Posts by simonb_london

Google to bake COVID-19 vaccine passport support into Android with Passes API update

Just what we always wanted. Not.

We're not saying this is how SolarWinds was backdoored, but its FTP password 'leaked on GitHub in plaintext'

"The Washington Post reports that unnamed sources believe..."

Hold the press! We've found some guy who "believes" it was the Russians!

PC makers warn of battle for air freight capacity, will have to fight for cargo space with... the COVID-19 vaccine

Wow, I had no idea this vaccine was so popular!

India to run optic fibre to 450,000 villages in 1,000 days and give 1.3bn a digital Health ID

Re: For health reasons ?

Think of all the wonderful things a Health ID, either giving bad news or by not having one, could stop you doing!

Two COVID tests, five-day quarantine, limited expense account abuse opportunities: Taiwan sets new rules for business travel

The first virus in history to be managed by committee.

India says 'Zoom is a not a safe platform' and bans government users

Jitsi?

Open source and you can run your own server. Would that help? Just a thought would be interested to hear other opinions on this.

From Brit telly presenter Eamonn Holmes to burning 5G towers in the Netherlands: Stupid week turns into stupid fortnight for radio standard

Anyone know where I can get my hands on a portable 100GHz spectrum analyser and a calibrated antenna for it? I can only find up to 6GHz so far.

I want to go out and do some research on this for myself to settle this matter once and for all. I know that sunbathing and having a picnic is frowned upon, but as far as I know walking around with an electric shopping trolley and coat-hanger is OK. Right?

Good luck pitching a tent on exoplanet WASP-76b, the bloody raindrops here are made out of molten iron

It does indeed seem like a bad place to pitch a tent. Looks like I'll be taking the caravan then.

A-high: Prototype drug squad bot to patrol Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc for dodgy ads for opioids

Simpler solution : Post adverts for ibogain treatment

So much effort to fight a war on drugs where the a possible cure for the addictive illegal drugs just happens to be the non-addictive illegal drugs.

We’ve had enough of your beach-blocking shenanigans, California tells stubborn Sun co-founder: Kiss our lawsuit

Communism??? Ah, glad you reminded us of that!

Just nationalise all his assets without compensation so the public has access to his whole estate too.

Boffins find proof that yes, Carl Sagan and Joni Mitchell were right, we really are all made up of star stuff

Not right about everything

Joni Mitchel went on to claim that we were also "golden". Last I checked we all a variety of colours but none of them gold.

She also asserted that we had to find our way back to the garden. This is potentially offensive to anyone living in a block of flats.

That's Microsoft price: Now you can enjoy a BSOD from the comfort of your driving seat

Chuck Norris can still see missing disks and read corrupt files.

RuneScape bloke was wrongly sacked after reading veep's salary details on office printer

When it gets as far as a tribunal ruling

Then one side or the other has probably been very stubborn and needs to be clouted round the head with a clue-stick by a tribunal to realise their mistake.

Otherwise they would have reached a settlement before it got that far.

Now everyone knows the company's name and what the attitude of their management is like.

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

Re: Lies, damned lies, and statistics that don't lie.

Which in turn is probably due to a simple router/WiFi arrangement being easier to configure for IPv6 than a complicated and funky corporate network with various NAT IP ranges and upstream gateways.

I've been bashing my head against just two PFSense boxes for days already and now so far I have a headache. And that's just a small outfit.

Interpol: Strong encryption helps online predators. Build backdoors

Backdoors help police and security agencies become predators.

Python overtakes Java to become second-most popular language on GitHub after JavaScript

Re: Finally!

Not

print("Hello, Java, you suck"),

it's

print "Hello, Java, you suck"

Sorry. I'm a bit old fashioned for this new-fangled Python 3 thing!

Tor blimey, Auntie! BBC launches dedicated dark web mirror site

Not worth it

BBC News sounds just the same to me today as Radio Moscow sounded to me in the 1970s and 1980s. A useless, robotic propaganda station.

Register Lecture: Is space law 'hurting' commercial exploration?

Wild West

I, for one, think the Wild West was exciting and therefore represents an excellent model for lawlessness and disorder in space. Can't wait!

