Posts by alain williams

Europe's right-to-repair law asks hardware makers for fixes for up to 10 years

A good start, but ...

Not quite far enough. Needs:

* When sold it should be prominent on the box/web-site when the support for the device ends and when guaranteed availability of parts ends.

* Security updates should be available for 10 years. Feature enhancements can stop quickly, not so important.

If a vendor wants to stop security updates early it can if there is a user friendly way of replacing the OS with something long term supported, eg Replicant or LineageOS.

* Apple/John-Deere style blocks on independent repairs to be out-lawed.

* Spare parts & tools to be available at reasonable cost.

Hospital to test AI 'copilot' for doctors that jots notes on patient care

AI interpretation of surgeon & patient conversation

Surgeon: We will cut off your diseased foot, the left one ?

Patient: right.

Which foot will the AI summarise needs to be cut off ?

Don't Be Evil, a gaggle of Googlers tell CEO Pichai amid mega layoffs

"Don't be evil" is long forgotten

It has been ignored since Larry Page and Sergey Brin ceded day to day control to the money men. All that the money men care about is money (especially money in their pockets). They do not care who they hurt or what laws they break - as long as they are not caught and fined.

The Shakespearian question of our age: To cloud or not to cloud

Forgotten question

The topic not talked about was security.

When something is running on someone else's machine you need to worry about confidentiality of your data. For some orgs/applications this does not matter (much). This needs to be an up-front eyes-open decision after which the other things talked about can be discussed.

FTX inner circle helped itself to $3.2B, liquidators say

How did they think

that they would get away with it ? Surely they must have realised that it would eventually be noticed.

Maybe their business plan is: 10 years in prison and then go & live off the $30 million that they have somehow laundered & stashed somewhere. $3 million/year is a decent salary, I could retire on $30 million.

Budget: UK chip strategy still nowhere to be seen. Money for quantum, AI? Sure

The nice thing about quantum money ...

is that it really can appear in two bank accounts at once!

Cloud upstart offers free heat if you host its edge servers

Great in winter ...

but would you still want all that heat in a Summer heat wave ?

Meta chops another 10,000 employees, closes 5,000 vacancies

Will Zuck do a Musk

Reduce the head count to the point that their web sites become fragile and risk total collapse ?

We can but hope.

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

Why is use of a 'phone in a car discouraged ?

even if hands free. Because it can distract you from driving. If something happens on the road a passenger will see it and shut up until the distraction is gone; someone at the other end of a mobile 'phone call cannot see the road and so continues to talk - or worse: "why have you gone quiet, are you still there ?"

I can see that some useless AI will be much the same: just babble and distract you from driving.

Also: I detest machines that talk at me.

Japan Post closer to replacing snail mail with autonomous drones

Good luck with letter boxes

I occasionally distribute flyers for my local community group. Getting paper into a letter box can be hard. Many if what I call 'letterbox fur' - some sort of draft excluder that blocks the inside. Pushing paper through that is difficult. Other letter boxes have different challenges.

Posting to just the easy ones is not good enough.

Rebel without a clause: ISP promises broadband with no contract

Re: !no contract

Their T&Cs refer to https://rebelinternet.uk/knowledge which says: Page not found.

Well - I'm not impressed

I visited their web site https://rebelinternet.uk/ but it is almost devoid of useful information. It goes on about an app that I need to download** to do things and how good their WiFi is and lots of good reviews on trustpilot (I wonder how they get those on a completely new service ?).

So I 'phoned their "Customer Success Team" and spoke to some bloke who wanted my contact information while his PC was loading, I gave up after 2 minutes when he still could not get connected.

I asked him if they supported IPv6, if they gave static IP addresses and how many GB/month the $35 gave.

He knew none of the answers to any of that but kept on wanting to know who I was.

It might improve.

** Why an app on my 'phone ? What is wrong with a normal web site ? It this something built by clueless millenials ?

British industry calls for regulation of autonomous vehicles

Re: We do not want "British" regulations

before the technology hits the street

I would have thought that that would have been part of what regulations would have tried to prevent :-)

We do not want "British" regulations

Autonomous vehicles are being developed all over the world; there should be one set of rules that manufacturers can build to, certify and then sell. Having similar, but slightly different, standards would be a nightmare.

Variations in how the "standard" vehicles are used to suit local conditions might be OK, but the way that they are built must be standard. Even right/left hand drive is a pain that we would (hopefully) not repeat today.

Common standards are good, not something that the Brexit brigade understands.

Cop warrant orders Ring to cough up footage from inside this guy's home

Video on Ring's servers is the problem

If this was stored on a machine within the home they would be much more secure.

It would mean a little more set up work on behalf of the home owner - which pretty much guarantees that very few would bother -- even if the likes of Ring provided the option.

Wannabe space 'superpower' UK tosses £1.6M at eight research projects

You can tell where the Gov't priorities are

Compare to the cost of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda So far the UK has paid the Rwandan government £140m for the scheme.

