Posts by eldakka

Laser sauce, cheat code, jam seshs: The Waymo vs Uber trial kicks off

Nom nom nom. Nom nom nom.

That's the sound of me eating popcorn.

Basket case lawsuit: Fancy fruit florists flail Google over rotten ads, demand $200m damages

Re: Long time coming?

> I'm pretty sure I got my wife some kind of edible arraignment when our first daughter was born twenty years ago.

I got my GF an (possibly NSFW) edible arrangement, but she wasn't too happy about it.

Beware the looming Google Chrome HTTPS certificate apocalypse!

Re: Well done Google....

> So why the fuck do they need to pay for and install crap?

Who is enforcing anyone to pay and install crap?

Google isn't requiring everyone to install HTTPS certificates.

This article is about them revoking the certificates - a relatively small number - of the relatively small number of websites that actually use certificates.

Re: Well done Google....

> Most mom and pop shops will not have the money or expertise to install and maintain certs

What's that got to do with this?

If you use a HTTPS cert, and if that has a Symantec authority in it's certificate chain, this will impact you.

Only approximately 20% of HTTP sites in the entire world use HTTPS. Therefore this revocation will not affect 80% of the sites in the world - of which your "mom and pop" example most likely resides in.

And of those 20% that are HTTPS, this will only effect a very small sub-set of those, as the cert-issuing market is quite large with much competition, and Symantec wasn't one of the bigger players in that market.

Broadcom adds a few billion to its indecent proposal to Qualcomm

Re: Poor copy

Things have to be read in context. This is true of many languages, including English.

It is perfectly fine to say "it will appeal the decision" if the context surrounding it - "Qualcomm lost. It will appeal the decision." - is sufficient to supply the missing information as 'it' in this case would refer to Qualcomm, and 'the decision' would refer to the one it 'lost', which would imply against the decision.

Of course, if you want absolute precision (e.g. a legal document, contract) then you may want to avoid implicit context and always use specifics - "Qualcomm lost. Qualcomm will appeal against the decision."

But then, this is The Register, not a legal document such as a contract, so they are perfectly fine to use implicit context (as long as it is reasonable clear).

MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF CARS: SpaceX parks a Tesla in orbit (just don't mention the barge)

Re: Academics

> Er, if you design a rocket to lift 26 tons then you pretty much have to put 26 tons on the top to make the thing fly as intended. If the payload you're launching doesn't actually weight that much, you have to make up the difference with ballast.

Right, that is actual mass, not simulated mass.

Re: Can't sell it, the battery's old and tired.

> I know! I'm rich, I'll send it to Mars where I can't be jailed for illegal dumping!

Sending it into the Sun would have been easier than Mars, work with the gravity well, not against.

I suspect it's more likely he is trying to colonize Mars, I deduce there are seeds of some type (you probably don't want to shine a blacklight on the upholstery...) in the car that will be released onto Mars.

Re: Academics

> All orbital tests require simulated mass,

What? Since when have we been able to simulate mass?

I know the discovery of the Higgs Boson may lead to exciting advances in the future, but they've already made mass simulators from it?

Epic spacewalk, epic FAIL: Cosmonauts point new antenna in the wrong direction

Re: Erm

> Maybe there IS something out there they're not telling us about …

Obviously the Russians know where Zuma is!

Open source turns 20 years old, looks to attract normal people

Re: Open source is leading to single source

@teknopaul

> The entire point about OpenSource is that each person can have their own OS. With just the stuff _they_ want. Nothing less and, nowadays more revelant, nothing more than what they want.

Unfortunately it is becoming harder and harder (tho still possible depending on how technically minded you are) to do this. For example, while it is possible, it is getting quite difficult to have a Linux desktop OS without the Systemd borg collective. Many end-user software suites are becoming dependent on that component. Finding alternative applications or just "doing without" is of course still possible, but the alternative pool is shrinking. Some software packages that were cross-platform are becoming less so, as they make dependencies on Systemd, however Systemd itself is not cross-platform, not even to other *NIXes - BSD, commercial, etc.

Besides the XPoint: Persistent memory tech is cool, but the price tag... OUCH

Re: Persistent memory has been failing in the market for decades

> Somebody has to succeed eventually.

Why?

As you pointed out with grid power and UPS, a persistent-memory (as in RAM replacement) may never make financial sense over non-persistent alternatives.

Re: Bandwidth != Latency

> If I get my 30 MB file off a HDD within 1 second, that's 30 MB/s

> If I wait for a tape drive to find the file for 9.9 seconds (latency) and then read it within 0.1 second, that's 30 MB/s.

