Posts by monty75

Startup Mycroft AI declares it will fight 'patent troll' tooth and nail after its Linux voice-assistant attracts lawsuit

Self-hosted, local server is a work in progress https://github.com/MycroftAI/personal-backend

Wake me up before you go Go: Devs say they'll learn Google-backed lang next. Plus: Perl pays best, Java still in demand

Re: To be taken with a grain of salt

It also doesn't take into account aptitude. It's quite hard to find a programmer who doesn't claim to know Javascript but ones who actually understand Javascript beyond installing some npm packages and linking them together are considerably more rare.

My job title should probably be "bloke who glues open source libraries together to satisfy the whims of people who don't know what they want"

Shouldn't Uber freeze app accounts to prevent spread of coronavirus by drivers and fares? Oh, OK, it already is

Re: Well whaddya know

I'd hazard a guess that was a bottom-up action.

You mean, there's a suppository that cures nv coronavirus?

This episode of Black Mirror sucks: London cops boast that facial-recog creepycams will be on the streets this year

They're playing fast and loose with the statistics. They say 70% of wanted people who walked past the camera were matched. How do they know that? That would presume that they know exactly how many wanted people walked by and were able to identify them all by some other means. It doesn't take account of how many people who were on the watchlist sauntered past completely unnoticed by computer and by plod (the "unknown unknowns" in Rumsfeld-speak). What they actually mean is that *at least* 30% of wanted people were not spotted.

As for the 1 in a 1000 false positives, we're meant to take that as meaning it's right 99.9% of the time but it doesn't consider the number of false negatives (wanted people who are not identified) and as I said above that presumes that we know how many wanted people are actually in the crowd to start with.

Then there's the fact that they are talking as if all people are uniformly likely to be picked out in error. As regular Reg readers will know, facial recognition is notoriously bad at identifying non-white people so while the overall false positive rate might be 1 in 1000 that could be something like 1 in 100,000 white people but 1 in 100 or even 1 in 10 black people (depending on the makeup of the crowd). Being stopped every tenth time you step out the house could get really annoying really quickly.

Finally, we are meant to just assume that everyone on the list is there because there is some genuine need for the police to stop them. They don't tell us anything about how accurate and up to date their data is. Sure, they may identify 7 out of 10 people they're looking for but if those people aren't actually wanted by police then the efficacy of the facial recognition system is greatly diminished. GIGO.

Addendum: finally finally, there's no comparison given for this facial recognition system against other methods such as, you know, giving coppers a bunch of mugshots or even just randomly stopping people and fingerprinting them.

This is also a system for GPs, right? UK doctors seek clarity over Health dept's £40m single sign-on funding

Re: WTF are they doing ?

My phone and laptop have automatically connected themselves to Eduroam networks at other unis all over the U.K. and also in Germany. It’s not always welcome as the phone sometimes decides to stop using 4G when it can see a weak Eduroam hotspot at some educational establishment or another a mile or so away.

Apple calls BS on FBI, AG: We're totally not dragging our feet in murder probe iPhone decryption. PS: No backdoors

Re: Hypocrites

Applauding Apple’s stance against the US doesn’t preclude one from deploring its actions vis-à-vis China.

US Government : “Don’t buy Huawei products. They have a government mandated back door to spy on you”

Also US Government : “Buy our American products with a government mandated back door to spy on you”

Microsoft wields ML to catch child predators, city drops 7-year facial-recognition experiment after no arrests...

A network of 1,300 cameras embedded on smartphones and tablets manipulated by staff recorded over 65,000 faces from 2012 to 2019.

Did they just stop because they were using a 16 bit integer to count the faces and it was about to overrun?

We won't CU later: New Ofcom broadband proposals mull killing off old copper network

Re: A Pedant comments...

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one with this almost unique brand of pedantry

Sir John Redwood backs IR35 campaign, notes review would have to start 'immediately' before new off-payroll working rules kick in

Re: let the shafting begin

Has Boris Johnson published that report on Russian interference, the one he blocked before the election but promised would be released afterwards? I must have missed it. Maybe Dominic Cummings' russian handlers decided best to keep it under wraps.

