Posts by JeevesMkII

Cosmo Communicator: More phone than the Gemini, more pocket computer than phone

Re: Software

As a Gemini owner I can't say I've experienced any of these problems, though I have noticed a serious drop in battery life since the 8.1 upgrade. Also, occasionally the youtube app crashes the phone when switching away/back to it, which is to put it bluntly a bit of a pisser.

It's the lack of support from MediaTek that's the problem. They don't properly support their hardware with drivers kept up to date with the latest Linux kernel. You're dumped on ancient releases and no bug fixes, even the Android 8.1 update was a bit of a miracle.

Do you want fr-AI-s with that appy-meal? McDonald's gobbles machine-learning biz for human-free Drive Thrus

Someone has to do it, though.Someone also has to haul your rubbish away, clean your office space, pack purchases at the Amazon warehouse and keep the sewers unblocked. According to your philosophy, all these people apparently fucked up their lives and deserve nothing but miserable penury for their moral failings.

I think if there were a general strike we'd all be clamouring for the fast food workers to go back to work long before the insurance company middle managers, stock brokers and, yes, IT professionals.

What is valued is not the same thing as what is valuable. I'm a software engineer and I don't think I've ever had a job where if the entire company went away anyone would be much the worse off. Why then am I paid so much more than the cleaners without whom the whole office would descent in to squalor within days? I can't imagine having the sheer brass balls to lecture ANYONE who has a full time job on how they don't deserve to be able to have a roof over their heads or food on their table.

Cu in Hell: Thousands internetless after copper thieves pinch 500m of cable in Cambridgeshire

Well, I wasn't affected...

But if anyone caused my broadband to go down for a week, I'd support the death penalty for the thieving bastards.

Auditors bemoan time it takes for privatised RAF pilot training to produce combat-ready aviators

Has there ever, in the entire history of the world...

been an instance of outsourcing saving money in real terms? I mean actually delivering more productivity per unit money spent. Even if you don't consider the unpleasant but difficult to put a monetary value on side effects of outsourcing my own experience leaves me sceptical that it has ever taken place.In this case, I bet one of the effects is that it's going to screw up pilot retention because they'll all be itching to take up lucrative roles as private sector instructors.

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

Re: Git

It's true though. Git really is the VHS of version control. To think that we're going to be forever lumbered with this sad example of "eh, good enough" design saddens me when there are so many better systems that already exist.

Cloudflare comes clean on crashing a chunk of the web: How small errors and one tiny bit of code led to a huge mess

It never gets any less true.

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems."

If you hear podcasting star Joe Rogan say something dumb, it may not be his fault – an AI has cloned his voice

It had the feel of a human reading an unrehearsed speech from notes in front of them, but if you told me that it was a human doing the reading I'd probably have believed it.

We're a few years away, but voice actors are on serious notice that their jobs are going away real soon now and movie/television actors can't be far behind when photorealistic animation becomes cheaper to produce.

Europol takes down Wall Street market: No, the other cesspool of dark international financial skullduggery

Don't worry. When Amber "Iolaus" Rudd is PM, all your packets will be routed through a BBFC server to be inspected for wrongthink before being sent on to the wider internet. For your own good, citizen.

Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I'm an American citizen

Re: Need more court challenges

It's OK if you're a citizen, because what are they going to do? But if if you're a foreigner, all you're going to achieve is getting frogmarched back to your plane (at your own expense) and told never to come back.

If you have to go to the USA, get a landfill android and netbook to take. Let them have fun with your zero data.

I helped catch Silk Road boss Ross Ulbricht: Undercover agent tells all

Re: Life without parole

I can't remember the precise quote, but didn't he say he was "balls to the wall and all in" when informed that this was probably going to be the sentence if he were ever caught?

Whelp, he went all in and got busted. He was not unaware of what he was doing, and he did it anyway. Doesn't seem like he has much of a leg to stand on whining about it now.

The Palm Palm: The Derringer of smartphones

350 quid? Nokia take note.

If they want 350 quid for this thing, maybe Nokia has a business on their hands. Go around ebay and hoover up every N97 mini for sale. Pay someone to update the TLS library, patch Opera Mini to use a new proxy. Bob's your uncle, 300 quid profit for every unit.

