* Posts by Black Betty

404 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Mar 2010

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Facebook quietly switches on facial recognition tech by default

Black Betty
FAIL

It's called Feeping Creaturism.

As processing power increases this will start being used to "autotag" first the rest of your own pictures, then your friends and vice versa, and ultimately every image held on FB servers.

"Find me in other people's pictures" | "Find all my friends" | "Who do I know?" | "Find this person" and more. All the wonderful (and double edged) uses for this kind of technology.

And it won't be long before other image/social networking services start doing the same thing.

Even if settings exist to hide "your name" from different classes of other users. That privacy won't extend to law enforcement (whether or not you have any relevant connection with their subject of interest), and with the privacy settings being constantly reset there will be plenty of opportunities for third party services (such as those who make a business of digging up dirt for employers) to create thier own "name maps" which will forever be independent of any privacy settings which might or might not be in effect at any given time.

In fact with the help of a comprehensive library of highschool yearbooks your privacy settings could very well not mean a fooking thing EVER.

If an episode of you "cutting up or loose" exists in cyberspace, this technology will ultimately out you. And the camera truly will have the power to take your soul.

This is why I avoid these "enhanced" image services like the plague and am very careful about what I put on even the basic services like photobucket.

Black Betty

Slight problem. Your "helpful" friends will vote you down.

The most basic of algorithms will include some sort of weighting system to maximise the probability that any given phiz is accurately tagged. Unless you make a huge effort to ensure multiple concurring false identifications your efforts will take you nowhere. And as the technology becomes more ubiquitous your chances of successful obfuscation become less and less remote.

RSA makes token offer to worried customers

Black Betty

One way query with only two possible returns.

Is this value correct for this token at this time? YES|NO

A huge proprortion of the security holes opening up as a result of making data accessible online is the all things to all comers nature of the internet.

Hack attacks on US could spark military action

Black Betty

Your dog. Your problem when it bites.

"Stand up or shut up." Hmm, how's that working out in the Middle East anyway? South America? SE Asia.

Over the last half century the US has killed millions who's basic crime was objecting to the presence of the US where it wasn't welcome.

Prior to that, the US killed millions of its OWN people, for daring to have the "wrong" skin colour, and for occupying land that people of the "right" skin colour wanted for themselves.

'Upgraded' Apple iMacs lock out hard drive replacement

Black Betty

Apple ][ perhaps? Loved mine.

Built my own boards, and my ROMS saw more of the barber than I did. (UV steriliser was free erasure)

Then came two abortions and the Mac. And I stuck with my ][s until the 386 showed up.

The hardware side was beyond me, but at least I could still do what I wanted to do, the way I wanted to do it.

BOFH: Every silver lining has a cloud

Black Betty

The "pain" of testicular surgery is for life.

The opportunuties to perform it on the truly deserving are too rare to waste on dicking around with artistry. Just get it right.

Is iPhone data collection legal?

Black Betty
FAIL

There is broadcast and broadcast.

What is shrieked out through a 100 KW transmitter is clearly meant to be heard.

What is whispered at 200 mW is just as clearly NOT meant for the entire world.

By your arguments, anything coming out of an old analogue phone is "broadcast" and legally subject to interception by anyone with the ability to "listen".

And as a matter of fact, when missuse of that "publically attainable" information is possible or likely, laws against consolidation, or very strong regulation covering the circumstances where consolidation is permitted are likely. Reverse phone/address books are an obvious example.

Black Betty
FAIL

Law enforcement trolling for crime.

The Dutch have already used Tom Tom data to set up speed traps in areas where road speeds were consistently high.

The police have apparently been using similar data lifted from phones for years, which may be acceptable in terms of proving or disproving an alibi. However, I believe such data has also been used to put people in the frame for crimes, where the police had no reason to suspect that individual until their phone ratted them out and put them at or near a crime scene at the time of the crime.

User data stolen in Sony PlayStation Network hack attack

Black Betty
FAIL

Given all the personal data, the CC is easy.

Assuming you are correct and encryption/hashes are used, the ONLY thing which might be beyond compromise is the account password itself.

But either way is doesn't really matter, because of the information richness of the material which WAS exposed. What of "secret questions and answers"? how are they protected? Are they protected at all?

