Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

You dopes! US state's pot dealer database pwned after security goes up in smoke

Re: Serves them right

The framers of the Constitution should really have thought about adding some clause that gave states the right to exercise some sort of democratic choice about their local laws.

US states accused of skimming cash from 911 emergency call dosh

Re: Not Surprised

1p of every $ collected actually goes to its intended purpose, the other 99p goes to pay the bribes, corruption, & padding.

I think the technical term is trickle-down economics

Secret weekend office bonk came within inch of killing sysadmin

Re: I hope these were supposed to be humourous.

why ... suggest a couple of $$ (or ££) of plastic and a manual water control system to protect tens of thousands of $$ of delicate and mission critical electronic systems

Because B&Q / HomeDepot don't offer the same sort of perks to customers as companies selling mission critical electronic systems

From July, Chrome will name and shame insecure HTTP websites

Re: Dumb move

I take it you prefer Telnet over Secure Shell as well, and you prefer postcards to envelopes?

I take it you are typing this from your Tempest screened bunker on a machine with a verified CPU and no IME or closed source BIOS.

Security depends on the threat model NOT ticking boxes

Tech giants' payouts go to everyone but affected citizens. US Supremes now urged to sort it out

1: they are forced to pay everyone 4cents regardless of how much it costs to do

So massively increase the fine over what the court decided?

Great as long as it is only being used against evil corporations that we don't like.

But next time you get a parking ticket you are required to pay $100 divided by all the other drivers in the city that were delayed / incovenienced by you. So you have to pay each of them 1c however much it costs - oh we seem to have fined you $200,000

Talk about a hot mic: Dodgy Pixel mobe audio lands Google in court

Re: Every 30 months?

in enlightened Norway its 5 years (regardless)

So you just tack 50-100% onto the price to insure against failure.

Actually it's great for suppliers, you know a phone battery will only last 3years and the government tells you to warranty it for 5, you just build the price of a new battery into the phone and then after 3 years the consumer can't switch to another brand without losing their investment.

It's like Volvo and Merc getting together to persuade the governnent that you need to require 5* crash ratings and 500,000mi warranties on all cars - to protect the children. Oh you wanted a 10k Kia? - tough, peasant!

Apple's top-secret iBoot firmware source code spills onto GitHub for some insane reason

it turned out to be a gay porn film featuring hunky German bikers, and not a zip of the Win2k source after all."

I think that's the source code to Vista

Digital version of Universal Credit still pricey, wobbly, failing to deliver – MPs

Re: Omnishambles

Possibly this is all part of the plan.

Require that anybody applying for benefits has an iPhoneX or Samsung Galaxy 999 turbo WRX - then deny them benefits on the grounds that they can afford such a phone

Failing to deliver?

It takes money out of the hands of the poorest people and gives it to the usual bunch of Govt IT providers who make large donations to the party and provide directorships to the people who picked them.

Isn't that exactly what it is was supposed to do ?

Unlucky 13 collared by cops hunting cyber-crew who stole up to $2.2bn

So close

If only they had stolen 10-100x as much they would have been bailed out

Monday: Intel defector touts Arm server chip. Wednesday: Intel shows off new server chips

Re: Yes, but does it ...

.. run Meltdown exploits ?

Yes but faster, at lower power and with reduced cost of ownership

South Wales cops crow about facial recognition arrests on social media

Easier still, just criminalise having a ratboy face.

Burberry seeking missiles

Nobody much complains about human Police spotters identifying trouble makers at football matches. So is this just luddite objections?

Nobody complains about a school crossing patrol - so what's wrong with having a drone following you 24/7 and a camera recording everything you do and everyone you meet

Re: Nothing more

Not if I convert to Islam and then claim to identify as female...

I'm Catholic with "irish heritage" so a black balaclava is cultural

US broadband is scarce, slow and expensive. 'Great!' says the FCC

Re: report finds agency actions have restored progress

Reboot into safe mode and do a clean install - it's the only way to be sure.

