Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Safe Harbor 2.0: US-Europe talks on privacy go down to the wire

Re: WTF?

Same rules, if Ms May(and her French and German counterparts) insists that it's necessary to track all UK internet use, and hack Belgian telcos to protect us from tourists then the Eu can't claim that US monitoring is unreasonable and a violation of human rights.

But safe harbour isn't to protect you from the spooks anyway, all the Eu inteligence agencies will happily hand over the data to the NSA in the name of cooperation.

It is protect you from companies. It is to stop Google noticing you searching for diabetes and selling that information to your bank so they can decide if you are a good mortgage risk, or Netflix noticing you watching CageAuxFolles and selling that to grindr

Re: simple question.. @ YAAC

The Eu could say "no safe harbor, separate your businesses and build data centers in the eu" and the companies could reply; "try it, ban us and see how long before the populace storms the winter palace"

Re: simple question..

On the other hand if the commission said, nobody in europe could use Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Facebook/Netflix etc do you think people would say, thank you for protecting us from the snoopers ?

China has a chip to fry with y'all: Wants its own chip smarts and fabs

>Do we want the Chinese government to have this information?

Depends on the market. I'm sure Rolls Royce would rather the Chinese military had this info than the US government, who would pass it on to GE just before negotiations with a US airline about whose engines get bought

Apple CEO visits EU regulator to discuss tax bill

"could be liable" doesn't mean they will, Ireland could negotiate a little 99.99% discount for them to stay there

Cabling horrors unplugged: Reg readers reveal worst nightmares

Re: I got a call-out...

>Someone had taken a patch cable from a switch and plugged it back into the same switch.

The ping time was good though

Re: Thin co-ax

Judicious rewiring of the mains plug so the chassis ground was at 240V would be the BOFH solution to people fiddling with connectors

Re: Illuminati Online

I think that's what iso9001 requires as documentation for a regular office network

Re: Wrong spec co-ax

> he was one of the chief developers of vector calculus .... He developed transmission line theory

Bastard !

You can also trace them more easily if the colour coding is - picked up whatever cat5 was in the discount bin that day + different hues produced by fading and years of dust

Data centers dig in as monster storm strikes America's East Coast

Re: ...advising customers to keep their phone batteries charged...

>I'd just swap my SIM card into the old Blackberry 7230.

If you only need it to call 999 (or 911) you don't need a sim.

Criminal records checks 'unlawful' and 'arbitrary' rules High Court

Re: CRB never included "spent" convictions

So case-case basis means the biased opinion of somebody who doesn't mind the odd drinking and driving but isn't going to hire somebody who once smoked a joint ?

What about next year when the Super-ECRB includes someones web search history ?

You interviewed them and offered them the job, the court has decided it's safe for them to walk the street - how come you are now deciding if it's safe for them to work there ?

And sheep (well it did say Yorkshire)

Re: leads me to believe the story has greater errors and omissions than just the date.

" typically used " but there is no law preventing others using them.

A risk averse local authority decides it's safer (for them) to do the check on everyone, then insist that any company working with the council do one, then somebody in HR reads a story in the Daily Mail and decides that everyone should do one ...etc etc

Re: Spokesperson for the Home Office 'disappointed'

Has anyone told Ms May ?

The home office is in charge of "security", anything can be a threat to security,so therefore they are in charge of everything.

Then throw in the PM's definition of Problem Families (=anyone on benefits) and most crime in the country is covered.

Except for LIBOR rigging bankers, tax evasion, bribe paying arms dealers and other criminals seemingly unknown to the police

But then the Daily Mail will hype the case of any kid that is hurt by somebody that the police "thought was a bit dodgy but had no evidence" but they couldn't tell everyone because of those socialists in europe.

That could cause proportionate harm to the local MP's chances in the next election

Re: Proportionate

Minor offenses by poor people end up in court, minor offenses by rich people end up on the bill for trashing the restaurant. It's proportional to wealth.

Re: Spokesperson for the Home Office 'disappointed'

The home office considers itself to be in charge of law, the police and the courts.

So for a court to rule against it is like a child misbehaving.

So they are very disappointed - in the same way as a parent with a kid that won't eat brocolli

Boeing just about gives up on the 747

Re: Museums

Funny how it managed that when Concorde was never allowed to fly supersonic over the USA .

