Posts by alain williams

NHS tech chief dismisses concerns over loss of statutory power to protect patient data

Sending the data to Plantir

is a much greater issue than merging with another government run unit.

Amazon founder Bezos to donate 'majority' of $126bn fortune

Re: Easy??

I'm willing to help ....

NTT claims it can stop the noise leaking from annoying people's headphones

Can they also stop ...

the musak in shops, sports centers, pubs, ... Why, oh why, these people think that it is necessary to blast us with their crap choice of music is beyond me.

Zoom adds email and calendar to its apps, to relieve the crushing burden of ALT-TAB

Re: Toggle tax gives privacy

so you are clearly an advanced keyboard user: you are able to press more than one key at once: Alt + Tab. There are plenty who are unable to do that.

Toggle tax gives privacy

I like to use separate tools for separate jobs. If everything handles email ... which one do I use ?

This is partly trying to keep the user always in their product ... but life is not like that, you are not always in conferences (unless very unlucky).

It also gives zoom the ability to look through emails to profile the user to be further able to sell stuff.

Use separate tools and reduce the privacy gouging that the tools can do. Use open source stuff: even better for privacy.

Jacks of all trades is a master of none.

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent

We will lose all control of the data

once it hits Plantir - no matter what the contract says.

UK.gov finds billions in cash for big data contracts

Re: "We will ensure that data can be leveraged"

Well the government has a big black hole in public finances. I am sure that selling your & my data will help fill part of that.

Voyager mission's project scientist retires after 50 years of service

Retiring aged 86

Edward Carroll Stone was inspired to enter the fields of planetary science and space exploration by the launch of Sputnik in 1957 - wow, what a career!

Microsoft ships non-Surface PC: a cheap Arm box for devs

Anyone put Linux on it yet ?

Hopefully the BIOS equivalent is not locked down.

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

HTML vs PDF

the webpage jumped and moved to accommodate for an ad changing for one with different height

It is possible to create a mess with even the best of tools. Do not blame HTML for some numpty mangling it with Javascript from some framework that s/he does not really understand.

Use tools for what they are good for

PDFs are great for making something that will look the same for everyone.

If you want something that adapts to the viewing device then do not use a PDF; this is something that HTML is good at.

If you want a form completed and submitted why use a PDF ? Some do that as a way of preserving their existing documents but just doing it over the web. If you want to do it over the web then HTML has got excellent forms ability, just please do not make it unusable with too much Javascript.

Most Metaverse business projects will be dead by 2025

The metaverse is not real

the profits that it will generate will be just as real

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

General Election

If the new government (led by whoever Prime Minister) followed roughly the 2019 Tory manifesto then I would be content to not have a GE. If they do not then a GE should be mandatory.

(I will accept changes mandated by unforseeable events like Covid & Putin's war.)

I pity satire writers - they must be struggling to keep up and find that events are more surreal than they could invent.

Junk cellphones on Earth would stack higher than the International Space Station

Longer support times

and operating system/firmware updates would cut waste - but this would hurt manufacturers' profits so is unlikely to happen.

Microsoft leaves the Office, rebrands everything as 365

Survey missing option

"I don't give a toss".

I am very happy with LibreOffice.

Rivian recalls nearly every vehicle it has sold

Would it not be great ...

if software vendors behaved like this when some dangerous flaw was found in their products.

Juno what? Jovian moon Europa is looking rugged

Did they spot ...

a little island to the west that is splitting off from the rest of the planet ?

Brexit dividend? 'Newly independent' UK will be world's 'data hub', claims digital minister

One person's 'red tape' is another's protection

More sound bite legislation from an increasingly vacuous government. Just look at the 'success' of their 'well thought through' economic announcements of the last fortnight.

Cult leader meets the Pope: Apple CEO chats to Francis

An apple led to mankind's downfall ...

in the Garden of Eden.

Does the pope not remember?

What is Tim Cook planning ?

Arm founder says the UK has no chance of tech sovereignty

Strategy means long term planning

But in the UK politicians are incapable of looking beyond the next general election.

How one Ukrainian software maker planned for survival as invaders approached

Emotional state of employees

Nice to see a CTO thinking about that.

Oracle pays $23 million to SEC to settle bribery charges

Re: Small fines = getting away with corruption

The fines must be matched by life changing fines on the individual Oracle execs show knew about this.

This will only stop when the execs can no longer afford to send their daughters to pony club.

Ukraine fears 'massive' Russian cyberattacks on power, infrastructure

Re: WTF .... SNAFUFUDBAR

I assume that you live in Europe, as do I. Like many of us you will have grown up in a peaceful environment, one where wars did not happen, wars were a long way away. The result will have led you to question why there was so much spending by our governments on defence - it was not needed.

Putin has shown us why this spending is needed and has been a wake up call for many (me included) to now understand that peace cannot be assumed, you need to be ready. This has happened at the country level as well, the backing of NATO has got stronger as countries have realised that without it they might be vulnerable to an aggressor.

Spending on your local fire station is a complete waste of cash ... until a house catches fire.

The only thing that a bully understands is someone who is stronger than them. The way of dealing with a school bully is to have them visited by the rugby club.

I do not like spending on the military but do understand that the consequences of not spending might be awful.

How much spending and what on ? A hard question that can only be answered with hindsight.

Grand Theft Auto 6 maker confirms source code, vids stolen in cyber-heist

Grand theft source code

A great new game for us all to play!

