Posts by alain williams 2888 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
It will be interesting to see if rules are introduced that restrict how face masks are made:
* how big they are, how much of the face they cover
* what patterns can be printed on them. Patterns can confuse recognition systems
Also which countries make the restrictions.
It might be sub-standard but it has powered the PC revolution and even the wider IT revolution. Could something better have done that?
It was a product of its time - if MS DOS/Windows had not appeared then something else would have.
I remember SCO ODT was quite nice & better than what MS had some 30 years ago; the unfortunate thing was that it cost far too much for widespread adoption -- because they had licensed many components from elsewhere. Pity.
This article was all about business users, what about home/personal users ? I suspect that Microsoft sold their personal information as well ?
Me: happy to use Libreoffice on my Linux boxes but unhappy to realise that I have likely had my private information harvested from anything that my O-365 using friends have recorded about me.
The GDPR talks about clarity in agreements - but I doubt that most O-365 users are aware. Time for a huge fine from the data protection people.
Unfortunately it appears not to and only does 2G. Pity as otherwise it would sound perfect.
Beware: Nokia released a 5310 in 2007 - this is not the same thing, but looks similar.
From the point of view of today's technical assessment this is the wrong decision. This assumes a benign China - us techies don't like to think that people are nasty (with a few exceptions).
From a much longer political decision of international geopolitics you might get a different answer: depending on how you value human liberties and your view of Chinese political ambitions.
If our UK politicians have taken a long view I am very pleased at this rare event - irrespective of them being right or wrong. If they are just bending over for Trump - I am not pleased.
by Google, Facebook & pals is increasingly looking like: China or The Rest of the World. If China pushes too hard they might find themselves cut adrift.
Good from the point of view of preserving freedoms, but this would also increase the isolation of those who live in the totalitarian state that we call China.
I do not know what the answer is.
Remember: it is not just China, other oppressive states also exist.
The email includes:
The African slave trade was a brutal system of human misery deployed at global scale.
So: do slaves (past or present) from other places not matter ?
OK: I understand why Dan wrote that - he is reacting to the current brouhaha - but it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture when under pressure from on group.
The Chinese ambassador has been saying that we must not interfere with internal Chinese affairs, but how can we ignore human abuses in other countries ? Should we let Primark ignore working conditions in Bangladesh from where it buys its clothes or slave labour in Chinese prisons ? No: public opinion is making them change.
Likewise: we must not ignore what China is doing to fellow humans.
I have met Uighur Muslims, I know people from Hong Kong - but even if I did not how could I ignore oppression of people even if they are 10,000 miles away ?
We must send a message to Xi Jinping that we do not like the bully that he has become. He is emboldened by their burgeoning economy - so we can express our disapproval by buying less of their goods and services.
Other nations should do likewise: a school ground bully will just dominate/terrorrise one child who stands up to him but if many do he will be defeated.
I recognize that some of the UK's history is not good, but that does not mean that we should turn a blind eye.
China is not the only rogue nation but is, I believe, the most dangerous.
Can Akamai pass the IP addresses from which they got the attack to the various ISP's, so that the ISP's can contact the associated end user and suggest they give their machines a thorough cleaning?
What they need to do is to speak to a few of the ISPs and get traffic logs for some of these PCs. Try to work out the command & control addresses - these are the real ones to chase - not the hapless users running a compromised Microsoft machine. Maybe examine a few of these machine to see what malware they have.
It will be interesting to see who the botnet controllers are: criminals or governments (mind you sometimes they are the same thing).
After IR35 how many of those consultants will be paying the correct tax ?
I am thinking of those who are working away from home for a few months but cannot claim travel & hotels against tax - if they were doing the same but working for a large company they would have this paid for them by the company which would claim it against income.
Considering the lifetime of Laptops is now more like 5 years, this year's CPU will be outdated for 80% of the machines life as well. Additionally, the single thread performance of modern CPUs is no longer growing rapidly.