With Name, Address, DOB,and all the other people readable identifiers, it would no great task convince the issuers to send replacement (or duplicate) cards directly to the hackers.

BOFH: People get annoyed when you try to debug them

Black Betty
Thumb Up

And it's a very Good Friday

Indeed

No, iPhone location tracking isn't harmless and here's why

Black Betty
FAIL

Then why hide your name, if ....

...you have nothing to hide?

There are any number of people, as mentioned in the article, who have a perfectly legitimate reason for others not to know where they are (even at the level of granularity the data is said to have).

Despite your obvious belief that an iPhone is a permanently grafted appendage, they may in fact on occasion travel entirely independently of their owner. It has inherrently far, far less believability as an alibi machine than it would as a silent accuser.

People are legitimately paranoid about unauthourised and secret data collection, because of the many ways it can be and is used against them. From using targeted advertising to get folk to overspend by 25% or so, to complete identity theft.

Fukushima fearmongers are stealing our Jetsons future

Black Betty

Coal tailing ARE TOXIC. Virtually ALL mine tailings are toxic.

The toxicity of most mine tailings (uranium included) is in the heavy metals made mobile by the extraction processes. And even though coal might produce only a minimal amount of overburden per ton of coal extracted, the sheer volume of coal removed from the ground is so large that the total quantity of tailings is very significant. Furthermore, once burnt, the mineral ash which remains contains considerable quantities of heavy metals.

Nor are coal's effects limited to those of mining, and it's solid wastes. Atmospheric pollution remains the real killer at an estimated 80,000 lives per year worldwide.

Total cycle, including Chernobyl as a datapoint, coal kills at least 1000 times as many people per year as uranium. Excluding Chernobyl (since it's like is never likely to happen again) the "true nuclear casualty rate" lies comfortably below that of idiots killing themselve falling off swivel chairs whilst changing light bulbs.

No go zones? I believe that the US federal standards for the cleanup of any site disturbed by human activity for "radiological purposes", mandate that background readings be reduced below an arbitrary nationally defined figure before the site can be declared fit for human use. Local norm be damned. Natural background radiation condemns much of that land simply because it once fell within the bounds of a Uranium mine lease which was worked.

The amount of radioactivity present, even in uranium tailings, really is a complete non issue. Take a look at the Soviet waste dump near the Mayak reactor and places like Faluja and to a lesser extent the Balkans where significant quantities of depleted uranium munitions were deployed? The symptomology in these locations is quite consistent with heavy metal poisoning. It is not particularly consistent with radiation poisoning.

Some Navaho (I think) indians WERE badly affected by drinking water which had accumulated in uranium mine pits. In these cases it was absolutely determined that the culprit was heavy metals and had little or nothing to do with any elevated levels of radiation.

This suggests to me, that it's only circumstances like the current Fukushima crisis, where volatile (and potentially bioactive) radioactives such as iodine and caesium are concentrated by a process akin to fractional distilation in the overheated reactors, that they present an appreciable radiolgical threat.

At other times, chemical/heavy metal toxicity would appear to be the primary biological issue, long before radiotoxicity reaches a worrisome level.

Black Betty

Hmm let me count the ways.

Solar = Huge quanties of extremely, and I mean Bhopal extremely, toxic solvents used in manufacture. Manageable when making Pentiums by the square metre. How manageable when manufacturing is to be measured in hundreds and thousands of square kilometres?

Also most solar implementations are roughly the equivalent of paving over a like area of ground in several ways. They are highly destructive to the ecosystem of the land they occupy, and they allow for virtually no other use of that land but power generation.

Wind = A very strong possibility that infrasound from turbines can have a measurable effect on the health of nearby inhabitants. The audible sounds of turbines isn't all that pleasant either. Aircraft warning lights are also very intrusive at night.

Wave = We have yet to successfully build something that the ocean can't smash economically. This problem may well manifest itself rather expensively when rogue waves start taking out offshore wind turbines too.

Geothermal = Fracking the ground. And moving the wells to different locations every decade or so.

None at this stage ubiquitous enough to determine a true cost.

Coal = An estimated 80,000 deaths per annum from respiratory illnessess. And a couple of thousand dead miners per year.

