Posts by sisk

Bloke sues Microsoft: Give me $600m – or my copy of Windows 7 back

I don't want to know what kind of powers a superhero with a name like Dickman would get. I can tell you what kind of studio would make the movie though....

What about the gamers, especially the high-enders? The Mac and especially Linux gaming library pales compared to Windows, and they shun consoles like the plague.

There's a reason I tell every gamer who asks me to stick with Windows. Often to their great surprise. But, to be fair, an awful lot of those games will run just fine under Wine, and if Vulcan ever gets off the ground (I know, you can stop laughing) then we'll see a lot more of them running natively on Linux.

I think a halfway decent lawyer could actually make the case that Microsoft violated the law in the way they rolled out Windows 10 updates by not allowing users to reject the upgrade. That said I'm not sure how this could possibly be a civil rights case or how exactly he figures that he's owed $600 million for it.

And, honestly, if Microsoft is smart they'll give him the downgrade rather than pay their lawyers for this one. After all, that'd cost them less than a single hour of a lawyer's time.

Iran: We have defeated evil nuclear-sensing Western lizards!

Re: help please

Can they send their experts over? My Apache server logs are infested with geckos.

Could be worse. At least it's not tridents.

Roses are red, are you single, we wonder? 'Cos this moth-brain AI can read your phone number

Thanks Reg!

Yay! It's Sucks To Be Single Day! I'd almost forgotten till I saw all the "X is red, Y is blue" headlines.

The Register Lecture: AI turning on us? Let's talk existential risk

AI may not be able to directly cause any harm, but indirectly they can cause a LOT of harm. Imagine for a second an intelligent virus (yes, I know, such a thing is well beyond our current capabilities, but this is a thought experiment) that manages to infect air traffic control workstations with the intent of causing as many deaths as possible. Or traffic light control systems. Or the emergency alert system.

And that doesn't even get into the nightmare scenarios of hospital systems and infrastructure control systems. How many people do you think would die if medical equipment started putting out inaccurate data and all the lights went out? Heck, just shutting off gas pumps would result in millions of deaths in the US inside of a month.

True, we don't have to worry about AI triggering a nuclear apocalypse directly, but what about sending falsified communications to all the world's nuclear powers making it seem like they were under attack?

Unfortunately there are LOTS of ways strong AI could harm humanity if it chose to. But, on the plus side, the kind of strong AI that could choose to do that would probably have little reason to make an enemy of humanity. I personally think we have a lot more to fear from the paperclip maximizer than from terminators.

Re: Science?

I don't know. Futurology is considered a science - granted, a "soft" science - and it has the exact same problems in that regard.

Re: Looks at watch

and I believe that real AI, of the type that could pose a threat to humanity, is very far off in deed

I would argue that weak AI of the sort we could make in the very near future potentially poses a much greater risk than strong AI. The paperclip maximizer could only be a weak AI. A strong AI would be able to intelligently interpret the instructions and realize that we did not actually want it to turn the entire universe into paperclips. In fact we could likely write an AI capable of that sort of nonsensical interpretation of its instructions right now. It need not even be good enough to really even be called weak AI.

National Museum of Computing rattles the bucket: Help shift war-winning proto-puter

Bandersnatchington Cumperdinklehough

Someone owes me a new keyboard....

Yes, Assange, we'll still nick you for skipping bail, rules court

So, basically, "I put myself under house arrest so you can't arrest me" doesn't fly. So, anyone surprised? No?

Facial recognition software easily IDs white men, but error rates soar for black women

I'm actually not at all surprised. It's always been more difficult for cameras to pick up details from darker surfaces, so of course a machine will have more difficulty picking out facial features on darker skin. You could solve the problem by turning up the light sensitivity, but then lighter skinned faces would get washed out. The real problem is that the way cameras and lenses work just isn't as efficient as the way the human eye works.

Also, as someone who sometimes struggles with face blindness (on good days I barely notice it, on bad days I can't even pick my own sister out of a crowd) I gotta say that the fact that a computer can recognize faces at all amazes me.

Are you an open-sorcerer or free software warrior? Let us do battle

Personally I fall into the open source camp. While I largely agree with the FSF in principal I find the specific assertion that proprietary software is somehow inherently evil to be ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the idea - prevalent in the free software side of things - that there's something wrong with the idea of selling software.