> Bandwidth and latency are related.

Do the same calculation again when you have to restore a 3TB virtual server image.

Or have a raw movie file.

That 10-second seek latency of tape is irrelevant when you are talking 100's GBs and TB+ of sequential data - e.g. a server backup, large scientific data-sets, video, etc.

Some data access requirements are latency sensitive but bandwidth not-so-much (e.g. loading your word doc), others are more bandwidth sensitive and less so latency.

Uber saddles up for a new cycle of controversy

Well, it's not like they don't already have a fleet of cars and drivers who heading back from a drop-off can't toss a bike or 2 into the boot and return to a better location for a small bonus....

Re: Locking to railings?

> I once had my fifty quid ladder stolen, the hundred-quid bolt cutters they'd used to liberate it was dumped in my garden.

Maybe they needed transport, so they stole the bolt cutters from somewhere else and used them to steal the bike (hint: if you are going to become a thief, the first thing to steal is a cordless angle-grinder).

Supermassive black holes scoff just one star per year, say space weight watchers

Re: That's weird

> It is not likely that a dwarf galaxy brings a supermassive black hole to the table.

They are beginning to think that it's normal for even Dwarf Galaxies to have SMBH's.

Supermassive Black Hole Discovered Inside Tiny Dwarf Galaxy:

The supermassive black hole is about five times more massive than the one at the center of the Milky Way, but the dwarf galaxy in which it was found--known to astronomers as M60-UCD1--is about 500 times smaller than our own galaxy,...

The discovery suggests that supermassive black holes may be twice as numerous in the nearby universe as previously thought, ...

The discovery suggests that there are many other small galaxies containing supermassive black holes....

Crowdfunding small print binned as Retro Computers Ltd loses court refund action

Re: Absent

> late summer 2016

So is that February 2016 or August 2016?

> As I understand it videogames have recently bombed on Kickstarter, because so few ever got produced, after taking the money. Oddly the boardgame industry have become their biggest growth area,

Board games tend to cost a lot less for RnD, artwork, and so on than a videogame.

Production cost might be more (mass producing the pieces, the board, etc) , but the time and cost to get to that point are typically considerably less. And you only enter that phase once you have a finished product.

For videogames it's the reverse, all the costs go into the RnD/programming, with production and distribution costs being trivial (because people can just download the finished game).

Govt 'comprehensively ignored' advice over NHS data-sharing deal

Re: The NHS is broken

> If it were a business it would have gone bust long ago.

Well, since it's not a business, and your starting position seems to be contrasting it with one, there's no point in reading further, is there?

Re: Dog bites man?

> Government acts based on expert advice - now that would be news.

The Government often acts on experts advice.

Of course, the way they choose which experts to provide advice is by first finding those experts who already agree with the governments position before appointment.

Re: Free

> the french doctors were adamant that she needed very expensive surgery

> The NHS told her she would be fine with physio as long as she didnt try any extreme sports.

Sound's like to me the French doctor's beginning position was to restore the knee back to full (or as near as possible) functionality so the patient would not be limited in their future endeavors. Getting it back into mint condition so it can be used just like a new one.

The NHS' beginning position was that they were happy recommending limiting the patients future endeavors and fixing it just enough to get you home.

I know which one I think has the patients best interests in mind.

Forget cyber crims, it's time to start worrying about GPS jammers – UK.gov report

Re: Big Brother is Watching You

@Korev:

> Out of interest, what happens if you need to call the emergency services quickly?

The same thing that used to happen 2 decades ago before I owned a mobile phone,

You might as well say I should carry an EPIRB in case I get kidnapped and dropped into a remote location so I can signal for help. Or carry a complete set of spares in the car (fan-belts, light bulbs, gaskets, o-rings, hoses, radiator/brake/hydraulic/engine/transmission fluids) for a 5-minute drive to the mall, because I might need them.

I don't get this whole "But what if you need to make/receive a call in an emergency".

I lived fine for 25 years without that immediate capability to hand, I have no trouble doing without now. It is a convenience, nothing more.

I know how to navigate with a street atlas (a topographical map and compass for that matter) - in fact I prefer it when planning trips, as it shows more classes of roads in a single high-level view rather than the limited road information you get when trying to use google maps for example, you often have to zoom in so far to see anything but main highways that you can't use it to plan a trip.

