Posts by Dave 126

Western Digital CTO Martin Fink refused El Reg's questions, but did write this sweet essay

No mention of the unpatched security holes in the WD My Cloud series of NAS drives (as reported by the Reg this week), then? No great surprise, their website makes mo mention of it, either.

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a drone? Is it a car? It's both, crossed with Uber

Re: Not the dumbest idea I've ever seen.

But it would make it easier to spend more time in more widely located pubs... and a pub is arguably a better venue for expressing genuine individuality than the road.

In any case, I do see a few beautiful vintage cars on the road, but they tend to be owned by enthusiasts. A silver Audi or black BMW would appear to be chosen for its anonymity, or else some game of keeping up with the Jones.

Re: And if you think about it for more than 10 minutes...

Conventional helicopters were developed for military use. However, they have been bloody useful for search and rescue, air ambulances, disaster relief and coast guard operations.

The same is true of so many technologies. So why make the point about the transportation concept outlined in this article?

It's a logistics concept system. Like... the idea of using pallets and forklift trucks to easily shift lots of stuff around. You guessed it, the pallet and forklift system was developed in the Pacific theatre during WWII. The use of shipping containers revolutionised civilian shipping and trade, but hey, they are convenient standard shape to use as a site office or generator set - by both civilian and military users.

Basically, if an engineer develops any transportation system that is cheaper, more reliable, more efficient, quieter etc it will be of interest to the military.

Re: "The internal combustion engine" [...] is designed to use fossil fuels

>The concept assumes the ground and air modules will be battery-powered and therefore more environmentally-friendly than petrol-burning cars, which of course neglects the very real possibility the electricity charging those batteries was generated in a coal-or-oil-fuelled power plant.

It neglects nothing. Whilst burning fossil fuels is likely to play a part in generating said electricity, these fuels aren't being burnt in densely populated cities, i.e in the environment that many people live in. CO2 emissions are a concern, but in a city other emissions and soot are a real health issue.

Top tip: Unplug your WD My Cloud boxen – now

Re: Any ideas?

Thanks Korev, I'll give it another poke and see it can be configured to run without needing access to WD's cloud.

Re: Any ideas?

Incidentally, I bought the WD My Cloud box at Christmas, and it was in January I plugged it in. I didn't copy data across to it because after setting up an account, it refused to accept the password I gave it that day. Looking for a solution, I couldn't access the WD websites, forums or support pages.

It may be just coincidence that the flaws in the article were discovered in January.

Any ideas?

I've bought one and unboxed it, but I haven't copied any data to it yet. Should I just take it back to Tescos for a full refund? (because it's clearly not fit for the purpose for which it was sold)

I just want a NAS that can back itself up to an external drive. Not fussed about cloudy features or accessing stuff when away from the house.

Huawei's just changed the way you'll use Android

Re: "There's no way to customise this in current software builds: you get what you're given."

My last few phones have had microSD card slots, and to be honest they have caused me more trouble than they have been worth. Some apps will store their data on the microSD card by default, so this causes unexpected results if I decide to take out the microSD card in order to play its music contents through my car stereo, or to put in my compact camera (I have a few microSD > SD card converters on my dashboard).

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not judging you for wanting a microSD card slot, but the point of my post now is to highlight the disconnect between my desire for a microSD card slot and the reality of actually trying to use it - especially between different devices. Oh, and on top of that I lose the damned tiny things.

For sure, if I did a lot of commuting and was in the habit of watching locally-stored video on the train, then for sure a nice big microSD would be nice... but really, it's best treated as built in storage once it's fitted to the phone. And for watching video whilst seated, it isn't a chore to use a microUSB thumbstick. If you want a microSD card in order to swap data between devices, then you have to sacrifice having the card's data encrypted.

So, for the above reasons, I'm curious as to why people demand a microSD card slot instead of just a phone with reasonably-priced ample storage to begin with. However, the above might give a clue as to why microSD card slots are falling out of favour with phone vendors, in addition to being able to charge mark-ups on storage, of course.

