Posts by cyberdemon

Consolidation looms for UK broadband providers

Re: Yeah but...

As a Toob customer I can tell you it's worth the wait.

I'm on 900Mbps (link is 1Gbps and it tests at ~930 at speedcheck and fast) for £25/month

It's symmetric, but half-duplex i.e. it's only one fibre that can do 1Gbps up OR 1Gbps down, so probably the missing 70Mbps is spent on link arbitration. This doesn't seem to affect latency though - 3ms ping to 8.8.8.8

I'd be gutted if they got 'consolidated' into one of the big providers though. As a small operator, they are not required to block sites such as sci-hub, tpb etc ..

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

Re: She was a good one

No, we're just sick of foreign trolls trying to destabilise our political system.

Trolls like you are trumpeting propaganda for all sides, just to stir the shit.

If you have any respect for our queen, you'll suspend politics for at least the day after her passing....

Microsoft to stop accepting checks from partners

Re: Ahh cheques.

Dear downvoting American colleagues: This was an example of Tongue-in-Cheek Humo(u)r. I don't -really- equate you to pubic wigs! (or do I?? :o)

/ sticks thumbs in ears, waggles fingers, and blows raspberries across the Atlantic /

Re: Ahh cheques.

Maybe the only thing noteworthy about the article is the odd spelling of its title?

If the article had been titled "Microsoft to stop accepting cheques", my cursor would have moved straight past, because most companies have stopped accepting cheques decades ago.

But as it was, I was curious as to what checks from partners was Microsoft no longer accepting? Checks on code security? Identity checks? Standards are slipping at Microsoft perhaps?

It is a very annoying homonym. Until quite recently, I thought that "Rain Check" meant to look outside and see if it was raining or not..

bloody merkins

(and yes, I am aware of the 'correct' use of the word merkin. They deserve it)

Re: Ahh cheques.

Yes, that'll be El Reg's new Californian "deputy" editor-in-chief, subsequently hiring four more Americans and firing Alistair Dabbs - he was too British, and El Reg is now an AmericanGlobal publication!

Newport Wafer Fab sale to Chinese company held up again by UK.gov's probe

s/twitter/nitter/

Here's a better hyperlink:

https://nitter.net/EdConwaySky/status/1550376046264025090

Replace twitter.com with nitter.net and view without being slurped.

Re: The UK can't afford chip shops

Would those be caramel wafer fabs or chocolate?

How do they compete with the irish ice cream wafer?

They're all going up I hear. Something to do with the cost of running freezers and roasting cocoa beans..

Google, YouTube ban election trolls ahead of US midterms

Da, Comrade

Down with Democracy^H^Hts

Arm sues Qualcomm over custom Nuvia CPU cores, wants designs destroyed

Re: Breach

You might have an allergy to solder flux then. That no-clean flux can be nasty

AI detects 20,000 hidden taxable swimming pools in France, netting €10m

Re: 30% error rate!

Any error rate better than 50% is considered a success in AI land..

But as long as it is checked by humans, this is one of the few cases where I approve of the use of AI. No new data is being collected, and it makes rich b**tards pay their taxes.

LG makes a TV roughly the size of a queen-sized bed

Re: Parlor Walls

Can I have this WITHOUT the alpha-9 AI processor?

Errr, nope.

Critical hole in Atlassian Bitbucket allows any miscreant to hijack servers

And what of Bitbucket Cloud?

I assume that Bitbucket Cloud was at some point affected, but Atlassian fixed this on their own servers first before making the embarrassing press release, but TFA says nothing on how much data could have been exfiltrated from Shitbucket Cloud itself, before this vulnerability was widely known about.

BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons

Re: "axed"

I suspect it has something to do with this...

Nicole Hemsoth Joins Situation Publishing to Drive Editorial Strategy

It would seem that she is from California. So expect anything requiring a British sense of humour, or passive contempt for large corporations and corporate culture, to be banned forthwith.