Gas = About the best all round "conventional" choice. Although I believe a more distributed delivery system is better than straight up replacing GW for GW. By delivering piped natural gas to all towns of a given size or above, the possibility of local power generation becomes more attractive. It is unfortunately still a greenhouse gas emmitter.

Nuke = Allowing Chernobyl (using figures from the pesimistic end of the casualty spectrum) and this incident, the civilian butcher's bill can be demonstrated to be approximately 1% of Coal's. Matched GW for GW that figure might climb as high as 5%. Now take Chernobyl out of the mix. Nothing about that event was typical and the number of such reactors remaining is small and will soon be zero.

WITH CHERNOBYL as a statistical data point. Nuclear power generation is far safer than air travel.

WITHOUT CHERNOBYL the civilan casualty rate that can be attributed to nuclear power generation is so small that it is litterally impossible to discern it from background noise. Nuclear workers on average are healthier, and suffer fewer cancers over their entire lifetimes than the general population. And the rate of non-nuclear industrial accidents is also well below that of any remotely comparable industry. It would not surprise me at all to learn that the reverse, the rate of radiological incidents in general industry far exceeds that of similar incidents in the nuclear industry.

IN THE WINGS: Thorium cycle liquid fuel reactors. Meltdown proof. Self regulating. No need for active control. Low waste and proliferation resistant. Can also "incinerate" existing waste and surplus bomb materials. Can't quite zero the waste, but can reduce it to something which only needs to remain canned for a couple of centuries or so.

AND Free Neutron beam sources. Can be used to build reactors with outputs as low as a few kilowatts, and physically small enough for like scale applications. Can burn any potential fuel, and what it can't burn it can "incinerate" with nothing more than an electrical input.

Carriers vs cops: Australia's spectrum conundrum

Black Betty

Let me count the ways.

Telescopic antena; Rubber ducky antena; Fractal antena; Antena in clothing; Vehicle mounted or luggable microcell using the VHF for a soild, terrain resistant link to civilisation.

TV antenae are as complex (and as large) as they are because they're designed to extract a good analog signal from the air and do it with no error correction.

Deleting 'innocent' DNA will cost £5m

Black Betty
Black Helicopters

IIRC the point of retention was FAMILIAL...

...matching. Sure there was some hope that a person of interest who proved innocent "this time" might be kind enough to leave a sample behind if he ever does offend.

However, that is small potatoes compared to the power of mining a comprehensive population wide sample of DNA. Even a relatively small sample would be enough to start getting direct hits on a parent, child, sibling or cousin. Once the number of samples has grown to a suitable representative size, it would soon become possible to say with some confidence: "We're looking for someone who's mother is a Kerry County O'Rourke and father is a Dun Edin McCleod." Which in turn requires a simple "hatches, catches and dispatches" lookup to resolve. Case closed.

Except with such a comprehensive database it would also be possible to frame up just about any member of the encompassing population simply by salting the scene with their DNA.

Big Brotherish enough thankyou that, even limiting the database to convicted criminals, still allows the "over the odds" apprehension of crime "families" with less than thorough police work.

Sympathetic (Voodoo) magic for real, where fingernail parings, hanks of hair, your blood and even your poop can be used to destroy you.

There is hopefully one silver lining. Technology is advancing at such a rate that spoofing advanced forensics like this is within reach of enough people, that conviction on forensics alone will hopefully soon assume a similar status to "only CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence" as it properly should.

BOFH: This buck's for you

Black Betty

That "nugget of wisdom" is offered in many places.

And unfortunately the truth is, you are almost invariably better off killing a person than maiming them in any situation where your intent is not malicious.

Another nugget from a serving police officer. When using a gun for self defence do two things: fire every bullet in the gun and loose your memory of the event.

A while back now a security guard was accosted just after she got into her car. Her assailant had her in a headlock through the window. She was able to reach her gun on the back seat and shot him.

IIRC she was slammed with a number of charges relating to using the gun when she was not authorised to do so and failing to secure it properly. And to really screw her over, her assailant was able to successfully sue her for compensation for his injuries.

Shocked mum muzzles foul-mouthed toy mutt

Black Betty

Um London, West End, Cockney, Chav, Shire.