Regards

Re: "There's no way to customise this in current software builds: you get what you're given."

Buying a phone every three years isn't rewarding the vendor (I've just stuck a new battery in my Nexus 5, does all one might want from a phone). Buying one every nine months might be. In any case, the best Android phone (by whatever criteria) several two years ago isn't from the same vendor as today, nor is it likely to be the same in two year's time - this means that 'brand loyalty' is limited in its power.

Aah, all is well in the world. So peaceful, so– wait, where's the 2FA on IoT apps? Oh my gawd

Re: Yawn

If one searches for 'open source home automation', a few different projects will show up. I haven't looked any deeper, but the code can be audited - though of course that isn't easy.

Re: "Multi user systems"

> Mind you I'm still not sure what happens when there's a conflict between two authorised users e.g. who want the lounge at two very different temperatures. There are probably precedents for this as well.

The computer encourages the two humans to fight to the death, or until one concedes control of the thermostat to the other.

Re: You know what's even better than 2-factor authentication?

As I noted this week, the established home automation systems (as used by very rich people for years) tends to be hard-wired into the house. They can afford to have the walls redecorated after installation. Not being wireless drastically reduces attack surfaces.

Similarly, my car - like most - is a network of sensors and actuators... but it doesn't have a wireless connection to anything.

A mooving tail of cows, calves and the Internet of Things

Re: IoT?

>I may be pedantic, but I'm not sure this actually uses the internet at all?

If you were being pedantic, you would have capitalised Internet. 'The Internet' is not the same 'internet' as the word is used in 'internet of things'. I suggest you look up the sources cited by the Wikipedia article on 'Internet of Things' and make your own mind up.

Re: Coverage - and not in the nice way

>Has anyone done any analysis about birth rate defects due to the calf growing up on a microwave transmitter, ... ?

If the health issues from RF radiation are fewer and less severe than health issues arising from an unsupervised births, then the net result is positive. Farmers are motivated to have a healthy herd - though now I'm thinking of Alan Partridges rant against farmers:

"You are a big posh sod with plums in your mouth, and the plums have mutated and they have got beaks. You make pigs smoke. You feed beef burgers to swans. You have big sheds, but nobody's allowed in. And in these sheds you have 20ft high chickens, and these chickens are scared because the don't know why they're so big, and they're going, "Oh why am I so massive?" and they're looking down at all the little chickens and they think they're in an aeroplane because all the other chickens are so small. Do you deny that? No, I think his silence speaks volumes."

Re: Now that is a useful IoT application

With a couple of exceptions (Nest, Alexi), IoT hasn't been marketed that hard by established companies (ones with a reputation to lose). I'm hardly swamped by advertisements for IoT gizmos (but maybe Google will only display adverts for security cameras and baby monitors if I search for 'nappies' and 'teething', which I don't). A lot of the really dodgy security is in the no-name cheap landfill kit - not sure how much is being sold; I don't see much of it about in the wild.

In time, genuinely useful items will be bought by more people, thus coming under greater scrutiny. Lessons learnt in industrial control will filter down to consumer kit. Health services, in an effort to make economies in caring for an ageing population, will look towards remote monitoring of vulnerable people's health to save on the time a community nurse spends travelling between homes.

Home automation has been around for years, but traditionally has been hard-wired into the house (drastically reducing attack surfaces) and expensive. It is the prevalence of now cheap wireless networking that means there are cheap wireless gizmos on the market that aren't as secure as they should be.

A good reminder that IoT can refer to industrial control tech, as well as assigning addresses to physical objects. Poorly secured home gizmos of questionable utility are just a fraction of one definition of 'IoT'.

Trump, Brexit, and Cambridge Analytica – not quite the dystopia you're looking for

>Is there any limit to the number of excuses the Left will try to come up with, to explain the fact that not everyone agrees with them?