I would add the famous line from Aliens - but I'm posting this from the Land of the Free and don't want to be labelled an internet terrorist

Re: report finds agency actions have restored progress

What's it going to take to restore honest government to the U.S.?

Have you tried turning it off and on again ?

IBM: About those agreed voluntary redundancies ... we were just kidding

... ah, you mean they're generally someone from HR?

No it's a management fad - which means external consultants

Generally either a GROLIES or a young sociology graduate with a fixed smile and a powerpoint

Makes me wounder how IBM gets employees.

It acquires 'strategic assets' - then locks the doors

Be very wary of " 'Time To Talk' mental wellbeing day" type stuff.

What ? They are fscking awesome

You get a bunch of other techies to memorize the customer vision quality standards statement or other corporate BS and quote it whenever asked any question about your feelings.

If you can keep a straight face, the facilitator (generally a well meaning but totally unqualified moron), can be driven mad

You realise that the "spokeswoman" is actually a bot, right?

Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about... your mother.

MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF CARS: SpaceX parks a Tesla in orbit (just don't mention the barge)

Re: Academics

offer no guarantees, beyond minimal telemetry where needed for a project: say a cam and mic for each.

And a promise to say nice things if it blows up?

Science got a free ride on the first Ariane 5 - it cost them $400M and years of work

A Hughes failure: Flat Earther rocketeer can't get it up yet again

Re: Bah!

A crowdfunding site to pay for morons to hurt themselves in spectacular ways for our amusement?

Isn't that what Channel 5 is for ?

Re: A rocketeer that cannot comprehend Gravity?

Gravity is just a theory.

Scientists disagree about gravity.

Intelligent push is the only truth.

UK Home Office grilled over biometrics, being clingy with folks' mugshots

Re: "Computer says no..."

worship Satan

Although to his eternal embarrassment

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Another Amazon Key door-lock hack

Re: Hand over securing my property to Amazon?

That's not even the real scary part.

This lock is only usable by you+Amazon

The cleaning service, meal delivery, dog walking, repair person - can now only get access if they are an Amazon partner.

You just paid to make Amazon a monopoly provider of any service that needs access to your building.

Lloyds Bank bans Bitcoin purchases by credit card customers

House always wins etc etc.

And yet a certain Mr D. Trump managed to go bust running a casino

What's the risk?

You buy a bunch of super-dodgy highly speculative "investments" and lose all your money - then the government will bail you out?

It's good to be a bank.....

Epic spacewalk, epic FAIL: Cosmonauts point new antenna in the wrong direction

Re: Pigs indeed fly, in space

gave it a shove in the direction of Earth,

Orbits don't work like that - it IS rocket science

Re: Hmm ...

Damn!!

In Space no-one can hear you scream

Hey, you know what the internet needs? Yup, more industrial control systems for kids to hack

UK 6th

And I'm betting almost all of those systems are AC/Heating for some call centers

Thanks to the brilliant foresight of the last 30years of UK governments - British industry is uniquely safe from all kinds of attack.

A tiny Ohio village turned itself into a $3m speed-cam trap. Now it has to pay back the fines

re: I had to defend myself.

No you don't - you just wait 13months and then claim you were investigating but the records of who was driving were destroyed for privacy reasons and so you cannot respond. You are then let off

Note this may only work if you are senior police officer in London

Morrisons launches bizarre Yorkshire Pudding pizza thing

As for Yorkshire puds, I have long liked, and regularly eat, a big YP filled with chilli-con-carne.

I could just go for some of that right now

in Lancashire.

Nevermind

Super Cali's unrealistic net neutrality process – even though the sound of it is something quite... ferocious

Re: Another club

But unlike more rural states the government doesn't make up a large percentage of business in California.

It can use the permitting process to slow them down - there is nothing illegal in taking years and demanding hundreds of rounds of public consultation for each utility box.

But it is most likely to use its allies in silicon valley and SF, Google/Apple/Facebook/Netflix want to keep net neutrality and the state can assist them in wiping out the cable companies

What a Hancock-up: MP's social network app is a privacy disaster

A bug in the iOS version

Surely if I deny it permission to access photos and it can - that is a bug in the OS not the app?

