Posts by druck

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.

Chinese sleazeball's 17-year game of hide-and-seek ends after drone finds him on mountain

Re: I cant understand the mentality...

You've got a very funny idea of what a vacation is.

The mod firing squad: Stack Exchange embroiled in 'he said, she said, they said' row

Re: Madness

Have you seen this? C-plus-Equality

WeWork, but We don't IPO: Self-styled techie boarding house calls off cursed stock offering

No Meat... No IPO!

I blame it on their decision only offer foliage based sustenance.

Three UK slammed for 'ripping off' loyal mobile customers by £32.4m per year

O2 and 3rd Parties

Meanwhile, O2 said it will reduce the monthly price of its out-of-contract customers to the equivalent 30-day SIM-only deal. This will apply to its direct customers only, but O2 will discuss options for customers who take out O2 contracts with third-party retailers.

i.e. If you bought the phone through someone like Carphone Warehouse, phone up O2 when your contract ends to ensure you don't get overcharged.

UK.gov's smart meter cost-benefit analysis for 2019 goes big on cost, easy on the benefits

Re: SMETS2?

No the primary aim is to allow selective load shedding when wind and solar aren't available and the grid starts to fall over, which is going to happen more frequently with increasing reliance on renewables.

Instead of the situation which happened recently, of everyone in large parts of the country experiencing blackouts, they can instruct the smart meters to disconnect peoples houses. That is unless you are on the Priority Register (elderly, ill, or have small children), in which case they'll leave you on, so as to try to avoid any negative publicity from the deaths of vulnerable people.

Boffins build AI that can detect cyber-abuse – and if you don't believe us, YOU CAN *%**#* *&**%* #** OFF

AI...

...making the world safe for snowflakes everywhere.

Face-recognizing cop body cams hit another hurdle, genderless voice assistants, and more

Genderless Voice

A world not defined by gender - what a load of Bolovaries!

All three of the Insiders on Arm64 can now muck about with Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

The Raspberry Pi runs Linux very well without needing the bloat that is Windows 10 using up precious RAM.

Breaking, literally: Microsoft's fix for CPU-hogging Windows bug wrecks desktop search

The reduction in call volumes suggest to me, people have given up reporting bugs in the ever shifting mess, and are just resigned to waiting for the next update.

Rolling in DoH: Chrome 78 to experiment with DNS-over-HTTPS – hot on the heels of Firefox

Re: DoT or DoH

DOH or DOT, you can bet corporate installed spyware security tools will intercept it.

Full of beans? Sadly not as fellow cracks open tin at dinner to find just one

Re: density

Like the age-old question of whether the fridge light turns off when the door is closed, we may never be able to answer it for certain.

You can if you put a Raspberry Pi with camera, in the fridge!

Big bang theory: Was mystery explosion over New York caused by a meteor? Dunno. By a military jet? Maybe...

Re: Degloved

Or these days for the more mature T-800 models; your cardigan, your slippers and your mobility scooter.

Today in tortured tech analogies: Mozilla lets Firefox loose in the hen house, and by hen house, we mean the tracking cookie jar, er...

Thanks...

...for the heads up on the advanced tracking protection features, I've now turned them on the current version 68.

There once was a biz called Bitbucket, that told Mercurial to suck it. Now devs are dejected, their code soon ejected

Re: A bad craftsman…

True, but it doesn't mean there aren't poor tools too. If I hadn't used git from the command line before Atlassian's SourceTree, I would have thought git was thoroughly useless. SourceTree is OK for very simple use, but you enviably need to drop to the command line for anything remotely complex.

The same thing probably goes for Mercurial which I've only used via Tortoise Hg. That and now my company is only using it for legacy products, the lack for familiarity and differences to git's work flow are the things that stand out. My main grievances with Tortoise Hg is it doesn't automatically refresh, doesn't get the latest version on copying a repository, and its not always clear which the latest release commit to update to.

Mysterious 'glitch' in neutron stars may be down to an itch under the body's surface

Who needs arms when you have those teeth?!

What do Windows 10 and Uber or Lyft have in common? One bad driver can really ruin your day. And 40 can totally ruin your month

Re: "all the vulnerable drivers we discovered have been certified by Microsoft"

Not even that, it just means they generated a cryptographic hash and embedded it in the driver.

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

Re: Radiation Leak

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket

Hack a small airplane? Yes, we CAN (bus) – once we physically break into one, get at its wiring, plug in evil kit...

Re: Physical Access

If this story was about about being able to get CAN commands on to the aircraft's bus via a comms or nav system, then that would be an issue, this isn't.

As the world secures itself, so do crims: Encrypted malware on the rise, warns Sonicwall

Re: The Fix

There's plenty of places to hide in the tens of thousands of lines of human readable interpreted javascript pulled down and executed each time you visit a website - because you look at all first, don't you?

Microsoft breaks out checkbook, turns Hungarian 'bribe' charge into a mere 'settlement'

That's the way it works in Germany too.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-28656050

Ofcom 'fair deal' action: UK mobile networks agree to slash contract charges when lock-in ends – except Three

It's not just the network

Beware, it's not just the network which determines if you continue to pay full price once the phone is paid off, where you bought it can make a difference.

I had several contracts with O2, and at the end they automatically transferred me on to a much cheaper 1 month rolling SIM only contract. Except for last time, when I found they were still charging me full whack the month after the contract had ended. I phoned them and it turns out because I'd bought the phone through Carephone Warehouse, they'll keep charging until I notice. I was very pissed off with them about that.

Enjoying that 25Mbps internet speed, America? Oh, it's just 6Mbps? And you're unhappy? Can't imagine why

Re: Only getting 1/4 of what I pay for here!

It's pointless trying to measure wired broadband speed over WiFi, you need to connect to the fibre modem with Ethernet to know what you speed you are getting.

There are so many factors which can affect the WiFi speed between the access point and the client, its near impossible to get the optimal transfer rate, so you will never get an accurate measure of a 1Gb broadband connection using WiFi.

Operation Desert Sh!tstorm: Routine test shoots down military's top-secret internets

Lack of Bacon

"to get my turkey bacon sub (hold the bacon)"

That's your first mistake of the day...

Dear chip designers: It will no longer cost you an Arm and a leg to use these CPU cores (well, not at first, anyway...)

Re: Trust Zone

The secure OS running inside the trust zone is under the complete control of the device manufacturer, not a secret closed source system within the chip under the exclusive control of Intel.

Re: Politics free cores?

ARM's Trust Zone is nothing like Intel's or AMD's management engine.