What of are not of the left or right, but get royally pissed off with people spouting bullshit? How can democracy function in the way that we all agree it should, if people don't get called out for clear misinformation, be it in the side of a bus or in a Trump tweet? This is a tech blog, and physics and engineering doesn't give a damn what your opinion - or mine - is. When we have group problems to solve I hope we use empirical evidence to assess solutions.

In the past, wiser minds have created bodies such as the Office of National Statistics in an effort to prevent the subjective masquerading as objective. Without the ability to agree on what is true and what is not true, we're at the mercy of those who benefit from our division. Trump's tweets are so often demonstrably incorrect.

As for left and right, or in or out.... not everyone who voted had extreme views either way. In fact, a lot of people were pissed off with the shallowness of the Brexit argument from both sides. If I made a decision in good faith based in information that was later shown to be false, I would like an opportunity to fix the mistake. I would certainly be pissed off with some politician or tabloid expressing my weary ballot vote as being my sacred 'will' (as in 'the will of the people').

Re: 'False' problem?

>This is targeted advertising, finding a group of people who are likely to be susceptible to a certain message and then giving them that message. This method is available to every political party and leaning, so all can use it to deliver their message to the groups they think will appreciate it most.

Mercer doesn't just operate in advertising, that's the issue. So no, their tactics aren't available to all. And do please note, this Reg article only addressed a small part of the Observer article, so it can't claim to refute it.

The issue in question is 'fake news', but not 'fake news' coming from the established media (for all their faults - shit, we're now in a world where Fox News looks sane in comparison) but from upstarts. This strategy has been used in the Putin government for some time - they aren't trying to get you to believe their version of events, but to be incapable of accepting *any* version, leading to division and paralysis. Just like Trump, the Putin government even told everyone that confusing the hell out of everyone was their aim.

Oh, that reminds me Reg - what happened to that Q&A with Adam Curtis we lead to expect on the Reg? It was never followed up.

Re: Finally

> It is only one week after the guardian and only one week after MPs have started raising the question.

And the Reg really downplayed this in its headline when it reported the ICO was investigating Cambrisge Analytica, which struck me as odd at the time. The strange thing about this article is that is says "a data analysis company backed by a Donald Trump-supporting billionaire" but doesn't fucking name him. What the hell? Robert Mercer.

Even for the IT angle, the billionaire in question is worthy of note (he has an interesting IT past). It's like the Reg hasn't even read his bio, yet the Reg is telling us 'there is nothing to see here'. Said billionaire is deliberately and knowingly supporting the spreading of demonstrably false opinions as facts. For gawds sake Reg, doesn't that upset you as journalists?

Private Eye is enjoying record sales.

Shopping for PCs? Ding, dong, the Dock is dead in 2017's new models

Re: Or we can read this as

>Soon I'm going to be expected to fiddle with USB connections every time, FML.

Just one USB connection. And at least it's the orientation-agnostic USB-C, so you can plug it in every time, not just on 50% of your attempts.

Re: Optional... apparently

>I currently run a Dell mobile precision 5510 lappy connected to their WD15 dock. it uses USB3 protocol on a USB-C physical hole, so only able to drive 1x 30" at 2560x1600 off the DP port,

I seem to recall that to drive a 5K monitor over USB-C, Apple had to go with AMD mobile GPUs. https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/16/macbook-pro-why-amd-gpu/

Something to do with number of video streams and DP 1.2 vs 1.3 or somesuch.

Re: Optional... apparently

>Can USB-C power a Laptop as well as provide connections for 2 screens, and other USB based devices... cos I can stand to plug in one cable at my desk.

Yes*

* USB-C only describes the physical connector and a way of it describing what else it can do. Not all USB-C ports carry Thunderbolt. Not all Thunderbolt is created equal. Be careful about which cables you use. Do not dispose of in fire. Your home is at risk if you do not keep up repayments.

Example: The LG 5K monitor (5120 x 2880 resolution) connects to a Macbook Pro with only one USB-C cable, and it provides 85W to the laptop, whilst providing 3 USB-C ports at 5Gb/s. Power, video, storage, peripherals in just one cable.