It's official. Microsoft pushes Google over the Edge, shifts browser to Chromium engine

Time to bow to the inevitable

For the longest time, Microsoft's browsers have only been used to download some other browser du jour. Why don't they just give up the pretence and just show a store page on first boot with the selection of third party browsers that are available.

If they're going to put less effort in even than Apple does, just give up entirely and focus on something more core to your business. Ship the Chrome rendering engine to back the HTML rendering UI controls, and don't have a Microsoft Browser at all.

Dell upping its margins again: Precision 5530 laptop will sting you for $13m. Yep, six zeroes

One for the tax experts.

If I buy one of these at the Dell discount value, can I claim depreciation against its "market value" and thus wipe out my corporation tax bill for years to come? ... I'm asking for a friend.

Planet Computers straps proper phone to its next Psion scion, Cosmo

I do have a Gemini, and it does suddenly feel like haha, you bought the prototype buddy. The keyboard backlight especially is a feature I could really use.

I'm glad Planet got enough money for a second product though. It's nice that there are still phones out there that aren't all the same boring Android slates.

UK.gov to press ahead with online smut checks (but expects £10m in legals in year 1)

One third porn?

So if I started Dave's Kitten Emporium (also featuring hardcore smut) and uploaded two videos of cute kittens to every one of sex I'd be exempt from the regulations?

Are reddit going to have to calculate just how much of its content is porn, and do comments count as not-porn?

Workplace services-flinger Sodexo pulls Engage website after division hit by malware smackdown

Re: Misleading headline

Maybe I have barbaric tastes in food, but when I worked at a company that had outsourced the cafeteria to Sodexo I didn't mind very much. I'm perfectly happy with a cheese and pickle baguette or a baked potato with tuna and mayonnaise, and that sort of food has the advantage that not even the most cretinous employee can screw up its preparation.

That was more than a decade ago though, so for all I know they may be in the business of incinerating even baked potatoes now. I did recently learn they're a major player in the private prison racket though. I hope convicts don't have more sophisticated palettes than I do.

Super Micro China super spy chip super scandal: US Homeland Security, UK spies back Amazon, Apple denials

Re: Who gains by this ?

Why assume it was malicious?

I can see a scenario where the FBI issued a notice to big tech firms to watch their supply chains carefully for threats introduced by state actors. That notice gets distilled in to a memo for people in to the company who need to worry about that kind of thing. The memo gets discussed by people who receive it and by some kind of (ahem) Chinese whispers process some confused underlings get the impression that it isn't just a warning but an actual active threat that the company is dealing with.

The leakers could have honestly believed what they were telling the reporters without it necessarily being true.

Trump pulls trigger in US-China tit-for-tat tariff tiff: 10% slapped on $200bn of imported kit

Re: In trade

There was that whole opium for tea affair. That didn't go very well for them.

For all the excitement, Pie may be Android's most minimal makeover yet – thankfully

Re: Clipboard

Hey, Symbian had that feature in its UI framework albeit for slightly smaller screens whereby you could embed views from random other apps in to your own app's workflow. I'm pretty sure it's one of the things directly inherited from Psion too.

So they're only about 20 years behind on this one.

This. This is the biggest, worst oversight in Android.

This past weekend I spent a very long time grappling with a family android device that had what I presume is a software fault causing the wifi not to work very well.

I wanted to backup everything, do a factory reset, check it worked in its vanilla condition then restore everything. What a fucking nightmare.

In addition to having no native way to do a full backup to an SD card or to a local computer, none of the apps that purport to do this actual work worth a damn and most of them are usability nightmares. It's absolutely inexcusable that the only native backup facility android has is to backup user data to google's cloud services. Backup to SD full app data (APK plus created files) should be a no-brainer, but it'd be really nice if Google at least had some sort of Chrome extension that stored backups on a local computer via USB.

SMS 2FA gave us sweet FA security, says Reddit: Hackers stole database backup of user account info, posts, messages

Re: Visa

VbV was always a complete load of cobblers.

Why can't they use the chip on the card's own signing as verification? We all have the little pin machines now that do challenge-response authentication.

I was kind of astonished when I found out my bank was more or less unique in using the "identify" time based password mode on those things for access to online banking, and they're still not using the challenge response mode for access to telephone banking, just a PIN.

Did you know? The word 'Taiwan' would crash iOS thanks to a buggy filter for the Chinese govt

Denying reality for the sweet, sweet cash

This sort of political engineering makes me sick.

