Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

How's your night sky looking? The Reg chats to astroboffin Mark McCaughrean about Starlink and leaving a mark

Re: Hoped for more

>Pardon my ignorance in the matter, but doesn't planet hunting come under "full sky surveys of variable objects", as they have to scour the sky looking for variations in a stars brightness/position?

Although these satellites are going to eventually cover the sky they are only a problem when they are lit up, a dark satellite crossing your detector at midnight for a fraction of second doesn't matter.

They are only visible when they are in sunlight but the sky is dark, which is only true for a short time after sunset/before sunrise, the lower the orbit the shorter this time.

Any planet survey looking for something faint (and all the bright easy stuff has been done) has to wait for it to be really dark. They also need the valuable few nights a month when there is no moon - called "dark time" in the business. Most planet hunting missions are now done from space because you need to observe the same object in ideal conditions for a long time.

Whole sky surveys suffer most because a wide field of view means they are going to see more lit up satellites if there are any around. The large pixel scale means a single bright track destroys more data and they need to maximise as much observing time as possible so can observe into twilight much further than deep+dark targets

Re: Space the final Frontier - allegedly

> 00's of BILLIONS they are worth were to have been 'invested. here on Earth

Yes stop buying alien satellite kit - tariffs on trade federation imports now !

Re: Hoped for more

It depends what astronomers you ask.

The sexy stuff in astronomy is very faint stuff from the beginning of the universe.

These satelites don't really affect that - they are only visible near dawn/dusk because they have to be in sunlight for them to be a problem. The time when the sky is still glowing is useless for deep faint objects.

it may be a pain for people doing full sky surveys of variable objects - but the Noble committee doesn't care about a bunch of stamp collectors so meh.

Radio are going to be pissed if these things aren't well designed not to leak in other bands.

Re: Space the final Frontier - allegedly

> I DO however, happen to believe that the idea of building a massive deep space telescope on the far side of the moon has massive potential

You are aware that, in the words of the PinkFloyd: "there is no dark side of the moon".

The moon orbits the earth, for half of its 28 day orbit the other side of the moon would point toward the sun.

There are are way better places to put a space telescope if you don''t need it to be in LEO

IBM Watson GPU cloud cluster Brexits from London to Frankfurt – because GDPR

Re: Pointless And Political

Mostly pointless because Watson doesn't work.

They are being sued by just about everybody that ever bought one over here

It only remains to be renamed and quietly forgotten about

Storage and processing in racks plugged in to ups in lorry . Closely followed by generator truck to top them up every 15mins

Why should the UK pensions watchdog be able to spy on your internet activities? Same reason as the Environment Agency and many more

Fortunately the ECJ and ECHR did such a good job preventing Poland and Hungary's current Nazi governments

> bought in new laws for the police to enforce

But since those new laws include things like: Nuclear Explosions (Prohibition) Act 1998

It isn't clear how much effort the police have to put into investigating prohibited nuclear explosions

Re: @Whitter

A criminal justice system that sends out posters telling parents to report their children as terrorists if they use linux

Re: They abuse RIPA and now want Contact Tracing?

It does reduce crime

Paying a police officer for this data would be illegal. Obtaining it yourself because you work for the council dog walking office is perfectly fine

Re: And yet

Not me, I always go for the leader chosen by the lady of the lake wielding Excalibur

Moistened tarts are a way better system than this lot

After intense scrutiny, Zoom tightens up security with version 5. New features include not, er, spilling video calls to network snoops

Re: So they are using AES-GCM? and decrypting at the server? With what keys?

Yes those were all the questions my mom was asking before being able to see video of her new grand daughter.

Meanwhile my condo association has switched to holding their online meetings.over quantum fibre links from their individual tempest screened classified data centers.

Wait till el'reg readers find out what level of secure key distribution is used by their landlines phone

ICE cold: Microsoft's GitHub wrings hands over US prez's Trump immigration ban plan

Re: It is called playing to the voters

If the current situation has proved anythign it's that all your programmers have to be in an office in downtown San Fransicso to do any work - especially if the servers they are working on are in a data center in N. Dakota

Just because we're letting Zoom into Parliament doesn't mean you can have fun, House of Commons warns Brit MPs

Re: Are we talking about Zoom, that bastion of security

To share parliament sittings that are reported in Hansard and broadcast on the Parliament channel ?