Similarly. But hey, when this old computer of mine does eventually keel over, the kinks will have been ironed out of many of the emergent standards and features outlined in the article.

It's been years since Sony first released a VAIO laptop with an external Thunderbolt GPU - it is only now that this looks to be on the edge of becoming mainstream. Such a set up would suit me very nicely, but I'm in no hurry. Every year I hold off, the more mature stuff becomes.

Re: Shamefaced admission

> (and I expect quite a lot of others will).

And those who don't (either invested in existing motherboards, or have workloads not best suited to the first crop of Ryzen) can look forward to cheaper Intel chips, now that AMD is a credible competitor again.

Did your in-flight entertainment widget suck? It's Panasonic's fault, claims software biz

Re: Panasonic has blocked other third party products

We've got quite a few Panasonic cameras kicking around the house, mostly a succession of TZ (Travel Zoom) models, but also an LX-5 and LX-7. Only between the latter two can the batteries be swapped. The chargers will only charge the battery they came with; annoyingly only a mm or two prevents a battery from fitting in a charger (obviously there is no clear identification on the charger as to which battery or camera it is associated with. )

However, if one pries the top half of the plastic shell off a charger and makes the PCB safe with PVC tape, the charger will be battery agnostic.

Palmtop nostalgia is tinny music to my elephantine ears

Re: Buy some HD25s

There was a similar model of Sennheiser used on Concorde... quite a few were available on eBay a dozen years ago with 'British Airways' printed on the headband. One assumes that BA wouldn't have specified them if they weren't durable.

EDIT:

>They look like ones originally sold for early gen iPhones (because 3.5mm with wider barrels above the rings physically would NOT fit into the IPhone's recessed port).

Clearly you lot knew what I meant! :)

Alternatively, a short 3.5mm male to 3.5mm female extension lead (about 2" long) will take the strain off your headphones' cable. The ones below are 99p for a two-pack. They look like ones originally sold for early gen iPhones (because 3.5mm with wider barrels above the rings physically would fit into the IPhone's recessed port).

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=3.5+male+to+3.5+female&noj=1&tbs=vw:l,ss:44&tbm=shop&srpd=8159865142164802484&prds=num:1,of:1,epd:8159865142164802484&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiIydCPp7rSAhWmIcAKHWguD4MQgjYIngU

Re: A man after my own heart

Neutrik - they're the boyos! A stage lighting company I worked for would only use Neutrik DMX plugs when making up cables.

For my use though, I fancy something lower profile. I guess the downside of the 90° is that whilst they protect the socket against knocks to the plug, they relay more stress if the cable is yanked.

Re: I've nothing of value to contribute

For noisy environments, I like using earplugs in conjunction with some good value over-ear Sennheisers. Cheap but effective, and whilst the ear plugs are biased against high frequencies this is only conducive to snoozing.

Re: A man after my own heart

Hmm, it's just struck me that the part of the headphones that disagrees with my hat is the headband, yet this component is redundant since the hat itself could be a stable platform for supporting the cans. Okay, not cans because there would be no force pushing them against my ears, but the battery and receiver for some earbuds could be stowed in the crown of the hat, as could the buds themselves when not in use. With magnets. Hmm...

Bugger fixing something, I'm going to cannibalise and improve!

Re: A man after my own heart

I can see the the soldering iron now as I type. The issue is that my small stash of leaded solder, no doubt hidden under piles of broken or redundant gadgets, is harder to find! Oh, and if I'm to fix em, I'll want to fit my choice of 3.5mm jack to them (the low profile 90° type) which I'll need to order. :)

My main memory of using an Asus netbook was that the letterbox landscape screen made reading websites a chore - too much scrolling! Whilst a higher Res screen would have helped a bit, the issue was the aspect ratio.

Tablets are easier to read websites on because the can be rotated to suit, and because they are held closer to the eyes than netbooks were.

A man after my own heart

My own headphone behaviour is uncannily similar to that of Mr Dabbs.

