Posts by veti

'5G for Five Eyes!' US senator tells Parliamentarians the world would be better without Huawei

It's not about spite. It's just that - well, it's been 40 years. We've moved on, OK? We've got other trade partners now.

Re: Another nutjob hiding behind the flag

I think you're wrong. Sure, political change can happen that way - Russia and France being the most prominent poster children - but do you really want to end up with what either of them got?

But it can happen non-violently too. Britain transformed from an aristocracy to a democracy, over the course of about 80 years, without a revolution. India became independent without a war. The Soviet Union fell because soldiers refused to fight their own people. Violence is not the only way.

Re: Do it! Chicken.

So at a stroke, we could get: cheaper 5G, less intelligence sharing, and no F-35s?

What's the catch?

Zealous Zoom's zesty zymotic zone zinger: Zestful zealots zip zillions

Why?

I mean, why Zoom? How did they get to be The videocall platform of the pandemic?

I don't know about you, but six months ago I had barely heard of Zoom. My employer used MS Teams, which worked fine for them. Personally I use Skype when I need to. But then came the pandemic, and suddenly Zoom was the default platform everyone talked about - and on. How did they pull that off, exactly?

Tech set responds in wake of American protests, police violence and civil unrest

Re: The next step...

America is fast approaching fascism on its own behalf. As for communism, the only reason to hate that is because it's used as a cover for despotism, which the US is now encouraging around the world.

Don't get me wrong, America has done great things in the past hundred years. But right now it seems bent on undoing most of them, and the goodwill it had built up is a finite resource, now nearing exhaustion.

Re: The next step...

"Lobbyists" are not some mysterious svengali caste. They can't just pick up a cause and translate into instant results.

Lobbying is about representing the specific sectional interests of your community. That's where their influence derives from, because politicians know who they are representing and why they matter. You can't simply "lend" them to another cause, no matter how strongly you feel about it, because they would have no authority to speak on that subject.

Remember when Republicans said Dems hacked voting systems to rig Georgia's election? There were no hacks

Re: Coup

You are playing Trump's game. If you are sincere in wanting to see the US return to some sort of sanity, this is not how to do it.

Trump is trying to make the 2020 election about the red/blue culture war. That's how he won in 2016, and it's by far his best chance of winning again. And you're playing straight into his hands. Language like "coup" and "illegal" (hint: if the relevant court says it's legal, then it is - there are such things as appeals, but your own conscience and opinions do not qualify as a higher court) are the language of violent revolution, not persuasion.

Don't try to fight dirty against Trump. He will drag you down to his level, then beat you with experience.

Re: A dry run for trumps loss in 2020

Sadly we've seen what "engaging the voters" looks like. Full on cultural warfare.

That's why half of America is now bent on getting back to business as usual without *any* acknowledgement of social distancing or masks or anything else that suggests there might be something bad happening.

When your political system is leading to tens of thousands of excess deaths, it may fairly be said to have failed. Utterly. After all, the whole point of politics is to prevent exactly that outcome.

Re: Brits can vote

Then change the law. If it's not up to the job of preventing shenanigans, then why haven't you complained about it before?

Like Trump with his tax returns. If you want "publishing your tax returns" to be a prerequisite for standing for president, then change the law to make it so. Don't whine because someone is breaking a rule if you never made it a rule in the first place.

If someone could stop hackers pwning medical systems right now, that would be cool, say Red Cross and friends

That's true for the regular spammed attacks, but there's a whole lot of spear phishing and other highly aimed hacking that's being directed at the medical industry right now.

If I had to speculate, I'd guess it's happening because unaccustomed amounts of public funds are being poured very quickly into medical care and research. Anytime that sort of money is sloshing about in places that aren't fully accustomed to it, there will be opportunities for scumbags to siphon some of it off.

Microsoft brings WinUI to desktop apps: It's a landmark for Windows development, but it has taken far too long

Clearly the next step is to put Win32 in a big sandbox of its own. All your legacy stuff will be fine, but isolated from everything newer.

BoJo buckles: UK govt to cut Huawei 5G kit use 'to zero by 2023' after pressure from Tory MPs, Uncle Sam

Re: Is it wrong to be in favour of this?

A characteristic of both sides in the US is that they don't much like the constitution. Leftists hate the second amendment, rightists aren't too keen on the first. I think it's probably possible to define every major faction in US politics by identifying "which bit of the constitution they want to repeal".

Trump and his scum really hate the 14th.