I remember being pretty shocked to learn that we kept two time zone databases, one that reflected the facts on the ground vis a vis Israel and one which completely denied the existence of Jerusalem for the reality challenged community.

I've got plenty of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, but that doesn't extend to flattering them and the rest of the Israeli hostile Arab world when they want to engage in delusional wishful thinking.

I think it'd be better if the phone just crashed whenever the Orwellian censorship engine was supposed to kick in. At least then the user would know something was wrong with their world.

India tells WhatsApp to add filters, ASAP

Shoot the messenger

Sure, India. It's the instant messaging service's fault that people are getting lynched.

Perhaps it would help if you paid your police a decent wage so they weren't all corrupt as hell, then people would have more trust in criminal justice through proper channels. But that would cost money, so lets blame it on telecommunications. I'm sure that makes sense.

EU court: No, expat Frenchman can't trademark France.com

Presumably, as a corporate entity...

France dot com Inc. has a better right to any dot com address than any government. That's what the dot com TLD is supposed to be for.

If France wants a tourism site they can have france.fr or tourism.fr or whatever they want under their own country code, since they ultimately own the whole namespace.

This is pure theft by a bunch of corrupt politicians and judges for no better reason trying to rig the google ranking game for their own tedious little state tourism department website.

The Gemini pocket PC is shipping and we've got one. This is what it's like

Re: Open source drivers?

Yes, but there's a big difference between "we've licensed a signalling stack that runs on the modem core that we can't distribute the source for" and "we consider the register interface of our USB chip a trade secret." It'd be nice to know which case this is.

Re: OPL

Hey man, OPL is open source. Symbian/EPOC EUser is open source. You can port it any time.... have fun!

Open source drivers?

What's the status on the linux drivers? Binary blobs or full open source?

Official: Perl the most hated programming language, say devs

love perl || die;

live perl unless dumb;

WPA2 security in trouble as KRACK Belgian boffins tease key reinstallation bug

Re: So in theory

If someone knows your session key, they can with some cheap software defined radio gear start attacking the ancient, completely insecure protocols that precede TLS connections and VPNs, DHCP and DNS.

You can't really trust TLS if you're not really sure if the hostname resolved to the right address. Doubly so if the security is totally non-interactive and it's vulnerable to the DNS returning PTR records.

I need an ISP that offers IPv6. Virgin Media: Whatevs, nerd

Re: need? really?

That's not how it works.

ISPs provide v6 and v4 in parallel allocating both a v4 address, for which the customer is generally obliged to supply NAT for themselves, as well as an IPv6 prefix so that the customer's computers can configure themselves with SLAAC if they haven't explicitly set up DHCPv6.

All consumer operating systems are smart enough to send both AAAA and A requests when they do DNS lookups, so when I talk to google on my laptop here I get their v6 addresses, but when I talk the register (who still have no v6 configured, SHAME) I get the v4. v6 traffic goes out over the ADSL in v6 records, v4 goes out in v4 records and never the twain shall meet. The ISP provides no 6to4 gateway, and I'm pretty sure if I tried to ping IPv4 address in the IPv6, my ISP would just drop the packets.

Email proves UK boffins axed from EU research in Brexit aftermath

My (united) kingdom for a politician with the balls to stand up and say that brexit would be a disaster and isn't happening. Even the die hard euroskeptic Tories must realise what's going to happen by this point. Why must we continue to drift towards the abyss just because a bunch of little-Englanders decided they hate Polish people?

The fork? Node.js: Code showdown re-opens Open Source wounds

Re: Without open source there would be no leftpad

Memset too hard for me. Me need library to do dis.

What to call a £200m 15,000-tonne polar vessel – how about Boaty McBoatface?

Re: This is why everyone thinks students are w*****s

It's the internet, dude. They should thank their lucky stars they don't have to name their boat RRS Hitler Did Nothing Wrong.

Microsoft's done a terrible job with its Windows 10 nagware

Re: Indeed

I don't blame you. Windows update has gone full malware at this point.

It's basically impossible to uninstall compattelrunner and its ilk and keep them uninstalled, Windows update won't take "no" for an answer. I hope it's possible to take them to court for this behaviour, surely installing things on your computer requires some kind of consent?

Microsoft’s Get Windows 10 nagware shows signs of sentience

It won't be long now...

