Posts by cyberdemon

Ex-soldier pleads guilty to terror crime after not revealing iPhone PIN

Re: Something fishy about this story

that has to be one of the cheesiest jokes I've read in a while..

Those online ads driving you bonkers are virtually 'worthless for brands'

Re: All the bad ads

HTML5 supports video, but it won't autoplay without JavaScript. You get a nice 'play' button instead. At least on all sane browsers.

Yes it's true that some sites are going down the road of forcing you to watch ads by surreptitious means, but those sites are starting to ditch the WWW anyway - "please download our APP instead". The only answer is don't use them.

As for driver sites: they're ALL security risks. Run Linux. :P

All the bad ads

Require JavaScript.

If it's not to run some obnoxious autoplay video, then its to spy on your mouse cursor or (more usually) to pull in other random ads from some delivery network, which then allows nefarious advertisers to do a switcheroo to bypass vetting.. (e.g. the download pages with umpteen different "download" buttons) I'm assuming these are pointing to something innocuous if/when the admen do any vetting of the adverts..

(I also assume this is what is happening on Facebook's malware "adverts" - with clickbait fake-news banners e.g. "FANS' OUTPOURING OF GRIEF OVER DEATH OF SIR PAUL MCARTNEY" which my dad clicked on, only to be assaulted by a fullscreen scam-page accompanied with a loud booming voice saying "YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN INFECTED WITH A VIRUS! FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY TO REGAIN CONTROL OF YOUR COMPUTER" - I'm giving Facebook the benefit of the doubt here - it's entirely probable that they don't vet their adverts whatsoever..)

Someone above noted that he needs "half a dozen plugins" to get rid of all the ads. That's not true: You only need one - a whitelist JavaScript blocker such as NoScript (firefox) or ScriptSafe (chrome) is all I use - no ABP. The nice thing about this is that HTML-only adverts, which are almost always non-intrusive, display just fine, so honest admen can still get revenue. And if I do see one of these honest, non-intrusive adverts, I am reasonably likely to click on it. (HINT HINT EL REG)

As for the "thanks but no thanks" - I'm sure they would appreciate your feedback to let their neural-networks know that you are most probably an actual real person, but they would use that information just to serve you with ever-more-obnoxious ads, while focussing your attention on their little iframe, rather than the site that you wanted to read, until you give up and click on one.

Meet the Internet of big, lethal Things

Milking It

Is what JD are doing..

@EarthWarrior - You're right, I'm surprised at El Reg for taking the Daily Mail angle on this. It's not about hax0rz in teh yuor combine harvester, it's about money for big agri companies. El Reg probably didn't realise the amount of money JD are milking out of their customers. They are taking full advantage of the fact they are in a niche market with customers who generally don't know much about tech - and when the few who DO understand tech, start doing trivial repairs themselves, they send the lawyers.

I work in Robotics - and industrial robot manufacturers are just the same (some are worse than others - I'm looking at you, Fanuc..)

They (Fanuc) will send legal threats to people "pirating" their user manuals, because they would prefer to send one of their "consultants" to set up your robot, or else you could pay £17,000 to go on a "training course" where you will receive said manual. Your factory floor manager, generally speaking, doesn't have the time or the incling to do configuration or repair, no matter how trivial it really is. But he does have lots of money to throw at consultants.

We asked Kuka really nicely, and they gave us the manuals we needed, but still charged ££££s for some extra piece of (shitty) software that we needed to control the robot the way we wanted.

Mercedes answers autonomous car moral dilemma: Yeah, we'll just run over pedestrians

Re: Hard decision but Mercedes are probably right

I hasten to add, if an autonomous car has to run itself into a tree to avoid hitting someone, despite all of its super-duper sensors to detect it in advance, and super-duper autonomous braking to stop on a peanut, then it was almost certainly driving too fast in the first place. Either that or the obstacle was being tragically stupid, which isn't the car's problem at all.

Re: Hard decision but Mercedes are probably right

Completely agree. But I think the most important angle is the legal angle. As soon as you consider that, then you realise that this whole moral madness is just a can of worms with no bottom. It is better to just try to stop as best you can for ANY obstacle, and not even try to think about this stuff.

1. As you say, the car's sensors cannot possibly ever be perfect. It could quite easily see a paper bag, a cat, a dog, running across the road and decide that it is a human infant. It may then decide to take extreme evasive action to avoid the infant, and end up "deliberately" killing its driver. A human could make exactly the same mistake of course (and probably does, in all of the RTAs of the world). The difference with the human, however, is that you can't then download the black-box data out of his squished brain, and replay his fatal mistake in front of a court of law. The car manufacturers will be *terrified* of this second-guessing by the courts, and of course the lawyers will be salivating just thinking about it.

