Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Microsoft devises new way of making you feel old: Windows NT is 25

>It is a shame he didn't bring the VMS/DCL command syntax with him.

Powershell is trying. DCL used to give you a grammar lesson in every error message.

UK 'fake news' inquiry calls for end to tech middleman excuses, election law overhaul

Re: Chickens coming home to roost.

Surely somebody with this much power over the voting habits of the UK electorate should be treated with the same respect and hands-off regulation as Murdoch or Maxwell ?

Re: Why are people getting their news from from Social Media?

if you know a source of news that you trust, you've fallen victim to fake news

I rely on el'reg, newsthump and the IEEE Journal - fair and balanced trustworthy sources

Re: 'Fake news'

A newspaper today reported that Fracking is divisive... It didn't point out that the protesters are paid by a wind farm company owner.

Then it presumably divides wind farm and oil companies - perfectly fair and balanced

FBI boss: We went to the Moon, so why can't we have crypto backdoors? – and more this week

Re: Encryption? We don't need no steenking encryption!

Britain already does - the law on handing over your encryption keys also requires you to reveal any hidden meaning in a message.

Better not have a copy of the Torah or Finnegans Wake around

But that's a perfect example of using it for good.

Since the US president is chosen by God, then anything they do is for the good.

Certainly protecting the Saudis from buying heathen godless commie euro planes instead of honest God fearing righteous Boeings would be "for good"

IBM Watson dishes out 'dodgy cancer advice', Google Translate isn't better than humans yet, and other AI tidbits

Re: Don't worry IBM!

they'll just gift you the entire data set of the NHS without any checks, balances, or patient permissions.

And that is why it would work for the NHS.

If you want to detect cancers early from unrelated symptoms you need ALL the data from ALL the people in an unbiased sample.

You can't detect diabetes risk from poor diet if you take data only from US hospitals that charge $100 for an aspirin, or from genes in some racial group if that group opts-out because their data is going to be handed over to the police.

So grab the data. process it in the UK, by a university that isn't going to de-anonymise it and use it to fix car insurance premiums. And don't worry that a few Gaurdian columnists are going to whine about owning our own data

Nah, it won't install: The return of the ad-blocker-blocker

Every 5 years or so you DDG "discount t-shirt" to find whichever site is still in business

Buy 2 dozen plain black cotton T-shirts (for roughly the price of a coffee each)

Wear one each day for work

Do laundry once a month

Shock Land Rover Discovery: Sellers could meddle with connected cars if not unbound

Re: As long as they're still using Lucas...

With a Land Rover the only GDPR related issue should be checking that the previous owner hadn't left a couple of sheep dogs in the back

Rights group launches legal challenge over London cops' use of facial recognition tech

Re: A fine distinction

>Employers buying browsing history?

Over here, on the left pond, the employer pays for health insurance - it's fscking expensive.

If we were a bigger company and had an older workforce it might just pay me to check that a new hire hadn't been googling "high blood pressure" or "diabetes medicine" before I hired him.

Ironically I can't ask about health, marital status, kids etc in an interview but I can (probably IANAL) buy all his browsing history from his ISP following a few recent rulings.

Even if it were illegal for me to use that info in the USA - I could have my offshore "employee screening" subsidiary do it and then "advise" me on hiring each candidate.

Re: A fine distinction

Actually I'd suspect that the vast majority don't care about this

Until the first case of their employer buying their browsing history, or the first time it is used in a divorce or child custody case.

Politicians fume after Amazon's face-recog AI fingers dozens of them as suspected crooks

And in practice worse since you have a training set of mug-shots (3 views square-on staring ahead, fixed lighting) and are hunting for matches in poor quality CCTV footage at random angles and lighting

Intel Xeon workhorses boot evil maids out of the hotel: USB-based spying thwarted by fix

Re: Should be disabled in firmsware

> Bosch do a USB-charged wireless hot melt glue gun for this sort of thing.

And you check that the gun isn't itself hacked ....

Spectre/Meltdown fixes in HPC: Want the bad news or the bad news? It's slower, say boffins

Re: Stop me if I'm wrong here but...