The first thing I noticed was the "Sir" on the end of SFTW disappeared. I thought OK fine maybe the woke brigade might take exception and say that wasn't inclusive (but dropping the 'sir' lost some of the character and implied humour I think)

But now they have axed the whole column, with no consultation? Why?

Are there new bosses at El Reg?

Re: Kicks himself for not answering the survey

I did answer the survey: I said 'distract me` - i.e. I want more articles like BOFH and SFTW

WTF? And Why not Dabbsy's SFTW then? And Paris?

This stinks of that time when The Inquirer got bought by Incisive Media, and then canned a few years later.

WTF is happening at El Reg?

Japan reverses course on post-Fukushima nuclear ban

Re: Excellent news

You can get cancer due to the stress of being told that something bad will happen to you because of something that is actually completely harmless.

Does not burning billions of tonnes of fossil fuels hasten the deaths of many?

Also, if you are that afraid of radiation, btw, there is orders of magnitude more radioactive material sent up the smoke stacks of coal and biomass plants, amounting to more than the entire world history of nuclear power, accidents included.

see: https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/43/035/43035329.pdf

UK launches 'consultation' with EU over exclusion from science programs

Re: Groan….

And there we have yet another false dichotomy between two unattractive options - the tories vs starmer's labour.

I never said I was a Labour supporter, and you are right that this stuff got worse under Blair, Jack Straw and particularly Jacqui Smith (although arguably it started with Michael Howard).

But while Labour were interested in pure state surveillance, it was the tories who handed it to their mates in the corporations (along with everything else.. the railways, the power lines, along with choice cuts of the NHS, education & policing..) So now we are not just spied on "for our own good", we are spied on "for someone else's profit". See recent sale of NHS medical records to US insurance companies, zero public consultation whatsoever.

Re: Groan….

Er what? You are trying to say that "Remainers" wanted Hard Brexit? What kind of Remainer wants that?

Although tories are weird. Theresa May called herself a Remainer but was (at the time) the most xenophobic politician I had heard of.. She was behind the "Go Home" vans, the expansion of the Border Farce, and the massive expansion of the surveillance state that was completely at odds with EU law, and she hated the Human Rights act. I couldn't understand why she would declare herself a remainer, and had assumed the only reason she did so is because she actually supported leave but knew that everyone hated her, so the cummings-controlled SPADs told her to declare for remain instead.

Choice between two pre-selected unattractive options seems to be par for the course from the conservative party these days.

Democracy, they've heard of it...

Icon, because the totalitarian surveillance/police state is what the tories seem hell-bent on bringing to Britain..

Re: "Not -entirely- self-inflicted I think. "

I think your Greedy category deserves an extra subdivision:

There were those "honest" shopkeepers etc that you describe, who thought that they might be in for an extra buck somehow. This category includes British plumbers, builders & other trades that were being out competed by Polish workers, and even the bankers who bought crypto and got ready to short the UK economy might fall in to this category, but they are more likely to fall in to my next one.

My extra category is far more dangerous, these are the political class: The Tory brexiteers, who were greedy for power. Knowing that power is money and money is power, they are quite happy to inflict untold misery on millions if it gives them the levers of power. They are quite happy to push the UK into a full blown economic collapse, towards general strikes, and towards a new world war, because they think they are rich and powerful enough to ride it out.

These are the guys who used to bang on about "sovereignty".. They are distinct from your first group in that they are not expecting an economic renaissance - they wanted to remove the anti-corruption rules (that the UK introduced to the EU!) that prevented them siphoning off all the public assets and handing them to their mates. They want to take over complete control of the UK "take back control.." but the gullible fools think they will be running the UK for the interests of its general population - they won't of course, they will be ruinning it to benefit themselves - and they already are.

When the UK crashes and burns, they will have built their offshore private islands, mansions and manor houses. They could even move to Russia or China, where they might be hailed as heroes who brought down the EU and the UK from inside.

Re: Leaver whining!

I disagree. I think it would have been much more prudent to try to reform the EU from within, rather than just sabotage the whole project, breaking European unity so that only Putin and the Chinese Communist Party are the winners.