Boeing signs off design of anti-jamming tech that keeps satellites online

What worries me ...

is them forgetting to change the default password or sending them up all with the same password or something equally stupid. Sooo easily done.

Ex-Tweep mocked by Musk for asking if he'd actually been fired

Space X

I guess being one of the richest men on the planet buys a lot of arse lickers

FIFY

Tech demo takes brain scan, creates a picture of what you're looking at

Re: Yeah, this won't be abused.

What was more scary was a paper that I read that showed different brain activity when the person was shown something that they had seen before. So: worry when the border guards ask you if you "have seen this person before".

Sorry, I cannot find the link - maybe I need my brain scanning :-)

Financial red tape blamed for London losing Arm IPO

A race to the bottom ?

What happens when too many rules are removed ? Was this not one of the causes of the 2008 crash ?

So are we supposed to ignore history to make a fast buck and just hope that nothing goes wrong ?

Those who lost out after the 2008 meltdown were not the same as those who profited from lax rules beforehand.

The trouble with international competition is that a country's regulators will be under pressure to water down rules, or look the other way, while hoping that other all country's regulators do a good job.

Arm co-founder: Britain's chip strat 'couldn’t be any worse'

"locate manufacturing over the next five to 10 years"

That is more than one or two electoral cycles into the future. What interests politicians are things that they can brag about when next at the hustings. Even worse the other lot might be in power then, so why do work today to help the opposition in the future?

How many premium portable sales = HP CEO's 2022 compensation?

Did he make HP more than $19 million richer ...

than it would have been if HP had a CEO who was paid $1 million ? Of course: to be really worth it this should be many multiples of $19 million.

The huge ratios in income between those at the top and those at the bottom is one of the causes of problems in today's society.

If we plan to live on the Moon, it's going to need a time zone

Re: Just set the entire moon to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC +0) ...

That depends on what you mean by lunar day. Yes the time between the moon being 'above the same point on Earth' is 24h50m, but the time between noons on the moon is about 29½ Earth days.

UK consortium set to bid for £480 million NHS data platform

I hope yhat they win it

* keep the £480 million in the UK

* grow IT skills/solutions in the UK -- will let us better compete for similar in other countries

* keep our personal data private -- away from grubby/leaky USA companies

This is the sort of joined up thinking that our government should be doing; but I fear that they are not

I wonder if FDP have the right sort of brown envelopes to help them win this

HMD offers Nokia phone with novel concept: Designed to be repaired by its owner

Re: Web site access denied ??

Hmmm: it works fine now, must have been a glitch. I tried it from 2 different locations over 15 minutes:

$ curl https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_gb/subscription

<HTML><HEAD>

<TITLE>Access Denied</TITLE>

</HEAD><BODY>

<H1>Access Denied</H1>

You don't have permission to access "http&#58;&#47;&#47;www&#46;nokia&#46;com&#47;phones&#47;en&#95;gb&#47;subscription" on this server.<P>

Reference&#32;&#35;18&#46;646e5668&#46;1677519017&#46;1056443d

</BODY>

</HTML>

Re: Lasts 3 years

A phone is not dead just because it no longer gets security updates.

It is more than security updates that are needed. My ancient phone still works as a 'phone (+SMS & wifi hotspot) and the battery lasts most of the week but the SSL certificates expired a couple of years ago so I can no longer browse the web - which I only did occasionally.

Web site access denied ??

If I follow the link in the article https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_gb/nokia-g-22 I get 'Access Denied', if I search for the 'phone the links that I get show much the same. What is going on ?

Also: Nokia seems to wants to rent it at £10/30 days - so I would pay the £150 purchase every 15 months. Not a good deal.

Europe to consult on making Big Tech pay for the networks it floods

All should pay their costs to the backbones

The trouble is that consumer ISPs want to offer low priced "all you can eat" packages and then find that consumers take them at their word by viewing huge numbers of videos, etc.

What is needed is a dose of reality: use lots of bytes, expect to pay more.

Big Tech should pay what it costs to get its bytes to the backbone and consumers pay for what it costs to download them from the backbone.

When I talk about "backbone" I mean more than the local Internet exchange, this should include the cost of bytes between these exchange points.

Yes: prices will go up for heavy consumers, that is only fair. Lighter users will pay less.

Phở no! Vietnam's last working submarine cable glitches out

How long before

We learn that China is behind this

China denies anything to do with it

This won't hurt a bit: Amazon now a US healthcare provider

This takeover should not be allowed

Amazon is far too big and is unfairly crushing competition.

If anything Amazon should be broken up.

NASA: Yup, thousand-pound meteorite exploded over Texas

Re: Dang Chinese!

And now metal spheres.

What next ?

EU lawmakers argue against signing US data-transfer pact

Is the UK going down the same path ?

Were told that one of the Brexit bonuses was to get rid of 'pesky' EU legislation such as the GDPR.

I just hope that the mob in Parliament keep 100% alignment with the GDPR and prevent us all a huge headache.

