Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Welcome to Heathrow Terminal, er, Samsung Galaxy S5

Re: Airports are becoming luna parks - allowing customers to travel is not their main aim

At least they had payphones and a postbox - luxury

Re: Airports are becoming luna parks - allowing customers to travel is not their main aim

To be fair Heathrow was never intended as an airport - it was just that the world's biggest perpetual building site attracted so many visitors that they had to put in some transport links and the only practical way to reach central Heathrow from London was to fly.

Re: Beware of awkward associations

>Rather that than the other way around.

You obviously haven't visited Southampton !

Re: #fail

Not sure why Samsung would want to be associated with T5 anyway. What's their next move "Samsung sponsors the Auschwitz experience" ?

Whose idea was it to build a terminal at the worlds busiest international airport, specifically for the worlds favourite airline (!) and have no transit passenger connection to the other terminals?

We nearly missed a flight because it took an hour for my non-Eu colleague to get through immigration.

Hint to UK border agency, 40 year old Canadian engineers with a Canadian passport and a business class ticket on an Air Canada flight to Canada leaving in 2hours are unlikely to be secret asylum seekers.

Named after would suggest it was some sort of monument in their memory - named for means they plonked down the money and we did it for them.

It's the difference between Trafalgar Square and the new Thales square

US authorities name five Chinese military hackers wanted for espionage

Re: Just a terrible idea

The effects are slightly more asymmetric.

NSA employees not allowed visas to visit China - big fat meh

Employees of Chinese companies with government links (ie all of them) not allowed US visas, so difficultto visit South American countries or Canada.

US citizens not allowed to do business with these companies, US companies not allowed to do business with companies that do business with these companies etc etc.

Beam me up Scotty: Boffins to turn pure light into matter

Re: Star Trek Replicators

That's why you need pasta and anti-pasta

Titsup Russian rocket EXPLODES, destroys $275m telly satellite

Re: Here's another one I prepared earlier

A large proportion of the satellite build is test and verification - that still costs 2x as much for 2 units.

Most of the commercial satellite bus is pretty much pick and mix, compared to the R&D effort in a science payload.

So if you built a spare it would probably cost 75% of the first item and unless it is one of a constellation like GPS/Iridium you wouldn't have a market for it unless there was an oops, it's cheaper to buy insurance.

Yes but you aren't allowed to launch on them if your payload contains any significant American technology, or you want any US government work in future.

A clever bit of protectionism/nationalism that has led to china developing (or at least copying) a lot of the technology themselves.

Motorola Moto E: Brill budget blower with one bothersome blunder

Re: Front facing camera

Possibly a market for an attachment with two small mirrors that allow you to video conference using the rear camera?

SAVE NET NEUTRALITY, urges Steve Wozniak in open letter to bigwigs

Re: Why do the cable companies

That was before it started affecting the big boys.

Demanding money from apple for access to iTunes is going to be like asking a Mr Putin to pay a parking ticket. A certain telco is going to end up in the corporate equivalent of a shallow hole in the desert

Why do the cable companies

Think that they can charge Apple/Google/Microsoft/Netflix extra to ship their packets?

Don't cable companies normally pay for content?

Presumably when this goes through Apple/Microsoft etc will charge the Comcast the same as Fox/HBO/etc do for allowing them to show their content.

Cisco's Chambers to Obama: Stop fiddling with our routers

Re: Words vs Actions

Because you would still have to trust Cisco themselves - a US corporation subject o national security letters, that relies on US government contracts for a lot of its INCOME.

The only way you could trust them would be if they moved to Switzerland, fired all their US citizen employees, banned all American shareholding, refused to sell to any US government customer..

Even then it would be prudent to assume it was all a front.

Re: Victim mentality

It did occur to them - but with the current level of US manufacturing the NSA had to outsource the innards to Huawei

So you reckon you're a leet infosec warrior. Now you can prove it, pal

Re: Basically No!

And of course, never had any problems with the police, never even seen a drug and apparently not being tattooed.

Net neutrality foes outspent backers by over three to one – and that's just so far

Re: When in doubt about regulations and origins of same,

Or unless the losers decide to fight back.

So Comcast want $M from Netflix to make sure that Netflix's packets don't get 'broken'

Then Apple decide that Comcast users don't get iTunes, Microsoft decide that they don't get updates and Google is suddenly 404.

