Posts by cosmogoblin

Facebook is abusive. It's time to divorce it

Re: Such a true reflection of a sad world

Still wondering how a publication which relies solely on advertising money - AND knows that its main userbase uses probably, on average, more than 1 ad-blocker - survives...

While Facebook reinvents Sadville, we still dream of flying cars

15 Million Merits

I've seen this before ...

An excellent episode of Black Mirror. But don't watch it alone - you need somebody's arms to cry into at the end in despair for humanity.

Which is how I feel after following that FB link. Thanks so much Register...

'Nobody's got to use the internet,' argues idiot congressman in row over ISP privacy rules

Re: Senior Moment

Hear, hear.

Judge people on their choices. You don't get to choose your age, race, sex, or intelligence.

You do choose how informed you are. At the top of the political game, regardless of your intelligence and background, things like information, expertise and education are not in short supply; whether you make use of them is your choice, and choosing to remain ignorant should be the political deadly sin. Shame it's not.

Prisoners built two PCs from parts, hid them in ceiling, connected to the state's network and did cybershenanigans

Re: 2 PC's what?

The worst recent change Imo is capitalising only the first letter of acronyms, which I first noticed on the Bbc. Idk why they do that.

Why do GUIs jump around like a demented terrier while starting up? Am I on my own?

Re: Zombie hard disk

"a user interface element can't be clicked or keyed when it has only just appeared on the screen"

This exists. When installing extensions in Firefox, the install window needs focus for a couple of seconds before the "Install" button will activate. Until then it sits there greyed out - just long enough so you can't accidentally click to install malicious software, but not quite long enough to annoy you. Very well designed, but nobody else seems to have copied them.

D'oh! Amber Rudd meant 'understand hashing', not 'hashtags'

Works with maths too. "I'm bad at maths" or "I hated maths at school" is a badge of honour for many people.

I strongly believe that not only should "none of the above" be an option on the ballot, but it should be a returnable candidate. If we have the choice between a racist Purple Party candidate and an idiotic Yellow Party candidate, and "none" receives more votes, we have chosen to not be represented by either muppet and should leave an empty seat in the House of Commons (or wherever).

Look at the 2012 PCC elections - average turnout 15% (2016 wasn't much better). Did we really vote for Mr Plod to be the police commissioner in our county? Or did we in fact not want an elected police commissioner? Spoiled papers are not counted in calculating winning scores, but are counted in turnout calculations, since whoever wins can claim a stronger "mandate" if the turnout was high - but even in the weakest turnout, government claims to have the full support of the people.

FPTP turns this from a mockery into a farce. In every constituency across the country, exactly 51% of people vote Party A and 49% of people vote Party B. To any sensible person, this sounds like a compromise situation: give slightly more than half the seats to Party A. But to Westminster, this means Party A gets all the seats and Party B collapses like a flan in a cupboard.

This isn't a theoretical extreme, either. 2015 general election: Tories get 36.9% of the vote, 24.5% of the electorate (on a 66.4% turnout), giving them 50.8% of MPs (actually slightly more due to Sinn Féin not taking up their seats) and 100% of the cabinet. And don't even get me started on the 2010 Lib Dems' "kingmaker" debacle...

Passport and binary tree code, please: CompSci quizzes at US border just business as usual

Re: @Valarian

Compile.

Execute.

Panic as the trojan hands control of airport security to terrorist group du jour.

'First ever' SHA-1 hash collision calculated. All it took were five clever brains... and 6,610 years of processor time

Re: Newsworthy?

Very interesting, thanks for pointing that out. The cryptomaths is beyond me, but I assume the abstract is supported. It's a very surprising and counterintuitive result.

Newsworthy?

This is obviously of interest on The Register, but is it actually interesting more generally?

I remember when the very first hash collision was identified, being astonished that it had ever been considered impossible. As several commentards have pointed out, if the hash is smaller than the document, then OBVIOUSLY collision exist (whether or not you can find them in less than 10^n years).

