Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Have YOU got Equation NSAware in your drives? Meh, not really our concern, says EU

Re: Detection

>And given that Kasperski is a Russian company,

Is the only reason this is being made public

Nice that we have to rely on the evil empire for Pravda and Izvestia

Google strongly opposes plans to let ANY US COURT authorise digi-snoops

Re: Rule 41 says......

Yes but when the KGB murders a journalist in London we tend to regard it as a bit naughty.

When our own defenders of peace and liberty do it - that might cause a bit of introspection.

If it is a foreign machine

Why does the constitution apply ?

The court has demonstrated that the constitutional protection doesn't apply to US citizens abroad, to foreigners in the US or to anyone within 100miles of a border.

Lenovo shipped lappies with man-in-the-middle ad/mal/bloatware

You clicked OK to eula when you bought/unpacked/isntalled/walked past the machine in Dixons - it's your fault.

Re: Stock install?

And where do you get the clean install from ?

You certainly can't trust the OS install disk that came with the machine.

And if you do an install with a retail copy of Windows you will still have to go to the laptops maker's site for all the driver downloads. All those run as administrator system installs ......

Re: I'll give you three guesses

d) All of the above

Re: Criminal

Like the one to British Telecom for doing the same thing with phorm ?

At least with this you can reinstall the OS or remove the software - trickier when it's your ISP mtm-ing you

BBC: SOD the scientific consensus! Look OUT! MEGA TSUNAMI is coming

Re: Is BBC Radio more rigourous ?

Apart from TIMC the science shows are a bit magazine-y

In Our Time is always good for science, mostly because the presenter isn't a scientist.

Re: So a meteor didn't wipe out the dinosaurs

But it wasn't in recorded history ....

Re: BBC says no to science

And it's complete lack of balanced reporting on whether the moon landings really happened

So a meteor didn't wipe out the dinosaurs

"No such event, a ....., has occurred in either the Atlantic or Pacific oceans in recorded history. NONE"

'Net neutrality will turn the internet communist – and make Iran's day'

>There is the wonderful idea that has taken hold in parts of the US....

Those parts of the USA regard everywhere outside the USA (and any US states within 100miles of the coast) as part of liberal commie plot to destroy the USA.

Vodafone didn't have a £6bn tax bill. Sort yourselves out, Lefties

Re: One Question:

Yes - but if you take them out for a decent lunch they will overlook it.

Re: Abolishing Corporation Tax

So you pay tax when you take it out - what's the difference?

It's allowing people to save tax by transferring money from companies to the themselves in different boxes that is the issue

I am a non-dom, I haven't lived in the UK for 10 years, I don't pay UK tax.

If however I worked in London. But flew in on monday morning, flew back to the channel islands on friday afternoon, claimed that the 2days travelling didn't count so I was only present 3*52 days/year and so shouldn't pay any UK tax.

I think a reasonable person on a jury might detect a difference - even if the accountants don't

Re: TAX shouldn't be taxing

So living in the UK, sending your kids to UK schools, using the NHS and roads, while having your "salary" paid into a swiss bank, and doing all your spending on a swiss credit card with a fake swiss address while paying no tax - is no different from having an ISA?

Inside GOV.UK: 'Chaos' and 'nightmare' as trendy Cabinet Office wrecked govt websites

Re: phnaar..

Why on $DIETY's Earth would they want a random link button?

How else do you think government policy is decided?

Obama turns back on spooks: 'I'm on the side of strong encryption'

Re: UK

If you are trying to get elected and more voters in key marginals read the DM than Wired then you base your opinions on what the DM says - that's "democracy"

Snowden disclosures

“The Snowden disclosures were really harmful in terms of the trust between the government and many of these companies, in part because it had an impact on their bottom lines."

So doing the spying wasn't harmful - only the disclosure only affected the bottom line ?

SCREW YOU, BRITS: We're going through with UK independence ANYWAY – Scotland

Re: "As an American and an objective observer, does he actually believe that"

>if you think Nicola Sturgeon is a man.

I think it's the skirt wearing that was confusing him

> I doubt very much that another referendum would yield a different result.

Unless in the next referendum you are asking the English......