It was approved for release almost immediately after the election - odd that isn't it? We still have to wait for the technicality of the appropriate committee being reconstituted before we get to see what has been allowed out unredacted.

Re: Dear Vulcan

Just imagine what he could have achieved if he'd been doing something worthwhile all that time. He could have fixed global warming or something.

This week, we give thanks to Fortinet for reminding us what awful crypto with hardcoded keys looks like

Or dates of birth

London cops seeking £600m mega IT contract to knock 'towers' sprawl into 'one throat to choke'

MPS awarded its contracts to Atos, BT, DXC and Accenture.

Yeah, I think I can see why this didn't work.

I'm still not that Gary, says US email mixup bloke who hasn't even seen Dartford Crossing

Re: TV

oddly shaped vegetables

Actually we prefer the term "commentards"

Double downtime: Azure DevOps, Google cloud users put the kettle on

"Scalable" - all the way from zero up to zero.

All bets are Hoff: DXC exec is standing for Brexit Party in UK General Election

Re: Obligatory

My irony meter has exploded at this one

Heads up from Internet of S*!# land: Best Buy's Insignia 'smart' home gear will become very dumb this Wednesday

Re: Need a home-brew solution

There's quite a lot of options. OpenHAB is my personal preference but there's also HomeAssistant and Domoticz. If you want voice control there's Mycroft. Node Red is pretty easy to use for visually programming control logic.

The problem is finding the IoT hardware that works without talking to its own cloud services. My smart plugs have been reflashed with the open source Tasmota firmware but the manufacturer has subsequently patched the hole that enabled that so newly purchased devices would be locked in to their cloud.

Pentagon beams down $10bn JEDI contract to Microsoft: Windows giant beats off Bezos

Re: Article about JEDI shows picture of Spock

This is The Reg we’re talking about. I think they know exactly what they’re doing

Mandatory electronic prescriptions was the easy bit in NHS paperless plans

Paperlessless

I've been getting electronic prescriptions for a couple of years now. When I go the pharmacy they print it out for me to complete the form on the back. All this has achieved is to move the paper from GP to pharmacy. I mean, it's quicker and less effort for me but it's not paperless.

Android dev complains of 'Orwellian' treatment as account banned after 6 years on Play store

Amazon have. And it's got next to nothing available due to the chicken and egg phenomenon of it not being worth the dev's time unless more people use it, which they won't because the devs don't bother uploading anything they want.

UK Home Office primes Brexit spam cannon for a million texts reminding folk to check passports

Re: First problem, right here ...

They obviously ran out of space. It should say "Please check, and if you find out, could you please let us know?"

Watchdog: Hush-hush UK.gov blew £97m on Brexit wonks from six of the usual suspects

Re: Small Change

Not very likely that Brexit chaos is going to make the pound rise

Do you want fr-AI-s with that appy-meal? McDonald's gobbles machine-learning biz for human-free Drive Thrus

Sounds awesome.

Brits are sitting on a time bomb of 40m old electronic devices that ought to be recycled

I'm still using a 2014 iPhone 6 Plus. It's running the latest version of iOS 12. But Androids? Yeah, useless bricks in no time.

30+ countries, 160,000 emails, $4.2m in cyber-heists… maybe it's time for the Silence hacker crew to change its name

Re: Snitch

I would imagine that they're running through a series of privilege escalation attacks eg compromise a low ranking staffers' PC through spear-phishing/watering-hole attacks, the use that as a foothold to attack the next level of security. By the time they get to the actual money-controlling systems they are so far inside the bank's network that they're indistinguishable from the legitimate whitelisted traffic.

RIP Danny Cohen: The computer scientist who gave world endianness meets his end aged 81

So sad, he was only 18.

Criminal mastermind signed name as 'Thief' on receipts after buying stuff with stolen card

Re: Yup

They just randomly match unresolved crimes with the more heavily pigmented members of society and threaten them with inordinately long sentences if they won't accept a plea deal.