As for the "spoiled generation", you can apply that description to a generation who have grown up with their private wealth jealously protected.

Re: So...

Well yes, the sun is generally recognised as dangerous. That's why sunscreen is a thing, to say nothing of an entire industry of hats and parasols and sun awareness campaigns.

Dude, where's my laser?

Re: Not unbelievable

As soon as someone suggested "maybe they didn't think about it" as a plausible explanation.

Chicago: Why I just grin like a dork... It's my kind of Bork

Re: "...or a simple mistype in the max_connections system variable"

You mean, "didn't show up in the testing because everything else over-ran and QA was told to cut a week out of its schedule".

"Production only error", my left foot.

Document? Library? A new kind of component? Microsoft had a hard time explaining what its Fluid Framework is

Re: Will this shite never stop?

It's not for users.

As to what it's for - read up on "fire and motion". Classic Microsoft strategy.

New Zealand releases Bluetooth-free COVID-19 tracing app

Re: IQ downward spiral...

Oh yes, of course. Mob. Now that's a thing that never happened pre-internet.

Re: Police don't get it

Well yes, if Amazon really wants the data, I'm sure there are ways they could get it. Ditto GCHQ or the NSA or the Illuminati. But what would they do with it?

Bear in mind that if anyone twigged and could prove that they'd accessed it, there would be big, big repercussions, both legal and reputational. What gain would be worth running that risk?

Re: Name, phone number and email

In case you missed it, the Pm explicitly says that if you choose to upload the collected data, it will only be available to health services. Police don't get it.

As for businesses, when did you hear of one that was reluctant to gather and keep information about its customers? But NZ data protection law says that you have to tell people in advance what you will be using their data for, and you can't change that after the event.

Re: IQ downward spiral...

Like there was some golden age when there were no stupid people?

Former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman calls on UK govt to legally protect data from contact-tracing apps

Re: "A minister's letter is not legal protection"

Maybe not, but it's the only kind that can be provided by law.

Podcast Addict banned from Google Play Store because heaven forbid app somehow references COVID-19

Consistency?

Has Gmail also been pulled? How about Chrome, are they pulling that or simply replacing every mention of "coronavirus" with "Rick Astley"?

If you're appy and you know it: The Huawei P40 Pro conclusively proves that top-notch specs aren't everything

Re: "the long game"

Nope. The American government has no money, and since Trump it's also becoming less trustworthy. (Than China. Let that sink in.) Even Boris - American-born firm Americaphile personally backed by Trump - when forced to make a choice, went China.

This is what a crumbling empire looks like. At this point I doubt if Trump could successfully orchestrate a trade boycott against Fiji, never mind China.

'iOS security is f**ked' says exploit broker Zerodium: Prices crash for taking a bite out of Apple's core tech

Re: Here's an idea

Security is hard, m'kay? It takes more than a bit of QA. More even than a lot of QA.

Apple does, mostly, a pretty good job of patching vulnerabilities when they hear about them. So does Microsoft, for that matter. And when that happens, both of them will do their best to push out the fix to as many users as possible (which puts them ahead of Linux or Android as far as regular users are concerned).

But nobody, not even Linux, can keep them from ever being released in the first place.

Stop tracking me, Google: Austrian citizen files GDPR legal complaint over Android Advertising ID

Re: In all honesty

You're using software. Software costs money to create, and then it costs orders of magnitude more money to maintain.

If you're not willing to pay for that yourself, then you don't really get to complain when those who are paying for it decide to insert their own agenda.

Now there's nothing stopping the PATRIOT Act allowing the FBI to slurp web-browsing histories without a warrant

Re: Land of the free

Could happen. I can foresee a world, pretty soon now, where countries are divided in two groups: those that try to control and contain Covid-19, and those that rely on "herd immunity" and don't even try to trace cases. There will need to be very tight controls on traffic between the two groups.

I think most of Europe will eventually scrape into group 1, and the US will clearly dominate group 2.

That would actually fulfil Trump's dream of "a wall" with the foreigners paying for it. #MAGA!

If you're going to spend $3tn, what's another billion? Congress urged to inject taxpayer dollars into open anti-Huawei 5G radio tech

Re: Only themselves to blame

Compare the amount of resources devoted to defining, protecting and enforcing "intellectual property" today with the situation 100 years ago. Heck, even 50 years ago.

