Posts by druck

Voatz of no confidence: MIT boffins eviscerate US election app, claim fiends could exploit flaws to derail democracy

Re: I'm baffled

If your mobile banking application is compromised, you will find out when you receive the next statement from your bank, the details of all transactions will be there for you to see. If you dispute any of them, there is a clear process to follow, which (in exception of cases of gross negligence) will result in any losses bing refunded.

With mobile app voting, you will not get a validated statement of how you actually voted, so you will be unaware of any fraud, and have no ability to raise a dispute and have the vote corrected.

There's got to be Huawei we can defeat Chinese tech giant, thinks US attorney-general. Aha, let's buy stake in Ericsson and Nokia

Re: We've done it before

Not to forget what a roaring success it was when a US company last bough a bit of Nokia.

Wake me up before you go Go: Devs say they'll learn Google-backed lang next. Plus: Perl pays best, Java still in demand

Re: Some thoughts about "slow languages"

I think what you mean is that you used Perl to feed strings in to the RegEx library which is written in C, and is much faster than C# and its CLR.

Re: If you want to do Low-Latency properly ...

You do realise you are talking ms? Low latency is us or even ns.

Astroboffins may have raged at Elon's emissions staining the sky, but all those satellites will be more boon than bother

Re: Nuts

Is it really worth fucking up the night sky forever, just because the US can't regulate it's telecomms sector?

This AI is full of holes: Brit council fixes thousands of road cracks spotted by algorithm using sat snaps

It's definitely not using satellite images, but as google labels what are primarily aerial photography images as satellite, people no longer know any better.

Where do you draw the line? Escobar Inc doubles down on cut-price gold phone buying demographic with second pholdable

Re: I'd buy that for a dollar

Nah, old hat. They are now delivered to the seaport or navigable river of your choice, by narco-sub.

Is everything OK over there, Britain? Have you tried turning the UK off and on again? ISPs, financial orgs fall over in Freaky Friday of outages

Re: War with Spain now :)

The Spanish will have to wait their turn, it's traditional to have a war with France first.

Remember when Europe’s entire Galileo satellite system fell over last summer? No you don’t. The official stats reveal it never happened

Re: Isn't it amazing

A quick googling reveals:-

https://sciencebusiness.net/news/71710/Agriculture-raided-to-fund-Galileo-and-EIT

http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articles-view/release/3/86182/european-commission-to-unveil-galileo-financing-plan.html

https://lloydslist.maritimeintelligence.informa.com/LL098161/Brussels-digs-deep-for-Galileo-cash

Shall I go on?

UN didn't patch SharePoint, got mega-hacked, covered it up, kept most staff in the dark, finally forced to admit it

Re: so much fail

You've got to think more BOFH!

When whoever told you to wait is found in the data centre, with forensics saying the only explanation is he must have been taking a leak against the main bus bar, you've now got plenty of time to patch things as you are bringing all the servers back up.

SLS goes vertical at Stennis while NASA practises SRB stacking

Re: The future here ...

Except the past was hell of a lot better. The 53 year old Saturn V didn't need a pair of fireworks strapped to the side to do the job.

Bank IT bod pocketed nearly $1m in kickbacks from tech contractor bosses for sending deals their way, Feds claim

Re: Won't be a problem in the UK ...

@AC: Aww didums.

CityFibre relieves TalkTalk of its FTTP sister biz for £200m – after Boris win blows away Labour's nationalisation vow

Re: FTFY

BlackBogiesFibre?

EU declares it'll Make USB-C Great Again™. You hear that, Apple?

Re: 51000 tonnes?

I'd just got past the stage where kittens had stopped chewing through the phone charger leads, then the children started using them for teething practice.

Re: 51000 tonnes?

Plus a couple left over to use with Raspberry Pi's.

Are you getting it? Yes, armageddon it: Mass hysteria takes hold as the Windows 7 axe falls

Re: Ah, Git ...

Back when it was made with real beef extract.

It's just vegetable derived shit these days.

Windows 7 and Server 2008 end of support: What will change on 14 January?

Re: A repeat of XP?

Using Windows 7 in a VM was slow for me, as if I gave it more than one CPU, it complained about licencing. There's probably some fix, but I only need it so infrequently, that dual booting is an option.