Microsoft seem to have completely given up on the idea that they can produce an operating system that people will pay for, even out of inertia. Now we suffer from this ever evolving MS nagware, but I can only assume the next step is outright malware that drive-by installs Windows on any machine visiting an infected website. I can't wait for MS to develop software to reflash the bios on vulnerable macs rendering them incapable of booting OS X.

How long is your password? HTTPS Bicycle attack reveals that and more

Re: Ok

Or just add an X-Haiku header to every HTTP request with a random haiku in it.

Hate your broadband ISP? Simply tell your city to build one – that'll get the telcos' attention

We all know how this song goes...

Infrastructure is built at tax payer expense, and run profitably for a few years. Then a class of politicians will come along who have been bought by the right companies who'll decide that somehow providing much needed services to the citizenry is not a business the government should be in. Then the infrastructure will be sold off to private interests for a fraction of its worth, the prices will be jacked up unreasonably and the new operators will be seen whining to Whitehall every year about how beleaguered and in need of subsidies they are.

Flying drug mule crashes in Manchester prison

Re: Easy

But if you let its radar lock on to flying objects the size of drones, it'd be raining pigeon corpses in the yard 24/7.

Google's .bro file format changed to .br after gender bother

Re: I despair.

You discovered our evil scheme. All the while we worked on the Symbian installer, we were laughing to ourselves about how our misandrist file extension was destroying the world of men.

Fortunately for our dastardly plot, the patriarchy forced men to pretend to be strong and not injured by this outrage.

WATER SURPRISE: Liquid found on Mars, says NASA

Re: Dark Streaks

Not so much the canals of Mars as the rivulets of Mars.

Official: North America COMPLETELY OUT of new IPv4 addresses

Re: BT

Probably because the world and their dog would complain that everything is broken if they had to view the world through a 6to4 translator shared in common with few thousand other people.

It's all well and good having an IPv6 address, but until all the world's services are IPv6, it's going to break things if your house doesn't have at least one IPv4 address to itself.

As an IPv6 early adopter....

Shame on El Reg for not doing their part:

> Pinging www.theregister.co.uk [104.20.4.226] with 32 bytes of data:

> ..................................SHAME!.<^^^^^^^^^^^^> SHAME!

OFFICIAL: Zuck's BIG in-your-face Facebook Messenger SHOVE finally pays off

Re: Use is not compulsary

As of a few months ago, that's no longer true.

Now any clients that want to be compatible have to leach off the Browser version's data, probably breaking the terms of service and getting broken at the whim of facebook. Joy.

HSBC takes Twitter tongue-lashing over failure to offer Apple Pay

Re: Nando's

Or perhaps there just isn't anyone in the entire world tedious enough to tweet about how they bought quinoa at Nando's with their iPhone.

Pirate Bay founders 'cleared of copyright crimes' in Belgium

Re: Typo in sub heading?

Nope, "founder" is exactly the word they were going for. It's a nautical joke, innit.

Apple's Swift creeps up dev language survey – but it's bad news for VB

Re: Stack Overflow use introduces a big bias

I think the StackOverflow bias is mainly towards languages that clueless newbies think they should know.

I've long since given up with either asking or answering questions there. For most queries you'll find there, the proper answer is "when is your homework due?" and if you ever have a question of your own that's hard enough to give you more than an hour's pause, then you'll never find anyone knowledgeable enough to answer your questions in return.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Cuy Chactado – Deep-fried guinea pig

It'd be a lot more appetising if...

they didn't leave the little head on. I don't like to empathise with my dinner, thanks.

Bluetooth-enabled miracle washing orbs? Are you kidding?

Re: Blimey!

Our washing machine bleeps ceaselessly once the cycle is finished until you open the door. Believe me when I say awe is not the feeling this feature inspires.

'F*** you', exclaims Google Translate app, politely

Does this actually work for any reasonable definition of "work"? It would seem like this would be a derivative of youtube's automatic subtitling, which is legendarily awful. Except with the constraint of having to be real time, so it's limited in just how many audio frames it can look ahead to get grammar hints (though it can go back and revise if it has a better idea later, I suppose.)

If it's anything like what I've already seen, I think a lot of tourists are going to be very confused.

High Court: You've made our SH*T list – corked pirate torrent sites double in a day

Sounds familiar...

"It carefully targets sites whose sole purpose is to make money off the back of other people's content while paying nothing back into the legitimate economy."

Wait, isn't that Google's business plan?