Posts by cyberdemon

Yahoo! shuts! down! last! China! operations! as! doing! business! becomes! 'increasingly challenging'!

Re: oh, btw

Nor me. NoScript ftw. Better than any adblocker.

Joint UK-Oz probe finds face-recognition upstart Clearview AI is rubbish at privacy

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Pope still catholic, bears still shit in woods, surveillance capitalists still making billions by spying on everyone.

Forum layout borked "-%]" at top of page and long comment DIVs

Forum layout borked "-%]" at top of page and long comment DIVs

Who borked the CGI script for the El Reg Forums?

"-%]" appears before any other HTML (including "Doctype") and there is an excessively large space below each post. What's going on?

Don't super-size me – China defines rules for 'super-large' platforms

Good for them!

Doing something that western governments no longer have the teeth to do..

Of course, if/when the state itself sets up a super-platform, it will make an exception for itself though...

Google lab proposes solar-powered moisture farming to provide water for billions

Re: It's a blue planet...

15A @ 12V is 180W, which is the same as you'd get from the quoted 2 square metre panel anyway.

And 25 litres/hour is 10 to 100 times what this google contraption produces.

So.. Yes. It's all a load of hot, arid air.

Re: Hang on ...

As long as you only drink it, it's not so bad. Most of the water we drink comes back out in our breath. The rest is sweat and urine. And drinking water is "a drop in the ocean" compared to agricultural demands.

> two hypothetical devices: a 1m2 solar panel with a yield of 0.2 to 2.5 litres per kilowatt-hour at 30 per cent relative humidity and a 2m2 solar panel with a yield of 0.1 to 1.25 litres per kilowatt-hour at 90 per cent relative humidity.

Shouldn't they be quoting that per hour, not per kilowatt hour?

A 1 m2 solar panel produces about 100W on a good day, not 1kW. So That's a yeild of 0.02 to 0.25 litres per hour at 30% RH.

And why would a larger panel in much higher humidity produce less water?

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: Nippy stocking filler for the nerd in your life – if you can get one

Re: an unpopulated 40-pin GPIO interface

+1 for Learn to Solder.

Also, try using the old fashioned 60/40 tin/lead solder - it flows so much better, you don't get 'dry joints'.

While manufacturers are (rightly) forced to use lead-free (we want to avoid too much lead oxide seeping into the water supply from e-waste in landfill sites, and manufacturers don't make boards by hand anyway) But as a home user you are NOT forced to use lead-free (the environment has bigger things to worry about than a few blobs of lead solder on a home-made board - and also the fumes are much less toxic than lead-free solder fumes, due to the acid needed to get lead-free solder to stick to anything..)

It makes a huge difference, as does a decent soldering iron. I recommend the 'pinecil' as a cheap and powerful TS80 clone.

Nobody cares about DAB radio – so let's force it onto smart speakers, suggests UK govt review

Re: Don't touch FM!!!!

You mean a "lumie" - they are great, if a little pricey

Sounds like they're trying to protect the livelihoods of the buggy-whip makers

I'm not sure what they are doing actually, except trying to kill off FM..

On the one hand, our lovely tories have always tried to ensure a steady stream of license royalties to the patent holders of DAB, and DAB+ which still includes hefty per-unit licensing royalties. (and notice DAB+ is a requirement for the government's "digital tick") but I don't see how this particular policy benefits anyone except Amazon and Google.

When they say "smart home devices will be forced to rebroadcast DAB stations" - I don't think that has anything to do with DAB itself - more like, they will have to be able to *stream* all DAB stations over the internet, and broadcasters may well have to pay for that "service". Moreover, it will encourage more people to get an audio bug installed in their home smart speaker, instead of a DAB radio set.

Of course "smart speakers" will always out-compete DAB radios because 1. DAB is shit. 2. DAB is expensive due to the patent licenses, and 3. smart speakers pay for themselves in terms of all the data they hoover up. Amazon and Google would sell them at a loss if that sort of thing was legal and didn't make people suspicious.

Plus, the Internet is much more capable of reliably delivering a 100kbps data stream without bit-errors than a broadcast antenna to most if not all places, (even cars) especially with the advent of 5G etc.. And with so many competing stations, "broadcast" loses its relevance (except for local stations) - "multicast" is much more efficient.

My only hope is that this will finally kill off the idiocy that was DAB, and that it will convince the next government to NOT kill off analogue FM radio. We need it as an emergency broadcast system for one, and for two we still need some sort of broadcast radio service that is simple, cheap, license-free, local, accessible and NOT in the hands of the tech companies.

Re: FM vs DABS(+) !!!??? Qui Bono

Except that (unlike analogue TV) there really isn't an awful lot of bandwidth to sell.. FM radio stations use what.. 150-200kHz bandwidth? And you can't even sell it to mobile phone or walkie-talkie manufacturers, say, since it requires a fairly huge antenna to broadcast a reasonable distance.