Uppercrust Plum, at least three brogues. Shall I continue?

All quintesentially Brittish, and none within a bull's roar of each other.

Oz pair in blow-up sex doll whitewater ride

Black Betty

Victoria, big chunks of NSW and bits of SA are being flooded too.

But we still got a bit of drought happening over in Western Australia.

Primary school miss flashes porn vid at kiddies

Black Betty

Inneresting in'it. Kids got adults pegged to a "T".

Amused by what we find "upsetting" and upset at what we find "amusing".

When you think about it, rutting animals of any kind, can be imensely giggle worthy and human beings are no exception, particularly in some of the more "interesting" stock porn positions. Particularly from a child's POV where the most obvious thing is often the male's desperation. A big waggling willy flailing about is also considered high comedic art.

Though I beg to differ on simple violence. Kids like nothing more than a bit (read whacking great helping) of gratuitous (and preferably highly explosive) violence.

Where kids find issue is in the depths we adults will descend to, to justify the unjustifiable. How much harm (as opposed to just blowing shit up) we are willing to do for minimal gain.

Anonymous attacks PayPal in 'Operation Avenge Assange'

Black Betty

The difference is, personal anonymity works...

...with public conspiracy open to public scrutiny.

What is being fought is known people using the cloak of secrecy to get away with illegal activities right out in the open.

Wikileaks' DNS pulls plug, citing collateral DDoS damage

Black Betty
FAIL

Sadam Hussein was, like Al Quaida, a US creation.

When he signalled a certain independent ambition, he was deliberately set up for the Kuwait fiasco.

No one is calling him innocent. However, he WAS, if not a pawn, then a minor gamepiece sacrificed for a perceived advantage.

Fail because I'm getting cheesed off at people using diversion to cloud main issues,

Black Betty
FAIL

A pipeline ACROSS Afghanistan to bypass certain neighbours.

The recent "rediscovery" of certain strategic minerals may also have had something to do with that mess.

IIRC, Taliban actually offered to hand the US Osama's head on a platter and were rebuffed, because they were refusing to play ball on that pipeline and Osama gave the US a convenient excuse to try "diplomacy by other means".

You might want to note the "CIA working with locals" meme pops up a lot, often serially and usually with a lot of "nothing to see here" bloodshed involved.

Whether or not the handover offer was genuine, the pipleine is documented fact. Oil had plenty (if not everything) to do with it.

Horror AVG update ballsup bricks Windows 7

Black Betty

Bricked Vista (64) Utimate yesterday.

And my BIOS can't boot a G15, so fun, fun, fun finding a PS/2 keyboard.

And fun, fun, fun fixing all my game clients broken by System Restore.

Avast you get your chance to disappoint.

50m-year-old mystery space object doesn't look a day over 30

Black Betty

It would fry us long before direct tidal forces were an issue.

Radiation effects from infalling gasses would sterilise the planet long before gravity could cause harm by its effects alone.

A naked (gas free) black hole would have to approach within a smallish fraction of a light year to disrupt the outer solar system and closer still to affect Jupiter and the larger bodies inside its orbit. Not that we wouldn't have a sufficient plenitude of smaller rocks in abundance raining on our heads to deal with.

For it to have a directly tangible effect on human senses we'd have to come within a few hundred miles of the event horizon.

Hadron Collider switches to heavy ions, tinfoilers wet pants again

Black Betty

Um that would be 15 MILImetres. Not KM.

Neutron stars are considerably less dense that the hypothesised strange matter and they come in at only 10-12 km across.

Laptops heat up your balls

Black Betty
Paris Hilton

Long hot baths are a fairly decent male contraceptive.

However, since it's DEVELOPING wigglers affected by higher temps, the pipe need clearing. And the baths need to be a daily occurence. And of course there's also a chance a hardy little taddy migt make it. Still, for those who think Jebus is watching them, it's an option to add to coiutus interuptus and the rythm method and one that may well be more effective than either.

And yes, inquiring minds, your love spuds will work fine once you stop cooking them.

Paris coz.....

Vodafone secures email-flashing barn door

Black Betty

Think it was Vodaphone. Bloke here in Aus...

...started getting voice mails and texts intended for others. And not just one account's worth, but dozens'. He was getting invites to come and discus medical problems, car problems, anything and everthing.