What was Boeing through their heads? Emails show staff wouldn't put their families on a 737 Max over safety fears

Re: I guess

Even organisations which make washing machines need to consider safety and not cut corners. There have been many deaths from fires of overheating tumble driers.

Hey kids! Ditch that LCD and get ready for the retro CRT world of Windows Terminal

Does it have double height text though?

No horrific butterfly keys on this keyboard, just you and your big, dumb fingers

Re: Chorded keyboards

You mean like the 1980's Microwriter Quinkey for the BBC Micro?

2 more degrees and it's lights out: Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix's toasty mobile bit barn

I was lucky enough to be at the front of the FIA garage watching Redbull do practice pit stops next door during winter testing in 2018. You really can't believe your eyes how quick 14 people can move in unison.

Re: Weight, its all about the weight!

It isn't just a case of plugging a containerised systems in to mains and network, the environment is different at every one of the 21 races. The building and tear down involves running all the wiring from the servers in a trailer in the paddock in to the racks of laptops and monitors in the pit garages, and hooking in to all the FIA network which provides the telemetry. The pits are grotty bare concrete boxes, all the nice shiny white plastic interiors are you see on race weekends, are constructed by the teams.

Behold Schrödinger's Y2K, when software went all quantum

RISC OS Y2K no time soon

It's going to be a while before RISC OS's 40bit centiseconds since 1900 rolls over, so I'm afraid I wont be around to fix that one.

Two missing digits? How about two missing employees in today's story of Y2K

Re: There's notthing so enjoyable as rightful smugness

You seem confused, have another snowflakeball.

El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail

Did we retrieve this one out of the trash can from a couple of weeks ago?

News aggregator app Flipboard hacked: All passwords reset after hackers pinch user data

Flipboard was replaced on Samsungs by the equally annoying UpDay, so it's probably only a matter of time before we find the same thing has happened to that too.

Hey, ICANN, if you need good reasons to halt the .org super-sell-off, here are two: Higher fees, more website downtime

10% annually? It will be more like when a US pharma company buys up a drug patent, you are going to get an increase of a 1, followed by a shit load of zeros % on day one.

Windows 10 Insiders: Begone, foul Store version of Notepad!

StrongED? Bah! !Zap

Tory chancellor pledges to review IR35 rollout in UK private sector – just like all the other parties

Re: Yeah right...

The tories are not further right, if you take off the Brexit blinkers, the majority of Boris' policies are socially liberal - Mrs T would have described him as a 'wet'.

In Rust We Trust: Stob gets behind the latest language craze

Re: Do...While

I don't know about the Atom BASIC, but the BBC BASIC in the BBC Micro did not support DO...UNTIL, only REPEAT...UNTIL. Just checked on jsbeeb.

Re: Do...While

BBC BASIC on the original BBC B had a REPEAT...UNTIL and FOR...NEXT loops.

BBC BASIC on the successor RISC OS machine added a WHILE...ENDWHILE loop.

No wonder Bezos wants to move industry into orbit: In space, no one can hear you* scream

Re: re. the future of manufacturing is in space

Forget workers in space, the cost of keeping air breathing meat bags alive causes even the lowliest minimum wage employee cost more than a C suite exec on earth. If anyone is going to be working in space factories, it will be robots.

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

PlusNet (owned by BT) is still stubbornly IPv4 only, hell they don't even support encryption on email!

Magic Leap rattles money tin, assigns patents to a megabank, sues another ex-staffer... But fear not, all's fine

Re: It really is interesting

And how much of that was spunked on PR stunts, passing off specially commissioned Hollywood style special effects as an example of what their (at the time non-existent) product could do?

Boeing comes clean on parachute borkage as the ISS crew is set to shrink

Re: Going backwards?

In perspective, the 50 years from 1919 to 1969 saw commercial aircraft development go from wooden bi-planes to the 747.

Correction; it went from wooden bypanes, to supersonic passenger aircraft, Concorde's first flight was 2^nd March 1969. We've certainly gone backwards since Concorde and the Shuttle flew for the last time.

Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs

It would have been a line printer, and hell of a lot louder than a dot matrix!