2. Yes, pedestrians have the same responsibility to avoid danger as anyone else (young children are not directly responsible - their parents are responsible FOR them). The highway code is there for a reason. If a driver is not driving dangerously or carelessly, but still kills a child, then he should, in theory, be found NOT GUILTY, by the court - because the child or their parent should have been paying attention to the inherent danger of the road. Unfortunately in many cases (because the courts are not perfect), he will be found guilty of something and go to jail. If the driver was in fact a robot operated by some company, then one corporate manslaughter case could sink even the biggest of companies. (even if it was incorrectly judged, by the jury of falliable squishy things, which statistically some of the cases will be) I think this is one of the biggest obstacles to the widespread adoption of fully autonomous cars - that the courts have an unacceptably high error rate and that even a "perfect" autonomous car will some day be found guilty.

3. It IS a hard decision, but I would be more afraid of the car that is clever enough to be able to try and make it, than one which is "dumb" and doesn't even go there. The reason is this: If a car is able to evaluate in real-time, the value of all life around it, and try to prioritise the teenage kid walking into the road over the elderly driver, a "criminal", or any of the other ridiculous scenarios you will find over at Moral Machine, for example - then it must have extremely sophisticated social profiling built in. (or perhaps even outsourced to "the cloud" - even worse). This opens up all kinds of evil possibilities. People complained about a "racist hand dryer" whose sensor failed to properly detect black skin. You now have the possibility (or rather, certainty) for a car to deliberately kill a human just because they were profiled to be "less morally valuable" than some other human.

There will be inevitable imperfections in the profiling algorithm and its training data. It *will* be more efficient at profiling the kinds of humans in its training set than the kinds of humans outside of the training set. This is now automatic discrimination against any kind of human who was not included in the training set. Remember the Google Photos app that identified black people as "gorillas"? Well unfortunately they did not have enough black people in the training set, but apparently they did have gorillas. For Google, that was a serious facepalm. If that was an autonomous car though, then once you factor in the lawyers, it's racially motivated murder on the part of Google.

Worse still, the system could be deliberately modified by some evil human. If a large number of a particular manufacturers' autonomous cars had the software capability to profile people and decide on their moral value, and someone maliciously issued an over-the-air software update to all of these cars simultaneously, then that malicious person could even attempt genocide. Very scary indeed.

----

Basically, If I was buying an autonomous car, I would want it to protect ME. (humans are ultimately selfish, no matter what you say) and I would certainly not want it to be second-guessing my life over what ultimately could be just a paper bag. And humans are the customer, so this makes perfect commercial sense.

Ofcom blesses Linux-powered, open source DIY radio ‘revolution’

Re: Potato

> There's no Line-Out socket and it goes a bit deaf on DAB/DAB+ when earphones are plugged in because the telescopic aerial is then disconnected

> What the hell kinda stupidass design is that? Here, you can have this jacket if it's cold out, but you can't wear it with gloves.

Because then you'd be able to connect a tape cassette recorder and steal content in er, perfect digital MP2 quality. Cassette tapes will be the death of the radio industry, don't you know!

Sad reality: It's cheaper to get hacked than build strong IT defenses

Blame the hacker

The real problem, if you ask me, is that is the operators of these sites are never accountable for their own shitty security. Everybody blames the hacker. The real black-hats are rarely caught, but sometimes a white-hat will politely point out a vulnerability and expect to be rewarded - instead he is ignored (perhaps to save face) and the vulnerability often remains unpatched. So a grey-hat comes along and rudely makes the vulnerability obvious to all. In most cases he is attacked by the organisation (never mind rewarded) and frequently prosecuted by the state (who want to make an example of him in the hopes that this will scare the black-hats).

IMO the real reason that companies never bother to secure their networks, is because they can always label it as a "cyberattack", as if NOBODY could have stopped this ACT OF TERROR on their systems.

When a system of this scale gets compromised, it should be the sysadmin, not just the "hacker" who gets held accountable by the state. It would be nice if there was a neutral authority that white-hats could report vulnerabilities to, which will confirm them and then force (by law) the companies involved to close them.

Then again, the cynic in me says these sites are deliberately left open so that the state spies can get in, whilst having yet another excuse to pursue and destroy anyone else who wields the same power.

End all the 'up to' broadband speed bull. Release proper data – LGA

Prometheus

> Yes!

This might seem attractive to us internet users, but it is a piece of steak at the top of a bill which is otherwise a barrel of offal, fat and bones.

You should install smart meters even if they're dumb, says flack

Re: The only thing that makes a smart meter of any use to anyone

FYI You are the last person in the queue for the data from your smart-meter. In front of you are:

• Your electricity supplier (who want to charge you more if you put your kettle on when they are struggling to meet the load, because they pocketed too much of your bills instead of building the required capacity)
• Your council (who will be able to profile the number of people living in your dwelling-house to make sure you are paying the proper rate of council tax)
• Your insurance company (because they will use any scrap of evidence to blame you for overloading your circuits when your house burns down, and thus avoid paying out)
• The BBC (who will be able to profile repeated tiny spikes during popular TV programmes and thus detect if you are dodging the license fee)
• Data-mining companies (who will pay good money for any sufficiently-large high-quality dataset about anything)

The benefit:

Is to be able to be remotely switched off. When the electricity company feels like it. Ostensibly so that they can make their renewable plans work without needing to buy any expensive (and inefficient) energy storage devices like Electric Mountain, or (heaven forbid) actual baseload generation capacity (ie their job). Also it comes in very handy when you haven't paid your bill on time.