I can live without the convenience of a phone on my person for a few hours, even a few days. I went on a 10-day cruise about 5 years back, the ship's on-board cell was so expensive to use that I never signed up and just left the phone locked in the cabin safe for the duration. It's annoying to have to do so, to not be able to contact or be contactable immediately, but it is by no means important let alone a necessity.

Crypto-jackers slip Coinhive mining code into YouTube site ads

Re: We need NoScript for Firefox 57, and WebAssembly's bytecode is more insecure than Flash

> UI of uMatrix is beyond confusing

Confusing?

It's a dropdown list that lists the sites (and the specific activity - cookies, XSS, frames, etc) that are trying to load. You just toggle to green (allowed) if you want to enable the scripts and other resources from that site (and hit the padlock if you want to save that permanently).

That's pretty much all there is to it unless you start delving into advanced usage like, e.g. allowing a site only allows specific subsets, e.g. no frames even if site allowed unless you also toggle the frame for that site to green (allowed).

I used NoScript for years, then moved onto Policeman then, on Vivaldi (which is a chromium-based browser), I went to uMatrix, after which I moved to that instead of NoScript on FF prior to 57.

No parcel drones. No robo-trucks – Teamsters driver union delivers its demands to UPS

Re: Horse carts vs delivery trucks again.

> Well, look at it from another perspective. At least trucking companies still hired humans and actually reduced the biological burden by reducing the need to exploit horses. Here, however, the plan is to remove the human altogether, which raises issues.

Who's going to write the code to allow the AI in the trucks?: humans.

Who's designing the electronics (Chips, circuits, etc.)?: humans

Who's doing the maintenance on the trucks?: humans.

Who's issuing the instructions?: humans.

Humans are still very much in the loop, humans aren't being removed, truck drivers are being removed.

If the youngish drivers (i.e. anyone under 30) wants to get involved, they can get some education and enter the other areas where humans are still needed and allow the over 30's to keep being drivers and allow natural attrition - it'll take decades to replace a significant number of drivers with automation - to take the jobs.

Anyone under 18 should strike truck driving off their future career possibilities, anyone under 30 should consider it a temp job while they adapt to a new profession.

There are no longer people who come around in wagons to empty the outhouses and chamber pots.

There are no longer people who come around in the morning with large urns of fresh milk to fill people's mil pails.

There are no longer people who ride on horses from coast-to-coast in relays to deliver mail.

There are no longer people who come around with large ice-blocks to fill ice-boxes.

There aren't many people who come around delivering bottles of gas for household gas usage (stoves), it's mostly all piped in now.

Things change. Adapt or stagnate.

Here we go again... UK Prime Minister urges nerds to come up with magic crypto backdoors

How did this incompetent, brainless, insipid excuse for a human being become prime minister?

Perv raided college girls' online accounts for nude snaps – by cracking their security questions

Re: The very definition of "security by obscurity"

For starters, at the very least, you use different answers to what the questions are asking.

e.g. Mother's maiden name? Main Street (i.e. street where you first lived)

Favourite Author? Spot (name of first pet)

Favourite sports team? Victoria's Secret (where you work).

Anyone who answers the questions with the correct values for the question itself is stupid and shouldn't be allowed unsupervised on the internet.

Better than mixing up the answers would be to use either totally random words or treat each of them like a password field:

Mothers maiden name? Trombone (random word)

Mothers maiden name? jnk0dS@t(es (just like another password).

'WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?' Linus Torvalds explodes at Intel spinning Spectre fix as a security feature

Re: The bug is better than the buggy fix !!!

> Since I am using Windows 10 Home I don't have the option of disabling the updates.

Yes you do.

There are registry keys that can be changed and services that can be disabled to accomplish this.

There are even 3rd party programs, like ShutUp10, that give you a simple slider switch to disable/enable these features without having to go into the registry or services control panel.

We're cutting F-35 costs, honest, insists jet-builder Lockheed Martin

> Lockheed Martin aims to knock 14 per cent off the cost of Britain's F-35B fighter jets over the next couple of years,

And in other news, maintenance contracts and spare parts for the F-35 have increased by 14%.

Don't panic... but our fragile world is drifting away from the Sun

Reg, I am disappointed.

Earth's orbital distance of 1.496x10¹³ cm is

Linguine: 1068571428571.4286

Double-decker bus: 16227356546.2632

Brontosaurus: 6806187443.1301

And we are receding at 0.1071 Linguine per year.

Nervy nuke-armed nation fires missile with 5,000km range

Re: As long as...

In India's 2011 census, 2.3% of the population declared as christian.