Better to be inside the tent, pissing out, than outside the tent, pissing in.

Re: Groan….

Not -entirely- self-inflicted I think. I think a lot of the people who voted brexit were not culpable, in the same way that an imbecile under manipulation by a scheming psychopath is not fully culpable - he has a diminished responsibility.

Propaganda is a powerful tool, and it is becoming ever more powerful thanks to the mass manipulation machine that is social media. It's now extremely easy to manipulate people en-masse, as Cambridge Analytica discovered.

But they even managed to change the rules after the event: It was supposed to be a non-binding vote with the same regime as a general election i.e. there has to be a clear majority to call it a done deal..

If it had been 48/52 the other way, then the brexiteers would have been calling for another vote, and they would have got it. Nigel farage was even asking for another vote when he thought it might not go his way.

But then when the vote was over and the country couldn't have been more undecided if it tried, with a tiny 2% margin in favour of leave, suddenly it's all "we won you lost, get over it remainiac, the people have spoken" etc etc. And Personally I believe that it has been propaganda and foreign trolls that have been driving that.

After all, the person who REALLY benefited from Brexit, was Putin.

Labour brexiters

Tend to be both extremely racist and extremely stupid. They are the ones who were hoodwinked by a lie on the side of a big red bus. A friend of mine told me that his mum said she voted brexit "to kick all those bloody pakis out"

The tory brexiters on the other hand, knew exactly what they were doing: Removing any oversight and accountability so they could sell the country down the river for their own gain..

Although many of them are also xenophobic. Priti Patel would seem to be a very odd example. But then I think maybe she just hates everyone, actually.

Re: Reap what you sow

We were a Net Contributor only in terms of explicit financial payments. But that's like saying if I pay you for a service (and it's a really good service, and I am paying below market rate for it) then I am a 'net contributor' to you.

That would be nonsense if the service presented very good value for money. And clearly, I think our membership of the EU was very good value for money. Collaboration in science is just a tiny part of what we used to get out of it.

And "The UK will become a Science Superpower" has always been an empty statement. It makes no sense, you can't become a science superpower if you burn your bridges with the rest of the scientific community..

Anyway, we all know you are a russian troll, VOT.

Microsoft looks beyond the US with Windows Subsystem for Android

Re: Embrace, extend and extinguish.

More like

Embrace, extend, and slurp the data.

Oh Deere: Farm hardware jailbroken to run Doom

> Deere 803M tree-felling machine

Now if there was one machine which, with a remote-bricking OTA update, could stop deforestation by the likes of Drax "dead in their tracks", that 803M would be it.

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

Vested interests

No, honestly I think you have your 'vested interests' backwards.

Take a look at https://gridwatch.co.uk/ and you will see that the UK grid is vastly reliant on gas, because there are long periods (weeks or months) where there is scant power from any renewables. Anyone with a clue (including you) knows that batteries are only good for stabilising the grid as a replacement for spinning inertia. They will never have the TWh scale required to provide bulk-storage. If the wind stops blowing, then batteries allow us to prop up the grid for just long enough to fire up a big gas power plant.

Renewables can never replace oil, gas and coal, but nuclear can, and that is why the oil & gas lobby (which is much more powerful than the nuclear lobby) has got it in for nuclear. They love renewables actually, because it allows them to increase their prices as the supply of oil dwindles.

Thus, renewables support Britain's reliance on gas, the price of which is set by a cartel (the OECD) which includes Russia. The vested interests that I worry about are the ones making billions (Aramco alone is making $15 billion a week at the moment!) from burning a finite resource and replacing it with a greenhouse gas.

Biomass is even worse, we are taking something that actively removes CO2 from the planet - trees, chopping them down and burning them to produce more CO2! It's madness. And don;t get me started on CCS. If you are worried about nuclear accidents, a CCS leak can be just as dangerous, if a cloud of heavier-than-air CO2 settles on a town, it will asphyxiate everyone. It has happened before: https://climateinvestigations.org/co2-pipelines-and-carbon-capture-the-satartia-mississippi-accident-investigation/

But again, Drax is an extremely powerful lobbyist, so it gets away with it.