Prosecutor won't resign over lewd texts to 'hot' crime victim

Black Betty
FAIL

Too bloody many people are allowed to resign.

With all privileges and accumulated bonuses.

"Resignation refused. See these two gentlemen? They will be escorting you to your desk... And oh dear, <click> i seem to have CCed the note to Personel to every female employee. Take care in the carpark. Have a NICE day."

Oz pedestrians fall to 'Death by iPod'

Black Betty
FAIL

Read the post. 2 demerits for loud IN CAR stereo.

And the reason is perfectly reasonable. If your in car stereo is loud enough to legally be considered noise pollution outside the nearly sound proof box which most modern vehicles are, the driver has absolutely no hope of hearing audible warning signals coming from outside.

As far as the penalty for a pedestrian using an MP3 player in traffic... well death is a bit harsh, but only because of the life sentence they hand their involuntary executioner.

On bike paths, I have had any number of these twits out jogging suddenly turn onto another path right under my front wheel, without so much as a backwards glance. As far as they're concerned, the law says they have right of way and it my responsibilty as the cyclist approaching from behind to avoid them, WHATEVER they do. It may well be my responsibility, but this can be considered official notice: henceforth, if as a result of their actions, I am given the choice between hitting them and a pile of rocks, I WILL choose them.

Earbuds attatched to an MP3 player are as effective as an icepick through the eardrums for creating situational deafness. Almost certainly worse actually, since music is very, very good at grabbing a listeners attention (and focus), while silence at least forces a person to pay more attention to their other senses. You only have to watch the head and hands, when the rest of them is not in motion, to see how much of these people's attention is on the music and how much is on those unimportant things like trains, busses, ambualnces and uncovered mineshafts.

Even a single earbud is potentially dangerous in a high risk environment, since it effectively deafens the wearer on that side.

As for your "well *I* can multi-task" argument... Well, If you print it on nice soft paper, I will give it the same deserving attention I give to like arguments about using cellphones, applying makup, route planning, catching up on the news, eating, etc. while driving.

____________________________

The human mind can not multi-task.

What we can do with some training, and considerable practice, is delegate repetetive and rigorous rule based tasks to the same non-thinking part of the brain which takes care of walking and not shitting one's pants.

The human mind, can to a limited degree timeslice, but every extra activity requiring active conscious focus demands a certain amount of cognitive overhead (stackspace), more tasks = more overheads and greater cognitive hit each task takes. Furthermore, in the event of an emergency, when full focus is required, it takes time to let go all that "cerebral housekeeping" and focus all that scattered brainpower to go to work on the one task. A bit like real mode switching on a 286 really.

VW to eliminate worst road hazard: drivers

Black Betty

I disagree. There are many of us who prefer...

...(or would prefer given more options) not to have to devote a great deal of effort to learning the skill as it should be learned.

The whole transport issue needs a multiprong approach. Among other things a simple solution to the problem of where to put the high speed rail seems to me to place it on elevated tracks along the median strips of superhighways.

I doubt there will be such a thing as a fully autonomous vehicle any time soon. Instead there will be controlled and uncontrolled roads. And manual only vehicles will not be permitted on controlled roads.

Black Betty

I did 450 km/week from age 13 to 21.

And commuted (rail or car) over 1000/week for a couple of years living north of Sydney.

Such distances and much more are not uncommon.

Boffin-botherer's LHC doomsday case thrown out on appeal

Black Betty

Dissmissed without predjudice.

Not the same as an aquittal. Which would bring the 5th into play.

Want to use WD diagnostics? Buy Windows

Black Betty

Yes and no. Simple enough to use Ghost...

...or similar to ensure a machine starts clean and in a known state each time.

And I'm sure there is some kind of hack to the Windows hibernate function that allows booting from a saved image.

UK Skylon spaceplane set for engine test in '3-4 years'

Black Betty
Boffin

Not exactly how orbital mechanics work mate.

In orbit you slow down to move inwards and speed up and speed up to move outwards and slow down.

Assuming we stick with the simplest most fuel efficient orbital changes and circular orbits, a manouevering sattelite's "speed" at any given height relative to sattelites (moving in the same direction) in stable orbits at that same height is negligible.