There was/is, however, a great deal of money to be made by Phillips, Fraunhofer et al in the licensing of all the patents covering DAB/DAB+, which are chiefly why DAB radios cost so much more than FM ones - there is still about £20 (so i'm told) per unit of license fee to pay for DAB+. A little less than the ~£30 originally levied on DAB radios, but still a license to print money. (the original, and impressively shit DAB is now out of patent, but nobody wants to listen to that crap, if they even can..)

So the public purse will make little to nothing out of this, but certain private companies will make a fortune, and Britain will no longer have a reliable emergency broadcast channel.

Make no mistake, this is the crony government at work one again, lining their own pockets and those of their mates.

REvil gang member identified living luxury lifestyle in Russia, says German media

Re: If they know who

I'm sure they have passed on all the relevant info to the Russian police, who will do.. precisely nothing.

China Telecom booted out of USA as Feds worry it could disrupt or spy on local networks

Re: because Beijing will be livid.

Ok, correction: We're not (yet) talking about removing CGN from Hinkley, but we are talking about removing them from Sizewell and Bradwell. (FT)

Re: because Beijing will be livid.

Not as livid as the Chinese nuclear company that were originally going to be paid billions for Hinkey Point (which we so desperately and urgently need to support our electricity grid against our bonkers plans of phasing out gas boilers and internal combustion engines), who having done a pile of work on it are to be 'kicked out' by the same politicians who said back in 2017 that they wanted to usher in a new age of trade with China..

Not as livid as Huawei, who had their European headquarters in Reading with 5000 staff...

Thanks Dom, Thanks Kwasi.. Now how many friendly trading partners do we have left?

Re: Time to mothball SS7

Or follow the UK's lead and switch everything over to VOIP. What could go wrong!

If you're using this hijacked NPM library anywhere in your software stack, read this

Github, which owns NPM these days, put out an advisory

Should read: Microsoft, who own both GitHub and NPM these days, [don't really seem to give a shit?]

For a package to be hosted on NPM and be available to normal users via the standard 'npm install' / 'npm update' commands, SURELY it should have to be signed-off by more than one developer, and ideally had a supervisory glance from someone at Microsoft.

I'm sure PyPi do this.. Debian certainly do.

Embrace, Extend... Exonerate all responsibility?

Gotta love Microsoft for buying up the competition and then disclaiming any responsibility for good stewardship.. It's almost as if it buys the open source competitors only to let them rot and die inside its macrophage-like belly. Nah Microsoft would never do that.

DDoSers take weekend off only to resume campaign against UK's Voipfone on Monday

resilience

I can only hope that this is a sneaky UK government resilience test to see if VOIP is ready to replace critical infrastructure or not. (and the answer should clearly be NOT)

BT are planning to phase out POTS by 2025 and replace it all with VOIP.

If we find ourselves at war (cold or warm) after that, then how would the King/PM/President contact all of the cabinet, civil servants, military bases, factories etc. to coordinate the war effort?

And if it's not a sneaky UK govt resilience test, it's probably a sneaky Russian one.

Asia's 'superapps' bundle ride-share, food delivery, even financial services – and they're beating big tech

Re: I'm starting to believe that we need some regulation

I wouldn't be so sure.. There are ways to de-anonymize it (i.e. correlate it) based on the data points you already have about people from other sources. And if there are any holes, once the data is out of the bag, there's no putting it back in. The industrialised cybercriminals of russia/china/india/norks now have even more ammunition to con/blackmail people with.

Re: I'm starting to believe that we need some regulation

We're already doing the opposite.. Priti Patel hails "the end of anonymity online" - that only goes towards tech companies collecting invasive details about everyone.

And i'm not sure we want to make the data accessible to all and sundry either. I'd rather say delete it and stop bloody collecting it. Don't require login accounts when they are not needed (looking at you, BBC). Don't require login to view websites (facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, google)

Cleanup on aisle C: Tesco app back online after attack led to shopping app outages

Re: Bald Tony - What a twat!

I'd never heard of Belgian Bots.. Do they write for the Daily Mail?

Twitter's machine learning algorithms amplify tweets from right-wing politicians over those on the left

Machine learning no doubt has its place, but we're still learning what that place is.

Room 101?

Poor data sharing is holding back the UK court system's pandemic recovery, says National Audit Office

Re: Usual solution to data sharing

Or/and sell it all to Microsoft, Google, Amazon...

Japanese bloke collared after using AI software to uncensor smut and flogging it

It's not that Ask Delphi lacks a moral compass, it just doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

Surely it both lacks a moral compass AND doesn't know what it's talking about. It's just a pile of statistics about English text. Like any so-called AI.