When the majority of people have "smart" meters then they can implement this plan, and give cheaper tariffs (read: a massive price hike for nearly everybody) to people who don't mind being switched off every now and then (i.e. in the middle of EastEnders, or when the sun goes behind a cloud). If you moan about being switched off then well you should have paid extra, and you shouldn't be watching that drivel anyway, or you should be streaming it on your ipad on 3G.

So in summary, WHAT exactly are YOU doing that needs such a reliable and therefore WASTEFUL energy supply? Washing your clothes you say? Only rich people wash their clothes - you can afford to pay the premium. Perhaps you'd like to buy an energy efficient kettle?

It really is a sorry state of affairs, privatised electricity generation in the UK. We should've stuck with the Ministry of Power, and invested in research into newer, cleaner, cheaper nuclear power, rather than cancelling all the programmes and building privately run coal and gas plants.

Meanwhile we have regulated the pants off of nuclear, making it ridiculously expensive and making everyone scared of it (meanwhile more radioactivity is pumped out by coal plants than nuclear, never mind all the rest of the shite that fossil fuels dump into the air, and vastly more people are killed by wind farms, despite the tiny fraction of energy generation that they currently provide!)

The only people who benefit (aside from the energy companies as above) are the likes of Siemens who make the infernal things, and charge a fortune and make a fortune, knowing that they are subsidised by both the bill-payer and the tax-payer, i.e. you and me and me and you!

Childcare app bods wipe users' data – then discover backups had been borked for a year

Cloud Cuckoo Land

The *ONLY* perspective from which Cloud makes sense is from the company that provides it. For users, it's a stupid idea, always.

There is *no* reason whatsoever for this app to have been storing data anywhere except locally with the users. That would have given superior security and reliability.

Sure, they could have replicated a small subset of that data back to their server if (and only if) it is needed for collaboration features, but to put *everything* in the cloud, that's where most apps fall over, and it's driven by greed - of the cloud providers - to be able to mine all the data and sell it to advertisers/statisticians/crooks as they please.

The most ridiculous part of all is that they were storing the only copy of the data on one server, which is 'doing it wrong' even from a cloud perspective.

Bungling Microsoft singlehandedly proves that golden backdoor keys are a terrible idea

Re: "Security of Everyone" - WTF?

Like encrypting all your files, plus all your backups if they're in an accessible disk or network drive, and then demanding bitcoins.

That's so lucrative for malware writers that full blown rootkits are a waste of time. Unless you are the NSA or Mossad in which case you could just phone up Intel or Google.

With technologies like IME, embedded in all new Intel chips, your OS is basically running inside of a VM anyway. You are already rooted before you even install an OS.

"Security of Everyone" - WTF?

> And perhaps most importantly: it is a reminder that demands by politicians and crimefighters for special keys, which can be used by investigators to unlock devices in criminal cases, will inevitably jeopardize the security of everyone.

Wait a minute. Blowing secure boot wide open and allowing people to run what they want on their own devices, jeopardises the security of "everyone", does it?

No, it only jeopardises the security of microsoft's monopoly, and apple's.

Secure boot is an insidious anti-feature that deserves to be cast into the deepest of technological hells. Along with its bastard brothers Intel SGX and Anti-Theft, and their hideous, bloated, evil witch of a mother, UEFI.

And the devil himself: Intel Management Engine

Saying "Oh, but you might get a BOOTSECTOR VIRUS!!" is the same argument as "If you don't accept all of these insidious anti-dissident laws then you will all die in a TERROR ATTACK!!"

There are worse things that malware can do than install spyware/trojans into the bootsector, frankly, and accepting exactly the same thing at an even lower level from a bunch of corporate neo-feudalists in bed with state spy agencies hardly fixes the problem!

Drone bloke cuffed after gizmo stops firemen tackling forest inferno

Too much COD

Perhaps not a door gunner, but if incidents like this are at all common then firefighting planes should perhaps carry a blunderbuss for emergency purposes. Load nets into it?

Anyway this is 'Murica after all. Everyone has a handgun, including firemen, right?

As for EMP guns, obviously that's not going to work. But a 433MHz/2.4GHz signal jammer wouldn't be too hard. You could send out an "all channels at 0" signal which would cause it to fall out of the sky.

Intel's SGX tiptoes towards Linux

blargh

This sounds like a technology that can only bring bad things. I'm not sure if I WANT Linux support for it.

Anti-features, DRM, inscrutable code.