Remember the Uber self-driving car that killed a woman crossing the street? The AI had no clue about jaywalkers

A human has the instant ability in nearly all cases to know that the bike is the same as they saw a second ago, and also understand the likely path of it and the likely travel direction and if it is being ridden by a 5yo it is likely to be wobbling and change course rapidly whereas if it is being ridden by a sensible adult is more likely to retain it's course.

Ridden by a sensible adult? I'd like to see you come up with enough training data on that to teach an AI!

Boffins don bad 1980s fashion to avoid being detected by object-recognizing AI cameras

Re: Psych out the psyche-less?

No, all the pictures of forests with tanks on them were taken on a sunny day, and all the pictures of forests without tanks in them on a cloudy day, so the AI learned the difference between sunny and cloudy forests.

Remember the big IBM 360 mainframe rescue job? For now, Brexit has ballsed it up – big iron restorers

The only budget IBM would allocate; is to the legal team to prosecute the restorers for performing unauthorised repairs, and the compliance team make sure the licences have been paid on any software when its running again.

Re: Disposal cost

Unlike your example of Concord, which would be almost impossible to return to operational status (see the trials of getting Vulcan XH558 to fly again), there is a chance that one or both of these systems may live again.

Whilst the British Concordes were left to rot outside, or had the wings chopped off to transport them to museums, the French have kept one of theirs in a hanger in flight condition, regularly running up the hydraulics systems to keep them in order. One day they'll fly her again to make one last attempt to steal the glory of this mainly British technology.

I'm not Boeing anywhere near that: Coder whizz heads off jumbo-sized maintenance snafu

Re: A software engineer friend of mine

The A320 cabin software was written in 68K assembler, it had far more bugs the the A330/A340 equivalent written in C (and not just because I worked on it). And we did compile without optimisation.

We're late and we're unreliable but we won't invalidate your warranty: We're engineers!

Re: Steps for working with electricity in the home

Check for sockets and pipework on both sides of the wall, in a line vertically or horizontally for where you want to drill, as that is how they tend to run. Although at some point I fully expect to find some diagonal wiring/pipework that someone thought was a good idea.

Deus ex hackina: It took just 10 minutes to find data-divulging demons corrupting Pope's Click to Pray eRosary app

Maybe they are using...

...the widrawal method of internet security.

Help! I bought a domain and ended up with a stranger's PayPal! And I can't give it back

Re: Whe someone uses my email address...

Mr Saddler doesn't have to live in the EU, but the owner of the PayPal account does. As their identity is unknown, a GDPR violation is unlikely to be considered

Creepy AI Clips cam, Daydream VR headset, 1st-gen Pixel Buds join Google Reader, Allo, Plus in digital heaven

Google Clips

Google Clips isn't anything a Raspberry Pi + camera and raspimjpeg can't do for $200 less, plus then you can be reassured only you are storing the creepy stalking funny cat vids.

First Python feature release under new governance model is here, complete with walrus operator (:=)

Re: But what about the GIL?

I've found PyPy to be far worse for multi-threading and multi-processing on both Linux and Windows.

But what about the GIL?

Nothing in 3.8 stands out as a must have, or even more than mildly useful. Where progress is desperately needed is in threading, which sucks on Python due to the Global Interpreter Lock. Yes there is multiprocessing, which is just about usable on Linux, but completely hopeless on forkless Windows.

Nix to the mix: Chrome to block passive HTTP content swirled into HTTPS pages

Not wanted or needed

I've got dozens of Raspberry Pis with web servers providing anything from temperature data to video streams. Many of these are older slower models that https will put an increased burden on, so I neither want to or need to do this. They are only ever accessed on the local network or via my routers VPN, so there is no security benefit. Any browser which prevents me accessing my own systems will be unceremoniously dumped.

Devs getting stuck into Windows 10X on Surface Neo will have to tussle with UWP

Intel copies...

Lakefield, announced in January, has a "hybrid computing architecture", meaning that it combines power-efficient Atom Tremont cores with high-performance "Sunny Cove" cores.

...ARM's Big-Little.

This won't end well. Microsoft's AI boffins unleash a bot that can generate fake comments for news articles

Re: I thought this had been done and deployed ...

Ah... I look forward to a blissfully sparse Register comment section.