Posts by druck

The seven deadly sins of the 2010s: No, not pride, sloth, etc. The seven UI 'dark patterns' that trick you into buying stuff

Re: think of the children!

An alternative to the only 5,4,3,2,1 left, is the bargain everyone has missed ploy

About a decade or so ago on late night British TV there used to be these "quiz" shows, where would offer a prize and ask some blindingly simple question, they used to sit there for half an hour pleading with people to phone up, as the first to do so would win. In reality thousands of people were calling in, and going through some automated call system, racking up massive call cost on an eye wateringly expensive premium number, before before one was chosen to go on air. It was such a rip off, the the regulators specified they had to show on screen in real time how many people were actually calling. Strangely enough all these shows disappeared off air within a few months of that being imposed.

Weather forecasters are STILL banging on about 5G clashing with their sensors. As if climate change is a big deal

Re: Why not use 4G/5G?

If they used 4G/5G instead of direct microwave links, they risk relying on a large amount of telecoms infrastructure, any part of which could be affected by an adverse weather event, and stop communications over a wide area.

The Great IoT Protocol War may have been won: Thread's 1.2 release aims at business

A Raspberry Pi with open source software is more than capable of controlling every IOT device in the home.

The protocols used aren't the problem, the main issue is most people's home internet is provided by cheap and nasty (in the US read expensive and nasty) ISP's who hide the connection behind layers of NAT, and it isn't a one click process to access the devices from the smartphone app everyone demands.

The reason an external server is used for off the shelf IOT stuff, is both the device and the app have a publicly available server they can connect to, without having to configure router firewalls and dynamic DNS. The disadvantages are that you can be charged a subscription to access the server, the server can mine all the data passing through it to sell to whoever. And best of all, whenever the vendor feels like it, they can switch the server off making all the devices completely useless.

Mayday, mayday. Cray, you cray cray: Investor attempts to halt HPE's $1.3bn biz gobble

Re: Make or Break

No.

HPE unveils Primera storage tech, vows 100% availability – anyone fancy breaking, er, putting that to the test?

Albatros

I'm surprised they didn't rename it Albatros, being 3(under)PAR, but then again maybe I'm not.

Silicon Valley doesn't care about poor people: Top AI models kinda suck at ID'ing household stuff in hard-up nations

The point?

Who really cares if an AI model can recognize these household items? It's not like there is going to be an AI self driving car travelling through the house, deciding to avoid the hand soap in a rich household, but plowing through the bathrooms of those who can only afford soap bars.

Own goal: $280,000 GDPR fine for soccer app that snooped on fans' phone mics to snare pub telly pirates

A new twist on Big Brother...

...where even the telescreens are being kept under surveillance.

Enemy of the Matebook: Huawei shuts up laptop shop. When is it back? Depends on America's Entity List

Re: Red Flag

China has it's own x86 compatible CPUs.

The more they are cut off from buying US technology, the more effort they will put in to matching, or better it themselves.

Red Flag

Huawei could still knock out a version with Red Flag Linux. Can't be any worse than Windows 10, and I'm sure most people wouldn't notice the telemetry heading for Beijing rather than Redmond.

Wondering where that upcoming meeting with 'Cheap Viagra' came from? Spammers beat Gmail filters by abusing Google Calendar, Forms, Photos, Analytics...

Re: "Spammers are abusing the preferential treatment Google affords its own apps"

It should be trivially easy for google to add a cryptographic hash to the headers of emails originating from their apps, and block anything purporting to be from google which doesn't contain a valid hash.

Top websites screwed over in WordPress.com super-outage: VIP Go? More like VIP No Go

Improvement

No ads, no cluttered themes, what better time to visit those sites!

When it comes to DNS over HTTPS, it's privacy in excess, frets UK child exploitation watchdog

Re: Help!

DNS over SSL is far more sensible, and achieves the same outcome.

Heathrow Airport drops £50m on CT scanners to help smooth passage through security checks

Re: if the tech will mean an end to the daft liquids rule – only 100ml per container

Having liquids confiscated at security, and having to buy more from duty free once airside, works very well for airport profits, so don't expect to see any change there.

HPE's Spaceborne supercomputer returns to terra firma after 615 days on the ISS

Rads

The plan had been to run the thing for a year to see how it would stand up to life in orbit onboard the ISS. A year or so, after all, is roughly how long a round trip to Mars could take.

There's hell of a difference in the radiation environment between ISS's orbit and a Mars transit.

It's the curious case of the vanishing iPhone sales as Huawei grabs second place off Apple in smartmobe stakes

Re: Trump's tariffs and bans...