But what about moles? Or the Edward Snowdens of the world?

They have access to the information anyway - they aren't stealing the supercomputer memory a bit at a time through cache-miss side channels.

My point is that the jobs running on these machines are restricted, controlled and billed!

Back in the Cray days, and even now on the biggest machines, you don't log in to your shell account ad start running stuff. The builds and verifications are typically done on front end servers and then submitted to some queue.

Worrying about Spectre on a top500 is like fitting a bike lock to the wheels of a moon buggy.

Re: Stop me if I'm wrong here but...

I assume this will apply to cloud.

I can buy cloud time with all the protections enabled - but I pay a 20% loss of speed

Or my company's tasks are guaranteed to be the only user on the physical CPU and a I pay a 10% security premium.

Or I could decide I don't care. The attacker can slowly try and extract sensitive information with cache miss tricks. But if I'm doing CFD or seismograph modelling, and the attacker would need to get hold of the entire Tb data set to make sense of it, and still wouldn't know where the data was coming from - do I care? Especially if I can conceal who I am when I'm renting the machine.

Stop me if I'm wrong here but...

If you are worried about malware exploiting security flaws in your on-premise top500 supercomputer - aren't you perhaps missing a bigger problem ?

It's a few years since I worked on this sort of stuff, but we used to have men with guns stopping you even going into the building with all the Crays - we certainly weren't concerned with a user clicking on a dodgy website.

Official: AMD now stands for All the Money, Dudes!

Re: I hope AMD can keep this up

Or they could have bought ARM

have you actually met any woman who was there simply cos she 'ticked the boxes'?

cf Dr Su / Martha Lane Fox

US Homeland Security warns of latest hacker craze – ERP pwnage

Re: "exploit flaws in Oracle and SAP platforms."

We will know if the hackers succeeded when Russia announces a 5 year plan to utilize synergy to leverage paradigm changes in Soviet era agriculture

From toothbrushes to coffee makers to computers: Europe fines Asus, Pioneer, Philips for rigging prices of kit

That's when the predatory pricing investigations starts.

But the court has just ruled that the retailer can charge whatever they want your honour !

Ironic really since this protected the high st shops.

Now a certain south american river can heavily discount any product in europe to loss making levels, drive any competition out of business and then have a monopoly - then get to dictate to the manufacturer what the new wholesale price is

ReactOS 0.4.9 release metes out stability and self-hosting, still looks like a '90s fever dream

Buttons that look like buttons instead of having to discover that swiping three times widershins during a full moon is required to start some app.

Buttons that distinctly change to tell you they are selected, rather than a pale blue-grey changing to a pale grey-blue.

Borders you can actually click on rather than having to find the 1 pixel wide gap between ribbons that will move the window rather than expand some toolbar element to full screen

I predict a riot: Amazon UK chief foresees 'civil unrest' for no-deal Brexit

Re: Sue Europe, They Can't Get Away with It

Sue Europe

At the ECJ ?

Re: The comment has been taken out of context

But Brexiteers taking advantage of the likely increased rush for properties there is a bit beyond the Pale.

Not at all. Once they see the UK's ascension to the glorious dawn of Eu-free prosperity, these former soviet republics will be clamoring to leave the Eu and join a new British commonwealth.

Mr Rees-Mogg et al are just the advanced guard, setting up cricket pitches etc

No country has to let anyone and everyone fly over.

They do if they are members of ICAO. What they don't have to do following Brexit is to allow UK airlines to fly passengers between 2 destinations within Ireland.

Burn down the high st

Simply add blades and spikes and V8 turbos to their delivery trucks

Obtain some bondage gear uniforms for delivery drivers

Instill a slightly more customer focused level of efficiency in their delivery drivers to bring it up to Mad Max 2 levels.

Sorry, Neil Armstrong. Boffins say you may not have been first life-form to set foot on the Moon

Re: Good! - "how do you explain the Clangers?"

Sounds like an excuse to post this NASA Fakes Moon Landing! Photographic Proof!