Biden: I want standard EV chargers made in America by 2024 – get on it

Re: Why Does it Need an App

An App is the easiest way to handle that for half-wit vehicles.

A credit card is even easier -- FTFY

What if the car is not yours, eg a hire car ? You do not want to give the car your credit card details - you then have to remember to remove them when you give the car back.

Even if it was my car: I would not want to give it my credit card info.

Re: Of course chargers must be standard

Why need an app at all? When I buy petrol I use a credit card: simple, easy, robust and preserves my privacy. Why does the supplier need to know my email address ?

Make Linux safer… or die trying

Unix was always diverse

Because it was open (specifications more important than code) it has always been possible to replace components. So people did. Sometimes the replacements improved things, sometimes they did not.

So there was diversity and experimentation. In a Darwinian way the better alternatives usually** won out after several years, so Unix systems gradually evolved to use better components. The same is happening today but without the benefit of hindsight today's diversity just looks like a mess. In a few years time what is considered a mess will be something different.

** "Usually" - large company marketing and techie conservatism sometimes meant staying-with/adopting non best solutions.

Microsoft's AI Bing also factually wrong, fabricated text during launch demo

"AI-powered search is not to be trusted"

Of course it will be trusted - especially if what it returns supports whatever loony conspiracy theory that someone wants to push.

UK prepares to go it alone on post-Brexit science plan

The Horizon replacement money ...

is in the same place as the £350 million/week that is due to the NHS.

Spotted in the wild: Chimera – a Linux that isn't GNU/Linux

Re: But why?

why the push to remove GNU

It helps to increase diversity. Like in life a monoculture of plants is more susceptible to devastation when hit by a virus or similar.

That is why I am pleased that the Intel x86/x86-64 architecture is seeing more competition.

Four top euro carriers will use phone numbers to target ads and annoy Google & Facebook

Those whowant targetted marketing

Why would anyone opt in for a hosing with advertising?

I did meet someone who really liked targetted adverts as it was "showing her just what she might want to buy".

That she was young and worked in marketing might have had something to do with it. Sigh.

Bank of England won't call it Britcoin but says digital pound 'likely to be needed in future'

Getting to see what I bought

the big stores get to see exactly what I bought anyway - I will probably pay by credit/debit card. So they can put all the transactions on that card together to get some sort of profile.

OK: the loyalty card gives them a bit more, mainly email address for spam purposes. Address and, to a lesser extent name, lets them work out who I live with and thus further profiling.

I suspect that card number does often give them the address by seeing were the same card is used to buy something over the Internet. A bit harder in my case as I have one card that I use for all Internet purchases and use for nothing else.

Warning: Microsoft Teams Free (classic) will be gone in 2 months

If you want to do an on-line meeting

Just use https://meet.jit.si/ - it is free and you do not need to (pretend to) read a complicated license.

China’s Baidu reveals generative AI chatbot based on language model bigger than GPT-3

I wonder what it will say ...

if you ask it to write a story about what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 ?

The Simpsons are not allowed to mention it.

China reportedly producing quantum computers – good luck observing one

China has banned its export

Maybe the rest of us should crack their research labs and grab the blueprints.

I am not one who usually advocates such action, but China regularly steals tech info from us. Sauce for the goose & gander.

If we do not do so then I doubt that China will hesitate to use whatever advantage that it has against us.

It is a shame that as a species we do not cooperate for mutual benefit. Maybe something of Darwin as the cause.

A moment of silence for all the drives that died in the making of this Backblaze report

How busy are the devices ?

Do we assume that all disks are as busy as the rest of them ? I would have thought that the ones doing more work might fail earlier. I cannot see some sort of I/O count.

They exclude boot devices as presumably they are not that busy.

Re: I'd like to see a report like this for flash drives and SSDs

Backblaze do provide ssd-drive-stats.

McDonald's pulls plug on Wi-Fi, starts playing classical music to soothe yobs

Even them playing classical music ...

is not enough to tempt me into a McDonalds -- I only eat food.

Maybe this might get my local supermarket to play some decent music rather than the wailing that they normally pump out of their speakers.

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

Re: Same

Nah, MS Windows does not require a quantum computer -- yet!

Microsoft Office 365 Cloud has a secret lining

Is that not an oxymoron ...

security being holding top secret documents in someone else's cloud ?

Home Depot sent my email, details of stuff I bought to Meta, customer complains

"consent fatigue"

I am fatigued at all these corporations that assume that I consent to their slurping and sharing my data.

The one that currently annoys me most is how many web sites have www.googletagmanager.com in them and do not ask if I consent to that. OK: my /etc/hosts maps that to 127.1.1.1 but most people do not know how to do that.

Oh: El Reg - you have googletagmanager ... when are you going to ask us if we want that ? To see how it should be done go to https://ico.org.uk/

Amazon warehouse workers 'make history' with first official UK strike

Avoiding Amazon

alternative was only £1 more expensive

Important detail: was that £1 on a £5 item or £1 on a £100 item ?

Either way I applaud your action.