Posts by alain williams

Open source work makes me appreciate software testing. It's not an academic exercise

Need to check that failures happen when they should

It is all too seductive for me, as a developer, to write tests that check that certain inputs yield the expected outputs.

What is much harder to think about and thus write are tests where the s/ware should fail (eg invalid input, conflicting records, ...). What is wanted is that the system should detect these unwanted situations, complain suitably and then proceed normally to deal with more input. If this is not done you can get disasters like earlier this year when UK air traffic control went TITSUP over a bad flight plan.

Brits make Amazon, Meta stop using third-party data to undercut rivals

Now stop Amazon from ...

demanding that any goods cannot be sold more cheaply anywhere else than the price on Amazon -- including the vendor's own web site. If this edict is not followed then the product disappears from anywhere that someone could reasonably find.

Re: Freudian typo?

It is easily found below Errors and complaints by following the "contact us" link at the bottom of every page.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

My simple way of avoiding Zuck's ads ...

is to not go near his privacy sucking empire. Also my no-script settings mark him as untrusted.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Why smart meters ?

The benefits in terms of cost savings to households from knowing the amount of energy they are consuming was pegged at £19.5 billion ($23.6 billion).

So does that mean that energy suppliers make £19.5 B less profit ? ... over what time period - I cannot find a range.

If consumers switch off a device or few - will they chalk up the lekky saved as entirely due to a smart meter ? If a household does not have such a meter - who/what gets the credit ?

Then these devices will draw power, 24 x 7 - how much will that cost the consumer? Is this factored in ?

I have the impression that there is something that we are not being told.

Want a clean energy transition? Better start putting cash into electrical grid

I would be willing to agree that ...

the Tories can have the grid upgrades done by their favourite party donors if that is what it takes to get it done quickly.

Better that they trouser lots of our dosh than we be dead or suffering greatly due to climate change.

Having looked at Sunak's limp wristed approach to dealing with climate change massive corruption might be the only way to get him to do something.

Far better of course would be that he has an epiphany and does the right thing in the right way, but I am losing hope that that might happen.

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

Re: Start right, now

So why not mandate that all new houses built from (say) 2025 meet a much higher standard

Because it would cost major Tory party donors a lot of money.

UK government slammed for Palantir 'free trial period' deal in Ukraine housing scheme

Start by looking for brown envelopes or campaign contributions.

Nvidia boss tells Israeli staff Mellanox founder's daughter was killed in festival massacre

I fear that by the time that this ends ...

many more Palestinians will have been killed than Israelis.

The vast majority of those killed will be innocent bystanders/civilians.

Europe mulls open sourcing TETRA emergency services' encryption algorithms

They were kept secret ... why ?

It is well established that encryption algorithms should be published so that people can try to break them. This is a form of peer review - to a larger set of experts than the ones that you employ. If what you encrypt is valuable to someone the algorithm will be obtained anyway by opponents with deep enough pockets to bribe or blackmail the right people.

Keep the keys/passwords secret of course.

Strength in an encryption system must not rely on secret algorithms.

Hell no, we won’t pay, says Microsoft as Uncle Sam sends $29B bill for back taxes

Someone at Microsoft forgot ...

to send the fat brown envelopes to those politicians.

Astronomers spot collision between two exoplanets, both feared vaporized

Nah ... it just had an encounter

with one of these

Red Hat retires mailing list, leaving Linux loyalists to read between the lines

Re: So in brief

I would not be surprised if this is a step in monetising what used to be free.

Maybe we should call them: Blue Hat.

What to expect when the UK-US Data Bridge comes into force this week

Re: A small loophole...

And when said company goes bust its assets get sold to the highest bidder. That includes your PI - the purchaser will then do what it wants with it - there is nothing in law to constrain it.

Microsoft does not want ValueLicensing CEO anywhere near its confidentiality ring

Re: MS is a monopoly

A monopoly can have competition:

In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with a decrease in social surplus.

See wikipedia

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

Re: not happening

For most Linux end users a GUI is what they see.

Me: I prefer a terminal as it is easier and faster -- for me.

