Posts by alain williams

Former NHS AI leader joins US spy-tech firm Palantir

How do we verify ...

that information given to Palantir will not then be used for non NHS purposes or given to USA spooks ?

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

Will it be allowed to drive me back from the pub ?

When I have had a jar too many.

IBM not cooperating with discovery, say attorneys in age-discrimination case

It makes me wonder ...

what have they got to hide ?

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

What you are used to is perceived as best

No-one (or almost no-one) wants to dig around for a third rate alternative to the software they've grown used to.

Also: no one wants to learn to use a first rate alternative to the third rate software that they've grown used to.

Unlike many here most people have zero interest in software, many stare blankly at you when you ask them which web browser they use - it is "the Internet", they are unaware that there is a program that they use to get there.

They buy a PC/laptop and just accept whatever it comes with to use the Internet. Everything else (eg view an image, open a document) just happens - they do not think that programs are involved, even less that there might be a choice as to which program to use.

We are the strange ones: those who think about such things.

(Speaking as someone who got into Unix 40 years ago and now just uses Linux)

Swedish firms ink deal to make green hydrogen with wind power

Oxygen by product

Will they do anything with it or just let it gas into the atmosphere ?

ESA's Sentinel-1A satellite narrowly dodges debris

100 meters at 50,000 kmph

is not a lot of room for error. I am impressed.

How large was this bit of debris ?

EU law threatening 'commercially painful changes' for tech out tonight

What data do they take ...

they must be forced to fully describe what data they take and what they do with it. Eg none of this sort of games by Google.

Users must be allowed to say "no" to this data grab in a way that is just as easy as re-enabling it; the default should be "no".

If this is broken the penalty should be a large fine AND jail time for the programmers & their managers all the way to the top.

Android's Messages, Dialer apps quietly sent text, call info to Google

Re: GDPR

The only way of stopping this sort of thing from happening again is fines levied on individuals: a sum about equal to 1 year's salary would be about right. This should be paid by the: programmers, their managers all the way to the top.

If it is a find paid by google then little will change.

Biden says Russia exploring revenge cyberattacks

Re: It all smells like "WMD" to me...

The latest pretext to draw the West into conflict.

What is the advantage to Putin to start a punch up where, at best, everyone gets a bloody nose and at worse we all get destroyed ?

Unless the thinking is "I am going down, I'll take everyone else with me."

I always assumed that politicians had some sense of history: how will they be viewed in 200 years time, hero or villain ?

FIDO Alliance says it has finally killed the password

I do not trust my smartphone

and do not like biometrics (I cannot change my face).

Passwords work

Are we springing into a Y2K-class nightmare?

Re: USA change its date format ...

I do remember in the early 1970s the TV cook The Galloping Gourmet measured wine in "Slurps". I never worked out how much that was.

USA change its date format ...

that would be nice.

How about also adopting the same paper sizes as the rest of the world ?

Ireland: Meta fined $18.6m for breaking EU's GDPR

'the fine was "entirely disproportionate."'

Correct, the fine should have been 10 x as much: €2,250 million

Where are the (serious) Russian cyberattacks?

Re: "Putin may not be insane"

I think that it is unwise to label someone who is dangerous as insane as we then downplay, to ourselves, how they can act: sometimes very rationally. Thus we might not take it as seriously as we should.

We need to understand that he has a plan. This plan is long term and has been worked on.

I suspect that the plan has feet of clay as none of his advisors wants to be the one who tells Putin of invalid assumptions, etc, that the plan is based on.

Having said that I am fearful that, when his back is to the wall that, he might show little restraint and start chucking nukes around. If he feel that he is on the way out then why worry about anyone else being blown up.

Russia mulls making software piracy legal and patent licensing compulsory

So Russia looking at China

and doing as China does.

How much of a change will this be anyway ?

Deutsche Bank seeks options as sanctions threaten Russian dev unit

'fast-track "knowledge transfer" from developers in Russia'

In other words "not everything is documented". This is monumentally stupid ... although commonly happens but no one speaks about it :-(

The zero-password future can't come soon enough

Re: "the charge into a passwordless future"

If one of my passwords gets compromised, I can change it. I can't change my fingerprints.