I look at headphones in the shop when I don't need any new ones. My preference is for over-ear designs, except they are incompatible with my hat which I wear anytime it is raining or likely to rain... or sunny. I have preemptively reinforced the cable near the plug on various 'phones with Sugru, Sikaflex or heat-shrink tubing. Indeed, this cable issue is why I don't have a problem with a cheap dongle on the end - let an inexpensive doodad take the mechanical strain, be it 3.5mm > 3.5mm or otherwise. If I broke out the soldering iron now, I could repair at least four pairs of 'phones I have kicking around.

I'm mildly upset at leaving my plastic over-ear Sennheisers in a pub the other week - I could fall asleep wearing them, and yet feel no discomfort on my ears when I woke. Still, I'd only taken them out of the house because I had lost or broken all the pairs of earbuds I've had.

I would never buy anything akin to Apple Airpods- far too easy to be loose if you're me. Might be tempted by the 'neck bud' form factor.

Keep hearing of cheap but very cheerful Chinese ear buds... think I'll consider them to be consumable items like drill bits or knives.

If we must have an IoT bog roll holder, can we at least make it secure?

Re: IoT Bogroll - All logic has been flushed

In fairness to Vizio, LG had been previously caught harvesting data from their smart TVs. There is a Vizio TV sold by Richer Sounds that looks handy because it still has VGA in, in addition to more recent ports.

My mate has an LG OLED, but it isn't connected to the internet. Ohh, those perfect blacks on OLED are just lovely.

Re: IOT Bog Roll holder?

NB. My idea is both useful AND secure!

The alternative is to have a printer mounted above the bogroll holder, so that you can read War and Peace directly from your two-ply as you use it, one sentence at a time.

Hmmm... Choice of ink would be crucial.

Re: IOT Bog Roll holder?

Genius! Take apart an old mechanical mouse, connect one encoder wheel to the big roll axle. Interface the mouse's USB to a tablet...

Result: As you use the bog roll, you scroll through the eBook you are reading automatically!

Li-ion king Goodenough creates battery he says really is... good enough

The article only said sodium *could* be substituted for lithium, so if this new tech pans out it might be a case of choosing cheap or high density as the situation demands.

BTW, Lithium extraction is done by removing salts from water, not blowing up mountainsides. It does have ecological impacts if done poorly, but can bring money to poor places such as Bolivia and, um, Cornwall.

Silicon Valley tech bro's solution for homeless: Getting himself in the news. Again.

The Onion has covered him today, by coincidence!

Area Man Accepts Burden Of Being Only Person On Earth Who Understands How World Actually Works

http://www.theonion.com/article/area-man-accepts-burden-being-only-person-earth-wh-55427

Frustrated by reboot-happy Windows 10? Creators Update hopes to take away the pain

Re: "We also heard that unexpected reboots are disruptive if they happen at the wrong time"

Since Vista, you mean. It just feels like decades! :)

Re: Stopped using

> How much lower will Windows nose dive over the next few years?

Walt Mossberg has written this week that he believes personal computers to change to ARM soon, citing Chromebooks, Windows Universal Apps and Apple. Being Mossberg, he thinks Apple is best placed, given their ARM expertise and range of existing iOS tablet apps.

http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/1/14771328/walt-mossberg-pc-definition-smartphone-tablet-desktop-computers

Samsung phones, Apple's iPhones are 'overpriced', says top Huawei exec

Re: They're all mostly overpriced landfill.

I've just switched from a low-end (but very usable Huwaei) to a Nexus 5 (after fitting a new battery). Huewai was bought news half price for £45, has 4G, never annoyingly slow for basic tasks, poor camera - good value though. Nexus 5 feels fast, can't immediately imagine what anything faster could do. I knew that anyway, because it shares he same generation of Qualcom SoC as my broken-screened Xperia Z3C.

Downsides?

Huewai overlay subtly annoying for some operations. Stock Android on Nexus 5 has to be told not to bring up irrelevant notifications (related to Play Store and Google Maps) the whole damned time. Grrr. Nexus battery life not great (2300mAh), especially compared to my smaller-screened Z3C (a proper 2-dayer, a treat!)