There are lots of rules about telcos and common carriers, there aren't many saying that a computer company can't choose who its customers are.

Who's going to look after the computers that look after our parents?

Re: money and such...

Tech follows the money.

The reason disabled tech is so bad is that the customer is government health schemes/insurance companies. once there are more old people and they have more money than teenagers then Apple/Nike/etc are going to focus on them

Crypto-guru slams 'NSA-proof' tech, says today's crypto is strong enough

From people in the community I've talked to I believe the self-encoding flaw wasn't that serious in itself. It was opsec failures that led to it's downfall, especially sending the same message in different codes and using long stock phrases and greetings.

Ironically the major break in the 4 rotor U boat system was due to attempts to tighten security. Rules requiring that all rotors be changed every day and no rotor be re-used within a certain time etc greatly reduced the keyspace - especially if you had broken a recent setting.

Worth bearing in mind when you create password rules the word must be a certain length, must have a capital, can't have two numbers next to each other etc etc....

The enigma was effectively unbreakable by the technology of the time.

It was broken because of poor security procedures. Choosing weak keys (the famous AfrikaKorp signaller who used "HIT" "LER" as the code group everyday for the entire war) retransmitting the same message with incremented code settings, or sending identical daily weather reports in enigma and weak civilian code.

The British navy had a less complex but reasonably secure book cypher. Unfortunately they also had an admiral in Halifax who sent the same message "nothing to report" with a long long florid greeting and sign off signature every morning using that days code.

US space-station crisis: 'We have enough of our own problems' sighs Russian deputy PM

Re: The West is daft?

It is a very complicated question with a long history of religous, cultural and historical issues which must ultimately be judged by the only appropriate measure in these cases.

Do they have oil ?

Re: Return of Hermes

>Time to, you know, re-fund NASA? ...might well prove faster and cheaper.

2014 version of Kennedy's speech:

"We choose this decade to convene a focus group to work on a powerpoint presentation to engage k12 students and stakeholders in creating a new Nasa mission statement - to go to the moon"

>the guys who wrote the textbooks on how to do it might well prove faster and cheaper.

I think all the Nazi rocket scientists are dead

Return of Hermes

The USA could just do what it historically did when faced with a threat from an overwhelmingly superior foreign empire - turn to the French for help.

Ariane5 was originally intended to carry the Hermes spaceplane as part of the Eu's "Frogs in Space" project. Shoudl be easy enough to reinstate it

GCHQ grants security clearance to Samsung's Knox mobe security

Re: "Android solutions"

Presumably the solution to Android is iOS - in the same way that Imodium is "Diarrhea Solutions"

Double edged sword

So any individual, company or government agency in the world should now assume the phone and its manufacturer are fully cooperating with GCHQ and their masters at Fort Meade.

Might not be the global sales boost that Samsung were expecting

World loses mind: Uber valued at TEN BEEELLION DOLLARS, Pinterest pegged at $5bn

Worth more than Fiat

You could just buy Fiat, give everybody their own Fiat 500 and keep the Ferraris for yourself

'My house is on fire m8 lol' ... 911 texting tested in the US

Re: Meanwhile . . .

Wait until they privatise it.

Press one if you are a premium member, press to to hear about other NHS services, press 3 to check your account balance

More importantly

SMS messages will often get through in poor reception areas and the phone will keep trying until it sends it. There have been lots of cases of people lost at sea / in mountains etc - texting friends to call emergency services.

The local mountain rescue here posts a number to SMS because 911 doesn't support it.

There was one case where somebody in the Caribbean texted the pub in the UK to call 999 to get them to call the local coast guard because he couldn't get a voice signal

ULA says to blame SpaceX for Russian rocket rebuff

So the KGB not as good as the NSA

Until SpaceX's court case the Russians didn't know that ULA were planning to use the launches for military payloads ? Really?

Feature-phones aren't dead, Moto – oldsters still need them

Buttons

I traded my Nokia for a ridiculously expensive smart phone.

It's great except in winter when I can't use the screen wearing gloves - so I miss calls while trying to get the gloves off.

It would be great in summer - except you can't see the retina-esque pixel count colour screen in sunlight.

For the other 11 months of the year when it rains here in the Pacific North West - you can't work the screen because of the water on it

GCHQ's 'NOSEY SMURF' spyware snoops dragged into secretive tribunal

Re: Can someone explain to me...