HMRC 'disciplined' almost 100 employees for computer misuse over 24 months

Time for a career change

When I got into trouble for using the Internet too much many years ago I ended up just making an occupation of it.

Now I am in the fortunate position of being encouraged to read the Register because I am keeping up with news and new developments in IT, which is part of my new career :)

For real this time, get your butt off Python 2: No updates, no nothing after 1 January 2020

Better headline

How about:

"from future import obsolescence"

?

FBI, NSA to hackers: Let us be blunt. Weed need your help. We'll hire you even if you've smoked a little pot in the past

Re: Depends on your clearance level

Is there any sane reason for that level of strictness or is it just an excuse for persecution?

Meet ELIoT – the EU project that wants to commercialize Internet-over-lightbulb

Re: So we are going to have flickering streetlights everywhere

Probably the exact opposite. We will no longer have flickering street lights because the current 50/100 Hz flicker is due to rubbish LED driving circuitry. If it has to be an advanced driver that pulses the LEDs at a much higher frequency than anyone can see then the 50/100Hz will disappear in the process.

Metropolitan Police's facial recognition tech not only crap, but also of dubious legality – report

I sympathise

It's about the same success rate I have as me thinking I recognise someone, saying hello, and then........."Sorry, thought you were someone else"!

Bonkers British MPs rant: 5G signals cause cancer

"Is there any evidence that electromagnetic fields can affect the behaviour of animals?"

Yes.

You put them in a microwave oven. They cook!

Sometimes the debunkery is worse than the pseudo-science it is debunking. Of course RF affects living things. In what way and how much just depends on how much power and at what frequency.

I guess with 5G the issue is how much millimetric RF is safe and at what power since this hasn't been used all that much yet, except for these new airport body scanners and for point-to-point links etc.

Facebook won't nuke deepfakes? OK, let's tear up those precious legal protections from user-posted content, then

Re: Should apply to pubs also

The key words here are "the culprits get thrown out" i.e. the pub itself isn't liable or whatever was said.

Making online forums, of any description, liable for the behaviour of the individuals on it creates a dangerous precedent for them to start censoring speech just in case it lands the carrier in trouble.

Some form of expression may be illegal but this is something that is to be determined /after/ it has been expressed, not preemptively before. Also the only crime is committed by the person that expressed it, not anyone who provided the space in which it was expressed. These are basic requirements of free speech being meaningful.

Should apply to pubs also

People in pubs can tell fake stories so convincing that the listener will have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction.

Therefore we should make the pub landlords liable for what the customers say on their premises.

Oh, and people read bad things too, so we should make coffee houses liable for what books their customers read while they are there.

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

Found it!

I've been looking for those backup tapes all over!

We ain't afraid of no 'ghost user': Infosec world tells GCHQ to GTFO over privacy-busting proposals

Re: I would love to hear the response...

"...how does this plan differ from the one alleged of China?"

One difference for me is that I don't actually care if the Chinese government is listening to my conversations quite so much because I know they have no interest in me. Whereas the UK government is a direct threat, or at least a future threat, to its own citizens in the same way as the Chinese government is to theirs.

Do Not Track is back in the US Senate. And this time it means business. As in, fining businesses that stalk you online

Governments

How about bringing our governments that track us online to justice?

Silk Road 2 + Dread Pirate Roberts 2 + 1 Liverpudlian = over 5 years in prison

Prohibition is in its death throws. It is obviously broken and much more harmful than most of the drugs being prohibited by it.

When it finally gets scrapped then leaving a prohibition-era outlaw to languish in jail for the rest of his life will also be redundant.

London's Metropolitan Police arrest Julian Assange

Re: final straw?

The housekeeper was Carole Bayer Sager and she even wrote a song about it.

Official science: Massive asteroids are so difficult to destroy, Bruce Willis wouldn't stand a chance

Chuck Norris

Chuck Norris can destroy any asteroid.

Congrats, Satya Nadella. In just five years, you've turned Microsoft from Neutral Evil to, er, merely True Neutral

Re: Evil Neutral

"The sheer madness of some of those decisions strongly suggests a madman is holding the reins"

Or an AI project running on .NET.

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

Road rash

So medium for an initial investment that has multiplied at least by more than 7 times since 2013 is, "exclusively for fools, liars and conmenen"?