Hacktivist attacks erupt in Middle East following Hamas assault on Israel

Unwanted fall out from Israel/Hamas conflict

I have just received this completely inappropriate email from the Perlweekly mail list.

It is completely off topic (nothing to do with perl) and has no acknowledgement that neither side comes up smelling of roses in this long conflict.

Yelp sues Texas for right to publish actual accurate abortion info

Paxton should take CPCs to court ...

for operating in bad faith as reported by the NIH. But he will not as CPCs support his ideology.

I wonder what his view would be if he had been born a woman ?

NTT will take those SAP licenses off your hands if it helps ease cloud migration

Re: Really?

Why ?

Because SAP makes more money that way. Just as do all the other vendors who now have cloud only products.

There is also the suspicion about what they are doing with all your lovely data that they did not have access to previously.

Israel and Italy have cheapest mobile data out of 237 countries

Who is the UK provider selling at $0.08 ?

But: I also want to know speed, reliability, etc

The only way is WebKit: Vivaldi's browser arrives on iOS

Can anyone tell me why ...

Apple mandates WebKit on iOS ?

NYC rights groups say no to grocery store spycams and snooping landlords

Maybe I should go & buy

a Maggie Thatcher or Ronald Reagan mask.

I suspect that if I did somewhere would not let me in as they could not see my face.

NASA's Mars Sample Return mission is in danger of never launching

When it comes to collecting dirt ...

the only dirt that interests politicians is dirt on their political opponents - $9 billion would be approve in a moment.

This dirt is 'only' of scientific interest, it will result in few votes, so NASA will have a hard time getting this approved.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

You forgot "politicians" ...

in that first sentence: Magicians, management, and marketing depend on misdirection.

How TCP's congestion control saved the internet

Another reason for Internet's success ...

is the RFC process. It is open, lightweight and fast. This means that new or updated protocols could become known quickly and used quickly.

Contrast this to, eg, the ISO process: large committees, meetings in nice parts of the world and several years before it gets out.

Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks

Lack of browser choice

the growing habit of web sites checking the browser and refusing to play if it isn't one of their favoured ones

Simple: if they do that then I go elsewhere. If I spend money elsewhere, their loss.

There are very few places that would cause me problems if they did that, eg my bank.

Would not behaviour like this fall foul of disability legislation, eg refusing to work with a text-to-speech browser ? (Assuming that gov't can be arsed to enforce its own laws).

One also needs to wonder about their technical competence if they are apparently unable to make their web site work cross browser, it is not very hard.

Robocall scammers sentenced in US after netting $1.2M via India-based call centers

Re: broken system

The last that I looked the TPS was a subsidiary of the British Direct Marketing association -- if that is not putting the fox in charge of the hen house I do not know what is.

$835,324 in restitution

but $1.2 million scammed. What about repaying the missing $364,676 ?

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

Drat - I will need a new 'phone

What I have is 10 years old and lasts a week on a charge. From what I see newer ones do not last very long.

This also means that I will have no reception at all when I visit a friend in rural Wales, 3G is bad enough there & 4G is a fantasy!

.

What is the current best replacement for vanilla privacy sucking android ?

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Meanwhile ... BMW grabs private data

The always-on data in most modern cars will upload: where you have been; how fast you travel; who you talked to on your mobile; ...

BT dips toe into liquid cooling in quest for a chill network

Even better

would be looking at how to recycle the extracted heat to somewhere that needs it, eg homes or offices in Winter.

Friends don't let friends use AI to chat

Would it not be simpler ...

to just short circuit the whole social media process. Let AIs manage it completely and have AI talk to AI so that we could get on with having a life!

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

HP is involved ...

so will Mopria include the ability to check that the printer does not have third party consumables installed ?

Although it cannot be that bad as Debian supports it.

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

Maybe adding employees' travel-to-work should be added to a company's carbon footprint might help managers see sense here.

A bit of green-washing can be good!

Kyndryl bags short-lived HMRC mainframe contract

Why the cloud ?

HMRC is big enough and it's workload stable enough to non see any real benefit from running its compute load on someone else's servers.

So: why ? Who is really benefiting and how ?