With Apple's gross margins they could easily absorb a doubling of the production costs, if they chose to.

Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence?

Re: Radioactive money

I had an Economics teacher who would muse how much fun it would be if cash was made from radioactive isotopes with a short half-life. He wasn't hoping to irradiate the population so much as to see what might happen to consumer spending habits if everyone knew they had to dispose of their pay packet before it blinked out of existence.

Some bloody economics teacher that hasn't heard of hyperinflation. Ask Venezuela .

Twist my Arm why don't you: Brit CPU behemoth latest biz to cease work with Huawei – report

Re: And so, history repeats itself

Plus a number of good armoured personnel carriers.

If poking about Doctor Who's TARDIS in VR sounds like fun to you, better luck next time

The current show runner seems to think that the Doctor should be a modern SJW sent back through time to look disapprovingly at history, and in particular British history. That finished it for me.

You're not still writing Android apps in Oracle's Java, are you? Google tut-tuts at dev conf

Re: K&R Braces

You've missed the point, it's the braces style.

It has to be Allman or all vomit.

K&R Braces

I went to the Koltin site to have a look, but as soon as I saw it was still using the gawd damned awful K&R style braces formatting in this day and age, I walked away.

NordVPN rapped by ad watchdog over insecure public Wi-Fi claims

Re: Public wifi

If you have problems with VPN blocking or throttling, set up your personal VPN to work on port 443/tcp. This isn't normally restricted, and most APs can't tell its not HTTPS traffic.

Re: Public wifi

The problem with this is the definition of public wifi - while the more professional operators will have protections in-place to ensure

But do you know if you are connected to one of these more professional operators, or someone spoofing the same SSID and authentication mechanism?

UK taxman falls foul of GDPR, agrees to wipe 5 million voice recordings used to make biometric IDs

Re: Voice ID, over the phone, for financial security?

I had to call HSBC once to sort out an issue, at the end of the call they tried to persuade me to sign up for voice recognition. This was despite me struggling to make myself understood throughout the call, due to suffering from laryngitis at the time.

FYI: Yeah, the cops can force your finger onto a suspect's iPhone to see if it unlocks, says judge

Some face ID systems use depth sensing, so aren't fooled by a 2D printed picture, but it doesn't mean they can't be tricked by masks, or other techniques.

And face ID is even worse, they can just hold the phone in front of you, no need to force you to use a finger.

Re: Authentication factors

They have already managed to decode peoples speech patterns by planting electrodes in the brain https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/30/ai_brain_reader/ How long before they develop sensitive enough external sensors that they could put a non tin foil helmet on you, and say "don't think of your password", and then read it out when you inevitably do think of it.

Sophos antivirus tools. Working Windows box. Latest Patch Tuesday fixes. Pick two: 'Puters knackered by bad combo

What's new?

McAfee said users may experience "slow boot times and performance after installing Microsoft Windows April 2019 updates on a system with Endpoint Security."

What's new?

The peelable, foldable phone has become the great white whale of tech

Re: Good reasonable and balanced.

There are OLED screens which are so low power you can leave them on all the time showing art.

Cheapskate Brits appear to love their Poundland MVNOs as UK's big four snubbed in survey again

Re: O2

Just found out why. I got the O2 contract through Carphone Warehouse, where as previously I had always gone to O2 directly. The direct accounts roll over to SIM only, the CPW ones keep charging you full price until you notice, and ask O2 to change to another contract - or leave.

O2

Thanks for reminding me about O2's outage, I'll be mentioning that when I call about why my out of contract fee's didn't drop this month. As I've written in praise of them here twice previously, when the 2 year phone and airtime contract ends and the phone is paid off, they normally automatically transfer you to a cheaper SIM only 1 month rolling contract. This time they've done the same as the other big 2 and continued to gouge me for the full previous contact price.

Disco Dingo fever: Ubuntu 19.04 has an infrastructure bent, snappier GNOME and another stupid name

Try Ubuntu Mate.

Microsoft debuts Bosque – a new programming language with no loops, inspired by TypeScript

Re: so it's...

...just something else to confuse comp sci students with, instead of teaching them something that might actually be useful in their future careers.

IT meltdown outfit TSB to refund all customers that fall victim to fraud in 'UK banking first'

Easy fraud detection

It's very easy to detect fraud with TSB, if you can register and login to an online account, it's fraudulent. As TSB told me a couple of months ago when I tried to register and check my mortgage balance; "this hasn't worked since the last upgrade".

RIP: Microsoft finally pulls plug on last XP survivor... POSReady 2009

BBC micros will be running long after the Psion has died. Plus if you couldn't get a replacement (still loads around), you could use a Raspberry Pi running RISC OS and the same BBC Basic.