+1

Maxar Technologies: The eye in the sky tracking invasion of Ukraine

Eye in the sky until blinded

Would Putin be able to blind it by pointing a powerful laser at it ?

Do the satellites have some protection to stop the cameras being so burned out ?

Does Putin care ? As long as he controls the media in Russia it does not matter what sky eyes tell the rest of the world.

Govt suggests Brits should hand passports to social media companies

They want a passport ...

I suspect that any passport will do. How do they verify that the passport that I give them is mine ?

I think that we should all submit that of Nadine Dorries or Nick Clegg - depending on which gender we decide that we want to be today.

Like that we would stop SM sites from data mining our passports & joining up everything we do on-line; before it all goes AWOL in a huge data breach or is sold to some future Cambridge Analytica.

Dutch govt issues data protection report card for Microsoft

What about mandatory account for windows 11 ?

This is a new slurp of personal data. Why is it necessary, how long is the data held, who is it shared with ?

European Union takes China to WTO over smartphone patents

Take them to court outside China

Get a court injunction in the EU, USA, ... to prevent the Chinese made goods being sold in the EU, USA, ... on the grounds of IP violation.

Internet connection now required for Windows 11 Pro Insider setup

Illegal under the GDPR

The GDPR has several things to say about this.

* Right to be informed Does MS say what it does with the personal info, how long it keeps it, etc, and be concise, transparent, intelligible, easily accessible, and it must use clear and plain language ?

* necessary Why is this data necessary for the PC to work? It has not until now, so what has changed ?

The EU might take MS to court - but until then MS may refuse to let your PC work.

UK regulator 'broke international law', says Facebook

Pot calling the kettle black

If the CMA did break anything in the first place.

Linux tops Google's Project Zero charts for fastest bug fixes

Raw bug counts are not very meaninful

Project Zero is about security vulnerabilities but not all vulnerabilities are equally bad: some are harder to exploit, others have limited impact.

A vendor should, rightly, prioritise fixing some bugs over others.

Russian 'Minecraft bomb plot' teen jailed for five years

Will they be in a real prison

or one in Minecraft ?

Reality check: We should not expect our communications to remain private

Do not have a poll with a negative in it

We should not expect our communications to remain private

It makes it easy to click on the wrong yes/no. I know that the el-Reg readership is by & large intelligent but we can be busy or rushed.

The question would have been much better worded "We should be able expect our communications to remain private"

World's top chipmaking equipment maker claims Chinese rival may infringe IP

Its all lies they will tell you

Push them and the Chinese government will claim that it is a lie -- just as they claim for everything else that they do but pretend that they do not.

France says Google Analytics breaches GDPR when it sends data to US

Also consent not sought

Before taking personal data the GDPR also mandates that the user be clearly informed and their consent sought. This does not happen with any of these things.

UK government gifts new £250m hosting contract to its own joint venture

This makes sense in so many ways

A Wiltshire based company so easier to do a security audit & keep on so.

Based in the UK, so out of reach of things like the USA patriot act, increase UK based skills.

A joint venture: good for audit and stop bleeding profits overseas.

UK science stuck in 'holding pattern' on EU funding by Brexit, says minister

Why not borrow from the NHS Brexit bonus ?

As far as I am aware most of the £350 million/week has not been paid to the NHS - so surely a little can be taken from that.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Backup disk full

I wrote a script to do automated backup of a Linux box at night to a remote (NFS) disk. Old backups were removed to not fill the backup disk.

The script sent an email saying what happened. My customer did not want to pay for me to check the emails, so to him only.

Several years later some gremlin removed a bunch of files. I was asked to restore from backup. The backup disk had gone full as what was being backed up had grown.

"Did you not see the error emails ?" I asked. He had got bored with the backup emails and set a rule to automatically save them somewhere so that he did not have to look at them.

Too clever by half!

Website fined by German court for leaking visitor's IP address via Google Fonts

Will google have to remove

the information that we now learn it obtained illegally ?