UK admits 'spy clause' can't be used for scanning encrypted chat – it's not 'feasible'

Scanning just hurts the innocent

who risk having legitimate communications intercepted and undesirable things done with them.

The real undesirables will just use an unbreakable encryption mechanism - regardless of how outlawed this is.

How to ask Facebook's Meta to not train its AI models on some of your personal info

Re: don't use meta products

Which is why it should be opt in -- a default of not using PI unless someone has agreed to it.

Arm wrestles assembly language guru's domains away citing trademark issues

arm-assembly.com does not pretend to be by ARM

You can view the site by putting into your /etc/hosts

136.243.165.62 arm-assembly.com

It does not pretend to be ARM.

The closest that she comes is to say " Maria worked on exploit mitigation research alongside Arm in Cambridge" - note "alongside" which clearly shows that she is/was not an ARM person.

Google wants to take a byte out of Oracle workloads with PostgreSQL migration service

Google just wants you in their cloud

Even better would be running your data on your in-house servers - far more secure and will still work when the company broadband goes TITSUP.

More UK cops' names and photos exposed in supplier breach

Re: "Security measures have been taken by the MPS as a result of this report," the statement said

We have not yet been told "lessons will be learned", after which we will all be able to relax safe in the knowledge that it will never happen again -- not!

Wordpress sells 100-year domain, hosting plan for $38K

You might be better putting the money elsewhere

$38,000 invested for 100 years at 4% compound interest will give you $1,919,188

Linus Torvalds couldn't find an excuse to hold back Linux 6.5, so here it is

Re: Doesn't have X feature :)

I did not know that Musk was into kernel development.

We'll show you our patents if you show us yours, say Huawei and Ericsson

Re: Telecoms is too important…

Hopefully this will help prevent the development of competing standards. Such fragmentation is bad for end users.

Huawei being deemed a security risk should not be an issue here as what is being shared are paper specifications, not physical kit or software.

Concorde? Pffft. NASA wants a Mach 4 passenger jet

This project must not be allowed to happen

I shudder to think of the emissions per passenger mile that this jet will produce and so make worse our climate change problem.

Other than ego tripping why would anyone really want to pay what I suspect will be a very high ticket price?

We can do many meetings these days over the Internet, far better use of most people's time and far kinder to the environment.

Having said that: I expect to be ignored and NASA will try to build this.

China cooks covert chips, recruits global geeks to dodge US restrictions

Unexpected consequence ?

Will an unexpected consequence of Western policy be that China will develop chip manufacturing expertise that is on a par with that achieved by machines from ASML and the ability to design them on a par with Intel, AMD, ARM, ... ?

At that point China will point two fingers at us and ship chips to BRICS & other nations at a price that undercuts what the West can make them at.

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Re: Worst ever example of marketroid mail

Another gripe are folks who quote the message and it includes original attachments, often of several MB, that are not in any sense needed.

Many of the attachments did not need to be sent in the first place. I do not care about their poxy corporate logo or motto of the week. Often these images are huge (measured in bytes) and it would take a few moments to produce the same at 1/10 the size -- but this sort of thing is done by marketing droids, trying to get them to understand such concepts is well neigh impossible.

Which question did you answer ?

Another annoyance is receiving a top posted reply "yes" to a message with several questions. Which of those questions is that a reply to ?

When I receive one like this I will ask them which question they are replying to. Generally they will fail to understand why I am asking the question since they knew which one they answered and surely I should also know. I have lost count of the number of times that I have told people that I cannot see the inside of their head.

The inability of some people to empathize (or maybe just not care) is the cause of many of the world's problems.

Microsoft teases Python scripting in Excel

Re: Something libreoffice can.

Libreoffice does not need a cloud to do this as there is no intention/plan to charge you lots of $$ to do this.

Google 'wiretapped' tax websites with visitor traffic trackers, lawsuit claims

blocking off google

echo is what you want here ... unless you have files called 0.0.0.0 & analytics.google.com

This after last year removing all google-hosted font imports from all client's websites.

Well done. Many do not realise how things like google fonts is just another source of data to google.