Posts by JimmyPage 3223 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2010
is he ?
Why not sue the Highways agencies, for enabling criminals to move around ?
Or Southern Rail for the same (no, scratch that).
I really don't want criminal law to become "we'll charge the people we can catch" rather than "we'll charge the people responsible"
When you are looking for a needle in a haystack, the old-school real-world approach was top reduce the size of the haystack, not increase it exponentially. Which is exactly what this strategy is.
I have been suggesting for years now, that a good use of GCHQ resources would be to write bots to make phishing completely worthless by generating billions of useless login details.
>>>>> 8. The battery is fairly new.
>>>>
>>>> And fucked. Buy a new battery.
>>>
>>> You might be right, but is that the only way you're able to express
>>> yourself?
>>
>> Oh, dear, has the nasty man used a word you don't approve of? Well,
>> tough
>> titty.
>>
>
> You know, there was a time in this country - not a million years ago -
> when certain things were not said, and certain words were not used, in
> general social situations. That has changed, and now this sort of gutter
> language pervades almost all aspects of life. It hasn't improved
> anything, quite the reverse, and all it demonstrates is the inability of
> certain types to respect the language and other people.
History says otherwise
"What the fuck was that?" Mayor of Hiroshima
"Where did all these fucking Indians come from?" General Custer
"Where the fuck is all this water coming from?" Captain of the Titanic
"Thats not a real fucking gun." John Lennon
"Who's gonna fucking find out?" Richard Nixon
"Heads are going to fucking roll." Anne Boleyn
"Let the fucking woman drive." Commander of Space Shuttle "Challenger"
"What fucking map?" Mark Thatcher
"Any fucking idiot could understand that." Albert Einstein
"How the fuck did you work that out?" Pythagoras
"You want what on the fucking ceiling?" Michaelangelo
"Fuck a duck." Walt Disney
"Why?- Because its fucking there!" Edmund Hilary
"I don't suppose its gonna fucking rain?" Joan of Arc
"Scattered fucking showers my ass." Noah
"I need this parade like I need a fucking hole in my head." John F.
Kennedy
it's a good start to capture that otherwise useless (because of it's unreliability) "renewable" energy. (looks at wind farms).
Surely the best way to store hydrogen is .... as hydrocarbons. You know. Like nature does.
Where's that too-cheap-to-meter energy we were promised in the 70s (or was it 80s. Or 90s ????)
Whilst I get your sentiments, it's a shame it'll be the coalface staff that suffer, not their shitlord bosses.
As your Maplins, Comets, (and soon to follow) PCWorld/Dixons/CPW all go, leaving the internet as the prime tech supplier, I have a nasty feeling that general IT literacy in the UK (which, let's face it, is hardly starting from a high point) will simply sink further.
Which is a tragedy, when you consider that for a brief sneeze of time - BBC Micro and compulsory computing in schools - we had the US shitting their pants.
Don't confuse retail products with technology.
The building blocks for a smartphone were laid in the *early* 80s (if not 70s). GSM radio handsets, programmable calculators. Incredibly rudimentary, but jam them together and - voila - a proto "smartphone". Makes calls, runs "apps" and can be ported fairly easily.
Maybe Apples problem is they are now run by a bunch of hipsters who think everything was invented in the 21st century >>>>
Smartphones - like everything else invented in the 1980s - are now a mature market.
That means those that need already have.
Those that want can get an entry level model (either a noname, or a pre-owned one, if "second hand" is too declasse).
So any new devices are either replacements due to failure/damage, or a network-pushed upgrade (at no upfront cost).
All else is unicorn droppings.
Also, objectively, there's nothing you can do with a new smartphone that you can't do with a two year old one. Or (to put it another way) there's nothing in the last two years that requires an upgrade.
That's £100,000 of top-level research for you there.
reminiscent of the D-Day crossword scare.
On a related note, did anyone watch the documentary on Britains H-Bomb ?? I was intrigued to see that even the crew were no allowed to see the actual bomb itself. It was loaded behind curtains while they were in the plane.
So what was so secret about the shape ???
Totally useless *for me* as I have a requirement that I know what the speed limit of the road I'm on is displayed.