Antitrust battle latest: Google, Facebook 'colluded' to smash Apple's privacy protections

Imagine if Microsoft owned Android?

It already thinks it does... But I see your point. Google still tries to maintain a "don't be evil" facade (it dropped the phrase from its actual corporate charter years ago) whereas Microsoft were evil before it was cool, and these days don't even pretend to have any qualms about treating users as no more than data-cows to be milked, tracked and herded.

Chrome is great, except for all the anti-features like DRM (have you noticed how some websites are now 'un-screenshottable' in Chrome?), Google tracking (fortunately since chromium is open source, you can remove the tracking but i'm sure Google will have their revenge if you do), aggressive shutting down of certain ports and protocols.. The ban on text reflow on mobile... Not to mention adding web-breaking features that No Web Browser Should Ever Need, like WASM. Google is really asserting its interests through Chrome, and they are heavily aligned against most users' interests.

Youtube seems to be just as much a sewer of clickbait, misinformation and hate as Facebook, Twitter and TikTok - the only difference is that most things on YouTube are accessible without being in 'the club' i.e. a friend/subscriber/follower. (not all, mind - they still have subscriber-only / unlisted videos) and the 'recommendation' algorithm really homes in on some scary crap. (see: ElsaGate etc.)

Also, Google are really cracking down hard (with the full support of Priti Patel) on anonymity (aka not-monetised users). If you use Incognito (or worse, Tor), you are sometimes (or if Tor, always) faced with an infinite captcha and are completely unable to use Google services.

But yes I agree they have mostly done a good job with GMail (that's not to say they are averse to analysing your emails to sell ads to you and anyone who contacts you) but at least it does provide a good service.

Google Search, meanwhile is going down the pan. It often fails to return results for things that are in plain sight on the internet e.g. github, and so much sponsored content and click-tracking. I have switched to DuckDuckGo but it is so slow for some reason? In search of another alternative tbh.

Back to the topic of TFA: Personally I would *in theory* happily pay to not have my data slurped, but in practice I don't trust these guys as far as I could throw them, and I think they would simply take my money AND my data.

Theranos blood-test machine demos for VIPs rigged to hide any failures, court told

due diligence

How did they even manage to spend $350m on "making a space in the corner and putting a sign up", and maybe a bit of premature advertising..

Yes I'm sure there's other stuff involved in "preparing their stores to offer rapid blood testing" but the figure sounds fishy to me, as if they are sweeping up other losses into their insurance/damages claim for their own lack of competence.

Yes, theranos were charlatans, but as Pseudo said, you'd have to be pretty incompetent yourself to spaff that much money on the back of their dubious claims..

Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids

Re: Fecesbook

Faeces has an 'a' in it, in English English. And I suppose as a singlular entity, it doesn't have to be plural.

So, FaeceBook?

Subtle, but to the point...

Where's the Shit icon?

The ex-company that used to be called Toys'R'Us might be offended by your comment, which implies some sort of vague association.

How about "the ex-company that used to be called Facebook, before its CEO was prosecuted and it was was disbanded entirely"

Correct answer

The (ex-)entity formerly known as Facebook. Rest in pyrolysed pieces.

Re: Sparkling turd

The phrase I heard was "You can't polish a turd.. But you CAN roll it in glitter!" :)

Perfect description of marketing..

Re: DataSlurp Incorperated?

@NoneSuch

And what does that have to do with the post you 'replied' to, eh? :P

Late Posts are down there ↓↓↓

Also, they've been doing it since a long time before 2021, and 'incorporated' has one 'e'. Welcome to the Reg forums :D

Re: It doesn’t need a new name

@ idiot taxpayer

As Jake said, send them off to work the fields or something. We don't need their corporate rot in other companies. In fact we need to get rid of that same scourge from a lot of other companies.

I'm talking about the "treat all customers as data cows" culture. Surveillance, Modelling, Manipulation.

i.e. "Let's build a marketing machine and use everyone's private data that they trusted us with as input."

Sack the bloody lot of them.

"Apparently Zuck wants to create an umbrella brand "

That's It!

Umbrella Corporation.

Re: Hatebook

Twatter gets my vote.

There used to be an actual parody site called Twatter.com, calling itself the Anti-Social Network, but it soon folded as Twitter itself became the open sewer of hate that it is now.

There are some still around though e.g. http://www.twat.me.uk/

Re: It doesn’t need a new name

It doesn't need a new CEO. It needs to be liquidated and its global assets distributed to various good social causes.

As for Zuck and the board of directors... Chain Gang? They could start by fixing the potholes on the A34.

Re: Better than Life

Worse than Death?