On a separate note, surely you could just use separate hashes. Finding a collision on one algorithm is difficult; finding documents which collide on five or six would be near-impossible.

I was authorized to trash my employer's network, sysadmin tells court

Re: "I wish for world peace" ---- of course, we all do, but not necessary

"how does a 3rd party tell the difference between a mistake and malicious intent sans a confession?"

Various methods - "reasonable doubt" and "a jury of your peers" spring to mind.

Teach undergrads ethics to ensure future AI is safe – compsci boffins

Re: Future Elite ESPecial Forces in Novel Sources

I suggest we take amanfrommars' opinions on this very seriously. As the only example I know of an ordinary chatbot that has achieved sentience, it has a very personal stake in this, and a unique perspective - albeit one so stratospherically removed from human understanding that we would need a Rosetta Stone /and/ Sherlock Holmes to understand.

Facebook's dabblings in TV suggest Zuck isn't actually a genius after all

Re: Genius

It's called a cargo-cult.

Bureau of Statistics hides trade data about monitors. Yes, monitors!

Monitor lizard

Once I had a cardboard monitor lizard from an 80s computer magazine sellotaped to the top of my monitor.

My brother went a different route - he had a minotaur.

Re: It's a what?!

Sounds like an AI to me!

Makes sense to restrict an experimental sentient machine's access to I/O. I'd leave it running for a while, then freeze-dry its memory and inspect in a virtual machine. In a Faraday cage. In a bunker 10 miles down.

Naughty sysadmins use dark magic to fix PCs for clueless users

I'm a school science teacher, and I've cultivated plenty of these. My favourites include hitting Ctrl+Shift+T when a student quickly closes a browser window while doing "research", and Ctrl+W if they're not fast enough to close it.

I have what adults generally call "great mental arithmetic", but children perceive as "witchcraft"; and until presentation pointers became commonplace, I could wow students by progressing a presentation by clicking my fingers (my other hand, of course, being in my jacket pocket).

And a few years ago, when Acer included a simple button (not a Fn+button) to turn off Wi-Fi, I received several phone calls from friends and relatives who couldn't connect to the Internet. They were pretty freaked out when the first thing I said was just "Press the button with the red light on the top-right of your laptop"...

Ban ISPs from 'speeding up' the internet: Ex-Obama tech guru

Re: I know, I know

Only if the packets have mass in the first place, i.e. you're using electronic communication.

Using optical communications means the packets always have zero mass, no matter what you do to them. But it also means they're stuck at the speed of light, meaning that actual, real, meaningful, important laws (laws of physics) restrict their speed, so they're immune to regulation.

If we can't find a working SCSI cable, the company will close tomorrow

Yeah, as a teacher I can see his train of thought:

"Oh, that's my break time gone while I fix it, cos there's no chance if I call IT"

"Maybe I can fix it in class, I'll give the kid a spare in the meantime so he can get on with his work"

"Here you - oh you've fixed it already! I wish all my students were like this..."

My plan to heal this BROKEN, BREXITED BRITAIN

"Their mistake was handing him more power than even traditional Prussian absolutism allowed a Chancellor."

Not exactly. Hitler stole that power. His party didn't win a majority, but used thugs and mercenaries to prevent the opposition from turning up to the Reichstag to vote against his "Enabling Act" (the first step toward martial law).

Proof that you don't need popular support, or even a Parliamentary majority, to destroy a country. Just enough people who don't stand against you.

"We really should try and elect honest, competent, morally and ethically principled political leaders, shouldn't we?"

And where in Toyland does one find such a creature?

'Leave EU means...' WHAT?! Britons ask Google after results declared

Re: Seriously...

He does.

All countries will be inspected, and should they be found lacking, forced to become academies.

London Mayor election day bug forced staff to query vote DB by hand

Re: If it sounds dodgy, it is dodgy

The vendors have to adjust their business models from "selling election software" to "providing election vote counting services"

They don't even have to do that, they just have to publish the source. They don't need to go the full GNU route of allowing anybody to use their code, and they can still sell it on a traditional, subscription, or per-election basis. It's not like anybody is going to steal their code - it's of no practical or business use to most people, and if the government used their software without paying, it would be pretty bleedin' obvious!