"Intellectual property" has been pushed by the USA, among all countries, as a way to pretend that the inexhaustible realm of "ideas" is an eternally-expanding frontier that anyone can exploit. Because what's the alternative? - letting the new generation of go-getters have actual land and real property would mean - (gasp) - the rich of today letting go of some of the stuff.

Which they have no intention of doing voluntarily, and no American government has anything like an appetite to force them to.

So instead they've built up this edifice of "intellectual property", where people can stake out their claims and exploit them without dispossessing the already-rich. The only people disadvantaged are newcomers, and the poor, and who ever gave a toss about them?

So yeah, it's very much "America's fault". Fifty years ago we wouldn't have had to worry about this kind of nonsense. But this is the world America built, and now we all have to live in it.

Microsoft doc formats are the bane of office suites on Linux, SoftMaker's Office 2021 beta may have a solution

Re: Seems like a losing battle, and there's an elephant in the room

Yep, I've always loathed Outlook, but pretty much everyone I work with - including the IT department - is only, at best, dimly aware that there are other ways of handling email.

And appointments.

And room bookings.

And to-do lists. And... well, admittedly it can get a bit complicated. But still, if Outlook could just be expunged forever from every computer in my employer's company, I'd be a happy bunny.

Re: @Charlie Clark - Seems like a losing battle, and there's an elephant in the room

This is true, but it's also true that LibreOffice developers tend to try to work through specs and, when they encounter such ambiguities or inconsistencies, don't even think to ask the question - they'll quietly "resolve" it in some way that makes sense to them, sometimes without even noticing it.

A more disciplined development community would insist on a culture of questioning and escalating issues until they could be authoritatively resolved, but that sort of discipline is precisely what LO lacks.

Re: Trust Office

Ok, there's lots to criticise in MS Word, but to insinuate that it's "not (even) marginally usable" is just plain silly. Hundreds of millions of users worldwide struggle through the issues somehow. The evidence that it is at least marginally usable - is, frankly, much stronger than you could muster for any of its competitors.

Briny liquid may be more common on Mars than once thought, unlikely to support life as we know it

Don't be silly. That's clearly an artificial decoy, probably put there when Apollo 11 landed on Mars and pretended it was the Moon.

Surprise surprise! Hostile states are hacking coronavirus vaccine research, warn UK and USA intelligence

Lots of countries like to brag about their effective treatments. But the best evidence is, none of them are really all that effective. They still brag, because it makes their leaders look stronger and look like they're doing something to help their people - but like Trump with his hydroxychloroquine, they're just overselling something that might have helped some tiny number of people but - at best - doesn't work for most.

Iran got hit early. If their treatment was "reasonably effective", at four months in they wouldn't still be losing a full 5% of their cases, and that's just the official figures.

Re: Bullshit article based on bullshit press releases.

The source talks about "advanced persistent threat" (APT) actors, which is a euphemism for state-sponsored hackers.

We beg, implore and beseech thee. Stop reusing the same damn password everywhere

Re: In other news....

I don't know what your relationship with your dad is like, but I don't fancy asking mine that question.

Re: I reuse the same password on loads of sites

For sites I have no intention to return to, they get a randomly-generated string that I don't even bother to record anywhere. That's easy.

Re: In other news....

The trouble with "correcthorsebatterystaple" is, it doesn't scale. If we all start using "three or four common words strung together", then attackers will start guessing passwords in that format. There's only about 20,000 English words in common use (of which most people only use about 2000-4000 on a regular basis), so the guessing space there is not nearly as big as you probably imagine.

As long as only a small minority uses it, it's excellent. But when attackers start expecting it, it suddenly becomes much weaker than a randomly generated string of characters.

Re: In other news....

And if you do need them, give people the option to use single-sign-on with Google.

Yeah, I know they're spying on me. So what? They're going to do that anyway, I really don't mind if they know what inane blather I'm posting on some overblown blog's comments page.

Spyware slinger NSO to Facebook: Pretty funny you're suing us in California when we have no US presence and use no American IT services...

Re: Implications...

If Hutchins had sold malware but only to state actors, then he too could have made the same defence. As it is, though, the cases are not comparable.

The point is, if it's not a crime when a state does it, then you can't coherently charge someone with abetting a crime by helping them do it.

Re: Implications...

I don't think FB's business model depends on people trusting their deepest secrets to their phones. They're in the advertising business, not espionage.

They're upset because if their tool isn't secure, people might look for others instead, and once your users start looking for alternatives to your products there's no telling what they might find.

