-sky video satellite

Re: sun-synchronous orbit

You can't quite do one spot each day. This is in a 90minute orbit, so gets 18 slices of the Earth each day.

Since it only images a 5km wide swath you don't get very complete coverage - basically you get 5km wide lines 2000km apart. You can slowly precess the orbit so that you can fill in the coverage over any spot but that takes a while

Re: State of the art

1m res earth observation satellites are now startup territory. There are half a dozen groups with constellations of 20-30 being launched to provide continuous coverage. One satellite has very limited coverage unless you want to use a lot of fuel

Woe Canada: Rather than rise from the ashes, IBM-built C$1bn Phoenix payroll system is going down in flames

Re: Without reading the contract specs or anything, I would think their would be withholds

the vendors should have started calling out warning signals knowing how bad it was progressing.

why ? That's the entire business model for this sort of project.

The vendors job is to deliver something that doesn't work but exactly meets all the specifications in the contract - then get paid 10x as much for "changes"

That's why the contract is 6000pages -

At last, sex trafficking brought to an end with US House vote on new internet law (Yeah, right)

It means the current facebook is the last and only permanent one.

Anybody starting a competitor has to have enough lawyers on day 1 to screen all their content.

Somebody with an anonymous email address of zuck666 might even be tempted to post some content to get them shut down.

The reason we have lots of rules and laws restricting business is that they are written at the behest of currently successful businesses.

Brit spooks slammed over 'gentlemen's agreement' with telcos to get mass comms data

Re: No surprises here

GCHQ is a spy agency

But we had naively hoped that they were spying on the enemies of the country, rather than the enemies of the current home secretary

Vaping on the NHS? Don't hold your breath

Tobacco is a carcinogen whether or not you burn it

At some level almost all substances are.

Especially those which have had millions of years to evolve a defence against mammals eating them

Full shift to electric vans would melt Royal Mail's London hub, MPs told

Re: Who remembers....

Seems odd that 40-50 years ago we had electric vehicles suitable for door-door milk delivery but the Royal mail needs Teslas for door-door mail delivery.

I suppose that's why I can't get a newspaper delivered - the delivery boy is waiting for his flying car

Super Cali's futuristic robo-cars in focus. Even though a watchdog says tech is quite atrocious

Re: Not a good idea

So long as regular cars are only allowed on the road if somebody is available to take over when the driver is distracted, on their phone, looking for something they dropped on the floor, drinking their coffee or drop dead of a heart attack

You get a criminal record! And you get a criminal record! Peach state goes bananas with expanded anti-hack law

Re: Not Surprised

What about TOS saying you can't post a negative review? Those have gone to court. Having the extra negotiating power of it being a criminal conviction should help keep the public in line

Re: I don't see the problem

Until a bank / health insurer / credit agency with your records moves its data processing to Georgia to take advantage of this and is hacked

Re: Not Surprised

So you don't think this will help Georgia Tech's attempt to lure students and researchers away from certain "Institute of Technologies" named after other states ?

NSA boss: Trump won't pull trigger for Russia election hack retaliation

Re: Really?

It isn't the votes that count - it's the person that counts the votes.

What were they planning on doing?

Interfering in Russia's free and fare electoral process?

Is this why Facebook is such a toxic dump? HP, HPE sued for 'leaking chems' into office site

Re: A small irony

A modern company would have added a clause to the user agreement that results from the instrument can't be used against the manufacturer

Apple: Er, yes. Your iCloud stuff is now on Google's servers, too

But Apple would have to run the cloud on their own machines - since they don't sell real computers anymore that would be one hell of a lot of Macbooks!

Trump buries H-1B visa applicants in paperwork

That has been tried:

One they must pay prevailing wages in the area

Add a requirement that they must know your own internal software, there are no local applicants so the prevailing wage is whatever you claim. Look on craigslist for job ads wanting php+cobol+matlab+VMS so they can get a market labor opinion that there are no local candidates.

Two they must pay $ $50,000 per person

Minus deductions for health care premiums, pension, flights home, housing costs, company store etc

Three lying on the h1-b1 visa is a five year felony

It is the candidate that applies and signs the visa. You actually want some low level of enforcement so you can hang a threat over the person.

can include up 10% of the companies income

Employee #12345 is employed by (and the sole employee of ) Tata services #12345 (Bermuda ), it has gross sales of that person's income.

Re: Why discriminate against people whose mothers gave birth in a different country?

Call me old fashioned, but I believe a company based in the US, should be hiring predominantly from the local labor pool,

And customers should do the same, nobody outside America should buy American software or cars or watch american tv shows

EU aviation agency publishes new drone framework. Hobbyists won't like it

It's a euro plot

To ban cricket.

Cricket balls can be thrown at over 100mph (except by English bowlers) and have a mass of 162g = that's 160J of potential impact ke.

Re: Certainly, in Germany

No problem - we can just claim that we are training as glider pilots with our new single engined high performance Messerschmidt "glider tugs"

IBM gives Services staff until 2019 to get agile

Re: If you can't say something nice

And a 3 year program to document the procedural changes that will enable agile use of the existing processes without any changes

Hubble Space Telescope one of 16 suffering data-scrambling sensor error

Re: The tyranny of the quanta

It was well known 20years ago not to trust successive approximation ADCs for astronomy. But the absolute ones topped out at 100Khz, which was fine for the 1K x 1K arrays we had then

Batteries are so heavy, said user. If I take it out, will this thing work?

Re: "how to check the oil level"

Our receptionist got a new Audi A3 years ago and the owner wasn't supposed to open the bonnet.

There was a pop out panel behind the grill with washer fluid + oil - everything else was for the dealer.

It made sense for her

re: batteries not included

Confession time.

In college we rented the normal "young ones" shared house and the ignition in the gas cooker stopped working after a few weeks.

A group of physics/engineering/math undergraduates tried to guess how it worked - piezo-electric button, catalytic from gas+air cell, thermocouple and a capacitor ?)

At the end of the year somebody looked under the cooker (not like we ever cleaned) and said "hey there's a battery here!"

SpaceX's internet satellites to beam down 'Hello world' from orbit

Re: a recovery vessel, dubbed Mr Steven

Because their names are probably, trademarked, owned, licensed and litigated over.

The advantage of using culture names for ships is that if the culture do ever contact us, the GSV will be pleased, or at least mildly amused

That microchipped e-passport you've got? US border cops still can't verify the data in it

Solution

Just print a little green padlock on the front of the passport - then they know everything is safe