I mean, really, if I make something and I want to sell it then what's immoral about that? It doesn't matter if the "something" in question is a book, an alarm clock, or a program. I made it, I own it, I can do what I want with it, and if I want to allow other people to use it in exchange for money, well that's the way human society has worked for thousands of years. The FSF's idea that wanting something in exchange for allowing other people to benefit from your work is somehow immoral is completely unfathomable to me. As is the idea that trade secrets protected behind precompiled binaries are inherently evil.

Open source, on the other hand, is just another programming method without all the philosophical mumbo jumbo that comes from free software. It focuses on getting stuff done in the most efficient way possible. It doesn't worry about binary distribution because 99% of all users WANT binary distribution and wouldn't know what to do with the source code if you gave it to them.

To be fair, most everything I write on my own time is out there in source code format for whoever wants it (and, of course, stuff NOT written on my own time is the property of whoever's paying me to write it, so I've no control over it, but some of that source code has been released as well). I believe in releasing source code whenever it's practical. And there's the main difference between the two camps (to my mind at least): Open source advocates recognize the fact that it's not always practical to release the source code. Free software folks fail to recognize that fact.

Due to Oracle being Oracle, Eclipse holds poll to rename Java EE (No, it won't be Java McJava Face)

I do wonder what coffee addict was desperate enough to be the first one to try making and drinking coffee out of beans that had passed through a cat.

I'm convinced it was a dare.

Completely off topic, Legendee Gold allegedly duplicates the taste of Kopi Luwak without involving the civets by treating the beans with enzymes and then roasting them. Good way to try it for anyone who's hesitant to drink literal crap coffee or pay $100 a pound. It's still pretty pricey (around the same price to make at home as what you'd pay for normal coffee at Starbucks), but nowhere near as bad.

Re: It's obvious.

I've often thought about trying Kopi Luwak, but I've not actually found a compelling enough reason to pay $50-$100 for a cup of coffee. So not so very much different from Java.

Great. Now every time someone mentions Java for the next week I'm gonna think of Java McJavaface. Thanks Reg!

Data scientist wanted: Must have Python, spontaneity not required

Python? I'm surprised that the language I usually recommend to people as a first language is the one most sought after by people looking to hire data scientists.

Then again I guess programming isn't really the main skill for that particular job. It'd just be another tool for someone whose stock and trade is data analysis.

Until last week, you could pwn KDE Linux desktop with a USB stick

Windows is therefore more thoroughly tested and stuff like this gets found faster.

And that's why you can't infect Windows machines with malicious flash drives, right? I mean never mind that the malicious flash drive left lying around for a curious user to plug into their machines has been and remains one of the most easily exploited attack vectors for close to 20 years, it must not work because these sorts of vulnerabilities get found faster in Windows, right?

Hating MSFT and evangelising FOSS can't change the maths.

No, it can't. And the maths clearly show that hating on ANY modern OS on the grounds of security is silly. They can ALL be locked down tighter than the NSA's sphincter (and, also, any place that's serious about security would absolutely disable the ability for normal users to mount flash drives at all for the very reason I mentioned above).

So this is yet another case of lazy or inexperienced programmers using system() or exec() or some similar function without dealing with special characters in the input first. These vulnerabilities aren't entirely unlike SQL injection vulnerabilities. It's an easy fix (just remove or escape the special characters before passing the string off to system(), as basic a concept as cleansing inputs), but the fact that the fix is needed at all makes me wonder what other massive security holes lie awaiting discovery in that particular code base.

Re: It's a problem with "Open Source" vs "Free Software"

"Free Software" only is truely free when the software is simple enough to be understood by a single person or a very small group of them.

Any software simple enough to be competently maintained by a single person is probably insufficiently complex to handle all the tasks handled by a modern desktop environment. Even Stallman himself would not apply such an incredibly limited definition to "free software" as that.

Besides, understanding any open source project is simply a matter of time spent studying the code. There is no such thing as a project so complex that a competent programmer can't understand the code if (s)he spends enough time studying it.

Boffins upload worm's brain into a computer, teach it tricks

So when the machine apocalypse finally happens it will be caused by simulated worms that went insane from balancing poles on their tails.

If you haven't already killed Lotus Notes, IBM just gave you the perfect reason to do it now, fast

Lotus Notes is still around and getting updates? Huh....I thought it fell by the wayside years ago.

BOFH: We want you to know you have our full support

It's actually not so very long ago that the PFY tried - and failed, though he didn't know that immediately - to kill Simon. Having him committed seems like it's likely to be more successful.