It does not matter if it was google's fault, it has personal information obtained without consent.

Even if google says that it has removed the information, do we trust them to be truthful ?

Faster web sites

will be a beneficial result of stopping all of this linking, little of which is really noticeable to the user.

New York Times outlays seven-figure sum for 1,900 lines of JavaScript – yes, we mean Wordle

How long before 1,900 lines becomes 19,000

and includes google analytics and all that sort of crap ?

UK's new Brexit Freedom Bill promises already-slated GDPR reform, easier gene editing rules

Clause 1 of the bill

Banning in the same sentence the phrases "party" and "Downing Street".

Mike Lynch loses US extradition delay bid: Flight across the Atlantic looks closer than ever

Re: If that wasn't bad enough...

Still, I'm struggling to understand how he can be extradited while the UK fraud case is unresolved.

Because the USA government wants to give a USA company its money back. Money that it lost as it did not do due diligence before it bought Autonomy. Once he is in the USA he will be found guilty no matter what is the outcome of the UK fraud case. He will prolly be offered a plea bargain: admit guilt or risk 200 years in prison.

Re: 1,500 pages? Damn that's huge.

But why a 2 year delay ?

Who is being pressured ?

IBM confirms new mainframe to arrive 'late in first half of 2022'

MIPS

This is a more meaningful number than CPU frequency.

UK, Australia, to build 'network of liberty that will deter cyber attacks before they happen'

Re: Demockracy

Maybe we should ask them "If they are doing nothing wrong then what have they got to hide ?"

Privacy is for paedophiles, UK government seems to be saying while spending £500k demonising online chat encryption

UK ICO disagrees with government

In The Guardian: End-to-end encryption protects children, says UK information watchdog

But I expect that the politicians will ignore what he says.

So: what are they really after ? Never trust a politician.

Re: Nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide....

Maybe we should ask ministers to read this paper.

Actually I suspect that they know the arguments and really hope that most of us do not read it.

Further comments by Bruce Schneier

First they came for Notepad. Now they're coming for Task Manager

Re: Ms just does not know when to stop fiddling

If it ain't bust don't fix it.

A good design philosophy -- but as a developer I do understand the temptation to fiddle.

Autonomy's Mike Lynch gets yet another judgment date as US extradition wrangling continues

This all seems horribly cruel

This has been going on for 7 years - a large chunk of anyone's life. 7 years where he has been living in uncertainty & fear.

This does seem to be the way with court.

Open source, closed wallets, big profits – nobody wins the OSS rock, paper, scissors game

Re: Governments

most songs ended up around 3 minutes long 'cos that's what the station was prepared to play

I though that 3 minutes was/is the play time of the vinyl 45 RPM 7" single.

Lawmakers propose TLDR Act because no one reads Terms of Service agreements

Model contracts should be mandated

There should be a set of model contracts that are clearly written and fair to both customer and retailer/business. These would come with a logo like the BSI Kitemark.

Different contracts as there are different sorts of business.

The contracts would come with a schedule where the business could put things like: delivery times & charges; URLs; geographic restrictions.

One thing forbidden would be any change without further customer agreement - except, maybe, stuff in the schedule.

Austrian watchdog rules German company's use of Google Analytics breached GDPR by sending data to US

Will this ruling apply in the UK ?

Following brexit ?

I hope so.

'IwlIj jachjaj! Incoming LibreOffice 7.3 to support Klingon and Interslavic

Pity that Klingon Unicode ...

did not make it. There is still a proposal which probably will not go far.

The James Webb Space Telescope has only gone and deployed its primary mirror

Re: Excessive - but a Space Camera Drone?

And the drone camera would be operating at around -300 deg F...

-185℃ would have been better or perhaps 88K

It takes more clicks to reject their cookies than accept them, so France fines Facebook and Google over €200m

Re: Reject all

You want "save cookies for this site, but scrap them when the tab is closed". Install cookie autodelete which does just that.

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of fraud: Blood-testing machines were vapourware after all

Now, if only ....

we could put politicians on trial when they lie!