That of course assumes constant acceleration/deceleration for the entire journey. Since that's not how rockets work and most of the acceleration and deceleration takes place at the beginning and end of the journey, there can in fact be a fair bit of diference in velocity along the way with respect to freely orbiting objects at any given height. That's what collision avoidance is for.

However the problem you envisiage is a non-starter. At the begining and end of the trip, the SUS and Skylon will come together with all the violence of a butterfly's kiss.

Dell warns on spyware infected server motherboards

Black Betty

The one place we wan't bloatware.

In firmware. Flash enabled firmware should fill every available byte of storage with working code even if it's just padding initialisation and other low frequency modules with interspersed no-op instructions. Leave no room for malware.

As for how it happened? How did it happen with those digital photo frames? How does it happen with tradeshow give aways? How does it happen with CDs and DVDs?

Some twat dropped the malware into a master image somewhere and boards got infected.

1984's MacPaint source code hits web

Black Betty
Unhappy

read again. 0.05 = 1/20 meg. (50k)

And the same 128k of memory as the Amstrad. Which cut its own throat with a "unique" disk format.

Now fun was squeezing an entire snake game into 2 lines of Apple Basic.

Australia unbans the internet

Black Betty
Joke

No one cares about Tassie itself.

But the 'Map of Tassie' is of great interest to us blokes.

Apple patent seeks to reinvent retail

Black Betty

Well for me it was about 2 seconds after "iPoo",

which was about 2 seconds after the release of the afforementioned product.

This Apple fanboi jumped ship after the //c when he figured out which way the wind was blowing.

The ONLY proprietary hardware I ever had time for was the Vax 11 series. (Fell in love with the totally orthogonal assembly language.)

Venus home to lost cities left by long-dead aliens, says ESA

Black Betty

No plate techtonics. No binding atmospheric CO2...

...in the rocks. Past a certain point any CO2 bound up in rock bakes out and it's all over red rover.

New prototype US spy satellite rushed into active use

Black Betty

Re: Calibration.

Half art, half science. Nitrogen compound abundance is always a good place to start. High concentrations over a wide confined area, think livestock. Very high concentration in a small area against a barrier, think people (men peeing up against something or an oubliet outlet). Allong a road, think explosives.

Minerals/compounds in soil will have an effect on overlying vegetation subtly affecting its spectrum. Including some explosives (though this is of more use finding old disintegrating munitions).

Disturbed soil will have it's own signature (or set of signature) effects on the normal spectrum of undisturdbed soils. Weathered rocks vs recently exposed will make its mark.

A meth lab in a town will add its own special localised overlay to the petrochemical fog.

It won't be any one thing in most cases, it will be an overlay of multiple spectral signatures adding up to a probable conclusion.

$11m jackpot just a 'reset' message, says casino

Black Betty

Penny slots are never going to pay the same as dollar.

Shrapnel machines are never going to pay out big, certainly not if playing minimum credits.

Huge payouts on such machines is sure sign of an error. Greedy casinos use the letter of the law to refuse any payout at all. Smart ones pay the normal jackpot for that machine and get it serviced.

German boffins develop sharkskin paint for ships, planes

Black Betty

Not super slick. Rougher than poppy's kisses.

Sharkskin ppls.

1. Yes you could. Insects, dirt and avian messages from above would affect peformance over time if not cleaned up, but even a very dirty car would still retain some benefit as it is airflow over the entire vehicle that matters, not just the part where it meets the wind and collects bug's bums.

Golfball dimples also work remarkably well.

2. Too smooth a surface has different own problems. Air flows nicely over a smooth surface, but does tend to stick like sh*t to a blanket when the time comes to let go. The easiest way to visualise the idea behind dimples or denticles is to think of each dimple, being filled with a tiny ball of air. Airflow over that surface is then a nearly frictionless air-air interface. Pressure effects still apply, but there is no "grab".

Google halts deletion of Street View Wi-Fi data

Black Betty
Big Brother

There is such a thing as "Reasonable expectation of privacy"

Indeed poor security is a problem which leaves people open for exploitation. And leaving the door open is an invitation to theft. However theft remains theft and will be prosecuted as such.