I'm not sure how those economists come up with their figures, but their cost of storage for example, does not scale. It might be right for the current small amount of storage that we can make, but to make it at a scale which could phase out gas, would mean using more copper and lithium than the entire world market.

The same goes for hydro and pumped hydro: We can't make artificial mountains, so the supply of hydro that we have (enough for about an hour of calm weather with no gas), is already about as much as we will ever have (and it is dwindling due to drought) so it doesn't matter how 'cheap' it is if we can't build more. It's a similar story with geothermal, and I am yet to be convinced on the power capability and storm-robustness of wave power.

But nuclear is easy. Change the rules so that it can be built underground, think of it as an artificial geothermal plant!

Re: Bang On - except the death stats

The current water being "dumped" is indeed less radioactive than the ocean itself - that is the obligation set by the regulator.

At the time of the accident, of course there was a detectable pattern of radioactivity coming from the plant, but it was always perfectly safe. In fact I'd argue that Fukushima was a triumph for nuclear safety! It was a very old design, we have improved safety a lot since then, and it suffered what was about the worst thing that could happen to a nuclear reactor: Being hit with an earthquake and tsunami, shutting down its cooling systems and backup generators - (BTW the tsunami itself killed 15,000 people and made 100,000 homeless, you neglect to mention that in all your anti-nuclear ravings eh?) Yet the so-called "nuclear disaster" has killed Nobody! Not even the 50 people who went in to stabilise it expecting to die from the scary radiation.

It's all fear, and it's a fear that is stuffing the coffers of Putin, Saudi Arabia and the big oil and coal companies, by turning people against nuclear.

Anyway, I don't know why I am wasting my time arguing with you, it's obvious that you are a troll, go back to your troll farm.

Re: Bang On - except the death stats

And MSRs will burn both!

Exclusion Zone

An exclusion zone is an entirely arbitrary, man-made concept. It is perfectly safe to live there, as demonstrated by the wildlife that have taken up residence and are flourishing in the absence of humans. There are literally birds nesting inside the exploded reactor core at chernobyl, they have been there for decades.

No, they are not mutants, as much as the FUD brigade would have you believe.

The problem with radioactivity is that it is invisible yet incredibly easily detectable down to the most minute level, which makes it scary. Nanoparticulate carbon, benzenes, fluorinated gases etc are all just as carcinogenic if not moreso, but they cannot be detected without a mass-spectrometer, which is a much bigger machine than a geiger-counter, and it has to ingest the material to test it whereas a geiger-counter can see radiation a long way off.

It is the fear of radiation, rather than its inherent danger, that creates exclusion zones.

And it is extremely easy for vested interests like the fossil fuel industry (who BTW are coining hundreds of billions a month thanks to the hole in our energy supply left by early closures, late construction or outright cancellations of nuclear plants) to spread fear about radiation and nuclear power amongst the population.

Re: Bang On - except the death stats

@TheSirFin

This is a great book, presented by a couple of pro-nuclear Greenpeace guys. https://climategamble.net/

In it, they explain how the Linear No Threshold model, used by the regulators for predicting harm caused by low-level radiation exposure, is completely wrong and has no scientific basis. There is no evidence to say that low levels of radiation cause harm, in fact it seems to be more likely the other way round- that low levels of radiation can actually be beneficial. Background radiation has existed the entire time that life has been on earth, after all. Nanopoarticulates and other modern day pollutants, not so much.

But even if radiation were the issue, the fossil fuel industry emits far more of it than the nuclear industry anyway!

See my earlier post on the subject:

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2022/08/11/nuclear_molten_salt/#c_4511213

Microsoft open-sources its emojis as part of new design philosophy

Assuming this is the same emoji set as used by the latest version of Teams: They are the worst emoji set IMO. Not sure what microsoft's motive is here. Maybe to try to force people to think they are normal?

Google tells Apple to 'fix text messaging' in bid to promote RCS protocol

Acquired and Killed by Google?