The process of switching handsets was not as smooth as Apple, either. Numbers transferred fine (if you avoided Huwaei default of not saving to Google), but not SMSs ( could be done with an app though) or WiFi passwords ((Grr!).

It seems that if some has the money to avoid the Grr, I wouldn't blame them.

Re: reduced the wattage or the current

The UK charger that comes with the Galaxy S7 does 9v (IIRC) in addition to 5v, over microUSB. Presumably it only supplies 9v if it detects that it is connected to a compatible phone. It may that Huewai are adjusting the voltage too.

Boeing seeks patent for mobile device case with built-in fire extinguisher

I'm confused...

... which probably means that I need to learn more. That said, I will still ask:

Since the C02 canister adds weight and bulk, why not use a less power-dense battery of a more stable chemistry such as NiCad and dispense with the CO2 canister? Can it be that a Li-Ion battery plus CO2 canister is still a more power-dense arrangement than a NiCad battery?

Ideas?

Polls? How very 2016. Now Google Street View AI scanner can predict how people will vote

Re: Its called Surveillance-Capitalism - And its just beginning

That ain't the least of it:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

It would seem that Google and Facebook are the monkeys and Cambridge Analytica is the organ grinder.

Re: What car?

There tend to be fewer bumper stickers than there are cars, thus fewer data points. Ditto Truck Nuts.

You want a 4-SIM mobe? Never mind why – your wish might come true

Re: Didn't you guys..

@ Doug

Hiya. To clarify - the Moto Mods use a magnetic connector on the rear of the phone (for two way power low and high speed data), not the bottom or side is where a USB port would be. Your post suggests that you may be thinking of LG's failed modular system, which did require removing the 'chin' of the phone.

LG's system was daft. Moto's system is technically good, but would be very good if it were opened out to other vendors. Whilst their physical connector is proprietry, it is built atop the open Greybus system, and Android nativity recognises most added modules as if they were a part of the host phone.

Regards

Re: Didn't you guys..

They assessed the 1st generation of modules, and assessed them to be useful (the battery), humdrum (the speaker... handy for podcasts), largely redundant (the camera, one probably has a better compact zoom camera already), and not great (the projector). This article is about new modules.

These existing modules neither prove nor disprove the utility of Moto's connector. What will decide its fate is market faith in Moto's continuing support on future models.

A great shame this connector is proprietary- wider adoption by Androud would be a great differentiator from Apple. Imagine Psion-style keyboards, game pads, specialist sensors (3D scanning, IR imaging)... Heck, the one issue with Sony's QX 10 screenless camera for Android (same lens and sensor as the widely lauded RX 100 compact camera) was that its wireless connection to the host phone was flaky.

Up close with the 'New Psion' Gemini: Specs, pics, and genesis of this QWERTY pocketbook

Re: Nope

>Which can probably be mitigated by having a battery underneath the keyboard as well, to be hooked up as a power bank, but the setup won't be very elegant.

I reckon it could be done... The Moto Z actually has a fairly small internal battery, and a two way power/data magnetic connector. If you place a second battery under the keyboard module, and use a cunning sliding mechanism to place some support (a la the original Psion) it should be stable.

It isn't necessary that it work with every phone, just each year's new Moto Z equivalent.

[By the way, I would like to thank you all for your understanding; I've harped on quite a bit about Moto Mods this last two weeks, and you've all understood my enthusiasm has been for the possibilities such a system could open up - especially if open sourced or licensed out -and that I haven't been cheerleading for Motorola per se. In fact, I feel a bit sad that it is a proprietary connector]

The most l33t phone of MWC: DarkMatter's Katim

Re: Really Secure...

Android Open Source Project does not equal Google Play Services. The clue is in the name. The hard bit is getting open source drivers from the hardware component manufacturers, but you're safe from Google.

Try to refrain from commenting if you'd be better off reading up instead.