Or are permissions on iOS purely an honours system ?

Crim-checker IT system update fail has cost UK taxpayer 'MEEELLIONS'

Research is hard

This isn't like digging a railway tunnel under London or building an LHC.

This involved developing a way for records to be retrieved knowing only a person's name, date of birth, national insurance number and address.

Possibly one day super smart AIs will be able to achieve this almost as well as a person with a filing cabinet - but for now it is a difficult problem and sometimes the outcome of cutting edge research is unpredictable

So you accidentally told a million people they are going to die: What next? Your essential guide...

Cyber-attack

If all else fails blame a cyber-attack by state sponsored thespians of somewhere to be decided later

Billionaire bros Bezos, Buffett become bonkers bio brokers: Swap W in AWS for H for healthcare

Re: Why is it the govs job?

Is fire and police - or should they be privatised.

It might be cheaper to pay my local Italian American Family Business for protection rather than pay for a police force that don't do anything to stop me being robbed.

The care, if you get it, is the best in the world

The problem is that you as "the consumer" are responsible for everything.

Visit the same doctor for the 3rd follow up for the same problem? Did you check that they, the lab they used for tests, the hospital they referred you to are are all still covered in your plan (they might have switched yesterday) if not, you pay.

Did a doctor not in your plan happen to look at your x-rays alongside your doctor? You pay.

Get any of these wrong on a major surgery and you are bankrupt.

Then there is the massive billing inefficiencies, it's like the worst car insurance + worst mobile phone + worst cable company billing depts are mixed together.

Expect to get final demands for bills for $10Ks that are already paid by the insurance, then bills for $0 then demands for -$10Ks for years following any visit. Expect to spend hours on the phone trying to correct this

FYI: That Hawaii missile alert was no UI blunder. Someone really thought the islands were toast

Re: Definitely!

anyone who hears "This is not a drill" and assumes that it is not a drill... real bad apple.

They didn't say "Simon says"

Re: Conflicting information

Following an incident when our rescue exercise resulted in a coastguard helicopter (when a member of the public overheard) we had a policy of shouting "pizza" rather than "help" during the drill

So far no passing do-gooder has decided to dial for an emergency takeout

Re: EMA - puzzling

Hawaii is a chain of island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean

A chain of volcanic islands - so smoke signal would be optimal

Forget cyber crims, it's time to start worrying about GPS jammers – UK.gov report

Re: UK Priority on emergency networks

Does MTPAS block the handset from sending a signal or does it just stop the call routing?

Emergency services could still be blocked if all the RF channels are busy being sending the "you have been blocked" recording

Re: Wow

To quantify 'not very accurate' I have seen drift values approaching 40 metres/minute for systems built on cheap sensors.

Aviation spec is 0.5Nmi after 1hour - but that's for a massive aircraft flying relatively smoothly.

The accuracy for something on a car bouncing around on a twisty country road isn't so good.

Re: Didn't we have such a system?

Not to mention a sextant.

In my neighbourhood it seems that all beige Honda Accords stop to take a reading before turning at a junction

Re: UK Priority on emergency networks

Presumably a priority sim card only helps if you can get on the network.

If there is a major incident in central London and a million people all try and call home so say they OK.

Does the GSM standard allow for shutting down all non-priority handsets in a cell ?

Re: a friend who was installing 4G BTS

Glonass & soon galileo will be at full strength...just need a widespread little retrofit away from the single-point-of-failure outlined in this article!

They all operate on very similar frequencies, jam GPS and you jam Galileo

Eggheads: Cities, don't woo rich Amazon with sweetheart HQ deals

Re: How do they get away with it?

they're subsidizing Bezos directly, at a net fiscal loss for the community.

They are subsidizing the reelection of the politician who "Made WhereverVille Great Again" and "Created Jobs" - in 10 years when the audits show that they lost $M/job it will be small print on page 7