Google have a nasty habit of buying up the competition and then closing them down. How many of the above "Google" products (and the rest, listed in full at killedbygoogle.com) were originally acquisitions?

Even the cases where google acquires a competing product and kills off its earlier in-house version, the effect is the same: They remove a competing product from the market and push all of its customers towards a new one, owned and data-mined by Google.

I'm sure Facebook will be along shortly to resolve this dispute

Oh wait, they already have.

If you want to be able to communicate seamlessly across mobile platforms, you use WhatsApp, not iMessage or this RCS thing that I have never heard of..

At least WhatsApp is (allegedly) encrypted (although that claim is becoming much more dubious with the new WhatsApp Web system that stores all your messages in the cloud)

Any chance of adopting a system that's not controlled by Google, Apple or Facebook? Not much chance, although Signal seems to be the closest we have to that.

DoE digs up molten salt nuclear reactor tech, taps Los Alamos to lead the way back

Re: Water

Not necessarily the construction companies, but the governments and regulation bodies who set the rules, certainly.

There is a running joke in the nuclear industry that the ONR, NDA, UKAEA, IAEA and AWE are 2/3 staffed by CND fifth-columnists. (and I say the CND is staffed by oil industry fifth-columnists.)

With the rules that come out of those regulators, it's easy to see why people say that: The ONR refuses to set a safe limit on radiation emissions from nuclear plants, knowing full well that physics means that gamma rays can't be completely 100% shielded by any depth of concrete - it sets a wishy-washy principle known as "ALARA" (As Low As Reasonably Achievable") which creates a ratchet-effect of stacking safety factor on top of safety factor, only ending when the project is at the edge of feasibility. (they specifically exclude cost as a factor in deciding whether something is reasonably achievable or not)

They also use a completely daft model (the so-called Linear No-Threshold model) for estimating harm caused by radioactive release to the environment. It assumes that any radioactive material spread over the earth, however diluted it is, is just as likely to kill someone as if it were in concentrated form. That's complete nonsense - all the scientific research says that radiation is only dangerous above a certain threshold (as with sunburn), and below that, DNA in cells is able to repair itself. There's even some evidence to say that this process of DNA repair is beneficial to health. After all, life has always had low doses of radiation in the background.. Modern chemicals and nanoparticulates not so much, but no such extreme regulation applies to other industries which pollute the environment on a horrendous scale. (see this book by two pro-nuclear greenpeace activists: https://climategamble.net/)

As a result, you have utterly daft situations whereby the nuclear operators end up spending billions and making their emissions way below background levels just for someone to come along and suggest a new and very expensive way of reducing them even further, and they are legally obliged to delay their project while they report on whether it is reasonable for them to implement it. Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry emits more radioactive material (though trace amounts of Radon in the billions of tonnes of Oil, Gas and Coal that they burn through each year) than the entire history of Nuclear Fission. Accidents and bombs included!

I used to work for UKAEA at Culham - they once declared a major incident after someone brought in a gas lamp mantle - it was far more radioactive than any of the sources they were allowed to use.. Their sensors would register a spike if you went too close with a bag of Brazil nuts.

According to the dosimiter badges, the staff on site who receive the highest ionising radiation doses are those who work on the security gate, because they catch more cosmic rays than those inside the building.. If you accidentally bring your dosimiter badge with you when you go on a long-haul flight, it will be picked up by Health Physics and you may not be allowed on site because you have exceeded your radiation dose.. Cabin crew receive thousands of times higher doses than nuclear workers are permitted to take. It's utter madness. That is why nuclear is so expensive, the regulations are stacked against it.

That's also one of several reasons why it's so much cheaper and quicker to implement in China...

Water

Yeah I came here to say that. The water in the primary circuit of a water cooled reactor is a closed loop, it is never used up. You wouldn't want water that has had direct contact with the core going -anywhere-, obviously!

TFA is extremely misleading on the water argument, so much so that some anti-nuclear types could use it to complain about false benefits.