Your criteria for buying something seem to be "because it is new"; should it not be "it does what I need". You might need a top of the range high powered laptop but I doubt that most people do. This machine would do me nicely except that I would like a smaller screen to fit easier in my ruck sack, I have a large screen at home - I do not need one when out & about.
See: we all have different needs.
The improvements are small increments, nothing revolutionary has really benefited general consumers for years.
Is that not the definition of a mature product: it does what it is supposed to so no major developments are needed ?
When you get a mature product what should happen is that the manufacturers start to compete by providing good prices and service. Most 'phone vendors do not do this.
that can be used to achieve what the students are learning ?
If there are alternatives then should the universities not be teaching general principles which is illustrated by using Adobe & other products ?
If they just teach Adobe products then they are delivering training, not education. The result will be graduates who can only work if they have Adobe products - this is not good. Adobe will achieve ever greater lock-in and the competition wither.
If universities teach one product because it is easier - then they are being lazy.
I've gone through about:config and updated the Mozilla URLs in a similar fashion, by munging the end of the hostname.
and there is a lot of them, + google ones & others.
A 99.9% of web users are, I suspect, unaware of these.Thus, surely, they are illegal under GDPR informed consent provisions. I would be very surprised if they did not record the requesting IP (ie user's home) address and various other things - many of which could identify the user, or at least start to.
Another set of GDPR breaking exfiltration of user data are things like google analytics - surely a web site should ask permission first to ask consent which "must be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous" - no web sites that I know of do so (including El Reg).
However: I doubt that our chocolate box ICO will bother.
What with so much money going there the increasing economic clout gives them increasing political influence and confidence.
A big concern that I have about China is that it will use this power in ways that I do not like, look at the problems of the Uighur Muslims, recent freedom restrictions in Hong Kong, rhetoric about Taiwan, surveillance of their own population, lack of freedom of speech, ... President Xi Jinping cannot be removed at the ballot box which, IMHO, makes him a dictator of what looks like an increasingly totalitarian state. All of that worries me and I think that we should push back before it gets unstoppable.
I am not saying that Western governments do not have their own problems, our imperial past & some of what the CIA have done is shameful, currently heighligthened black problems but at least I could walk down Whitehall with a placard that said "Bollocks to Boris" without ''disappearing''.
I will not deny a certain amount of preferring 'my lot/friends' to another grouping.
One way of slowing them is to not give them so much money: eg by buying European telecomms kit. It would also benefit employment over here and improve supply chain security. I think that this is part of what is behind the Huawei debacle - although our politicians are coy about saying so.
when you review these things do remember that some of us are not interested in running something like call of duty. We want a 'phone and one of the really important things is battery life.
afforded at least two days' worth of usage between charges
Presumably that was with wifi, bluetooth, GPS, Internet, etc switched on - these are also battery suckers. It would be really useful to be told how long the battery lasts with just 2G/3G switched on. Another time to quote is if you want 4G/5G would be good as well. I do realise that how long depends on local signal strength - so please say that.
Yes: some do want all the services, but some do not.
If anyone wants music in the kitchen, they find a laptop and bring it in.
I have a lot of music in my kitchen - I use something that you might have heard of: a 'radio'.
It works really well; super modern - it is a DAB radio. Tuned to either: Classic FM, BBC Radio 4 or Radio 3.
1) the date when it will no longer receive s/ware updates to protect it from the latest drive by attack
2) the date when the servers that it speaks to are switched off
Neither of these is explained in the point-of-sale blurb.
If you ask you might be told of a 'lifetime' - which likely started a year or two ago when the model was released - so what you have left can be quite short.
Quite apart from me not being able to understand *why* I would want something that costs more and blabs personal information to the manufacturer; I would never buy something where (2) those servers were not mine - prolly some R-pi in my house.