With over 1.2 billion people, that's more 27 million Christians. Only 50 of the 230ish countries in the world have more people than that.

F-35 'incomparable' to Harrier jump jet, top test pilot tells El Reg

Re: VIFing?

> Fact of life: an experienced operator with good knowledge of his (/her) tool will almost always outperform a less experienced operator using a "superior" tool.

I don't know, I get the feeling the ladies say that to me to save my feelings, not because they believe it...

Re: Hearts & minds propaganda, courtesy of MoD

> An interesting point. Those of us old enough may remember the great Japan scare of the 80s and 90s when it seemed Japan Uber Alles was coming. But, at least in computers, Japanese superiority never quite crystallized - anyone remember the Fifth Generation Computer Systems initiative?

Well, just wait until they feel the need to use their secret Space Battleship Yamoto, then you'll change your tune!

Next; tech; meltdown..? Mandatory; semicolons; in; JavaScript; mulled;

Re: Memory time...

> I do agree though that it should remain a warning, or a lot of code will break;

From the context, they want to enforce strict semi-colon usage because ASI has issues with newer 'advanced' features that have complex requirements.

I imagine it would be pretty easy to have a detection routine that says "you aren't using any of the newer version X features, therefore I won't enforce strict semi-colon requirement". Therefore any code written before fancy feature X is defined won't have fancy feature X - because it doesn't exist - and can be detected as not needing strict. And any new code written after fancy feature X is introduced, but doesn't use fancy feature X, can also be detected as not needing it.

Therefore it should only enforce strict semi-colon if those features are detected.

Re: Bad programmers blame the syntax.

> And if you are so old you cant adopt your coding style you should at least be able to write the code that will convert your coding style into whatever is required.

Sorta agree - I say sorta because you don't need to write your own...

There are plenty of "pretty print" programs out there that already do this. And they work much better when you have a structured language that requires braces and semi-colons and so on, much easier to parse for pretty printing.

Re: Tabs v spaces

> If you don't, then don't use them.

Unfortunately, if you wish to work as part of a team on a project (like, say from your employer) then you often don't have a choice on the language being used.

EU court to rule whether Facebook should seek and destroy hate speech

Re: Simple Criteria

> "All adherents of the ABCD religion should be expelled from the country"

That statement does not advocate violence, either mental or physical, against anyone. Following that example would then make the following hate speech:

"Anyone who holds citizenship of another country (including dual-citizens) who commits a crime should be expelled from the country"

"Bring back the death penalty for murderers"

Your definition, and example, would stifle public debate about matters that should be open to public debate.

Also, your definition would not pass US 2nd Amendment constitutional scrutiny. For speech to not be covered under the 2nd Amendment it has to either be libellous or intended to incite imminent illegal activity. Therefore if seeking a world-wide definition, that would not be it.

The answer you are looking for for how hate speech is currently, effectively, defined is, if you are a person of authority/influence (i.e. politician, billionaire, big business) then "Anything I don't like" or "I know it when I see it".

And that is the problem with hate-speech laws, they are all ill-defined, pander to specific sets of people, and vary from country (or state/province) to country.

> The postal system, by design, does not know anything about a letter or packet except destination and (sometimes) sender. Same with the phone system, all it 'knows' is caller and receiver (with modern systems collecting some more metadata especially in case of mobile phones). In neither case does any system know anything about content.

Not true in most modern western post or phone systems.

For postal mail, a lot of central mail sorting/distribution centres will x-ray/scan random packages looking for bombs and so on.

Most postal systems will scan and keep all external surfaces of all mail and make it available to security/intelligence services.

Most of these systems will open items if they are suspicious of the contents or if ordered to by security/intelligence services.

Same applies to the phone systems. In most western phone systems, the major providers are required to provide an eaves-dropping capability.

Re: Mycho The Reason For Limiting Words

>If they want to defend violence's right to exist then I would suggest they go to hell

But isn't hell a place where violence is perpetuated for the rest of eternity on everyone there?

So you are comfortable assigning someone to an eternity of violence if they disagree with your views on violence?

Boffins split on whether Spectre fix needs tweaked hardware

Would a separate privileged TLB help?

From most of what I've read (on tech sites like The Register, not the actual exploit papers and so on), most of the attacks seem to be caused by the TLB having unprivileged and unprivileged memory references simultaneously in the TLB. Although meltdown makes this worse on effected processors by not enforcing security on speculative execution.