It's looking like A380 production might end before 747s

The only customers are the few Gulf hub airlines and they have bought their fleet.

The US operators are flying smaller twin engines on more diverse routes so the need for an A380 because all the slots were full didn't happen

The idea that china would use the A380 for domestic hops - as a 737 for a billion passengers - turns out that most of china's billions aren't making even Ryanair customer salaries.

Women account for just one fifth of the EU’s 8m IT jobs

Sisters only count in Norfolk

Re: I believe the problem is present on all engineering positions

Been a bit of a backfire here in Canada.

The women in science and engineering programs have been phenomenally successful so that a majority of new graduates in many areas are women.

They all were immediately hired by the mining and oil&gas industry.

Then oil and metals collapsed and the newest, least senior, least valuable employees are the first to be laid off. So a lot of young women that were encouraged to break the mold and embrace this demand for STEM are screwed.

Just like all the low grade Java-school bootcamp graduate programmers were in 2001 but this is making news because these victims are a lot more photogenic.

Re: Assumptions

Try getting hired in silicon valley with a grey beard,

I think ageism is the major cause of fewer women rather than outright sexism.

Increasingly you need a postgraduate degree to be considered at the hot big companies, so you start your career nearer to 25. If it's harder to get a job after 35 and any break means your experience of last years hot technology is obsolete - then it's a lot harder to take a couple of years out to have children than it would be in medicine or law.

The same thing happens in academia, it's often said that a PhD+postdoc costs you your first born child - but at least once you get a permanent job you don't have quite such a ticking clock.

Assumptions

Smart women are pressured out of science and engineering and into well paid professions that don't consider them too old at 30?

Women medical students have outnumbered men for years and as they graduate and old men retire the number of women doctors will outnumber men in the next 1-2 years.

Teaching is becoming women only. Law is about 40% women but proportion of female law students is increasing faster.

How to help a user who can't find the Start button or the keyboard?

Power, what Power?

We made a blast monitor system for mining.

Had a customer in Australia who were desperate to buy one, email them the manual so they can learn to use it in advance, fedex them a unit express etc.

Get a call in the middle of the night. It's not working, won't turn on.

Did you charge it for 24hours like it says in the manual (we can't airfreight charged Li batteries)?

No we just got the delivery and brought it underground.

Do you have the charger - it might work while charging.

No, no power down here - what you are going to do to fix it?

You are 12,000 miles away, a mile underground and no power - exactly what do you expect me to do to "fix it".

But you have to - were blasting in an hour !

I put the phone down - my boss thought it was hilarious

GCHQ spies quashed this phone encryption because it was too good against snoopers

Re: Well I am really surprised

Since this was part of a global GSM standard they were also proposing weaknesses in every other country's phones as well.

It does give you an interesting side channel attack on the intelligence agencies.

If GCHQ block encryption X but not Y it tells you that they have broken Y but not X.

Then if the representatives of the French/German/Belgian agencies support X, does this mean they have broken X, or are just trying to fool the British, or aren't interested in spying on their citizens.

It's 2016 and idiots still use '123456' as their password

Re: Nothing wrong with insecure passwords

So it's particularly annoying when some trivial site insists on 87 characters, 13 symbols and no old password reuse, just to protect your my-little-pony updates

For fsck's SAKKE: GCHQ-built phone voice encryption has massive backdoor – researcher

Re: Am I missing something?

Well if the history of Britain's security services is to be believed - probably the KGB

Apple backs down from barring widow her dead husband's passwords

Not clear whether they have the actual password or can unlock it.

It's really two different questions:

The widow now owns the laptop, no argument, so Apple can factory reset it to recover the value of the HW.

But does she have the rights to all his data?

What about his medical history? What about before they were married?

Should the same thing apply to all heirs?

Do grandchildren have a right to know about the illegal abortion she had in the 1950s or the illegitimate child he had during the war?

UK can finally 'legalise home taping' without bringing in daft new tax

Over here a 25c levy is paid on each blank disc by small bands selling CDs at gigs.

The money is supposed to be handed out in proportion to sales/airtime (ie to Brian Adams) but in practice the industry body running it hasn't actually distributed any because it doesn't cover their costs.

