Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

GPS on the fritz? Britain and France plot a backup plan

Re: Sextant Alert

The FAA were hoping that AGPS would replace ILS, and it has at a lot of smaller airports.

ILS isn't going away at LHR but it would be a big cost saving to use something someone else is paying for

Re: WWII relic revived

Galileo has some of the augmentation/validation features that came out of the FAA's requirements for GPS / WAAS to at least detect spoofing

Jamming is still a thing because signals are weak

Part of the reason for Galileo was the risk that a future US president might be less cooperative and could threaten European GPS use.

But, like the other threats to soft-power, if the US is too heavy handed in using GPS to threaten partners they will just drive commercial users to rely more on Galileo + Chinese systems

Re: Anti radiation missiles

Pretty much line of sight because you are in sight of the satellites, so either a van parked at the end of the runway or close to the target. Or a high altitude aircraft over the area

Re: Sextant Alert

Hopefully when the do build their new ILS, they don't put it on a concrete wall at the end of the runway

Re: Cheap and nasty ?

Yes, we worked on it in the 80s/90s - even had a prototype "mobile" phone that triangulated on FM radio transmitters

Drawback was that it needed a data link to a fixed site, which isn't a problem now with ubiquitous data but added to the cost/power/complexity then

Then everyone was building GPS chips into their phones anyway and they became cheap commodities.

Re: maps?

Also less than useful in the middle of the ocean.

Or somebody wasted a lot of effort trying to solve the longitude problem.

Re: Sextant Alert

The F-35 can use it's cameras to compare the ground topology to reference map data to find it's location.

Unless your enemies are in featureless Middle Eastern deserts.

Of course since people who live in such desolate wastelands could never represent a credible threat to us, we would never need to attack them

Re: Bring back Long Wave!

Also LW extends beyond these shores, allowing foreigners to learn the secrets of the Archers' success or to get a lead on our Mornington Crescent strategies.

That's why the BBC is cracking down on access to the BBC sounds app

Re: Sextant Alert

>The intended market for it is for planes who can no longer rely on satellite navigation

It's great for the over the oceans,cruising at 30,000ft, stage of the flight - where you don't need to know where you are anyway.

It's less useful in the, descending onto a runway at 250km/h when you are trying to ensure you arrive with a positive altitude stage where GPS replaced all those expensive precision approach systems

Re: Galileo?

They all operate in the same way, with the same very low power signal at the same frequencies.

Galileo adds a few signal assurance features, which things like WAAS added to GPS and military bands add more security but that doesn't help with things like shipping or self driving cars

Re: Sextant Alert

May be a good solution for France, at least the southern bit, but Blighty has a national natural defence against celestial navigation. (Although it appears to be falling at the moment)

Someone hijacked Elmo's X account to post antisemitic rants

Re: My turn

I do miss the Clinton/Blair era where they went to some lengths not to actually lie-lie instead of just "they're eating cats and dogs"

Confused there for a moment

Thought "Elmo", Twitters' owner, did this all the time ?

Also I note that Kermit has been very quiet on the whole Epstein story!

Britain's billion-pound F-35s not quite ready for, well, anything

Re: Fit For Purpose.....

The F35 is totally fit for purpose.

There is no need for an fighter aircraft, the UK is not about to be invaded

The point of buying the F35 is to channel money to the USA and so prove we are good little allies and don't deserve punishing sanctions like those evil no-good Europeans.

It's the same reason that Saudi Arabia is the 2nd biggest buyer of US arms

Stopping the rot when good software goes bad means new rules from the start

The main problem is that F-droid has very little available beyond simple utils that should be in the phone OS anyway (and Firefox ?)

If you need banking, transit, pay parking, Uber, banking apps etc you are SOL except to trust the official store.

Re: Product liability

More likely that your iPhone would come with a full range of Apple tested and approved Apple apps, written by Apple. Because how could they in good conscience allow other risky apps onto their platform?

So everyone from Uber to your local transit app and your city's pay parking could all be on the iPhone, so long as they use Apple's infrastructure and pay Apple 30%

Grapheneos allows this, but it does require a bit of technical knowledge to understand which requests are suspicious and which to allow

Worth noting that F-Droid apps are required to be open source but they do allow a bunch of libraries to be included as blobs so it's not impossible that they are deliberately or accidentally compromised - eg. like Log4J

Re: Product liability - nice idea but...

The trouble is that verification is expensive. Apple and Google would have to charge something ridiculous like 30% fee to verify and distribute an app and no app producer would ever agree to pay that

EU-sponsored report says GenAI's 'fair use' defense does not compute

Re: The US innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates

But the web would never have caught on in Europe, where you either had very expensive local phone calls and restricted equipment (like the UK), or an official government alternative (like France)

ps. This isn't going to "save" Europe from AI, it's just that companies making the models are going to be American, or Chinese, or Indian.