What about splitting the TLB in future processors? Making a smaller (since it only needs the kernel memory references in it, not user processes as well) TLB that can only hold references for - and be accessed by - ring 0 threads? That way, any extra security that needs to be introduced around kernel memory (fiddling with timing for example) can be applied to access from the protected TLB.

CPU bug patch saga: Antivirus tools caught with their hands in the Windows cookie jar

That was exactly one of the points covered in the article:

SentinelOne is upset that "the responsibility of setting the registry key" is shifted to the AV vendor. "While our testing revealed no incompatibilities, we are unwilling to take on the risk of setting this registry key,” the security software house said.

“This is because our customers may have other software products that use unsupported/undocumented APIs that are incompatible with Microsoft’s latest patches. In such a case, our customers may experience stop errors/system instabilities caused by other products that are not compatible with Microsoft fixes,”

Elon Musk lowers his mighty erection for test firing: Falcon Heavy preps for maiden voyage

Re: putting a fueling station into orbit

> putting a fueling station into orbit

> something that a "super-heavy" might be really good for...

That's one of the roles slated for the BFR in its BFR Tanker configuration, which is in a class above super-heavy.

US Senators force vote on Ctrl-Z'ing America's net neutrality death

> Later, he wrote: "It is time for the Internet once again to be driven by engineers and entrepreneurs and consumers, MBAs rather than lawyers and accountants and bureaucrats"

There, fixed it for him.

FCA 'gold-plates' EU rule, hits BYOD across entire UK finance sector

> I can't see how you can ban someone from bringing their own phone to work. If they need to be able to make private calls after they leave the office WTF are they supposed to do?

I've worked for organisations and at specific locations where exactly this situation occurs. In the entrance lobby are little lockers where you lock up your private phone (or any other no-no devices - cameras) before entering and retrieve it from when leaving the building/area.

Smartphones' security enhancements just make them more dangerous

Re: Any Biometric is the least secure model I can think of.....

Stop looking over my shoulder when I unlock my luggage!

Re: Any Biometric is the least secure model I can think of.....

> 2. 'Force' different levels of password/pin implementation onto the device (i.e. no usage of more then two continuous numbers, no usage of duplicate numbers).

You've just reduced the size (difficulty) of the problem set that has to be solved for a brute-force password attack by including those restrictions.

Re: DNA scans would be no better

> drinking out of, your lipstick, your hairbrush (yeah it sounds like women would be easier targets here...)

>...

> though you might need to swallow something for contrast first...

So still targeted mostly at women then?

It gets worse: Microsoft’s Spectre-fixer wrecks some AMD PCs

> Most non technical (and many technical people too) don't know if a patch is critical, pointless or potentially damaging so have no basis on which to accept or reject it.

It's pretty hard to know whether a patch is necessary or not when the only information MS supplies in the list of patches is "this is a security update".

MS should be supplying full patch information in the windows update interface, not a generic message.

Re: athlon

I don't get forced updates on win10 either - thanks to shutup10.

If Australian animals don't poison you or eat you, they'll BURN DOWN YOUR HOUSE

Re: Australian wildlife

And the water buffalo.

Magpies during nesting season.

The sun, it really wants to kill you, boil you alive.

Nebula spotted with more super-sized bodies than a gym on Jan 2nd

I agree as I had a similar reaction on reading it.

I think a couple sentences need to be updated something along the lines of:

The Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Doradus or 30 Dor, located about 160,000 light years away in the Large Megallanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way , could contain a whopping 600 stars that are between 15 to 200 solar masses.

and

It’s uncertain how common rich galaxiesnebulae like 30 Dor are.

Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs

Re: Can you clarify?

Out-of-order execution

In computer engineering, out-of-order execution (or more formally dynamic execution) is a paradigm used in most high-performance microprocessors to make use of instruction cycles that would otherwise be wasted by a certain type of costly delay.

...

In 1990s, out-of-order execution became more common, and was featured in the IBM/Motorola PowerPC 601 (1993), Fujitsu/HAL SPARC64 (1995), Intel Pentium Pro (1995), MIPS R10000 (1996), HP PA-8000 (1996), AMD K5 (1996) and DEC Alpha 21264 (1998). Notable exceptions to this trend include the Sun UltraSPARC, HP/Intel Itanium, Transmeta Crusoe, Intel Atom until Silvermont Architecture, and the IBM POWER6.

...

The Intel 'Core' architecture (i3's, i5's, i7's etc) are basically a derivation of the Pentium Pro that, as per the referenced wikipedia page, introduced out-of-order execution in 1995.