HERE Maps does this beautifully (If they could have a setting to start in "Driving Mode" it would be perfect).
Despite many calls for Google Maps to have the same (we are talking years, if you dwell on the Google Product forums as I do) it's just not happening.
Shame, as actually, Googles Maps "driving screen" is nicely laid out.
You can get 3rd party "apps" that claim to overlay the speed limit for you. But even after registering on all kinds of open source geodata sites, that's a day of my life I will never get back.
That said, I suspect some of Googles inertia is simply waiting for more Android Auto equipped cars.
I'm getting to a 1/2 strike rate now with searches some days.
If Google really wants to make more money, they could offer a paid-for service that dumps anything advertised, and anything engineered to reach top (SEO shit).
Then they could invest that money into proper AI (not the shit they're serving at the moment) so that natural language queries are really and exactly that.
Because despite what they may say, they are still just keyword matching on steroids.
Is there any research (or any point into researching) using some sort of balloon to do the heavy lifting to 100Km, and then launching a rocket from that altitude ?
It's a question, not a suggestion.
If we can get a relatively cheap reliable way to get things into LEO, there's the possibility of building factories or really big moon/mars landers ?
In theory, you could build an entire moonbase in orbit, and gently drop it onto the moon, ready for habitation ?
Not being au fait with the science, how easy would it be to rig up a true conveyor (think paternoster lifts) between earth and a point in LEO. Mechanical stress issues about obviously. But you'd think that the descending weightpretty much matching the ascending weight would mean quite low energy to get a lot of stuff up there.
I recall Arthur C. Clarke seriously proposed a space elevator ... and he was worth listening to.
Er .... I wouldn't want to test that standing behind it, as a pilot once said.
That sentence is missing a "Should", and I can well believe that some combo amps have been built down to a price and someone said "100W speaker ?, No one will notice if we use a 50W."
Especially as some guitarists might think the resultant distortion is "pretty groovy".
what else could be uncovered with a little basic kit.
It's been many years since I worked in a lab, but a few logic analysers, protocol analysers, and oscilloscopes ...
Here's an El Reg challenge: what tools would *you* equip your exploit research lab with ?
It's much more likely there are more exploits than there aren't, I'd wager.
Oh Yes !! Please in my lifetime.
I know farmers will moan (not that we'd notice), but even if we lose a few sheep, it would be worth it.
Personally, I strongly suspect we'd hardly ever see them. They are very intelligent animals, and would quickly work out the best way to avoid mankind is to not eat our sheep.
Besides, the UK is drowning in deer (no natural predators).
Did anyone watch the BBC programme a few years ago about the amazing effect introducing wolves to Yellowstone had on the landscape ? Stopped flooding within a couple of years ....
came back "dog". Anything else is a waste of (your) money.
There was an (as usual) excellent Infinite Monkey Cage recently where they explained why race is a nonsense (apparently "species" is starting to look a bit flaky). And how these "ancestry DNA" tests are a load of old codswallop the moment they stray beyond "human".
Looks like it's still available for download
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06ybg84
I urge anyone who is interested to listen - it will reinforce any decision you've made to ignore those "ethnic origin" boxes on forms.
I'm pretty sure my understanding of DevOps isn't that it means "no testing" or indeed "no test platform".
I thought DevOps was basically an automated integration of the release process from development to deployment. Admittedly when you boil it down to that, it rather loses it's cutting-edge sexiness.
Did they ever find that bloke who was shouting his mouth off on TV seconds after Jean Charles de Menezes head was reduced to nothing.
For those that can remember he claimed to have "seen" the whole thing. Only unfortunately for his paymasters, everything he saw was later proved to be wrong in every respect.
But, job done. Most people still believe his version.
And communications aren't identical.
Did anyone catch the R4 brief documentary on "number stations" ? (Wiki it). A perfect unbreakable non-digital communication system where you have no idea where - or who the recipients are.
Meanwhile, back on USENET, bad actors might - even as I type - be breaking up encrypted messages, posting them in binary newsgroups where only those that know where and what to look for can find them.