Thankfully there will always be a market for cheaper non IoT stuff that will be wanted by those who are not rich enough to be stupid enough to buy these nasties.
not room for more undercarriage
Exactly: which is why it should have been redesigned, but that would have taken it out of spec as far as 737 pilots certification - so the pilots would have had to do some training. They were afraid that the training need would have reduces sales - so they pushed the engines forwards which made the plane unstable, so they came up with a software bodge to correct the instability.
Unstable: engines in front of the center of gravity, so more thrust pushes the airplane nose up.
If/when the 737 MAX takes to the air they are going to need to be insured. How will Lloyds, etc, assess them as a risk ?
It would have been far cheaper for Boeing to have done a proper redesign job and made it higher off the ground when the fitted the bigger engines. The few bob saved on retraining pilots just would not be noticed compared to the consequential loss from by cutting corners. This is what you get when you let bean counters rather than engineers make decisions.
It's also worth remembering that if you buy (or licence) a product from someone, the law offers you a lot of protection in the event that product doesn't deliver what you requested.
Whoo hooo! When was the last time that anyone successfully sued Microsoft for bugs in their stuff ?
Be slow to take the alleged reasons as being the true ones.
China has grown a lot in economic and political power, it is doing a lot of things that we do not like: interning Muslims, reducing freedom in Hong Kong, internal surveillance, ... and lastly threatening the West's world dominance.
You can either believe that international relationships should be warm & cuddly and all countries work to mutual benefit; or that it is dog eat dog and every country acts to achieve dominance. If you are weak (economically, militarily) then you try to cuddle. If you are strong then countries seem to try to dominate; the USA has done that for years (even before Trump's "America first" policy). China is increasingly trying to dominate.
So how should others react to China's bullying actions ? Do we let it continue and become ever stronger or do we clip its wings ?
It seems clear to me that the Huawei debacle is about clipping China's wings.
The USA cannot just do so, World Trade Organization rules prohibit discrimination between trading partners, but provides exceptions for environmental protection, national security, and other important goals. So a reason needs to be found: security is a good excuse.
If we ban Huawei then Western kit will be bought. This reduces the money that we send to China and benefits Western manufacturers - although, sadly, probably not any British ones -- although Brexit might (maybe) allow the UK government to help such initiatives -- if they can see that clearly.
I leave this to you to decide if stopping Chinese dominance and rebuilding domestic manufacturing (at a price) is a good thing or not.
DoH needs a server to answer DNS queries - that server gets to know a lot about you.
Use normal DNS and your ISP/company can see what you are trying to resolve. Even if you do not use its DNS servers it can sniff the packets as they go by.
If you live in a repressive regime (eg Egypt, China, ...) they can make your ISP hand over your DNS history or change stuff on the fly; so DoH might be good, although they can still see where your IP packets go to.
What about the DoH provider - what does it gain ? Knowledge of all the sites that you visit - good meat to the advertising machine for Google & pals - even when those sites do not run google analytics (or you have blocked the javascript). These DoH providers are subject to the Patriot Act or local equivalent - so, for some, the security is a fig leaf.
Oh - just because you do not think that your regime is repressive does not mean that your government is not snooping on you. DNS over TOR might be an interesting idea.
If you do run DoH then you might be visited by shady men and told to change your browser options - packet sniffing via your ISP will make it obvious if you have taken their 'advice'. So: will you make yourself a target for future visits ?
You beat me to it with that comment.
If you want to run MS Windows & Linux on the same machine (plenty of reasons why you might) the only safe way is to run MS Windows under Linux - that way the Linux part remains safe from snooping.
I wonder who might be sponsoring Microsoft to do this work ? How big is the NSA budget ?
If all of its income there is to be garnished by SAS there is little point in bothering.
It will be interesting to see what SAS does. It could go after the USA side of the banks and get an order there. The bank will then have to decide which jurisdiction to obey. Remember these cases where people who left the USA as infants were persued by the USA IRS which forced banks in England to close their accounts, if not the the banks risked penalties of huge fines. IMHO this is international terrorism.
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