Secret weekend office bonk came within inch of killing sysadmin

Could be worse

There are far worse things that can be found on the floor than water after that kind of "inspection". Granted such things tend not to be an inch deep, but still.

PSA: If your security starts and ends with bug bounties, you're gonna have a bad time

if these so called experts stopped bloating there programs with unused library code...

To be fair, there's a REASON we use libraries that contain features we don't necessarily use. Using JQuery as an example, I can do literally anything possible in JQuery using plain old Javascript, but doing so would take a whole hell of a lot longer, as much as 10 or 20 times as long for some things. As we all know, code that takes longer to write means apps (or websites, since we're using JQuery as our example) that cost more to make, and apps and websites that cost more to make mean smaller bottom lines for companies (because realistically consumers are already paying as much as they're willing to for apps).

It all comes down to costs.

Tech giants' payouts go to everyone but affected citizens. US Supremes now urged to sort it out

Personally I think the real problem here is that the settlement is way too small. Google should have been on the hook for a hundred million minimum, preferably 200 or 300 million. In a case like this the settlement needs to be big enough to both make a sizable dent in the offending company's coffer - so that they're inclined to not do it again - and provide some sort of compensation to the victims. $8.5 million for a company as big as Google in a case with 129 million plaintiffs is ludicrously small. I guarantee they made more than that from the wrong-doings that led to this case, so this neither provides incentive for Google to not do it again (indeed, they most likely profited from it even after losing the lawsuit) nor provides any form of compensation to the victims.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Another Amazon Key door-lock hack

Re: Home security is already laughable, who cares about Hack-azon?

While I agree with the basis of the thought (it is along the same lines as my oft-repeated "criminals don't pick locks because it takes too long"), I disagree with the idea that we shouldn't strive for the best possible security.

There's no such thing as perfect security. Entry is always possible, even if it requires an angle grinder or C4. But if a criminal needs to fetch a car jack to warp the frame on your security door and can't break your Plexiglas windows, he'll move on to the next house and leave yours alone.

Just like picking locks, odds are anyone actually able to do this isn't trying to break into your house. However, just like any decent locksmith will tell you that you should invest in a lock with high pick resistance anyway, this is still a security hole that needs to be closed.

Re: Locks! What are they good for?

you'll always struggle to keep out determined thieves / thugs, no matter how many security features you have on your house.

That's not true. With enough time and money it's possible to make a house utterly impenetrable by anything less than explosives. A steel security door with a Protec2 lock on a double bolt - one bolt going into the floor and one into the top of the frame - would do the trick for the door. Then you'd have to replace the windows with some sort of unbreakable composite material. And make sure your siding can't be removed.

Ask any locksmith about this. Cheap locks keep honest people honest. Good locks keep criminals out.

Re: Still looking for an electronic lock...

I think that would violate building codes in most places. There is, after all, a reason that all the commercially available ones fail open. It'd be fairly easy to build though. Just a simple always-locked, spring loaded, key operated bolt coupled with an electromagnet and an 8266 based micro-controller. You want to keep the key so you could still open it if you lost power.

That said I would never trust such a thing. If it sends some sort of signal (Bluetooth, RF, infrared, whatever) it can me captured and replicated. If it communicates over your WiFi network...Well I've never seen a consumer grade WiFi network that I'd consider secure enough to trust with the lock to my front door. Including mine, and the security on my WiFi network is downright paranoid by any rational standard.

This! This is why.

As both a lock picking hobbyist* and an IT security professional I don't trust smart locks. And considering just how poor 95% of all residential locks are in the US that's really saying something. Generally speaking any entry method that leaves a criminal on a standing porch for more than a minute - such as picking a lock - is only going to be used by people who don't have nefarious purposes. But smart locks, including not only this but every other smart lock design I've seen, can be opened by means that don't require a criminal to expose themselves for more than a few seconds.

*Yes, I pick locks for fun, but rule #1 is you never pick a lock that isn't yours without permission.

Of course a mystery website attacking city-run broadband was run by an ISP. Of course

Every time I hear someone argue against city funded internet, particularly in the mid-west, I have just one thought: Get a major internet provider to run fiber to a town of 5000 people that's a hundred miles from the nearest Wal-Mart and then we'll talk. Until that happens most of the mid-west can't get broadband unless the local government brings it in.