Good news for virus writers and "revenue protection managers", bad news for everyone else.

Oh and of course one thing that's most certainly already using it: UEFI. Truly the Spawn of Satan. The NSA, Mossad, etc don't want anyone looking inside their blackest of black-boxes.

Intel Management Engine

Judge rules FBI can hack any time, any, place, anywhere

Planting of Evidence?

If these Merkins (sic) can go round "hacking" anyone they please without a warrant, then what's to stop them from remotely planting evidence on whomsoever they choose, before having them burned as paedos/terrorists/witches?

Google-backed solar electricity facility sets itself on fire

Re: Supply commitments?

> There have really been just two disasters with catastrophic effects, Chernobyl and Fukushima

Chernobyl was a catastrophe. Fukushima was a catastrophe in terms of the PR it caused (e.g. Frau Merkel's knee-jerk) but in every other sense I think it was a triumph for nuclear safety.

Like you say it was an old design and was not built to withstand a double fault (modern nuclear plants & their safety systems are built to "SIL 4", which requires being able to cope with and immediately diagnose two simultaneous independent faults - more onerous than you might imagine..)

Fukushima was smashed by a "natural" tsunami that killed 10,000s, and made 100,000s homeless. In spite of this the nuclear plant itself has killed nobody. Not one of the "Fukushima 50" who went in to stabilise the plant expecting to die, has died yet. But we have almost forgotten about the tsunami.

Yet people are killed in ordinary "industrial accidents" every day, especially in the "third world", although three were killed (IN BRITAIN!!) demolishing an old coal plant down the road from me at Didcot a few months ago.

When people tell me that Chernobyl or even Fukushima were the worst industrial disasters mankind has known, I like to remind them of Bhopal.

But I suppose that happened in a part of the world we don't care about. :@

Closing nuclear in favour of coal..

Is beyond retarded.

For a start, if it's radioactive waste you're concerned about, then the stuff that comes out of coal stacks is actually very radioactive as well, possibly dirtier than nuclear waste. Per GWh, I expect it's even worse for coal.

That's not even counting all the other nasties that come out of burning coal (carcinogenic nanoparticles, exotic hydrocarbons, sulphur, never mind the CO2) and the kind of coal that Germany has (lignite) is the worst of the worst for all of these.

So let's all build Biomass power plants & burn trees imported on from South America on Diesel boats. That sounds like a better idea Eh?

Seriously though, the real trouble with nuclear is that nobody will define a "safe limit" for radiation. (A sensible level might be the background levels in naturally high-background areas such as Cornwall, where people have thrived for centuries) (cue Cornish jokes). Instead, we have "ALARA" and the "Linear No-Threshold Model" which make the assumption that any release of radioactivity, however small (even 100s of times below the background level) is going to harm *something*, and that ANY measure to reduce it, however expensive, is *legally* mandated. This only applies to the "nuclear" sector of course, and if the fossil fuels sector were held to the same standard then they would be just as expensive as Nuclear.

I find it odd that people are more afraid of "safe" things going wrong than "unsafe" things operating normally (i.e. killing people every day). "So&So was killed in a plane crash? OMG WTF I WILL NEVER FLY AGAIN!!!1" "So&So died in a car accident? MEH! Cars Do That."

I can only assume it's a "fear of the unknown" thing, and that until the general population become nuclear physicists, everyone who isn't will always fear this invisible yet eminently detectable poison.

The nice thing about nuclear power is that all the waste is nicely contained in one place, which makes it easy to clean up (contrast to fossil fuels where its spread all over the flipping atmosphere). And the nice thing about radioactive waste is that it is detectable from a mile off, making it easy to spot. But therefore a nightmare for OCD sufferers perhaps?

** DISCLAIMER: I DO work in the nuclear sector, although not in Fission Power. I work on Remote Handling robots that clean up all the Sperm Germs that everyone is so afraid of **

F-35s failed 'scramble test' because of buggy software

Stability Event

> I think this translates to "on average, one blue-screen-of-death every 15 hours".

Funny.. The way I read it was "on average, one BSOD-free bootup every 15 hours"

I thought the whole idea of super-expensive "military grade" (lol) software was that it is supposed to be deterministic!

Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

Re: Perhaps you were downvoted

Blarg. I knew that Ubuntu were the reason that systemd got forced into Debian, but I wasn't aware they were part of the whole LSB madness. I'd have thought that would be shooting themselves in the foot, given that their strength comes from Debian. If they really threw their weight behind LSB, then they would have to ditch APT/DPKG in favour of Yum/RPM.

But I wouldn't put that past Shuttleworth & co.

Personally I've only ever used Debian, since before Ubuntu was a thing, but neither my beard nor my hair are grey (yet).

Hard-core anti red-hat not just for systemd, but for LSB as a whole. The money from free-software thing only partially - everyone has to make a living - but I tend to distrust those with an axe to grind, especially when it has negative impacts on MY software @:

And that applies just as much to Canonical too.