If you could delete three corporations

Obviously Facebook would be top of the list, but what would the other two be?

Amazon, Microsoft (would be my choice)

But that leaves Google, Apple, Intel, the Communist Party of China.. :(

TriOptimum Corporation

to go with El Reg's theme..

Hatebook

Simple, recognisable and on-brand. Only 2 letters from the original.

Cleggy, you can have that one on me.

I wouldn't give him so much credit.

He knows people think of him as a child in adult's clothing so he puts on that persona to try to evade responsibility, but he is an adult, and one who is as evil and power-mad as the rest of the hundred-billion club.

Reg scribe spends week being watched by government Bluetooth wristband, emerges to more surveillance

Re: Freedom is Slavery

I genuinely hope that you are right, but if you read the 'i' article I linked, they talk about "Gain of Function" research that seems to have involved deliberately modifying a virus to make it as infectious to humans as possible.

> Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps Research institute in California, said its binding mechanism “looked too good to be true – like a perfect key for entering human cells” – while another unexpected feature appeared like something expected “if someone had set out to adapt an animal coronavirus to humans by taking a specific suit of genetic material from elsewhere and inserting it”.

Even if it wasn't deliberately released in 2019 in Wuhan, I think it is likely (or at least highly plausible) that this was a bioweapon in-development, and deliberate or not, it has been hugely beneficial for the Chinese regime.

Freedom is Slavery

For when you accept that you are under constant surveillance and you listen and obey all government commands, you are 'free' to live your life without fear..

"Ignorance is Strength": Thanks to the WHO's early dismissal of very relevant lines of enquiry, and the sea of bogus conspiracy theories which propagandists have put out to drown any real ones that might exist, we will never know if this pandemic really was a natural occurrence or a deliberate power play by the Chinese government..

But either way, it has given all governments (and some corporations) immense power over individuals, and given every country in the world a great shove towards a perfect Orwellian model of a totalitarian regime.

"War is Peace": The only stable system of government, he argued, is to be in a constant state of war. Not a real war, but an imposturous war that is fought chiefly at home, providing effective means of controlling dissent through fear.

"The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word "war," therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous, war has ceased to exist."

The book is so apposite that it seems incredible to say that it hasn't been used as a template for power.

For anyone who hasn't read it, it's so old that despite Mickey Mouse Act etc, it is out-of-copyright: https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/1984.pdf

Amid drama at .NET Foundation, Microsoft's De Icaza reveals it was meant to be like GNOME Foundation

Says the director of the F# Foundation

F### this

Want a piece of GitLab? It's going to cost you: IPO price per share settles at $77

Not "budget" but at least it's not Microsoft

So at least you don't have Microsoft sniffing round your data and building AI codebots that automate the plagiarism of your IP..

And at least it's not tracking you across other platforms like LinkedIn, Teams, MS Office and MS Windows to find out which little dilberts do the most work for the least pay, and emailing with a nice summary of how much more work they could do every month..

Nine floors underground, Oracle's Israel data centre can 'withstand a rocket, a missile or even a car bomb'

Re: can withstand a rocket direct hit

Don't be silly, nobody needs to worry about a small thermal exhaust port..

LAN traffic can be wirelessly sniffed from cables with $30 setup, says researcher

Re: I thought LAN cables were shielded

If the cable happens to be running through the middle of a completely shielded RF anechoic chamber that also happens to house your SDR (i.e. in RF terms you are in the middle of nowhere - just you and the ethernet cable) then this might be plausible. I bet the software on the SDR didn't cost $30 to develop and I bet it can't cope with more noise than a statically-charged mosquito.

UK's VoIP Unlimited hit by DDoSes again, weeks after ransom-linked attacks KO'd it

Interesting. I wonder how many other VoIP providers are currently under attack, and if there is a special motive for it, perhaps an experiment by somebody to see how feasible it is to disrupt phone communications on command.

If it works, it could be a useful weapon when WWIII breaks out...

(fortunately it seems it's not particularly effective.. although it might be a bit more so when BT switches off its landline network in favour of VoIP)

Clearview CEO doubles down, claims biz has now scraped over ten billion social media selfies for surveillance

His muskiness tweets

Am I missing something here? Why is there a random snippet about Elon Musk's latest dodgy firmware update in the middle of this article? What does that have to do with Clearview?

Facebook, Instagram finally end days of uptime by returning to some downtime

FB is a plague on society, it affects people that don't even participate.

^ This.

TBH, since Facebook cause various psychological harms including inciting people to various hatred, often at the behest of foreign 'troll armies' etc. (never mind their laughable tax contribution), could we please take a leaf out of China's book and just ban the lot of it, permanently?

Spiritual Opium? - more like Spiritual Arsenic.

@Captain Veg

[Celeriac]