Never attribute to conspiracy that which can be easily explained by common-or-garden greed.

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word

Re: Word processing programs can kern and should use n and m spaces

Times New Roman is fine for the environment it was designed for, which is multiple narrow columns of fully justified text.

In any other kind of layout, it's just too horrible to look at. If your lines are more than about 20 ems wide, then for Garamond's sake choose a different font.

Re: What's next? (@doublelayer)

CamelCase doesn't replace spaces, it augments them. You still need spaces to, y'know, indicate the gaps between words. Putting such random punctuation in the middle of a word may be annoying, but it's not nearly the worst offence. (That would be reserved for those cupid stunts who insist that their company's or product's name should be written in all lower case, including the initial letter. Bonus points if they try to compensate by using a different font whenever they write it themselves. Aargh.)

Re: What's next?

We could certainly do without capitalisation if we had to. Many languages (check out most Asian languages, or Arabic f'rinstance) don't have a concept of capitals at all, and they seem to get along without them.

But it's not clear how it would benefit us to do away with them. Their benefit may be marginal, but let's face it, we can use all the help we can get at reading comprehension.

There is never a good reason to "hit the right-justify button".

The correct longhand way to do it is to define a paragraph style with the right-justified attribute, then apply that style to the text you want to appear that way.

The quick and dirty way, if you can't be bothered with that, is <Ctrl-R>, which takes a fraction of the time of taking your hands off the keyboard to move a mouse to find a button on a toolbar.

Either way, the button is just wrong.

Re: It may be a US "standard", but...

You are aware that the "serial comma", also known as the "Oxford comma", is the more traditional British usage? It's one of a handful of instances ('-ize' at the end of words being another) where British English chose to 'modernize' itself and American English stayed with the older usage. The OED to this day supports both the comma and '-ize'.

As for your legibility argument: again, are you aware that when you post a comment online, HTML will remove any extra spaces you type in? Look here: how many spaces do you see directly after the colon? (Hint, I stopped counting after 20.) So you've been happily reading, and posting, text without the extra spaces for as long as you've been online.

In related news, El Reg is using HTML, which has always removed extra whitespace.

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

Re: WTF

You will care about them, passionately, the minute your rivals start using them in ways you can't.

Re: Stupid millennials

On the contrary, the Oxford comma, after languishing for several decades, is enjoying a comeback right now.

Nobody cares about readability of CSS because nobody writes it by hand. We have tools that can do the job better, for any value of "better" that values results vs effort as opposed to outmoded concepts such as brevity or efficiency.

Lockdown endgame? There won't be one until the West figures out its approach to contact-tracing apps

Re: Lockdown endgame? There won't be one until the West figures out personal responsibility

"Personal responsibility" means that the rich get to do what they want and the poor do what they're told, which is to stay poor and die in much larger numbers. You can see this unfolding in the USA right now. Trump/governors can indeed drive people back to work by stopping the flow of money to them, but it's the poorest who will be forced back first, the rich can afford to sit on their butts for a few more weeks.

This won't be over when lockdown ends. World Wars 1 and 2 saw a huge social levelling. (So for that matter did the black death, in medieval Europe.) If that doesn't happen this time around, then the reckoning from that failure will make the pandemic itself look like a picnic.

CFAA latest: Supremes to tackle old chestnut of what 'authorized use' of a computer really means in America

Re: "he was an authorized user of the plate system"

It's still "accessing and abusing the information" that is the crime, not "using the computer".

It's like if someone drove a car down a pedestrian precinct, heedless of the damage and distress as people leap out of their way. You don't prosecute them for "driving the car", you prosecute them for "driving it dangerously".

Academics: We hate to ask, but could governments kindly refrain from building giant data-slurping, contact-tracing coronavirus monsters?

Re: In the Antipodean version...

Seriously, why won't it end when the pandemic ends?

What do you think the government is going to say, then, that will inspire people not only to keep the app installed on their phones, with full permissions, but also to keep Bluetooth on 24/7, with the added battery drain that imposes?

And reinstall the same app with the same ID on each new phone they get?

If there were a central database being maintained by a process we had no power to control, then sure, I'd worry about that. But that's the opposite of what this article is talking about.

I know there's a popular right-wing talking point that says "governments never voluntarily give up power". But, at least as far as western sorta-democracies are concerned, that's bullshit. Governments take up extra powers during an emergency, then lay them down afterwards, all the time. It's happened in every major natural and non-natural disaster for the past century.