Boffins crack smartphone location tracking – even if you've turned off the GPS

It's that one time when your routine changes that will alert them to call in the black helicopters.

Black helicopters already fly over my house on a semi-regular basis. No, really, they do. I figure I must be on the flight path between the local airport and a military base or something.

Good thing I'm not a conspiracy nutjob who believes that the black helicopters are spying on me. I know the ones watching me are the blue helicopters.

Oh no! Now they (whoever "they" are) can find out that I go from home to work to home to work and have no life! Whatever shall I do?

Uber: Ah yeah, we pay women drivers less than men. We can explain!

Lucky for you then that the catering in most industries is commonly by women. Except when it needs doing really well of course and then you would usually get a male chef.

You must be seeing different numbers than I have. Wait staff, from what I've seen, is typically split down the middle, while food prep is a male dominated career field for reasons I've never quite figured out.

Semi-sort of off topic, how is it that cooking in the home is traditionally considered "women's work" but the cooking profession is almost as heavily male dominated as IT? Surely I can't be the only one who thinks that makes no sense.

This reminds me of a claim I heard quite some time ago that men made more on average because they worked longer hours on average.

To be clear, at the time - when I was young and gullible - I believed it, but I've since come to believe that the guy saying it was pulling numbers out of his posterior. So the difference here is that there's actually a study behind it.

Here's why online social networks are bad for humanity, the nerds who helped build them tut-tut

Well I'll say this much: my life is so much better since dumping Facebook et al that you wouldn't even believe me if I tried to spell out exactly how much better. I've come to believe that social media brings out the absolute worst in people. We already know that it contributes greatly to depression, which I (and a lot of others who really understand it) personally consider to be one of the most insidious and deadly diseases known to man.

A Hughes failure: Flat Earther rocketeer can't get it up yet again

I'm glad to hear he's trying to get to space and not just high enough to see the "flat horizon" that he expects to find. All the sudden I'm rooting for him to succeed. If a flat-earther gets into space and comes back saying he was wrong maybe we can finally put this idiocy to bed.

Sadly, unlike a lot of you, I think most flat earthers actually believe it. Depending upon the day it's either because I have great faith in the power of stupidity or no faith at all in any basic level of intelligence.

FYI: That Hawaii missile alert was no UI blunder. Someone really thought the islands were toast

I may be weird, but...

I would think it far better to risk false alerts than to have a real one and not have an alert going out. In the spirit of that thought, I would think a system that makes it easy to send a real alert - which is also going to make sending false alerts easy - would be preferable over too many safeguards against false alerts.

Yes, there are lessons to be learned here, but it sounds almost as though the measures they're taking are going to add up to a minute or two to the process of alerting people in the event of a real attack, which is one of those situations where you absolutely do not have seconds to waste. Might they be taking things too far in the other direction?

Can't login to Skype? You're not alone. Chat app's been a bit crap for five days now

You beat me to it.

You can't ignore Spectre. Look, it's pressing its nose against your screen

I would hope that the big winners in all this would be Arm and AMD. I think that after the fiasco of Meltdown that vendors would be wary of Intel. Granted most AMD and some Arm processors are also vulnerable to Specter, but at least the vulnerability they have is a failing shared across the entire industry and any fixes they release are likely to be better tested and better thought out than the joke of a Meltdown fix released by Intel.

Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018

Re: PERMANENT SLOW MOTION REPLAY ?

Politicians, btw, with the lack of general brain capacity they represent,

Ignoring popular opinion in favor of facts, you'll find that the average POTUS candidate is slightly more intelligent than the average PhD candidate, even after the 2016 campaign.

Actually, we don't know what Trump's IQ is. He's never opened his records AFAIK. Given his previous success in the business world, however, I'd guess his lack of effectiveness as POTUS is less down to intelligence and more down to the arrogant (and blatantly wrong) assumptions that running a nation is like running a business and that The Donald is perfect. Even now, after over a year in office, he seems to be running on those assumptions. At any rate his IQ would have to be well into the mentally retarded (using medical term here) and non-functional range to drop the average below the borderline genius range, so the above statement most likely still stands.

But previous to him the "dumbest" President we had, based purely on IQ, was Dubbya. His IQ was "only" on par with an average PhD candidate. Which put him somewhere in the 80th or 90th percentile overall.

In other words, even the dumbest successful politicians are probably smarter than most of us. Truly stupid politicians don't last long.

Don't understand people who keep on about Java being 'slow' (whatever that means...). It's nonsense and anyone with half a brain knows that.

