Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

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

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: 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

Kremlin social media trolls aren't actually that influential, study finds

Re: Sigh...

Russian is easy - it sounds just like English but with a Scottish accent

So if they can convince you that they aren't influential then they obviously are ....

UK.gov mass data slurping ruled illegal – AGAIN

- arguing that behind their buffoon facades lay intelligent minds. Since BREXIT started he has decided he was totally wrong.

Why ? they are both going to do very well out of it.

For Boris it's the best chance of a leadership bid. For Davis it will involve lots of nice directorships as each bank tries to negotiate their own post-brexit political deal

What do you press when flaws in Bluetooth panic buttons are exposed?

Re: What moron would trust Bluetooth for anything critical ??????

I worked on one of the first bluetooth products (before it was on phones) - it was a man-overboard alarm for yachts.

Every crew member had a BT transmitter attached. When the central server couldn't see one it sounded an alarm. The only way to go out of range was to go overboard, and since a failed xmitter, bad battery or dunking in sea water also disconnected it - it was pretty fail safe.

Really?

A hoodie wearing miscreant is running up behind a woman on a dark street and the likely threat is that he will have pre-rigged a bunch of BT transmitters to jam all the available channels between the button and her phone?

I know we have to panic about cybersecurity for everything now but really?

You can't ignore Spectre. Look, it's pressing its nose against your screen

Re: Smells like the financial crash...

More like farming.

We fed ground up cow brains to cows to grow faster and were shocked when that turned out to be a bad idea.

We decided that all that protected modes and ring security could be bypassed to run faster and were surprised when that turned out to be a bad idea

Re: Dedicated instances

My current employer won't consider it out of security grounds.

And they have you to secure it - and you are better at cybersecurity than all the people at Google and amazon. Or is the entire data center air gapped and in an underground bunker somewhere ?

Re: State-sponsored actors

It's time for Britain to step up and state sponsor its own actors.

I nominate Judy Dench and Daniel Craig

Dell board meeting: What've we got on the table? Sparkling, still, sarnies... and oh, IPO?

Re: Financial engineering

Since when did Dell make Proliants?

Since they invented their new business plan of buying machines retail at BestBuy then selling them at a discount. Lose money on every sale but make up for it in volume (tm)

It knows where the gravel pits and power lines are. So, Ordnance Survey, where should UK's driverless cars go?

Re: Maps are useful, but things change

There is so much more to OS mapping than "roads"

However your driverless car probably doesn't differentiate between church with a tower and church with a steeple

UK infrastructure firms to face £17m fine if their cybersecurity sucks

It will only apply to government depts.

The only outfits who are "critical infrastructure" enough to warrant the full fine will either be government or sole suppliers of services to governments and able to simply add the fine to misc expenses on the next tender

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Tokyo crypto-cash exchange 'hacked' for half a billion bucks

Re: And people want to continue to use these things?

Remember when somebody called up SWIFT and stole all of Bangladesh central bank's money?

User stepped on mouse, complained pedal wasn’t making PC go faster

Re: Reminds me of a story

Poor analogy, no empathy. Nothing to do with hand eye co-ordination and everything to do with "prior experience".

One of my engineers has a fancy rollerball mouse - I can't work it !

To the extent that she has to have a 2nd regular mouse for when I need to review any work.

Re: Old age + Experience != transferable skills

so naturally when wanting to email overseas she would turn on the Airmail

And yet a multi $Bn global computerized telephone system still requires me to dial a '1' to tell it I'm calling the next city where the first 3 digits are different. It even plays me a recorded message telling me I have to dial a '1'

A short bit of string and a dab of glue could help here!

We have a scanner that needs you to hold down a button on a remote handset while it's operating

The 'improved model' has a wireless handset which was always getting lost

The engineering solution was to attach it to the machine with a length of wire

PC LOAD LETTER

The "LOAD LETTER" bit I understand, you sent a US formatted document and the printer only has A4

But why the PC? Shouldn't it say please or at least "PLS" ?

Re: underneath the keyboard

Set up the system to sound an alarm when the password written on the Post It is entered

Moscow Rules

More subtly, my dad was constantly asking me how to close programs on his Android phone

We are moving into the regime of asking why we are loading and saving data when the server has Gb of ram and is always on.

Re: Old as the hills

> I've tried to pinch-zoom a book before, been confused for a split-second, and then had to sheepishly go and find my glasses.

I was trying to click and drag in a youtube video to rotate the object being shown - I couldn't understand why the movement was stopping and starting but moving the wrong way.

Re: Hey Gran!

Theatre Royal Bristol still had gas emergency lighting

"In case of" or "the cause of" ?

Re: Reminds me of a story

"Really? Every time I go back to my folks I have to show one of them where the button for X is on the remote"

Your remote has a short-cut key for pron?

Re: Reminds me of a story

1) do the work in a spreadsheet; 2) print the spreadsheet on paper; 3) fax* the paper to classmate; 4) type the stuff in spreadsheet... 5) Face meets palm quicker than you can say d'oh.

This is roughly what you have to do with medical data if you don't want to spend $MM proving that every system on the internet is secure and HIPAA compliant

GOLD! Always believe in your role. You've got the power to know you're indestructible...

Re: "Limb"?

"Limb, in astronomy, the curved edge of the apparent disk of a celestial body (star, planet, moon, etc.), as in lunar limb, limb darkening, atmospheric limb sounding, etc.; related to horizon"

Fancy coughing up for a £2,000 'nanodegree' in flying car design?

Re: Look inside your wallet. Is there money?