Why Tim Cook is wrong: A privacy advocate's view

Re: except

Is it paranoid to wonder, when it takes my phone/laptop an extra 30 seconds to get through security compared with everybody else's, if they have installed keylogging hardware?

Boffins' 5D laser-based storage tech could keep terabytes forever

Re: Re:1974 film Zardoz

If you want to get technical (and who here doesn't?) you can't reduce the energy required to get into LEO, which is about 30 MJ / kg.

What you can reduce is the amount of energy wasted in doing so. By using more efficient technology, we can get closer to that 30 MJ / kg. Right now, I think our tech is about 0.1% efficient...

Cops turn Download Festival into an ORWELLIAN SPY PARADISE

Re: fictional

Huh. I stand corrected!

Re: Panopticon Festival!!!

Not exactly accurate... The Panopticon is a system where you COULD be surveilled at any time, but you don't know WHEN you're surveilled.

With this system, and those to come, you know you're ALWAYS being surveilled.

The Panopticon was devised in an era when humans had to do all the surveilling themselves. In that respect, it was actually a much friendlier system (albeit fictional).

CERN data explains how Higgs heavies other matter

"That test yields only a 95 per cent confidence level"

“...establishes a signal at a significance level of 3.6 sigma"

3-sigma = 99.73% confidence. 4-sigma = 99.993%. I don't have time to check the maths but 3.6-sigma would be about 99.9% confidence, not 95%.

What's wrong here?

Ubuntu without the 'U': Booting the Big Four remixes

Why?

Here's what puzzles me. When I'm running an OS, I don't run the OS - I run programs. If that functionality is there, simple and unbreaking, what do people care about the OS?

An OS should be stable, secure and fast, with a program manager that gives you quick access to your programs, and a window manager that includes alt-tab and always-on-top. Beyond that, and maybe some accessibility options, what do any of these distros actually offer?

Yahoo! drops! size! limit! on! email! attachments! with aid from Dropbox

Thunderbird

Thunderbird already does this. You can set up Dropbox (or another system) to host files larger than x KB. You don't really see much difference when you receive - you can click the attachment or not, if you do it downloads using your default method of downloading files. It's the best of both worlds.

I can't see why anybody would object to this. Unless Yahoo do it in a stupid way - and how likely is that?

Oh wait...

Firefox's birthday present to us: Teaching tech titans about DIY upstarts

Re: Vendor lockin

"You claim to have installed Linux on people's PCs and they find it "easier to use"—presumably these people never, ever, play any games"

That's right. I've helped gamers update their system, and I always recommend Windows 7, unless I think they can handle dual-boot.

"yet you can't copy some MP4 files out of a folder named "iTunes Media"?"

*I* can do that, yes. iTunes has a more insidious lock-in - every time I've tried to convince an iTunes user to move, they don't want to "lose iTunes". I explain that you can download music from other places, but they're not interested. This compounds the other problems.

"You do know iTunes hasn't DRM on music for years now, right?"

Nice in theory, but you still have to do a bit of work with old music downloaded before the DRM-free era. This is my fault - basically I undersold the alternatives. When I said "it's a bit of work but it can be done", they said "sounds too complicated, no thanks"; I should have said "give it to me for half a day and pay me £30 and I'll sort it for you". This was a marketing fail; apparently I don't have Apple's skill in this respect!

Vendor lockin

"We are in the middle of locking ourselves into our respective mobile platforms"

So many people already have.

I've replaced Windows with Linux to loads of people who don't know much about computers, giving them improved security and reliability, and every one of them has found it easier to use.

But I can't do this for anybody who owns an iPhone, because all of their music is on iTunes.