Elsewhere, there's a webcam pointing at a stretch of road. Did anyone notice the curtains in one of teh flats being open sometimes, closed at others ? Basic morse code to the watchers in Russia ?
My concern over the fascination the powers that be have with digital encryption is that it gives the impression that 99% of baddies use it, and we can ignore anything else. With the obvious point that you only ever know about faulty implementations anyway. A truely perfect system is not only unbreakable. It's also undetectable.
Did you *really* think there was that much of an appetite for cat videos ? Of course not. Did you know that no two cat videos - even with the same filename - are identical ? (I made that up, but the idea that GCHQ now have to go through every single cat video on the internet and hash it just in case amuses me ....)
(Here's the first)
is no contracts. For some reason both Mrs Page and I have managed to not break, lose or outgrow our phones for over 2 years. So £10/month Tesco and £25/month GiffGaff (two SIMs one data, one vox) suit us fine. Being old farts we've never exceeded the minutes and texts, and with free WiFi out and about (in cities) data either.
I'm guessing we're sort of headed where most folk are. And we are looking in our rear view mirror and seeing the Telcos ....
the number of "apps" you will need to access content will explode ...
Virgin have shown the way. You used to be able to program your Tivo via the web. Then they got all pissy about doing it from Chrome. Finally you can't do it at all unless you (wait for it) "download our app".
Hopefully enough punters will say "fuck that, my phones already running 100 apps ...." and we'll see a change.
but my bar for actually investing time and effort into anything has been climbing for a while.
I am not ignorant of the privacy issues, regulatory concerns, and data protection issues. But at some point I find myself saying "but does it really matter ?"
On the scale of things I am going to invest my last few remaining breaths on this planet on, Facebooks abuse of 2FA is far below (for example) poverty, social inequality, the future for my children, and how often my bins get emptied.
The only reason I am commenting here is that I believe even a flaky spammy 2FA solution is light years ahead of no 2FA solution, and that it's probably the next step after not reusing passwords to go up a level of security. Personally I think an app-linked 2FA is probably the right level ... Authy, Google Authenticator etc etc.
Which is the main reason why the Page households standing order for mobiles is "Network Free". Instigated after the last mobile from Tesco had 5 un-uninstallable (and un-deactivatable) apps guzzling memory, power, and data. I had to root the phone AND install a custom ROM to remove them (obviously invalidating warranty).
So now it's Amazon/eBay for unlocked, and un crufted phones. Not that we've needed one since 2015 - nothing new we need (just in case anyone feels like writing a "Phone sales to soar" piece).
Fuck PINs. What we needs is a password standard ...
minimum/maximum length
defined character set
defined complexity modifiers (numbers, punctuation, case)
storage mechanism (hashed)
recovery protocol (hashed URL with time limits and supplementary challenge)
would be a good starting point.
I've booked 2035 off, to read the first draft.
Oh yes, the "app". Forget delivering content on a platform like HTML5 which can be rendered in a brwser of your choice on a device of your choice (including Windows Mobile). Instead we get the punter to install a well-written, carefully coded, guaranteed bugfree, no tracking or privacy issues "app".
Well, we could. But instead here's some shit that was cobbled together on a half term weekend between someones "in IT" nephew, and a bunch of people half the globe away that was only ever tested on the marketing managers iPhone for 30 seconds.
Sorry, if I need your "app" to do something than can be done via a website, you need to be selling something very special.
I winced in sympathy there ...
Funnily enough, one outcome of all of this is that local unsponsored news sources - FB pages, Twitter etc - suddenly become more important reinforcing the notion of "community".
Although whenever a politician uses the word "community" I can't help but feel it's a contraction of "potential customers" ...
You've earned one of these ->
this weird dynamic stalemate that ad-slingers and ad-blockers has morphed into some weird alternate universe where the elephant in the room: that nobody wants adverts is ignored.
I'd pay £<x> a month to not get ads. Anywhere.
Amazon and Netflix have twigged, whilst Sky et al seem to be stuck in the 1980s where people pay a premium and get ads.
Especially in a professional context, I could see an ad-free (no sponsored results, no SEO engineered cruft) Google subscription going down well commercially. After all, most searches are horribly inefficient and getting worse.
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