"systemd isn't just popular because of Red Hat...."

Actually, it's popular because of the so-called "Linux Standards Base", which was a circlejerk between RedHat, Intel, and Microsoft.

The intention was to create "binary-compatibility" within Linux, so that proprietary, closed-source software (and, presumably, malware) would have an easier time. It's completely contrary to what GNU are trying to do, and for this reason, Debian was late (or not invited) to the party.

LSB standardised a lot of things, and it all came from RedHat.

This is why, for example, that MeeGo (which is the abomination that replaced Nokia's Maemo OS) went with RPM instead of DPKG (deb/apt) for package-management, because RPM is specified by the LSB.

That doesn't mean that RPM/Yum is better than DPKG/Apt. It just got standardised by the LSB.

Consequently, Debian and Ubuntu are "non-compliant" until they adopt RPM format. They are fudging it with 'Alien', but eventually Debian will die thanks to the LSB.

Personally, I would love to go back to a time before Systemd. It has given me nothing but problems.

I also, for a while, used Trinity - a backport of KDE 3.5 onto QT4. I stopped using it when KDE4 became stable and usable.

Now that Plasma5 is being forced down my throat, with a shedload of bugs, I would love a backport of KDE4!

Next you'll be telling me to move from X11 to Wayland.

The case for ethical ad-blocking

Just block JavaScript

Use NoScript (firefox), ScriptNo (chrome), etc.

None of the "bad" ads work, including all that jump-in-your-face noisy pop-over bollocks, and the insidious mouse-pointer-tracking shite. Most of the "normal" ones are gone too, but they were all surreptitiously tracking your activity.

The only ads that remain, are plain HTML images with HREFs.

I call this kind of ad-blocking "ethical" because if a website owner honestly wants to promote someone else's product, without using some parasitic ad-network with a shedload of ulterior data-mining motives, then he still can. He or the ad-network just has to take all the crap out and it'll work fine.

The problem is that the ad-networks pay websites more because they are making money out of slurping and mining user's data (perhaps more than they are paid by advertisers for marketing their products). THAT's what's unethical if you ask me.

The downside is that some badly-designed most websites break until you whitelist their javascript (but not their ad-network's). But it's pretty easy to spot which scripts are legit and which are ad-networks just by the domain they are coming from. And pages load faster too.

More and more Brits are using ad-blockers, says survey

I don't use an ad blocker

But I still don't see those nasty flashy-background ads on The Register (unless i'm on someone else's computer, in which case my first reaction is 'eww').

The reason I don't see them is purely *because* the ads are so intrusive - they are running a whole load of javascript either to jump in your face or to slurp up your data (Mouse pointer tracking, anyone? Where's my tinfoil hat?)

As I say, I don't use adblock. But I DO use a whitelist Javascript blocker (ScriptSafe for Chrome). This *breaks* most bad ads (including those on El Reg, and of course Google's innocuous-looking but data-slurping ones) but lets the "good" ads through. I.e. those which are a simple HTML image with a hyperlink. Those nasty ones that slow this site down just don't load, because they are pulled in by a script that doesn't get run. So the page loads much faster too.

The only downside is that it breaks functionality on some websites (especially badly written ones) until I whitelist a whole domain. I often have to hunt a bit for the "functionality" scripts on a page, avoiding those which are "anti-functionality". But it's a small price to pay IMO for avoiding having my data slurped, and not seeing intrusive ads.

What a bum note: Violin's shares perform financial diminuendo

Cue...

The violins.

Terror in the Chernobyl dead zone: Life - of a wild kind - burgeons

Re: Chernobyl was a weapons reactor

I'm not sure where the link between positive void coefficient and weapons has been made..

TBH my best guess is that Mr. Pournelle is mistaken, having made the assumption that because it's a banned design, then it must have been for weapons.

Positive Void Coefficient means that when the coolant inside a reactor boils away (creating "voids" of steam), then the power output actually goes UP, because the coolant was also a neutron absorber, which regulates the speed of the reaction. It is fundamentally a Bad Thing To Do, whether you are making weapons OR power. It is one of the main reasons why the reaction at Chernobyl went out of control.

All modern reactors are specifically designed so that the coolant forms part of the neutron *moderator* rather than *absorber* - (a neutron moderator speeds up the reaction by slowing down neutrons without absorbing them, bringing them to the correct energy level where they are most likely to collide with a U235 atom and continue the chain reaction) - thus a loss of coolant in a modern reactor intrinsically results in a slowing down of the chain reaction. This is called a Negative Void Coefficient.

That's the reason Positive Void Coefficients are banned in the US. Nothing to do with weapons.

Oracle and Xamarin flutter eyelashes at suits with native app deal

Were you reading the article?

Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?

El Reg really needs to quit with all these worthless clickb.. no nevermind forget it.

Mine's the leather trenchcoat with twice my weight in guns in the pockets..