Re: That means you heard it before it was released

Also can't understand why there was not a single PF album in the second hand record shop I found the other day

I assume they all got worn out playing them.

Google's Alphabet hit by Europe's other GDPR: Global Domination = Profit Reduction

Re: So... what I take away is...

Which is just going back to what medieval monarchs did to their over-powerful barons.

They didn't have income tax so just attaindered a few worthies and then let them off a beheading in return for a generous apology to the crown.

Does it ever get paid?

Leaving aside if it is justified

Do these massive corporate fines ever actually get paid to the governments ?

And in the case of the Eu - who do they get paid to ?

Or (like Apple's in Eire) do they get appealed for decades, ignored, or 'disspeared' by some accounting trick - or paid but written off against tax ?

Sysadmin sank IBM mainframe by going one VM too deep

Re: Just to mudddy the waters a trifle ...

And thus the reason why in the UK eggs are sold in multiples of 6

Haven't chickens been decimilised by now?

Microsoft: The Kremlin's hackers are already sniffing, probing around America's 2018 elections

Re: Paper ballots only solve a tiny part of the problem

Why not just make the whole process open?

Just put the presidency out for tender - the one that pays most wins.

Same system as now but it's open, fair and the money goes to the tax payer rather than to Rupert Murdoch

Bonkers Azure bookings give Microsoft a record-breaking $110bn year

Re: Too good

Bring back Steve ...Ballmer.

Not sure that's the sort of cloud we want.

It's raining chairs....

Re: Rebirth of the phoenix

I'm sure many big businesses would prefer Microsoft's name to that of Amazon

Really? If you are a high st retailer whose only competition is Amazon why wouldn't you put all your sales data on their system ?

As Corning unveils its latest Gorilla Glass, we ask: What happened to sapphire mobe screens?

Re: Seems obvious ...

I keep my phone tethered to the wall in the house by a wire - that way I don't lose it and rarely drop it

Fake prudes: Catholic uni AI bot taught to daub bikinis on naked chicks

how much is a Grecian urn?

It would depend on the antiquity, provenance and degree of artistry

- and whether the Germans have imposed more austerity

The difference is urns. If there is an urn in the painting the nudity is OK

I wonder which they think more important, covering up various lady parts in photos or helping to relieve suffering and poverty in the world?

That would be an ecumenical matter

The Catholic university wants to protect children by blocking images of women......

Perhaps version 2 would replace online images of priests with pictures of naked women

Doctor, doctor, I feel like my IoT-enabled vacuum cleaner is spying on me

Re: IoT foolishness

If I drop crumbs on the floor, I can summon mine to the exact location

I've got a lab - the crumbs don't even reach the floor

Crypto gripes, election security, and mandatory cybersec school: Uncle Sam's cyber task force emits todo list for govt

But if you are Haliburton or Blackwater and you get the contract to do all the US govt computer security - what other customers do you need ?

Microsoft still longs to be a 'lifestyle' brand, but the cupboard looks bare

Re: isn’t there a risk?

All the line of business office apps will go to the cloud.

All the collaboration stuff is going to be mobile

That leaves the desktop for content creation, video, photoshop, cad. People who don't care how much the HW costs as long as it is powerful and works. It's Apple's to lose

Re: Know what you are

has rewarded companies that engage with tech-savvy professionals who bypass their fading IT departments, and introduce new technology products and services into their organisation

Say by introducing personal computers onto every desk so you didn't need the mainframe guys to do a spreadsheet ?

British Airways' latest Total Inability To Support Upwardness of Planes* caused by Amadeus system outage

That is why the captain has to sign off that they approve the load sheet - because it is impossible to calculate.

By making a man in a fancy hat ultimately responsible you solve the problem

Trump wants to work with Russia on infosec. Security experts: lol no

So kapersky is back in business ?

Farewell then, Slack: The grown-ups have arrived

Re: I'd rather stick with Slack than trust Microsoft not to stuff it up

screw up all the features you were relying on

The new "teams for business" removes the shared messaging facility and replaces it with the ability to email powerpoints to each other