The benefits of molten salt reactors are not about water use (you would site them on the coast like any other reactor) the main benefits of MSRs are, THEY EAT NUCLEAR BOMBS, and THEY EAT NUCLEAR WASTE. Most normal nuclear reactors consume about 3% of their fuel before it is considered 'spent', whereas MSRs can reach 50%, i.e. more than 10 times more efficient use of the fuel. They consume nuclear waste from other reactors and ageing weapons stockpiles, as fuel - you basically dissolve the warhead in the salt, and its energy is burnt off slowly and safely over decades.

We have enough spent fuel rods, plutonium stockpiles, and 'dud' warheads to power the world for centuries, we would never need to mine or enrich new uranium again, or at least that's the idea.

However, I am sure that the anti-nuclear lobby, which I am convinced is funded by the sorts of companies that made 3 billion a month recently in the UK, will once again step in to ensure that the world chokes on CO2 from coal, oil, gas, and tree-burning..

GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash developers and reneging on cookie commitments

Re: DNT

Not ignored at all, it's added to your data profile along with everything else. It provides a valuable marker to distinguish your data from that of other data cows - in that you said you wanted us not to track you. Hahaha, something to hide, peon?

Amazon to buy Roomba maker iRobot for $1.7b

What happens to the data that Roomba has already collected about the contents of their customers' homes? Most companies seem to have a "we don't sell your personal data, except when someone buys us" policy these days.. Presumably Amazon must have decided that it was already a treasure trove of data, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to promise "not to change how roomba operates" etc.

Too little, too late: Intel's legacy is eroding

Re: It is hilarious

I'll be glad if we all make it to summer 2024, just looking at the way the aggressive and divisive rhetoric is ramping up across the board, we'll have general strikes, civil wars, and a world war three before then.

UK wants criminal migrants to scan their faces up to five times a day using a watch

Re: Collapse

They really can't..

UK Parliament bins its TikTok account over China surveillance fears

Re: Creative Alternatives Urgently Desired!!

s/the elite/themselves/

So, they want to copy China then, gandalf?

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

Re: Not New News

Or rather, anyone who has been there, done that will steer clear.

And if you wanted to be really sneaky, you could put those kind of things over your ad, even if the pay and work-life balance are actually fine, to deter older candidates from applying in the first place.

Or, i'm sure you can outsource that sort of thing to LinkedIn or Facebook. It will do the discrimination for you, hidden inside an AI recommendation algorithm.

Icon: That's why I don't use LinkedIn or Facebook

Whatever happened to???

Whatever happened to???

The Paris icon?

Taiwanese military reports DDoS in wake of Pelosi visit

Re: "funny Asian names"

If I were in China and they laughed because my name sounded funny in Chinese, would that be racist?

No, it would be funny, and I would be laughing too.

Major IT outage forces UK emergency call handlers to use 'pen and paper'

Re: BRING BACK PARIS!

Wtf, what happened to Paris?

Warning! Critical flaws found in US Emergency Alert System

What's the betting

That he spends the duration of the conference in NSA custody

Walton Simons will see you now.

GitLab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts

Well, except for running GitHub at a loss, so that alternatives like GitLab struggle to compete..

Standard monopolistic practices.. Microsoft basically wrote the book on it.

SpaceX demonstrates that it too can shower the Earth with debris

Re: Raising the odds?

> So what are the odds of being hit by a meteor while holding a winning lottery ticket ?

Less likely than the existence of God, i'd say. (he'd most likely be the one throwing the meteor at you)

Raspberry Pi 4 takes a trip to Vulkan, sharpens 3D vision

Availability

Wasn't that the whole point of the raspberry pi to begin with? Something cheap and powerful that could be made in its millions and given out to schoolchildren and the like?

If you look on Amazon/Ebay, you'll find people selling them for £150 out of warehouses in California and Cheshire, apparently. Are they being scalped? Or is this just a second-hand market?

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Re: And we also want EV's?

No, clearly it is Your sarcasm detector that is faulty. The statement is too obviously false for it not to be sarcasm. No troll/joke icon needed.