Laws exist to (some degree at least) protect an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy. And as a general rule of thumb, a violation is defined as requiring a special effort on the part of a covert observer to gain access.

Thus yes I ACCEPT that in the middle of a crowd, my conversation can be overheard by those around me. However, I also EXPECT that there is no one covertly recording conversations in the crowd with the idea of trawling through those conversations later looking for useful nuggets of information.

Whatever Google's intentions, (and I am at least a little suspiscious of a story which has someone including a feature which was specifically excluded from the end user's wish list) the problem is that that data is a gold mine for those with a Stasi like mindset. Somewhere in all that random chatter will be evidence of crime, enough crime to help reinforce the idea that you can never know for sure when BB is watching.

Apply the above to one very important fact. Disidence is always a crime in the eyes of the establishment.

FB is a somewhat different amimal in as much as users voluntarily and knowingly allow access to private information to others. On the other hand, users were made certain promises that have subsequently been broken in the spirit, if not the letter of the law.

Mucky private chat could be illegal soon

Black Betty
Thumb Down

Can you imagine the likes of Glen Beck...

...Rush Limpballs, or even your average British Tabloid alowed to say as they pleased on any and every little snippet of an ongoing trial, both in an out of context.

Let's take a non-practicing perve, found in possession some of the more extreme doujinshi out there, and being charged under the OPA. He defends himself with the assertion that the only thing he takes from children is their smiles. Those with an agenda or axe to grind report this as he admits to stealing their innocence.

This is why the press is not permitted to speculate on nuances of an ongoing trial/name names/show faces/etc. Why the word alleged gets bandied about until we joke and then bitch about its overuse. And why even entire transcripts themselves might be suppressed. Unless the procedure is changed to totally isolate jurors for the duration of a trial, the best we can do is mandate a minimum degree of censorship that minimises the exposure of jurors to trial matters outside the courtroom.

Satisfying our taste for salacious gossip is a damned poor reason for needing to know right now, when every single relevant detail will ultimately be made available in most cases.

Exploding-battery epidemic caused by 'lithium moss'

Black Betty

Sounds like the tin whiskers that can plague...

...lead free solders. And why aircraft manfacturers resolder lead free circuit boards with good old 60/40 before installing them.

These wiskers can reach lengths in the tens of centimetres and cause either spurious signals in the equipment, or sometimes shorts and fires.

Reverse-engineering artist busts face detection tech

Black Betty

Facial recognition to pull bad guys out of a crowd...

...is, for the moment at least, rubbish. A way to extract cash from wannabe Big Brothers.

But for one of its originally intended purposes its not too shabby at all.

Take single piccy of unknown miscreant from security footage. Compare said piccy to huge database of known miscreants (or even of liscence photos) and extract small subset of close matches. Hand off to a real person to make a final comparison.

If /when the technology ever advanced to the point where it can name/label every individual in a crowd, defeating it would still be as simple as injecting an irritant such as bee venom into the eyelids/lips/nose to create swelling

'Beauty with antimatter bottom' created out of pure energy

Black Betty
Joke

I'm getting a hadron just thinking about this.

And a bottom like that should definitely be lepton.

Software engineer demands source of his speeding collar

Black Betty
FAIL

Not a tax on drivers. Tax on stupidity.

Every now and then I see editorials or LTEs complaining about receiving 10-20 speeding tickets in the mail at the end of the month as a result of speeding past a fixed, sign posted camera. Cameras that trigger their flash unit night AND day.

What this tells me is that these people are complete and utter obliviots. They've driven the same route to work day in day out for so long that they are on autopilot and almost completely unaware of their surroundings on a conscious level.

Expedition to seek out 'alien' ocean-abyss life sets sail

Black Betty

Indeed, however the more water that's piled on top...

...the higher the temperature the water at the bottom can achieve before becoming steam.

Argos buries unencrypted credit card data in email receipts

Black Betty

largely irrelevant.

grep "argos" /etc/mailstore (or whatever) will provide plenty of grist for the cloners.

Plenty people & businesses keep their mail serverside particularly if there's a legal need for archiving.

The ONLY secure fix to this mnoumental cockup is to issue every single one of Argos' customers a new card.

The ijit who thunk this up needs to be introduced to the rough end of a very large pineapple.

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