UGH... opposable thumbs are so tiresome! Why not mount your iPhone on your face?

Re: Patent trolls FTW

I believe there was prior art from Not the Nine O'Clock news where Mr Atkinson demonstrated a cunning headmounted system to allow the deaf to know the phone was ringing.

Your hard drives were riddled with NSA spyware for years

Re: but the '...w.dll'

Because they don't prevent these sort of attacks when the attacker has a copy of the key

But they do prevent you installing anything else to prevent these attacks

First HSBC, now the ENTIRE PUBLIC SECTOR dodges tax

Re: @Tom Wood - "while no one would go to prison for false VAT claims"

Yes - it changes it from a crime that costs the taxpayer in lost nurses, school places etc into an accounting exercise where the number in box A was subtracted from box B instead of Box C.

Re: Two things

>That's crazy - why should VAT on ANYTHING not be recoverable?

Universities can't claim VAT.

Didn't matter when all they bought was ink. But if you have a multi million quid contract to build a detector for CERN or a bit of the ISS and you have to pay VAT on all the components but you can't claim it back or charge VAT on the resulting product - you end up a bit screwed.

Boffins now one step closer to male birth control pill

And the IT angle

That is going to take a hell of breathrough in authentication between Alice and Bob to get Alice to believe Bob has taken it.

Apple LIGHTSABERS to feature in The Force Awakens

You're holding it wrong

Scene 1:

Obi-wan: It's your fathers light sabre.

Luke Presses a button and the beam comes out of the back and through his chest

Obi-wan: You're holding it wrong

Got $600 for every Win Server 2003 box you're running? Uh-oh

Re: Dear custommer move to free Linux or else we fine you...

If only you had the source so you could buy support services from anybody you wanted at a fair market price.

Hackers fear arms control pact makes exporting flaws illegal

Re: Export licence

But what if you are not "involved in defense" but merely report a vulnerability in some software.

Do you know need to become Mr Snowden to report a security flaw?

ps the spy software exported to middle eastern countries was detected by the government, IIRC the companies "advisor" on the deal was a former tory party leader.

'Come on, everyone – block US govt staff ogling web smut at work'

Re: Why just porn?

But you are happy having the postal service employee next to you checking out WhatAssaultRifle .com ?

Re: Why just porn?

Because (as in all other aspects of US domestic policy) it makes little baby Jesus cry.

Apple drives itself round bend: Pities the fool who inks deal with carmakers – source

Re: Mini Van makes sense

An "electric smart" would be my guess.

For the iPhone market sector that live in cities what's the point in the top-gear car specs?

What differentiates your Toyota little cute city car from the Honda little cute city car is the iPod dock not the torque curve roll off above 5000rpm or power slides.

If Apple built an electric Smart Car with the same level of Apple quality and design features as a Macbook I can see a market.

Re: 80% of parts on electric cars have commonality with traditional cars

On a high performance car like the Tesla the motors are heavy and expensive.

Putting them in the wheels would be tricky, you don't want unecessary unsprung weight. Formula 1 cars (and 2CVs) even have the brakes mounted on the "axle" to reduce the weight of the bit bouncing up and down on the road.

So you need to mount two motors back-back in the middle each connected to a half shaft. But then you need careful control that you don't put even slightly more speed to one wheel than the other (torque steer), except when cornering when you DO need to put more speed to one than the other. It's easier to just mount a single motor to a regular differential.

If you want AWD then two motors back-back in the middle and sets of axles and diffs makes sense. Especially since AWD transmissions already have a central differential anyway.

If you want super go anywhere low speed AWD or just a low speed golf-buggy then a motor per wheel does have advantages.

Re: 80% of parts on electric cars have commonality with traditional cars

But it is just a luxury BMW/Audi/Porsche saloon that just happens to be electric.

I'm assuming Apple aren't planning to just build a Nissan leaf but something a little more "think different"

Re: 80% of parts on electric cars have commonality with traditional cars

That's true for a regular car maker building a hybrid version of a regular car - especially those "hybrids" that are just built for a tax break.

If you were to build a car purely around it being an electric car first, even with a limited top speed, limited range, limited seats.