Smart meters set to cost Blighty as much as replacing Trident

Re: Never mind Nuclear Weapons

Yes - I do still work in the nuclear industry - although in the public sector, so I don't have a 'commercial' interest as such.. I'm actually in robotics rather than nuclear power/physics itself - the robots which go inside the radioactive areas - "so You don't have to".

Olkiluoto, Flamanville etc as I'm sure you know are hugely over budget, but I think they will succeed.

As for fusion - it's a nice idea - but if you ask my personal opinion, I think if the money we have invested in fusion were to have been put into testing better fission reactor designs (MSRs for example) then we would be a LOT better off. Fusion is safer than fission for sure (if the safest thing is to stop producing power forthwith, at the smallest opportunity) but there is still "low level" waste, e.g. the gloves and overalls that workers have worn when they have been in an area which has undetectably, low but unprovably nonexistent contamination. That is because of the ridiculous state the legislation is in, and it is precisely WHY nuclear is so expensive. Imagine if the fossil fuel and chemical industries had the same limitations on emissions: Where every last atom of heavy metals, nanoparticles etc they pump out, must be accounted for. But since a mass spectrometer is a hell of a lot more expensive per atom detected than a Geiger counter, nobody bothers.

In all honesty, I think fission is a LOT safer than most people believe. Those posters above, for example, advocating the construction of more nuclear subs: What do you suppose happens when a nuclear sub gets hit by a torpedo? If the same amount of radioactive material were released by a civilian power plant, then there would be a nuclear incident with the scale and cost of Chernobyl. Everybody panics, people DIE due to the evacuation (not because of the radiation), and the planet suffers, because we now need more fossil fuels to replace all the nuclear plants we just closed on a knee-jerk.

As for a policy on declaration of interest? Well I could always have gone AC like yourself!

RE: "Too Cheap To Meter"

You're right that it doesn't work in the current political and regulatory climate - but there's nothing to say it COULDN'T happen. If, for example, we were allowed to build nuclear power stations underwater (like nuclear subs!) and put the waste at very, very deep parts of the sea (subduction zones perhaps?) then nuclear would certainly be "Too Cheap to Meter". But of course, humanity would rather choke to death than pay any thought to that bogeyman.. At least not until they are *actually* choking to death.

When the world gets so hot that people start to need air conditioning to survive, then you can bet there will be de-regulation of nuclear power. But of course that will be too late. Most of our species will be extinct, and most of civilisation will have collapsed.

Never mind Nuclear Weapons

What we need is Nuclear Power!

If people would come to their senses about nuclear power (that it is cleaner, 'greener', and safer than basically everything else) then we would hardly need meters, let alone 'smart' ones!

Yes I know nuclear is expensive - but is a lot more expensive than it needs to be - Nuclear companies are forced by law to keep emissions "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" (ALARA) that is to say, they are forced to lower emissions even when there is absolutely no reason to. They set themselves stupid targets like 100GBq tritium per year (for scale, 1GBq tritium is found inside one of those glow-in-the-dark keyfobs - tritium is basically harmless) so when they find something unexpected and go over their arbitrary target, people think there has been a major incident when in fact there hasn't.

Nuclear installations are forced to go to ridiculous lengths (like quadruple-redundant dosimetry of personnel) to keep already insignificantly low doses of radiation even lower.

All this when there is no evidence at all to say that low doses of radiation are actually harmful - there are even some scientists that think low doses are beneficial ("hormesis" effect) and nobody has been able to prove them wrong.

Meanwhile coal, oil and biomass plants are belching out tonne after tonne of carcinogens, nanoparticles, even radiation (more than nuclear plants), and that's when they are operating NORMALLY!

I think there is a big case for relaxing the rules around nuclear power to make it less expensive, but it seems to be something of a taboo subject!

All of this irrational fear of radiation is just going to allow the fossil fuel barons, climate change denialists, and biomass bandits to destroy the planet.

Whopping 10TB disks spin out of HGST – plus 3.2TB flash slabs

The trouble with Helium..

Is it has a tendency to seep through *anything* - even solid steel / aluminum..

A balloon lasts a day or two - a foil one a week or two, while an 80 litre dewar flask of liquid helium will noticeably ebb away over the course of a few months. Granted this is primarily via the oil film seal around the stainless steel ball valve once it has been opened and closed again (rather than the metal itself, though that does happen), but I suspect the slightest knock/vibration could disturb the seal on a helium-filled hard drive, enough for the helium to gradually percolate through the seams of the case and up to the heavens - and your data soon follows it!

LG unfurls flexible SEE-THROUGH 18-inch display

Re: What about Folded Displays

Actually if you ask me - the folded display will be the death of the roll-up display.

Because too many plebs will try to fold them!

Who loves office space? Dell does: Virtualization to banish workstations from under desks

Anxiety

"having all of a workgroup's valuable files in a central location — architectural models, feature films, automotive designs, whatever – can significantly reduce that aforementioned IT admin's anxiety."