Most mediums for investments, such as bank "savings" accounts, are exclusively RUN BY fools, liars and conmen and give almost non-existent returns.

Still using Azure Scheduler? Schedule in 30 September 2019 'cos it's being euthanised

Re: And on 31st September . . .

Is that on 31st September at 25 O'clock???

Privacy, security fears about ID cards? UK.gov's digital bod has one simple solution: 'Get over it'

It's not just ID cards that the problem

It's just the fact that the government generally has no concern for our privacy and security seems to have an insatiable appetite for mass surveillance and zero tolerance for encryption they can't break.

Microsoft polishes up Chromium as EdgeHTML peers into the abyss

Open Source

"Microsoft engineers have been contributing to the open source Chromium codebase,.."

Being able to do this is part of what makes a browser successful. Once open source becomes the norm for an evolving application, nothing else need apply. Same with web servers.

Analogue radio is the tech that just won't die

Re: not much better than AM

@Tony W: "Broadcasters use heavy multi-band audio compression, trying desperately to push more high frequencies through the system, to be louder than the competition"

Most DAB stations I here appear to be doing exactly the same thing :(

At least the limited audio bandwidth on AM limits the amount of pain it can cause to listen to.

Doesn't have to be worse than AM, but it is

DAB could give excellent quality if a station is over 96kbps and using AAC HE v2 codec.

Unfortunately the main stations still use the bitrate-hogging MPEG 1 Layer II. And the rest are stations that all play the same narrow playlist at 32kbps AAC HE v2 and sound rubbish because of it.

Get rid of duplicate playlist stations, phase out MPEG 1 LII and there would be enough space for some decent sound quality.

Well that's just spliffing: UK Amazon merchants peddling Mary Jane

Condoning

Isn't pulling these products off the site tantamount to condoning prohibition. Surely no one would want to be seen to be promoting such a vile, counterproductive and harmful policy???

Russian computer failure on ISS is nothing to worry about – they're just going to turn it off and on again

It should finish booting by the time the ship gets to the Heliopause.

We (may) now know the real reason for that IBM takeover. A distraction for Red Hat to axe KDE

All roads lead to Neon

At least KDE won't drop support for KDE on their own disto. I hope....

Finally, someone takes a stand against Apple, Samsung for slowing people's phones. Just a few million dollars, tho

Re: Great! Now tackle App Store

See my original post regarding the age of IOS 10. Its the IOS version that determines compatibility with an App. July 2017 is not long ago.

Great! Now tackle App Store

I tried installing Garage Band on an IPad 2 only to find it wasn't there because the IPad can only support IOS 10.x and Garage Band isn't available any more for that.

They could at least have a fall back to the latest version of Garage Band for the version of IOS that I Have. At least with a PC you can install older versions of software that are compatible with the OS.

The latest IOS 10.x was released in July 2017 which really isn't that long ago.

Typed on my Ipad

I hope I can f-inn-sh th-is p-o-s-t be....fo......re.......................

Is this cuttlefish really all that cosmic? Ubuntu 18.10 arrives with extra spit, polish, 4.18 kernel

Re: "the system has a more modern and 'flatter' look"

"...but the first question I have is: with KDE* available, why does anyone use Gnome?"

Same reason Linux took off and BSD not so much. Because LibQT was open sourced just a bit too late.

Microsoft: OK, we have no phones, but look how much we love Android

Extortion

Android manufactures have to pay off Microsoft for use of patents, the identity of which Microsoft keeps under NDA so no one actually knows which patents.

Under this legalised extortion they probably earn a lot more from Android than Google do.

Crypto-jackers' best pal Monero resets the 'days since a critical bug' counter back to zero

So Monero is still alive

One definition I can think of for a failed cryptocurrency is when no one is left with enough skill or interest to fix bugs in the code. I can imagine this happening to a lot of the lesser-known cryptos quite soon.

Facebook sued for exposing content moderators to Facebook

Psychopaths

I hear that about 2-3% of the population are psychopaths who are not affected by gruesome images. Seems like an ideal job for them.

Flying to Mars will be so rad, dude: Year-long trip may dump 60% lifetime dose of radiation on you

Easy solution

Just make the spacecraft out of lead. Simples.