Sadly that happens all the time here on the left pond

A young women of shall we say 'limited formal education' was interviewed on the local news having borrowed $x,000 for a 2 week programmer boot camp. So if she didn't get one of those silicon Valley jobs it could only be due to sexism - because she now had the skills (or possibly skillz?)

Not necessarily. Many of the Coursera / Udacity courses are very good, they are taught by world experts, have included projects/tests to make sure you understood it and if you pay the money proof you completed it.

I would be more interested in a candidate that had completed a bunch of these courses on specific relevent advanced topics than somebody who had done a 3year degree in ICT at Podunk State

Re: 2k

But you are in the eu so it would be free to study in eg Germany

(for the next 14months anyway)

Re: "Degree"

It is only an offence if they appear to be from a UK university.

You can't offer a degree from "Oxfordshire University" but you can sell a degree from the South Houston Institute of Technology in the UK

Re: And the job opportunities?

And the job opportunities?

Their ads for the $3000 self-driving car course are plastered with the average salary for experts in the field.

Of course they make no promises that after completing a 120 hour python course you will immediately get the same salary as a Stanford PhD working at Google for 5years - that would be illegal <cough> Trump university </cough>

Western Dig revenues take $0.82bn spanking from US tax shake-up

Why are they western?

Obvious question - why are they an American registered corporation anyway?

They manufacture in SE Asia, they sell world wide, they don't have any particular public image or military contracts and none of their competitors are particularly american.

I now how difficult it is to raise VC money or IPO in America if you aren't Delaware registered and I can picture the political and consumer backlash if eg Apple relocated to Bermuda or Singapore - but why are commodity HW manufacturers sticking with the land of the free ?

GitHub shrugs off drone maker DJI's crypto key DMCA takedown effort

Re: The takeaway

Okay, but where do you store the secrets for your secret-encryption system?

In TFS hosted on visualstudio.com - then nobody will ever be able to find them

Trans-Pacific Partnership returns, without Trump but more 'comprehensive'

Re: Here we go again...

The problem is that they would never be negotiated

Day 147 - China offers full passporting rights for all uk banks in return for a reduction on import duty for Chinese haggis. Cue uproar from MP responsible for a small haggis farming village hoping for a moment on TV

Repeat for every clause and every elected official in every country

Re: Here we go again...

We want to know what's in the fine print BEFORE you put pen to paper because <surprise> we might not like what you're giving away in our name.

And what were you going to do about it ?

Have a national referendum on each treaty signed by the government?

That should result in a reasoned debate - at least about the parts that can fit on a bus.

FYI: There's now an AI app that generates convincing fake smut vids using celebs' faces

Re: All deniability is now plausible

It's an awesome opportunity.

Do anything you want, video yourself doing it and then run for president - people will assume it's fake

In fact the more depraved, deviant and bazaar the video the more fake it will look

get on with the important work of being a celebrity.

Generally the reason for employing a big star is their value for promotion and publicity rather than any actual acting ability. Once the customer gets to see the actor on-screen you already have their money

here's no good uses for this,

Replace the main actor in your blockbuster movie when he gets caught #metoo and recover his now worthless back catalog by replacing him with an actor who hasn't been caught yet.

In fact have the role played by a cheap 'character actor' and then replace the face for the movie.

Swap in a different ethnicity face for each new market.

Re: Stamping press, meet nail

Mask tracking can be done in minutes, Premiere and Final Cut have really simple tools for it these days.

But trickier when the person looks away from the camera - which GAN algorithms can do.

Google can't innovate anymore, exiting programmer laments

Re: The wonderful thing about Tiggers, is Tiggers are wonderful things!

They didn't generate sufficient ad revenue. You can never rely on a system you can't either host yourself or pay for.

Re: It is inevitable...

where they are now driven by greed

Nope - driven by greed works, it's what starts companies

They are now driven by fear and self interest - protecting your own dept/budget/bonus at the expense of the company.

Concentrating on keeping competitors out to protect margins rather than looking for new businesses while lobbying for tweaks to tax codes.

It's the traditional first steps down the MSFT->IBM->Kodak pipeline

Pope wants journalism like the Catholic church wants child sex abuse probes: Slow, aimless...

Re: Warning: Devil's advocacy in support of the Pope (???!!!)

Reading the economist + private eye pretty much gives you complete, if depressing, news coverage.

Re: FTFY

Wheres now we just have officials to ensure that immigrants "share our values" and aren't secretly remaining foreign-ish

H-1B visa hopefuls, green card holders are feeling the wrath of 'America first' Trump

Re: We don't deport our own citizens

Perhaps you mean "Citizens who were born in Canada can be deported for certain crimes if they hold or can obtain any other citizenship."

Thank you - yesmuch better phrasing

Re: A better life in the *States*?

it's a shit-hole of a place.

Inside Washington - maybe.

On the west coast I get to work in a group with people from 20 nationalities who don't vote to 'take back control'. With bosses who are world class technical experts - not chinless wonders who happened to go to the right school. We have access to VC money, contacts and partnerships unimaginable in the UK.

The scenery is nicer than anywhere except bits of the Dales and I get to live on the ocean - proper ocean not day trip to Blackpool.

It doesn't hurt to get paid 4-5x what I was paid in the UK - my fault for doing technical work in the north instead of working for a bank in London. And I work for a tiny company nobody has heard of, go to Amazon/Google/Msft and programmers make what UK bankers make.

ps. anything to do with INS / TSA is shit !

Re: i am wondering about unintended consequences

I'm still trying to explain to them that there are singular and plural versions of 'you' and 'yours' as well as formal and informal ones - I don't know how they manage to understand literature