I suspect the only admin whose anxiety is reduced will be the HR admin.

The "aformentioned IT admin" will be very anxious indeed, right before he ceases to be an IT admin @:

Fukushima radioactivity a complete non-issue on West Coast: Also for Fukushima locals, in fact

Financial disasaters..

Maybe, just maybe, the "financial disaster" is caused more by "'Elf and Safety" parasites (and the hysterical individuals who they brainwash in the name of profit) than the disaster itself?

Other examples include Asbestos, Electricity, Whiplash and PPI.

The nuclear industry is especially vulnerable to these kinds of parasites, because nobody understands it, lots of people are scared of it, and nobody can see it except for the 'Elf & Safety brigade with their geiger counters and smear tests for whom it is highly profitable to inflate its risks.

Especially when you have concepts like ALARA - that is, the whole UK nuclear industry is LEGALLY BOUND to keeping radiation emissions "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" (despite what the safe or background levels may be..) That gives a massive bonus to the ambulance chasers, because all they have to do is present some new (and very expensive) way to reduce exposure to a new, even more hilarious low.

I work for an experimental fusion facility, and the rules there are that any area where there is more than 1 Bq/cm^2 Tritium (beta emission, one measly electron per second) detected on any surface then that area must be designated as a controlled area that nobody is allowed to enter without a pile of paperwork and five days of brainw^H^H^H^H^H^Htraining courses. (To put that into perspective, a Tritium-filled luminescent keyring that you can buy in high street shops for £10 contains about 1 Giga-Bequerel of Tritium) Anyone who comes out of these areas then has to dispose of their overalls, mask, and three layers of gloves straight into the contaminated bin which then becomes.. Nuclear Waste!

Yes - most of that zillion tonnes of low-level nuclear waste that you hear about is just gloves and overalls that "might" be contaminated.

They had to evacuate the whole site at Sellafield recently, until they found the cause of their "radiation leak" - As I understand it someone dug a hole for some roadworks and released some radon from the granite bedrock. For your "financial disaster", Imagine how much that little incident must have cost. Then think about the Nuclear Decomissioning Authority as a whole, and how much money it must be plowing into parasite industries for no good reason..

In reality, there is far more cancer caused by the chemical and OMG Nanoparticles!! emissions from cars, than nuclear war never mind nuclear power, ever caused.

And if we could have nuclear power, maybe we could have enough of it to charge everyone's electric car!

By the way, anyone who mentions Chernobyl should be reminded of Bhopal.

Fukushima fearmongers: It's your fault Japan dumped CO2 targets

Re: The elephant in the room

>So current power generation digs something out of the ground and uses it to heat its surroundings. The heating might be local, but do enough of it for long enough, over large area of the planet and one has to ask if there is a better definition of "Global Warming". What we are doing is systematically overloading the planet's ability to dump excess heat. The other "bad" things simply add to the problem.

Hmm.

Given that total global solar heating is around 100 petawatts, and total global power generation is about 15 terawatts, that means power generation contributes around 0.015% of global heating.

I get that the climate is a sensitive balance, but I'd be very surprised if we could influence it by heating, in the absence of any gas emissions.

Solar power would be nice, if it didn't need so much resources to make the panels. And in many cases the land used would be better off growing crops (the same applies to all biofuels - you are effectively burning food)

This debate both amuses and depresses me. We have hippies (climate) versus hippies (anti-nuclear), with us scientists caught in the crossfire.

Google's Wi-Fi not good enough for its home town

Re: The problem is WiFi not Google

And the TLDR award for 2013 goes to.. btrower!

I keep reading your name as btrowel.. which is ironic since you always seem to be laying it on with one!

Wanna run someone over in your next Ford? No dice, it won't let you

Self-driving cars are never going to take off

One word: Lawsuit.

No matter how good they are, the whole concept of the self-driving car is doomed in today's society.

The average person (apparently) makes about 1000 road journeys per year. Therefore, even if a self-driving car were "nine-nines" safe, i.e. 99.9999999% certain to get you from A to B without killing you, that's still one death per year per million customers as a result of product imperfections, each with the likelihood of a nasty lawsuit or even a corporate manslaughter charge.

On top of that, 1% of the entire population every year are killed on the roads (730k in the UK, apparently), with a significant proportion i'm sure where the wrong person (or robot) gets the blame.

Even if the robot car were 100% perfect, humans are idiots, and there will be plenty of them ready to hurl themselves in front of the robot cars if there is even the remotest possibility of a big fat payout.

The nice thing about human-driven cars of course, is that there's a fleshy meat sack behind the wheel who assumes (nearly) all legal responsibility for its use.

Call me a cynical git, but I don't really see a way around it.

Radiation snatched from leaky microwave ovens to power gadgets

This is about as daft..

as putting solar panels on your ceiling to collect the 'wasted energy' from your energy-saving lightbulb!