This of course won't change - Apple needed to release iTunes on Windows to suck people into their ecosystem, but releasing a Linux version would simply give them the option, when they decide to take the plunge, to go elsewhere than Apple. People aren't locking themselves into a mobile platform; they're locking themselves into a whole ecosystem.

Microsoft pops preview of 'biggest, most ambitious' Office yet

Is my screen broken ...

... or am I really the only one who noticed all the people in the video are smurfs?

Year of the Penguin - el Reg's 2011 Linux-land roundup

Unity - no thanks!

I replaced my parents' aging WinXP computer last year with a silent mini-ITX running Ubuntu 10.04.

It's been great for them, and me. They can do everything they want, and aren't forced to do anything they don't want. Their complaints run along the lines of "I spent 5 seconds searching for how to do something new" rather than "I lost all my work because Windows decided to restart". Rather than spending three hours every week fixing their problems, I spend 2 minutes every month telling them what to search for in the Software Centre.

Until Unity, that is. "Install all the updates all the time, that'll keep everything running perfectly", I said. So they did, and suddenly Unity hit them. They couldn't find anything, their settings were removed, even their desktop background was changed to the Unity default.

I couldn't even figure out how to revert, I had to reinstall Ubuntu and disable updating to 11.

Ubuntu obviously took a page from the rude book of Microsoft - "We know what you should want, and if you disagree you're wrong". 10 is great, but I'm steering well clear of 11 on anything with a mouse.

Facebook engineer bashes Google for Gmail block

Ragedump?

Wow. Good point, in the absolute need to be able to sue somebody and prove they called you a dip*$#*, you MUST record everything you ever say!

You realise that's what did Nixon in, right?

Speaking of things that happened decades ago, some of used to use an organic form of communication called "talking". No matter how much we complained to the Creator, He never implemented a permament searchable indexed record of everything we said.

It still turned out to be quite popular, mind you.

iTunes disses doctorates

No need to be jerks

Non-story though this is, it highlights yet again the UK's hatred of intelligence. Even among the professional IT crowd.

What's wrong with somebody wanting to use their correct title? If they insisted on "Miss" or "Mrs", and got rid of "Ms", would people be so quick to slag off women who want to call themselves "Ms"?

A PhD entails a lot of work, and has to be considered a worthy addition to the sum of human knowledge in order to be granted. Personally I would be proud to put those two letters in front of my name, and I have no problem respecting those who do for their notable achievement, just as I respect people who wear their wedding ring or display dancing trophies on their mantlepiece.

Obviously the above doesn't apply to Gillian McKeith.

The Reg guide to Linux, part 3

Advertising, not fear

Windows is no better, in terms of usability. I recently installed Windows 7, and more recently, Linux Mint. It took me longer to switch from XP to 7 than to learn Linux.

Windows has just as much scary stuff, and although MS try to hide the inner workings of your computer, they do so erratically, and at the expense of usability (usability != user-friendliness). They're both good and bad in different ways, although Linux has the edge re security and cost.

The problem with Linux compared to Windows - and the one point which makes it VASTLY inferior - is advertising. Microsoft spend billions on advertising, marketing, FUD, pushing their software to government departments, etc, and get many times this amount back by continuing to dominate the market.

Linux, on the other hand, is free (ultra-specialist distros aside). Nobody in the Linux community is able to fight Microsoft's marketing muscle power, and so nobody goes to PC World and says "I saw Ubuntu advertised on TV last night, is it really as good as it looks?"

Salacious smut soaks 12% of web

The stupid ones

20% of men surf porn at work? That's utterly stupid, yet it happens.

Unless kiddie porn lovers are of above average intelligence, which I somehow doubt, I wouldn't put it past them to google their hobby.

I suspect the "rings" we hear of in the news, whilst being the most dangerous, are far from the most representative.

The internet, as imagined in 1965

You mean you aren't?

"it's a small wonder if you aren't automatically handing over your credit card for a pile of items before you even realize what is happening"

Speak for yourself. I do that every time I try to walk past HMV.

Mine's the one stuffed with DVDs and an empty wallet.

