Posts by jaduncan

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

Re: long-term Windows users are used to this and will barely notice

You could do worse than an M1 Apple - Asahi Linux is coming along and will soon be a Fedora spin.

Cloud, internet biz will take a Yellowhammer to the head in 'worst case' no-deal Brexit

Re: What's in a name?

> In that case I argue it would be undemocratic to hold an election, the Prime Minister should be voted for once and the next election held after they die.

It is the Will Of the People that that PM is PM, and by the new gods and the old, death will not disbar them. People knew they were voting for an eventually dead person all along.

Super-crook admits he nicked $122m from Facebook, Google by sending staff fake invoices for tech kit

Re: "But he failed to quit while he was ahead"

Survivor bias means you can't really tell - how would you track the amount of people that got away with unknown crimes?

Trust the public cloud Big Three to make non-volatile storage volatile

Re: Tried it and...

Absent a CVE submission, you should think up more believable lies.

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

Re: Yay landfill!

In fairness, to mitigate signal issues you can use offline maps from various vendors. OSMAnd or Maps.me are particularly handy, but in a pinch there's HERE if you have the processing power.

Online maps are at best a so-so technology choice if you are going into the wilderness (as are electronic maps without a backup in general) but there are alternatives.

Court orders moribund ZX Spectrum reboot firm's directors to stump up £38k legal costs bill

Re: "...Current And Former Directors Owe £38,000..."

On looking, David Neil Laurence Levy is the only current named director but the shares are still split with 250 each for Andrews, Smith, Levy, and SINCLAIR RESEARCH LTD.

Alphabet board smacked with sueball for paying off Google execs accused of sexual harassment

Re: PR stunt

Quite aside from your misunderstanding of the case, are you under the impression that leaving a company means that there is no legal accountability for one's actions at the company? I mean, it's a fascinating theory. Utterly incorrect, but fascinating.

Peak Apple: This time it's SERIOUS, Tim

Re: RE: Charlie Clark

Or Samsung could (and in that situation, should) just take AOSP and make things based on that.

Re: Too late

3000 words is not a great deal for a legal document.

Oracle's in-house lawyer denied access to Uncle Sam's procurement docs in JEDI legal battle

Re: $10bn cloud contract

I am going to give you a tip here: the word 'hosting' is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

Google Play Store spews malware onto 9 million 'Droids

Re: wait a sec

Yeah, the ongoing risk that they'll find an 0-day to root your phone with. You know that the app makers are scum already, there's absolutely no chance they are above malicious code.

Suunto settles scary scuba screwup for $50m: 'Faulty' dive computer hardware and software put explorers in peril

> Pay Again, Dive In-between

Hmm, that doesn't quite work. Pay Always, Dive Infrequently?

Brit boffins build 'quantum compass'... say goodbye to those old GPS gizmos, possibly

Re: An Achillies heel?

This kind of thing is literally what RTOSes are made for.

Xiaomi anarchy in the UK: Chinese tat-flinger wants to slip its cheapo flagships in Brit pockets

F1s are on Amazon

Pocophone did a soft launch on Amazon - the phones are being released on the 10th. See https://amzn.to/2Oyn99Z.

Sure, Europe. Here's our Android suite without Search, Chrome apps. Now pay the Google tax

Re: Google is far better than apple

"Google created a product, in your mind better, that also doesn't let you do certain things, like disable google play services let alone delete it."

I'm perfectly free to install an AOSP build without GPS in any form. Unlocking that on any Pixel takes one line of code.

UKIP flogs latex love gloves: Because Brexit means Brexit

Re: 51.89% vs 48.11%

Literally nothing is ultra vires for Parliament under English law, that's the central concept of Parliamentary sovereignty. If you have no legal training (and you obviously do not) you should probably not attempt to use legal terminology in some kind of cargo cult impression of any understanding at all.

Bloke hurls sueball over Google's 'is it off yet?' location data slurping

Re: 'One is IM and one is email. I'd probably suggest just using ProtonMail'

It's an email webmail client with a JS wrapper around GPG. It recently passed a security audit.

It's email, so you don't need the other parties to use it, although if you want encrypted comms they have to use GPG either via Protonmail or somewhere else (including their own desktop GPG install). So it's much more fitting into the gmail use case, just without scanning.

And yes, you can get plane tickets etc to it.

Re: Popcorn ready but EU/Cali Privacy-Laws face uphill battle

"Swap Gmail for Signal"

One is IM and one is email. I'd probably suggest just using ProtonMail.

UK.gov to tech industry: Hands up who can help cut teachers' admin

A raspberry pi in a metal case should be insanely robust. No moving parts.

Telegram crypto-chat chap says Apple has 'restricted' its app updates worldwide

Apple: Do be Evil

Well, it took a while but at this point they have undeniably become the Big Brother on the screen. Being a lickspittle for dictatorships is little better than administrating one.

'Facebook takes data from my phone – but I don't have an account!'

Re: host file?

You don't have to be root to modify DNS66, it works via a local VPN.

Microsoft, Google: We've found a fourth data-leaking Meltdown-Spectre CPU hole

Re: Its quite depressing really

In this context encryption outside of the CPU doesn't really matter; the compromised processor is the thing that must touch decrypted data to, well, process it.

Cambridge Analytica CEO suspended – and that's not even the worst news for them today

Re: Corbyn in 2017

You should probably

a) bother to spell Labour right;

b) note the continued 101-year existence of the Co-operative Party within the Labour party;

c) in no way present yourself as having knowledge of UK politics.