The US innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates

So Europe loses out on an AI future

Like they lost out on the internet because of government telecom monopolies.

Apollo-Soyuz at 50: The Cold War space hug that nearly ended in gasping horror

Re: An age of giants

We went to the moon with Nazi rockets, if we want to go back to the moon.....

You have a fake North Korean IT worker problem – here's how to stop it

Re: How fat is Kim Jong Un essay question.

>No doubt the lazy HR folks can have an AI generate other "weed 'em out" essay questions

You are int he desert. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.

It has helped us weed out AI applicants, a pity about Holden, but ....

UK's NCA disputes claim it's nearly three times less efficient than the FBI

Re: This an affront to our culture and society.

But surely we have a long tradition of successfully organised crime in the UK - at least in East London.

Re: Do NCA have better measures?

But at least they have completely stopped financial fraud and money laundering in the city of London

Pentagon snaps up ownership stake in America's only rare earths mine

Re: Sounds a bit...

As a way of redistributing tax money to the masses, the US DoD is probably more efficient than its former soviet competition

Re: Sounds a bit...

But there are many advantages to your HR dept having weapons of mass destruction

Lovestruck US Air Force worker admits leaking secrets on dating app

Re: Top Secret...

You can't trust these heterosexuals.

Trump tariffs turn techies topsy-turvy as US braces for PC tax

Re: Hmm

If you have a 38:9 ratio ultra-widescreen monitor

Re: Idiotic tariff nonsense

Recycling is woke, even for steel

Re: Idiotic tariff nonsense

Understandable given his unbelievable physique and reported medical fitness standard

Re: Idiotic tariff nonsense

>. Mind you, things weren’t much better in the UK - to get a decent Coffee you really needed to visit the Continent.

Une tasse de Mellow Oiseaux s’il vous plaît ?

Re: Idiotic tariff nonsense

They use the finest Swiss coffee beans.

Beans so expensive that no Starbucks in Europe make a taxable profit.

Re: Idiotic tariff nonsense

Do you need to switch to a nice relaxing herbal tea?

Re: Not "reciprocal"!

The tariffs are "reciprocating", they just bounce on and off

Intel's leaders have stopped pretending – and it's about time

Re: Intel's leaders have stopped pretending – anbpkkkl0d it's about time

Then Intel just has to use its massive market and global dominance to force the little Microsoftware company to introduce a feature in every new version which requires a new Intel chip.

Re: Intel's leaders have stopped pretending – anbpkkkl0d it's about time

Seems overblown

As long as everyone relies on Microsoft Windows and they launch a new version every 2 years which needs everyone to upgrade to a new Intel chip they're fine

UK Online Safety Act 'not up to scratch' on misinformation, warn MPs

Re: "legal but harmful content,"...

So you can only get the Daily Mail on prescription

No because whoever is in power they will do whatever Murdoch wants so it doesn't really matter what laws and who made them

Slow down on building power plants for all those new AI datacenters, report warns

Re: Oh my

>there's nobody to coordinate this

Collective action is communism remember

Or a bunch of power companies that will go bust, plunging kittens into darkness, unless they are bailed out by the government

Former reality TV star appointed NASA interim administrator

Re: Considering Duffy's background, experience, and performance to date:

> I hope the middle managers at NASA

they've thought of that

Thousands of NASA senior staffers expected to quit after budget slashed

>And all the people who didn't vote, which turns out to be a 1/3 of population

Did they make any difference?

If the reason you didn't vote is because you're a Democrat in Alabama or a Republican in California - it is the voter that's the problem ?

Please don't cut funds for space traffic control, industry begs Congress

Re: I'm confused

But that Shuttle is going to Houston Texas in Americaland

The other stuff is for traffic cops in space, why aren't the aliens paying for that ?

Have the Clangers even said thank you ?

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds

Re: Edible?

>after the Maori arrived.

Non-white people have always lived in peace and harmony with nature and any total wipeout of mega fauna with their arrival on an island is due to totally coincidental and extremely local climate change

Re: Bah!

Problem is that the only sample of the dodo is a half rotten skeleton in Oxford that was thrown out because it was smelly and then recovered from the bin when someone realised its importance

EU tries to explain how to do AI without breaking the law

Re: "but it's purely voluntary."...

Except all the consultancies that will offer you an AI tool that monitors your compliance with the AI rules

How to trick ChatGPT into revealing Windows keys? I give up

You do know that El Reg isn't a real person?

It's just 3 journos in a trenchcoat

Everyone has a tool for scanning public git repos for private keys

The advantage here is that the AI has a 'special relationship' with the data holders so get access to non-public data

So you just have to trick Meta's AI into revealing private Facebook data

The devs have experience of managers