>Security doubtful,

Parliament is public

>owned by Chinese.

Public owned, listed on the Nasdaq

(Of course that's what the lizard people want you to think......)

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

The emergency stop on this machine tool is a big red button on the front - it isn't a menu on a web page

The parking brake on my car is a handle - I don't have to two-finger swipe in a circle on the windscreen (unless you have a Tesla)

Facebook sort-of blocks anti-quarantine events – how many folks are actually behind these 'massive' protests online?

> handling food in Asia and Africa have to be brought into the 21st Century.

I hope not. When China and Africa start factory farming billions of chickens or cows and feeding them massive doses of human anti-biotics then driving them around the country in large open sided trucks aerosolling their crap

Welcome to a world where a scratched insect bite or a tooth filling has a 50% chance of killing you

To be honest since we are all locked down and stuck in front of Netflix we are all binge watching the new series of "The America" even though the new characters are completely unbelievable.

Re: What will Trump do

Are we blaming Carter now?

Makes sense, he was behind 5G - part of his plan to turn us all metric

Indeed, if women want to protest for the right to vote they should do it quietly, in private, in their own homes..

Re: Factually incorrect

Similarly here it is killing men:women 55:45% but the median age of those deaths is 86

And 86 is a lot older in "man years" than "women years"

And >86 year old men have a lot more other illnesses than old women

Who can we count on to slow Huawei's continuous growth? US prez Donald Trump and COVID-19

Re: With Trump & Co. still apparently on a suicide mission

> I'm guessing a second wave of COVID-19 ... increase in infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

Don't we have a national stockpile of "thoughts and prayers" to send out ?

Re: With Trump & Co. still apparently on a suicide mission

>whoever is best able to get the vote out will win

Not getting the vote out benefits the Republicans.

So if you were a totally unscrupulous incumbent you could arrange that mail-in votes were allowed for old people (covid safety) while requiring spacing in queues and only one voter at a time in NY/Ca and any cities with lots of black people.

That does pre-suppose something...

Also betting that just before he leaves office all the Trump empire gets sold to some sucker - otherwise there are going to be a lot of nations gunning for it once its CEO no longer has a Navy

Re: With Trump & Co. still apparently on a suicide mission

>He's on course for a Landslide in November.

Sadly probably true.

No campaign rallies, no big convention events, no tours of roadside diners in Iowa

Trump is on TV for hours everyday while his opponent 'whats-his-name' gets a paragraph in the Washington Post politics section once a week.

Something a bit phishy in your inbox? You can now email suspected frauds straight to Blighty's web takedown cops

what happens if you report phishing.gov.uk as a phishing site ?

Re: A dentistry question

>So what teeth do they have, in terms of following up, identifying and shutting down?

The UK national ninja-cyber secret security agency can employ a range of active counter-measures culminating in the ultimate deterrent of .... A stiffly worded letter

(the agency is not currently funded to permit overseas letters in the event of a foreign enemy)

>Pissing these people off with deliberate false reports is probably not the wisest idea going.

So if I work for Putin or Pooh-bear and I use this to get them to block a bunch of pro-democracy or anti-government sites, what are GCHQ going to do - send a gunboat ?

Getting a pizza the action, AS/400 style

Re: Pineapple good. Pepperoni bad.

>Once, In North Shields I had a donner kebab topped pizza

I had that inGlasgow, in a health food shop

Re: 56!

Could have been much worse: the system returns -1 as an error code and the pizza place come round and take away your pizza

Re: "Hopefully he also added a bit of text along the lines"

>That's not how humans function. We are designed to seek confirmation feed back.

Unix is designed to allow you to string simple commands together.

That's tricky if the output of '2+2' = "The answer is 4 and 4 is the answer, 3 is not the answer unless the answer continues to 4, 5 is right out. "

Are you fixing that switch? Or setting it up as a Minecraft server?