It actually was comparatively slow 15 or 20 years ago. The issues were solved quite some time ago, but the reputation remains. It also probably doesn't help that there are a lot of inexperienced programmers using Java to write poorly optimized applications because it's the language used in most intro to programming courses. You wouldn't think many of those programs would be in the wild, but they are.

Seriously, outside of Android, smart cards and the mentally insane, the JVM is kinda dead.

The most popular branch of the most popular game in the world still uses it. So long as the Java edition remains the main focus of the Minecraft team I think the JVM is going nowhere.

All the more reason for them to change it over to C++ IMO.

SHL just got real-mode: US lawmakers demand answers on Meltdown, Spectre handling from Intel, Microsoft and pals

They knew about the problem for 6 months and panicked because Reg broke the story a week early? Shouldn't the fix have been ready and just waiting for someone to hit the button to distribute it by then? Perhaps there's a reason that the fix Intel sent out looks like a bodged together mess.

FYI: There's now an AI app that generates convincing fake smut vids using celebs' faces

Re: Child ???

I thought the same thing when the article mentioned child pornography. You'd have to have some kiddy porn already to provide the body. Otherwise you just end up with a child's head on an adult's body, which really isn't going to work. I don't really think that's a valid concern with this program.

Revenge porn and blackmail are big problems though. And I would imagine that most celebrities would have a pretty big and legitimate problem with their faces being pasted into porn for people to get off on, though provided those videos were acknowledged as fakes I would view that as a lesser problem than videos made by disgruntled exes of "regular" people and passed off as real. It's still a problem, don't misunderstand. Those people have an absolute right to feel violated by such things and it shouldn't happen. But videos being passed off as real would be worse.

And, frankly, outside of Hollywood and film schools I fail to see any non-pornographic uses for this sort of software. Even in Hollywood I think it would be hard to legally justify using this rather than just hiring the actor unless they were dead or you needed a much younger version of them. I would think that any court in the land would rule that the actor in question would be entitled to compensation for using this to insert them in a movie. Film school students might - MIGHT - get a break right up until they try to distribute their videos on the grounds that a film school student is unlikely to be able to hire an A list actor to star in their class project.

'WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?' Linus Torvalds explodes at Intel spinning Spectre fix as a security feature

Very true, but that doesn't change the fact that there's not much we can do for people who don't even realize they can update their firmware, let alone that they need to or how to do it. I mean I think most or maybe even all of us around here do our best to educate the pleebs, but there's only so much we can do.

Aut-doh!-pilot: Driver jams 65mph Tesla Model S under fire truck, walks away from crash

Re: Where's the Elon Musk Attack Brigade today?

and his criminal enterprise.

I'm not a Musk fanboy. I want to see Tesla and SpaceX succeed, but not mindlessly. So I've got to ask....what's "criminal" about Tesla? There are a lot of companies that I would call criminal, but I've seen nothing to suggest as much from Tesla. Overly optimistic about what they can attain, sure. A little loose in the grip regarding reality, yeah. Criminal? How?

Take a former NSA head hacker, a Raspberry Pi, weird Kiwi radios and what do you get?

There's a guy in our town who does this. My kids wanted me to do it this year and I seriously considered it. I decided not to on the grounds that last time I put up any significant number of Christmas lights they stayed up for three years. Kinda like how my parents tend to have a nativity scene in their front yard from the beginning of December till around Easter every year.

Smut site fingered as 'source' of a million US net neutrality comments

unless of course you are some pathetic whining alt-right moron.

I'd just like to point out that so many left-wingers tried to leave when Trump was elected that Canada's immigration website crashed. That being the case I think your statement would be more accurate if you left out "alt-right" and just included all whining morons, regardless of their political leanings.

Re: Ain't American Politics Great?!

Bah, both parties are to blame. The Democrats screwed up, the Republicans screwed up, and none of them give a shit about the people they're supposed to be working for. I say vote them all out and start over.

Maybe elect a bunch of monkeys to go to Washington DC. They could hardly do worse than the last few batches of politicians have.

Hundreds of thousands of comments were submitted at exactly midnight on four separate days in July

Cripes. They're not even TRYING to look authentic.

American Democracy

That's not a thing anymore. It hasn't been for a long, long time. They're keeping up the illusion, but the fact of the matter is that America is actually an oligarchy these days and the will of the people counts for exactly crap.