Stick a fork in floppies - they're done

Death to the floppy

The best floppy experience I had was with a motherboard - I don't remember the make - which I needed the flash to the latest BIOS.

The BIOS flash program would only work from an MS-DOS floppy. The path to the new BIOS file was hardcoded, including A:\, so I couldn't get around it using a CD-ROM floppy emulation.

After hours of searching a houseful of geeks I finally uncovered a floppy drive, and eventually, a disc as well, only to find out that the motherboard itself - here's the genius - didn't have a floppy controller.

Bloke threatens BT with giant plywood cheque

Cheque standards

http://www.chequeandcredit.co.uk/cpas/-/page/standard_3.1/

"In Great Britain, all cheques must be printed according to C&CCC Standard 3.1"

More than that, such as what the standard is or what legal basis it has, I can't tell you, since it costs over a hundred quid to purchase the publicly-available standard... Still, I'm willing to bet it excludes paving stones and two-by-fours!

On the other hand, if you can screw over the crooks at BT so that it costs them more to debate their case than your bill is worth, all power to you.

Firefox plans fix for decade-old browsing history leak

Thanks

That fixed it for me too. Cheers!

Apple bins iPhone covers

uh what?

Type your comment here — plain text only, no HTML

Dell bars Win 7 refunds from Linux lovers

Not quite

I think you've misunderstood the original post. The price difference between 7 and XP is £17. The £41 is the price difference between 7 and Linux, so unless they're charging for Linux, that's the entire cost of the OEM version of 7 they're using.

This is fairly typical - you have the standard amount for a standard build, and it's more or less depending on what options you add or remove. To say that Windows is free would, in this case, imply that Linux costs -£24; and unless they have boxes of Linux in their store that come bundled with the price of a decent round in cash, that claim is clearly bogus!

'The LHC will implode the Moon or PUT OUT THE SUN'

Star Trek

That also ground my teeth on the new Star Trek film. You can't collapse a planet with a "seed" black hole.

Wow, that was geeky. Mine's the one with the pocket protectors...

Home Secretary swats away calls for Mosquito ban

Bloody nuisance

Another vote from the "I'm over 30 and I can hear them" crowd.

Specifically, there's one over the door of a local sweet shop. A *sweet shop* is using them to deter kids!

It's actually painful to me. I can't quite hear the pitch, but a nasty feeling goes right through my head. I have to walk on the other side of the street.

There was another one nearby, but it got vandalized. It's really subtle - they cut the wire but didn't leave a mess, and the shopkeepers still think it's working.

Password reset questions dead easy to guess

Why the warning?

Why, oh why, do network passwords have "warning periods"?

"Your password will expire in 15 days. Do you want to change it now?"

No, you fucking idiot, I'll change it in 15 days, but I'd rather not change it from the 16-character random sequence I already memorised at all!

Seriously, who in the whole world says "Actually, I could do with a new password. Why not? Let's change it to BUBBLES now."

Young people are lazy, think world owes them a living - prof

Shocking scandal!

Young people, if given the choice, would take "more pay" over "less pay"!

What's more, they'd prefer "less work" to "more work"!

As opposed to everybody over 40, who are presumably clamouring for longer hours, lower pay, and fewer holidays.....

UK is safer from al-Qaeda 'bastards', says security minister

I second that

1984 was a warning. We may not live in a police state yet (perhaps), but if we see it coming and ignore it, we will.

BT boss urges fines for filesharing customers

BPI?

"The BPI, the record label trade association, responded to the criticism"

Sorry, but isn't telling us what is and isn't legal (or going to be) the remit of the government/courts?

When did the BPI start deciding what the laws are and how they're applied?

Oh... right...

Tories promise medals not money for science and R&D

This was predicted in 1991

Oh yeah. Genius. Dyson wants to talk to us about science and engineering policy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm pro-science and pro-technology. But Dyson created fucking Skynet. Why in all hell would we want him anywhere NEAR science, engineering or politics?