Linux Foundation backs new ‘ACRN’ hypervisor for embedded and IoT

Excellent.

When I think of high quality process isolation, I think of Intel.

It took us less than 30 seconds to find banned 'deepfake' AI smut on the internet

Re: Scope Creep

"Amongst the methods is analysis of the background electricity hum, something that cannot be faked and cannot be spliced"

If you have the data to verify it you can remove and fake it. It must be a predictable waveform to be tested.

Firefox to emit ‘occasional sponsored story’ in ads test

Re: Bye Bye

You want the Firefox ESR version, since that is pre-Quantum and actually gets security updates.

UK's Just Eat faces probe after woman tweets chat-up texts from 'delivery guy'

Just Eat can just have an automated number that the restaurant can call before typing a auth code. That number can then connect the call. There really is no need to pass along the number at all.

Phone fatigue takes hold: SIM-onlys now top UK market

Re: Peak phone has been reached, that's why...

The latest is 8.0, though (and very soon to be 8.1).

Overdraft-fiddling hackers cost banks in Eastern Europe $100m

Re: Maybe

That was a CIA op.

Microsoft's foray into phones was a bumbling, half-hearted fiasco, and Nadella always knew it

Re: Awwww shut up and quit your whining.

In fairness, it does rather appear that Snap have gone on to quite some level of success...unlike Windows Phone.

Facebook let advertisers target 'Jew-haters'

Re: How about some balance?

I doubt all that much; let's face it, those people were locked in Leave voters.

Sofa-jockeys given crack at virtual Formula 1 world championship

Re: Will last until someone cheats by using a bot

It's in person. They don't control the hardware.

Kid found a way to travel for free in Budapest. He filed a bug report. And was promptly arrested

Without putting through the order it's impossible to know if the backend checks; without that he'd merely have demonstrated that Chrome does indeed allow one to edit delivered website code.

I question your understanding of the bug.

UK and Ecuador working on Assange escape mechanism

Is the Daily Mail website closed for the day?

UK gov draws driverless car test zone around M40 corridor

Re: "that buyers of driverless cars"

Want to make a bet?

Google to Chrome-plate our shops with creepy mood-sensing AI signs

Re: Turn your damn phone off!

Two words if you care that much: removable battery.

Tails Linux farewells 32-bit processors with imminent version 3.0

Re: Sad to lose old hardware

The press release regarding Chrome specifically states that "we intend to continue supporting the 32-bit build configurations on Linux to support building Chromium". Reading between the lines, you probably won't get more Pepper Flash releases and also no more Widevine, but will get a browser. Not such a big loss for most Chrome apps.

Felted! AI poker bot Libratus cleans out pros in grueling tournament, smugly trousers $1.8m

"Building a poker bot as good as Libratus is also a major task, as it requires a healthy sized supercomputer. Libratus probably won’t be playing anyone online anytime soon, as it costs too much to run."

Paging Dr. Moore. Dr Moore to the white VOIP enabled computer.

Trump's cyber-guru Giuliani runs ancient 'easily hackable website'

The real issue

Someone with that little clue is very easy to manipulate, and the FBI/CIA/NSA have a very definite list of what they want. He's already authoritarian, so I doubt this is going to go well with regard to civil and digital liberties.

Fake History Alert: Sorry BBC, but Apple really did invent the iPhone

Ironically, neither party mentions LG.

Chinese boffins: We're testing an 'impossible' EM Drive IN SPAAAACE

Re: Some people think it sounds crazy, some don't

"wily orientals"

FFS.

Heard of Brexit? The UK vows to join Europe’s Patent Titanic

Re: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"

Given that the character saying it was suggesting steps towards establishing an autocracy, it suggests that you, the article author, and many others have rather missed the point.

EU turns screws on Android – report

The claim that this is attached to Android itself isn't actually true, the bundling requirements attach to the Play apps. Manufacturers can and do run Android without them - Amazon in particular, but many Chinese manufactures do just fine whilst having Baidu search and apps bundled instead.

'I'm sorry, your lift has had a problem and had to shut down'

For the love of all that is holy, please don't have strobing animations in the sidebar like the one used to advertise this.

a) Some readers will be epileptic;

b) for those that aren't (such as me) rapidly flashing stuff is distracting and annoying in exactly the same way as spammy adverts that do that are.

Google's brand new OS could replace Android

Re: Open Sourced or Binary Blob?

TIL that the Linux kernel is crippleware.

*Shakes head*

Windows 10 still free, even the Anniversary Update, if you're crass

Missing option in survey

* Yes, I require/use assistive technologies.

Hurrah for unintentional ableism!

No more Nookie for Blighty as Barnes & Noble pulls out

...and you bought in again?

All-American Apple challenges US gov call for iOS 'backdoor'

Re: Authority V Liberty

"And it is not just conceivable but likely that within 10-20 years, we will have technology capable of ferreting that information out of any head."

Heh. You're very much overrating the state of neuroscience.

Rooting and modding a Windows Phone is now child's play

Re: Warning: Actual Windows phone owner here

"because of it's security and sandboxing"

Which, of course, has been breached five ways from Sunday by the above software. This would suggest that the device was not all that secure.

Top FBI lawyer: You win, we've given up on encryption backdoors

9/11 involved entire floors of banking staff being hit. It's NYC office space; I don't know why you'd expect there not to be banking tenants.