It is "proportionate" to the total number of !Yahoo! webcam sessions - in this case the constant of proportionality being 1.0

How to catch a fraudster – using 'top cop' Benford and the power of maths

>I am still digesting the concept of a Readers Digest digest.

I only read the summary

> I would still have expected 9 to have a higher incidence than 8 if the numbers are about money

It only apples to the incidence of the first digit.

Activist investors try forcing Google to pay more taxes

Re: The board don't want?

Percentage of Goolge owned by activist investors 0.000001%

Percentage owned by hedge funds/billionaires etc who don't pay tax themselves 99.9999999%

Chance of pink tutus - zero

Re: Interesting

It would be legal for Disney to find a country where the age of consent was 12 and run special peado adventure holidays - but it is unlikely to have a net positive benefit to their profitability.

Apple, Beats and fools with money who trust celeb endorsements

Re: Delicately put

>The best speaker cable I had was 10 metre runs of 16mm2 2-core power cable.

But was it directional ?

Re: Do Apple want the streaming licenses from Beats?

>. The problem with this theory is that those licenses (to my understanding) aren’t transferable in the event of an acquisition.

I'm sure Apple have enough lawyers to make sure that "Apple Holding Holding Holding Inc" of Grand Cayman's doesn't actually acquire "Beats Holding Holding ltd" of the Dutch Antiles.

Re: Yup

>instead persisted with the best available analogue tape.

And hopefully it has been stored properly and not reused too many times since

Russia to suspend US GPS stations in tit-for-tat spat

Re: Why do they need permission?

It needs to broadcast a correction signal - typically either over the GSM phone network or a pager band - which needs a license from the hosting government.

Since you need these systems to get high accuracy a lot of next-gen GNSS systems are just using a single geostationary satelite and a bunch of ground stations - to give cheap higher accuracy coverage over their own territory.

Re: Desert Storm

It was officially permanently disabled in 2000 (although the civilian signal can be blocked in regions of conflict) because the FAA wanted to use it to replace navigation beacons and landing aids.

It struck even the US govt has ridiculous to have one branch of govt spending $Bn to overcome a restriction put in by another branch that had spent $Bn to do the same thing.

Archos ArcBook: An Android netbook for a measly hundred-and-seventy clams

Re: Not that thrilling...

Carry a monitor, car battery and inverter around do you?

In a lot of ways it's better than a chromebook - especially if it can print to an actual printer, not a cloudy imaginary one. A chromebook with a touchscreen and a wider range of apps sounds like a winner. Needs a couple of hundred more rows of screen though

Spotty solar power management platform could crash the grid

Re: 566 terawatts a day?

>the whole solar PV thing across Europe has been a disaster

It has not been a disaster - it has been a great success, ask Ms Merkel's election team.

It's the best way of keeping both middle class home owners (or at least those with a south facing roof), farmers and greens happy. While getting the poor to pay for it, without seeming to raise taxes.

Silicon Valley bod in no-hire pact lawsuit urges court to reject his own lawyers' settlement

Re: Thought so for a long time ...

($325M - lawyers 25%)/1000s is even less

Oracle vs Google redux: Appeals court says APIs CAN TOO be copyrighted

Re: Copyrights protection for real code vs patents of trivial ideas - what is more evil?

Sun published Java specs, they published Java manuals, they encouraged people to learn Java - now it turns out that all that was proprietry secret information. If that had been mentioned at the time do you think we would have learned Java?

Nobody is saying Google have the right to copy Oracle's code - just to write their own implementation of a published language manual. If this isn't true then Intel or ARM could decide that their instruction set is copyright and tomorrow almost every computer in the world is illegal.

Re: What Java APIs?

>Does this mean that IBM and others who have their own JVMs (presumably implementing the same APIs) are Oracle's next targets?

Unlikely, once IBM has finished it's submission that it owns the copyright to the SQL language syntax

Re: Protecting interface monopolies = bad

In europe we do - it is illegal to prevent reverse engineering hardware,apis, binaries or file formats for the purpose of interoperability.

Re: Unintentional humor

Once IBM declare that their original PC bios API was copyright and every non-IBM PC since is infringing then wine isn't going to matter because there will only be Macs, chromebooks and mainframes.

Re: POSIX/ECMA everywhere

ISO standards can still be patented.

Or now that APIs are valuable, the patent troll law firm that now owns the original company can claim all sorts of excuses why the ISO process was invalid