Microsoft rolls out stealthy updates for 365 Apps

Microsoft is catching up with Linux

I often update my Linux boxes while running the applications that are being updated.

China's single aisle passenger jet – the C919 – likely to be certified next week

Should we be making lots of airplanes ?

What with the effect of aviation on the climate.

HP pays $1.3m to settle dispute over printer security chip

€95 is easily not enough

How much time wasted trying to diagnose what turns out to not be a real hardware issue ?

What losses through not being able to print important documents on time ?

HP has got off scott free.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

My dad was an officer who gave/awarded driving licenses. One day he thought that he would like one ...

Guess who taught me to drive.

CERN draws up shutdown plans to save energy

"the world's largest publicly known particle collider"

Is this suggesting that someone has a private particle collider ?

Would this be in a volcano on an island owned by someone with a penchant for white cats ?

Newport Wafer Fab sale to Chinese company held up again by UK.gov's probe

Do not sell to the enemy

Sorry to be so stark, but China is increasingly showing itself to be a country that is acting against us and our friends; it is throwing its weight around more & more - look at the firighteners that it put on Taiwan last month.

Nadine Dorries promotes 'Brexit rewards' of proposed UK data protection law

Summary: abuse personal data as you wish

one that is designed not for Brussels, but for the people of the UK,” said Dorries

Wrong: it is designed for those business that do not care about privacy of "the people of the UK".

EU proposes regulations for tablet battery life, spare parts

"spare parts for at least five years"

1) this is not long enough, many devices are easily usable for longer. 10 years would be good

2) "from the date of the device's introduction to the market". No: the date should be from when the device was sold new in a shop

Underwater datacenter will open for business this year

A flood of enquiries will result

from this announcement.

This will make a splash in the hosting market.

Oh no, that James Webb Space Telescope snap might actually contain malware

Re: Again, a bloody attachment

Yes, b b but I thought that the JWST pic was of some cute kittens!

Woman forced to sell 4-bed house after crypto exchange wrongly refunded $7.2m

Re: an account number was accidentally entered into the payment amount field

With a large transfer to a new account I will first transfer £1 and ask the recipient to tell me that they have received it.

Universal Unix tool AWK gets Unicode support

Re: Still work in progress

"café" can be four or five code points, but it is four characters, and they should be considered the same

Unicode equivalence is a pain, it allows different byte sequences to represent the same character. In the above example the 'é' can either be U+E9 (a single code point) or 'e' followed by a combining acute accent (U+65 followed by U+301). Searching algorithms are thus more complicated.

Big Tech is building the metaverse of its own dreams. You don't want to go there

Zuck has been listening to too much Eagles

Does he realise that Hotel California was only a song ?

There's no place like GNOME: Project hits 25, going on 43

Should have stopped before 2011

which is when Gnome 3 was released.

Thanks very much for the Mate fork (of Gnome 2) which provides a usable version of Gnome.

Court voids 34,000 unfair Fuji Xerox contracts

Unilateral variation terms

Far too many contracts contain this, often with the burden on the customer of finding out that there has been a change - expected to check a web site and notice that some wording is different.

This sort of thing should be blanket banned with limited exceptions for things like inflation linked price changes.

The trouble is that they are all at it so it is hard to find a supplier that plays fair.

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Other car manufacturers are available.

Just say no & buy something else.

Elon Musk sells Tesla shares worth $6.9b as Twitter lawsuit looms

Musk's sofa

It must be nice to have a sofa in which he can find such loose change ...

Apple tells suppliers to use 'Taiwan, China' or 'Chinese Taipei' to appease Beijing

UN Member states

The UN should grow some balls and recognise Taiwan as an independent member state.

While they are at it they should also recognise Palestine.

IBM puts NIST’s quantum-resistant crypto to work in Z16 mainframe

CRYSTALS-Dilithium

Encryption Jim, but not as we know it.

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

Re: Whack a mole

Yes: just count seconds since the epoch and things become simpler.

Put the complexity on converting epoch seconds to a form that a human will understand. That is already quite complicated as it has to cope with time zones and daylight savings. This can have 1.30 am happening twice on some days or not at all.

Part of the problem is that POSIX defines a day as 24 x 3600 seconds, it does not allow + or - 1. Fixing this would be hard (lots of legacy software to check), then the conversion code but would then let us count seconds.

DARPA seeks portable muon-making machine to see through almost anything

Re: negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit

℃ is U+2103 "DEGREE CELSIUS = degrees Centigrade"

℉ is U+2109 "DEGREE FARENHEIT"

K is U+212A "KELVIN SIGN". Kelvin is never referred to nor written as a degree

negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit

Oh come on el-reg ... Fahrenheit in a scientific context is stupid, if you want to give a different scale try Kelvin - much more meaningful when close to absolute zero.

UK government refuses public review before launch of NHS data platform

What privacy safeguards ?

What guarantees that the data will be kept in the UK and away from Uncle Sam and the Patriot Act.

Rocky Linux 9 and its new build service enter the ring

I have just installed it ...

went easily (under qemu under Debian). Seems a bit jerky (slight delay on terminal character echo).

Runs waylan (not a problem) but Gnome 4 - which I hate - I'll need to find a usable desktop.

How quick to release ?

I am not bothered if it takes Rocky a couple of months to get the first version out of the door. What is more important to getting security updates out quickly.

Sage accused of strong-arming customers into subscriptions

Re: Strong arming doesn't work

Doing this with only two months notice is extra nasty.

And at a time of year when people are going to be away on Summer holidays - so, in practice, less time available.