As for "1.8V, enough for most gadgets", this reporter clearly hasn't heard of electric current. In particular, that old relation P=IV!

Wait, forget I said anything - I hear another clueless mug, er I mean EPSRC executive on his way!

Facebook Frankenphoto morgue will store your cold, dead selfies FOREVER

Facebook are not storing YOUR data for YOUR benefit

They are storing THEIR data for the benefit of THEIR data-mining!

Meet the Unmagnificent Seven: The critical holes plugged in Firefox update

Re: Lamentable

Nope. No extensions.. The last time I used it was on a University PC with Firefox installed as part of their standard build. Whenever I tried to use it for literature surveys and the like, it would crash after about half an hour of heavy use.

I wouldn't be surprised if the culprit was the Adobe PDF plugin (the kind of steaming pile that Adobe is)

But then again, why should ANY plugin or extension be able to crash the entire browser? Surely there are catch statements to prevent that sort of thing?

Lamentable

Firefox used to be a really good browser, but I'm really not sure what happened to make it what it is today: Frankly a pile of cack.

It's still miles better than IE of course, but it's a shame that I now have to choose between a browser that is probably tracking my every move (Chrome) and a browser that crashes all the time, eats all my memory, and just generally plain sucks (Firefox). Regrettably I choose the former.

It was around version 3 when things started getting bad. I can't entirely remember why. Then they changed the menus, broke all the extensions, and started doing silly version numbers and it was all downhill from there.

Redmond slips out temporary emergency fix for IE 0-day

Re: The reason it is still in use IMHO

Ewww.

This dongle enumerates as what, a USB Network interface? Then you take the dongle and plug it into the meter?

Could be an interesting hack!

Btw, what happens if you run out of funds and the meter turns off. How do you put more funds in it then?

ActiveX?!

I thought that died in 1997!

Why the hell is ActiveX even allowed AT ALL in a modern iteration of Internet Exploder?

If anyone is unfortunate/lazy enough to need such an abomination they should have to confirm exactly which HTTPS certificates are allowed to run it, a bit like what Java is doing.

Telstra scrambles to fix voice

Faulty wiretap, perhaps?

Maybe a certain black box has spewed out some blue smoke.

Chap unrolls 'USB condom' to protect against viruses

Rubbish!

Those who are saying this device fakes negotiation to grab power are (probably) wrong.

I'd bet it just shorts the two data lines together so the device thinks its plugged into a dumb wall charger and draws the full whack.

I could even claim prior art on this one myself - I modified my n900's USB cable to include a simple switch between the two data lines to short them. Now I can plug it into a PC to charge at full speed (albeit completely flaunting the USB spec), with the added advantage that this also prevents the data lines from being used if I plug the cable into anything untrusted.

Tencent offers 10TB of free cloud storage for all

Mobile required?

Has anyone managed to sign up for this yet?

I made an account, but when I try to get the free storage I get this:

Does not meet all the conditions for obtaining

Conditions for obtaining:

1 Log micro cloud phone 1.6 version

2 registered handsets are not involved in this activity

3 your QQ number is not involved in this activity

* If you are already logged in before the start of Mobile try to log in again after logging out

It would suggest they want me to install something on either an Android or iOS device.

Even if I had either of those, they can sod right off!

Microsoft Xbox One to be powered by ginormous system-on-chip

Maybe I'm just cynical..

This seems to me like an effort to foil the mod-chippers.

Putting it all on a SoC with custom silicon could make it pretty much unhackable..

I'm sure a lot of managers at Microsoft would love it to be a black box filled with epoxy and only ethernet in one end and HDMI out the other, with a couple of antennas inside for controllers etc.

If it weren't for the small issues of cooling, and those pesky soldiers in their disconnected army bases kicking up a fuss about always-on connectivity, they'd probably have done that already!

'Hand of Thief' banking Trojan reaches for Linux – for only $2K

Re: Problem with this idea...

Quite right. Basic Safe Surfing practice means you avoid the vast majority of malware. (I personally advise against antivirus software. It is more trouble than it's worth and tends to lull users into a false sense of security)

Mind you, there is a lot of malware that can get in via javascript exploits in browsers, and there are quite a few privelege escalation exploits running around.

Javascript remote code execution exploit + privelege escalation + rootkit = one pwned box, with no permission boxes to click through.

The most effective defence per unit of user inconvenience, IMO, is to turn off javascript by default (only for selected domains), using something like NoScript (or NotScripts in Chrome). It has an added bonus of blocking almost all adverts and invasive trackers, whilst leaving non-intrusive HTML-only adverts alone.

Re: will the Linux Trojan have the same value as its Windows counterparts?

Or even just install the vboxaddons package, say, on your physical machine, and it'll probably think it's a virtual machine anyway!

You still reading us? Not for long! Summer is THE IT meltdown hot spot

Servers don't like heat

In other news, cats discovered to dislike baths, the pope announces that he is in fact catholic.