With the ability to run malware and phishing scams on premises in the switch there is a great saving in upstream bandwidth and hosting costs for the black hats

Academics: We hate to ask, but could governments kindly refrain from building giant data-slurping, contact-tracing coronavirus monsters?

>Where would we find these trustworthy people?

From their refusal to run for any sort of office

Re: @AC - Personal convenience

So is it going to be like the government ID cards that were only going to be required to be carried by criminals, illegal immigrants and terrorists ?

Re: And the non-centralised approach

No it may mean I live in a country with no paid sick leave, where I may become homeless if I l lose my "essential but minimum wage" job

Re: And the non-centralised approach

The point remains though:

If the system detects I might have been exposed - but only I know that result and the risk to me of revealing it (extended quarantine, job loss etc) is greater than the risk of being seriously ill (I'm <80 with no medical issues) then I'm going to ignore/delete it

Pity the virus is transmitted by 5G rather than bluetooth, we would all be safe

And the non-centralised approach

Means that if my phone detects that I walked passed a railway line and somebody on the train flagged as positive - I will phone my boss, tell them to fire me and go and voluntarily spend 14days living in the shed away from the family.

Or I will uninstall the app, and reinstall to get a new "clean" id

Three years ago, IBM ordered staff to work in central hubs. Now its new CEO ponders mid-pandemic: Is there a better way of doing things?

Re: The data is already in...

>one of the biggest factors in making workers happy and productive is to give them control over their working environment

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of IBM

20 years deep into a '2-year' mission: How ESA keeps Cluster flying

Re: Threat to Earth's atmosphere?

>I suspect there is a lot of space MacGyvering going on

Favorite is Hipparcos, a star position measuring mission. The 2nd stage didn't ignite leaving it in the wrong orbit.

But having a couple of tons of scrap metal hanging on the back made it more stable and the results more accurate

Re: This was the second attempt

>*it has an IT angle!

Very specifically an angle iirc

catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/18

Re: Activate Omega-13.

And if all else fails, turn it off and on again every day

Re: This was the second attempt

> it's why the payloads must always be insured

Generally not for scientific payloads like this one.

Dear insurer we would like to launch an irreplaceable scientific payload on the first launch of a brand new Ariane rocket that we are getting for free because they aren't too sure about it.

I can picture the nice little bulldog cocking his leg up at that one.

Re: How ESA keeps Cluster flying ... the original VAX VMS hardware

>"Sousa explained that the original VAX VMS hardware was long gone"

That's what they think - until they realise that thing in the back of the storage cupboard is a microvax that has been quietly running everything all along

Coronavirus lockdown forces UK retailers to shut 382 million square feet of floor space

I think the "sea change" is.

We are out of bog-roll, let us drive 20mins out of town and peruse the main new and innovative flavours of bog roll that a range of stores have available before filling the car with some and driving home.

Replaced with: Some algorithm at $MeaCorp has calculated that we will run out of bog roll tomorrow and our subscription package of our normal brand has arrived today

Re: Management speak

At least post-Brexit we will be self-sufficient in proper British clichés

Re: Next? The Mall Owners go bust

>However, they seemed to not understand the concept that it would destroy other areas.

Yes they did, but it's easier to get re-elected with pictures in the local paper of you cutting the ribbon on a new out of town shopping center that "creates 1000 new jobs" than a report of a council meeting where you deny the planning application in order to preserve a few corner shops.

>They were markets. We've had markets a long time

I for one will miss my annual trek to Troyes for the cloth faire and start buying my $2 black T-shirts online.

Tor Project loses a third of staff in coronavirus cuts: Unlucky 13 out as nonprofit hacks back to core ops

Re: TOR sacking people...

TOR is funded by donations from big corps a few ordinary users.

Big corps are now locking down and not spending money on anything, ordinary users are either unemployed or staring unemployment in the face.

There is no reasonable chance of these factors being reversed in the next few months.

As a nonprofit they can't run up a massive overdraft or get VC funding or print their own cryptocoins - they have very strict rules about their accounts