Need to automatically and securely verify a download is legit? You bet rget this new tool

Re: Yes, but

That's what subresource integrity checks are for https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subresource_Integrity

Patch now before you get your NAS kicked: Iomega storage boxes leave millions of files open to the internet

Re: Computer says no.....

Poorly configured uPnP would be my guess. A lot of these home NAS thingies make themselves accessible from the internet so you (or anyone else in this case) can access your files when away from home.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, where to go? Navigation satellite signals flip from degraded to full TITSUP* over span of four days

Re: Huzzah!

And none of this continental constellation nonsense, either. Britnav satellites will all line up one behind the other in a proper British queue.

GDS, what is it good for? According to a UK parliamentary committee: 'Increasingly unclear'

Going Downhill Slowly

ReactOS 'a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel', claims Microsoft kernel engineer

Re: Is there any reason to suppose this latest accusation is any more plausible?

Well if you read the article yes.

What is this witchcraft of which you speak?

UK's North Midlands hospitals IT outage, day 2: All surgery and appointments cancelled

"You need a more secure server"

It literally couldn't be any more secure. No-one at all can access it

Brexit: Digital border possible for Irish backstop woes, UK MPs told

"Former" chancellor

Spreadsheet Phil might be "soon to be former Chancellor" but for moment he's still the current one.

Musk loves his Starlink sat constellation – but astroboffins are less than dazzled by them

Re: Far Side of the Moon

4 - Pink Floyd getting in the way

RIP Hyper-Threading? ChromeOS axes key Intel CPU feature over data-leak flaws – Microsoft, Apple suggest snub

Word of warning

Don't install the MacOs update if you like using Virtualbox. It seems to kill the kernel driver rendering VMs unable to boot https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/18645

It's 2019 and a WhatsApp call can hack a phone: Zero-day exploit infects mobes with spyware

Re: OS level security?

Possible that the WhatsApp vulnerability is being used to deliver one or more other zero days the spyware company is sitting on or, more likely, there's some muddled up reporting going on.

IT bod who does a bit of everything: You might want to specialise if that pay rise proves elusive

Re: Full stack developer +41% offers, +4.3% salary

An IT bod that pads their CV with a buzzword bingo card

User secures floppies to a filing cabinet with a magnet, but at least they backed up daily... right?

Re: Well if the US ships want the Chinese to keep out of the way

Obviously, as Isabelle is the feminine form of Isabloke.

MoD plonks down £2m on table in exchange for anti-drone tech ideas

Re: Throw money at the problem?

I propose a swarm of drones with flashing blue lights on chasing the intruder round the airport while making nee-nah noises. They'd even be cost neutral if you stick cameras on them and sell the footage to Channel 5 for one of their "documentaries".

Centrica: Server fault on Wednesday caused Hive to crash on the Tuesday. Yes, yes, that's what we said

Re: Caused the previous days problem

Maybe the server overheated

SPOILER alert, literally: Intel CPUs afflicted with simple data-spewing spec-exec vulnerability

Re: I'm disappointed

Screw Performance, Only Implement Linear Execution Routes

Re: It's interesting...

"I can only speculate"

That's what got us into this mess in the first place

Cops told live facial recog needs oversight, rigorous trial design, protections against bias

Re: Curated images

"Do I take it, Savage, that your facial recognition system only picks out coloured gentlemen?"

"I can't say I've ever noticed, sir."

OK, it's early 2019. Has Leeds Hospital finally managed to 'axe the fax'? Um, yes and no

Re: paper records

All my prescriptions have been going electronically from GP to pharmacy for several years now. No signature on them although for some reason the pharmacy then prints them out for me to fill in the back of it.

Microsoft vows to destroy Office, er, offices: Campus to be demolished and rebuilt

And when you open the fire exits there's just a blue wall on the other side.

Marriott's Starwood hotels mega-hack: Half a BILLION guests' deets exposed over 4 years

Intruder in their network since 2014. Monitoring system noticed it in September 2018. Had someone forgotten to switch it on for four years?

Analogue radio is the tech that just won't die

Just because I own a DAB radio doesn't mean I use it. Haven't switched the thing on in years. If I do listen to radio (as opposed to streaming) it's the trusty old FM in the car.