Laptops share a lot of components with a desktop, just add a screen hinged keyboard and battery to the same motherboard - an iPhone doesn't

Components? Wouldn't they just CNC mill it out of a solid billet of Al ?

It's not easy being Green. But WHY insist we knit our own ties?

Re: So, in other words...

That's why I outsourced all my reg postings to somebody in India while I get on with more valuable tasks

Re: Yes, but,

Because economists (like undergrad physics) ignores friction.

Monsanto can grow grain more cheaply than I can so I buy their grain.

In February they can manage to deliver poor quality expensive imported lettuce to the supermarket.

In spring and summer they cannot deliver 4 fresh lettuce leaves in seconds direct to my kitchen cheaper than I can go and pluck them from the garden.

Jaguar F-Type: A beautiful British thoroughbred

Is there a body shop that can fix this man's minor dents and scratches?

You don't fix dents in Landies - you just wait until you hit another wall in the same place to knock the dent out.

Re: Jaguar (Land Rover) an icon of British marketing of the 60s!

So compared to Tesla's innovation we take a big car, put a big engine in it and innovate the hell out of marketing its links to the 60s E-type ( a car that was very pretty but not exactly the last word in automotive engineering).

Perhaps that's the advantage the Germans have, they don't have to design Porsche, BMW, MB and Audi based purely on the world's nostalgia for the Germany of half a century ago.

Think you’re hard? Check out the frozen Panasonic CF-54 Toughbook

Re: @John H Woods: Ouch

Equipped a former CEO with a toughbook because he got quite "managerial" if he was on a world circling trip to dozens of customers and his laptop had an accident. Compared to the price of his 1st class tickets and hotels it was negligible.

More recently I just get the sales people MacBook Pros, have all their work in the cloud and tell them to just go to the nearest Apple store and get it swapped if it goes wrong. If you compare a Macbook to a similar top end laptop and add instant repair service in most major cities it looks like a good deal.

Re: Ouch

It depends what the downtime would cost you.

Having a drill rig out of action for a couple of weeks while they fedex you a new macbook is a little pricey.

We did have one customer who rejected our £1500 rugged palm devices and just bought boxes full of £50 Dell Axims. We had another that picked up our Toughbook and kicked it into a rock pile - it still worked so they were happy and bought the product.

Euro ministers trade data for data protection – yes, your passenger records

What about international flights

I fly to the middle east a lot.

How is the Saudi government supposed to protect me from the IRA if they don't have all my credit card, mobile and web browsing information ?

Proposed US law could deal knockout blow to FBI in overseas cloud privacy ding-dongs

>Was there an assumption that he would try to veto this legislation then?

He is a democrat president with no power other than the ability to veto bills from the republican congress (and declare war). The republican congress has no power other than to vote down bills from the democrat president.

It's a system that protects America from their government.

Re: I had no clue..

Without this law the EU, and then others, is one step away from declaring it illegal to store any medical, financial or personal data on any cloud service with a US presence or buy consulting services from any company with a US presence.

That's the sort of thing that makes republicans take notice.

Don't worry it won't apply to American data, or the NSA.

BLAME ENGINEERS: Workstation sales soar by 8.9 per cent a year

Re: workstation laptop; ha! you want a luggable

You think you're joking - but you can pack a lot of i7 powered Intel NUCS into a suitcase.

Biggest part of the cluster is carrying all the power leads and 4way sockets

Elon Musk's Tesla set to unveil home storage battery

Re: Surely you aren't serious?

Slightly more practical then 1000s of backyard diesel generator sets for load peaking.

If enough people have an electric car plugged in to a smart charger it can charge slowly and cheaply off-peak and then you can have it sell power back to the utility when the game comes on, or it gets hot and the AC kicks in. Cheaper than spinning up a lot of gas turbine peak load plants.

Gov.UK begs Google 'n' U.S. tech pals: Forget Ireland, come to Blighty

Re: It's not just tax...

%70 of euro currency sales going through a computer in London, buying euros shares with imaginary euros and selling shares with imaginary euros is simple.

Running a manufacturing business on low margins when you buy raw material in $, set your prices and make sales in euro and pay your taxes in GBP is trickier.