Re: Hardware requirements

Acer Aspire One 735 with an AMD C-60 CPU and 4 GB of RAM

Luxury! Try a 2010 era HP netbook with a pathetic Atom N450 and 2GB RAM - the maximum allowed. If it wasn't running Linux Mint with Mate from a SSD off ebay, it would be inadequate even as a doorstop.

Menu mischief and interface deceit targeted by US lawmakers

What he said ^

The Windows 10 upgrade dialog box, should be the absolute gold standard dark pattern for any new legislation.

Lend me your ears and AI will play with your brain: Machine voice imitators outsmart us

Paintings

I'm puzzled about the previous study looking at real and fake Rembrandt paintings, where they using paintings in the same style but not a real Rembrandt or a completely different style of painting? Where they using ordinary people or trained art historians, who would actually know the difference. It could be argued that paintings are equivalent to fake photographs, and this is what is giving the changes in brain patterns.

And here's Intel's Epyc response: Up-to 56-core, 4GHz 14nm second-gen Xeon SP chips, Agilex FPGAs, persistent mem

Patching nonsense

They can’t patch all of it, because the only way to completely get rid of it is to completely get rid of speculative execution in caching, and if you do that, your shiny modern Core i7 performs as well as a ‘286,”

What nonsense. Speculative execution didn't even come in until the Pentium Pro. An i7 without it would work more like the older non-speculative Atoms, which is bad enough, but still orders of magnitude faster than a 286.

How do you sing 'We're jamming and we hope you like jamming, too' in Russian? Kremlin's sat-nav spoofing revealed

Re: "Misinformation coming from Russia"

No, but there will be multiple points of uncertainty.

Googlers, eggheads urge web giant's bosses to kick top conservative off its AI ethics council

Snowflakes

If you wont allow differing opinions to be heard, you should not be on any decision making body.

IT meltdown bank TSB: It's as good a week as any to announce we're taking back control

Useless systems

My mortgage is with TSB and I'm coming to the end of the two year deal, so I needed to log on and get a statement. Couldn't remember if I'd logged on before, so put in my name and the account number from a letter, it rejected it as being two digits too long. Left off the /1234 bit and it was two digits too short. Thought maybe I hadn't registered, so tried that and the account number was rejected as being 3 digits too long, or 1 digit too short. Phoned them up, and the girl said "oh the computer system has never worked", I can give you your current balance now, and send a statement through the post in 10 to 15 working days. WTF!

Lip-reading smart speakers: Just what no one always wanted

Here's a thought

If it could detect the sound of my bones creaking in bed in the middle of the night, caused by my 3 year is climbing over me to get to mummy, and lure him back to his own bedroom with the theme music of Paw Patrol, that would be a real use for the technology.

Here's a race condition we can get behind: Neural net learns to keep up with 'skilled' amateur track driver in robo-ride safety experiment

The least useful test ever

Massive expanse of tarmac, a couple of cones, no other cars, cyclists, or pedestrians. This has absolutely no benefit to increasing safety of automated vehicles?

NASA 'nauts do what flagship smartphone fans can only dream of: Change the batteries

Or if it's a new build planet, they might find it stuck on a buried workman's helmet.

Russian sailors maroon themselves in Bristol Channel after drunken dinghy ride goes awry

Re: 4am?

Luckily they didn't rock up at Steep Holm, there's even less there.

Although not as bad as Rockall - There's fuckall at Rockall. ^{© Rockall Times}

Want to cruise your auto auto around but don't fancy killing people? Nvidia has an answer

But its not impossible you know you are talking b*ll*cks, given the current state of the art in simulations.

Re: All this hoopla for nothing

Even if it manages all those environmental factors, it will never contain human drivers, human pedestrians, and the most difficult to simulate; the completely erratic Cambridge cyclist.

And autonomous vehicles do need to be perfect not just better. Humans can believe in the failings of other humans, they will never accept deaths caused by computers.

O2 brings forth a Friday fail for some unlucky UK customers

Re: Do dual-SIM (ie dual network) mobile phones still exist in the UK?

Unless you rush out an buy a second SIM when there is an outage, keeping a second contract SIM costs money, and a second pay as you go is pain, as it will stop working if you don't use it every couple of months.

Chap joins elite support team, solves what no one else can. Is he invited back? Is he f**k

And you'll never work in any posh school again.

What do WLinux and Benedict Cumberbatch have in common? They're both fond of Pengwin

Re: Microsoft dreams finally come true

Multi-threaded rather.