Adblock Plus blocked from attending ad industry talkfest

Re: Um....

My cat's litter tray also has content. Perhaps even user created content.

Re: Daily Telegraph now blocks Adblock

> I didn't realize Daily Telegraph is one of the whatdoyoucallthem... tabloids.

The Telegraph certainly is NOT one of those tabloids who show some topless model on page 3.

Instead we have several pages of tasteful pictures of the teenage daughters of some minor royal in their bikinis and a journalistically acclaimed 10page special on a new lingerie range - with pictures.

Re: Adblock's next step?

>I have no interest in buyinhg any of the shit they try to sell me,

But if you don't buy something from every commercial break you are stealing television.

Snowden bag-carrier Miranda's detention was lawful – UK appeal court

There's a difference?

My client didn't kill the victim, however the insertion of bullets into the victims head was "incompatible with life"

Group rattles tin in bid to snatch TfL licence from Uber's paw

If we allow these mobile phones then London's iconic red phone boxes could disappear

Re: world moves on

And the black cabs follow the guild model. Individual masters, barrier to entry, monopoly powers, opposition to change.

Test burn on recycled SpaceX rocket shows almost all systems are go

Although in practice the average life of an engine component was something like 1.3 launches.

Re: Parachutes?

It's difficult to steer parachutes precisely with a big rocket hanging off the end.

With the Apollo modules they were aiming for an ocean. It's a lot harder to open a parachute 100km up and steer to a barge or landing pad.

The only use for a parachute would be to lose some velocity at higher altitude and then release it to steer back to the pad, but the mass of fuel to lift the extra mass of the parachute is likely to be higher than the margin of fuel needed to slow it by the same amount

> AND could potentially be able to clamp the rocket beyond the unstable point,

But then parts of the rocket would be subject to big tension and shear/bending loads. So you need to make the rocket body + fuel tanks much stronger than if they purely go up and then powered vertically down. Then they experience almost entirely compression loads on axis

SpaceX: launch, check. Landing? Needs work

Re: what stops it falling over, even if all legs work?

>Also, the barge is the size of a football pitch...

So that explains why, after a perfect landing, it clutched its knee and fell over - then rolled off the pitch.

Eight-billion-dollar Irish tax bill looms over Apple

Re: I am a socialist... but

But they and their counterparts at Google Ireland are incredibly efficient workers.

All the sales throughout the Eu are performed totally and solely by that handful of diligent Celtic chaps.

Unless Malta or Slovenia offer a lower rate than Ireland and an even more accomodating regulator.

Traditionally Ireland was chosen as a european HQ for your American business because they spoke English, you could play golf, they had a close approximation to Whisky and the wife could pop over to London for a weekends shopping.

For a dot-com multinational that just need a single server and a brass plaque they aren't as sentimental.

I think there will be a little behind the scenes deal where Apple pay 1% of this to Ireland and stay there.

If Ireland actually extracted the fine, then Amazon, Google, Microsoft and all the other giants of the Irish IT industry with their literaly several Irish employees would all leave for a more accomodating Eu country

BTC dev: 'Strangling' the blockchain will kill Bitcoin

Re: It's a pyramid scheme by design

There is only a finite number of integer bitcoins.

There are an almost infinite number of fractions of a bitcoin.

But it's not chinese in the same way that Paypal is american.

They are mostly mined in china, but that's like saying Gold is Australian or Canadian.

China can't decide that you aren't allowed to make payments to Wikileaks or Greenpeace or other terrorist organisations - PayPal can.

Re: Blockchain isn't the problem

While the US$ is only used for the church collection plate on sunday

Forget the drones, Amazon preps its own cargo container ship operation out of China

Re: Shipping sans sailors

Container ships already have crews at pretty much the minimum to staff 3 watches = 12 people for a vessel 1/4 mile long.

The crew are really there for fires and other emergencies - the words biggest container ship nearly sank in the Suez canal when one of it's prop blades decided to take a short cut through the hull. It was only saved because of the crew.

French say 'Non, merci' to encryption backdoors

Re: I'm wondering

Because the messages weren't encrypted they can't have been secret.

That's why we need to make encryption mandatory for terrorists and then require backdoors