Posts by mootpoint

UK competition watchdog seeks to make mobile browsers, cloud gaming and payments more competitive

Re: "Apple and Google have substantial and entrenched market power in mobile operating systems"

It's astonishing to me how much people in tech have bought into the "tech titans are monopolies because they are good at what they do". No. They obtained first mover advantage and now they are exploiting their market power to maximise profits and destroy the competition. It is classic monopolistic behaviour. Market dynamism is down - there are way fewer startups than there were 20 years ago because entrepreneurs know they haven't a hope in hell of breaking their stranglehold on the market. Product innovation is down - without any meaningful competition, they don't need to innovate to keep market share. When did you last see any innovation from Google? From Facebook? The CMA are absolutely on the right track here. When the AT&T monopoly was broken up in the eighties, it resulted in a huge growth in the market, massive product innovation in the telco space and, ironically enough, the widespread adoption of the internet. Bring it on.

Lockbit wins ransomware speed test, encrypts 25,000 files per minute

I think the problem with this approach would be identifying that the process is running encryption. I'd imagine these would be custom written rather than using any identifiable system processes.

Anyone else noticed that the top countries for broadband speeds are well-known tax havens? No? Just us then?

Re: US broadband is still better than the UK ersatz

Sounds like you need to change supplier - Hyperoptic does 1Gbps symmetrical fibre in London for £45 a month.

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

Re: Anonymous Contractor

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the way contractors get paid. My clients pay my limited company, which pays corporation tax at 19%, NI, expenses etc before paying me. Then I still have to pay personal taxes like any other employee. The fact that I can receive some of my pay in dividends results in a small tax advantage but it's nowhere near what permanent employees seem to think, and hardly covers the lack of sick / holiday pay.

Gang way! Compsci geeks coming through! AI engine can finger fakes on social networks

FBP?

If it were possible to run this sort of analysis on publicly available data (I suspect it may be on Twitter), some enterprising soul could come up with a blocking script, Fake Block Pro if you will. I'd sign up to that.

Running with that idea gives you the ability to block trolls, or even accounts with a certain political proclivity - Snowflake Block Pro / Swivel-eyed Loon Block Pro depending on your preferences.

And our echo-chambers will no longer be troubled with any ripples of dissent. Or would we then find that our social networks consist entirely of bots designed to mirror our worldview?

Ah to hell with it, I'm unplugging the internet.

For nearly 2 decades, Google has been doing similar analysis to identify sites attempting to game their algorithm (link farms and the like). The big players are certainly capable of identifying the bad actors - the question is - are they motivated to do anything about it? For example, if Facebook weeds out a load of fake accounts, suddenly those ad view numbers look a bit less impressive to advertisers. Perhaps grilling the CEOs in front of congress/parliament provides some incentive but I doubt it. When (if) the users start closing their accounts in significant numbers we might see some action on this.

Beware the looming Google Chrome HTTPS certificate apocalypse!

Re: @John Lilburne Well done Google....

When I banned signups from gmail on the company user forum, the spam postings dropped by 80%.

Did the total postings also drop by 80%?

Dodgy Dutch developer built backdoors into thousands of sites

WooCommerce?

You make very good points about "standing on the shoulders of a crowd of giants" when using an established open-source CMS. I will back WordPress against a bespoke e-commerce site any day of the week, simply because it has been stress-tested to f**k in the wild.

I cannot see anyone run a shop on WP, that's simply not what it was designed for (it's OK for a little "public only" website)

WooCommerce extends WordPress to do just that. It does it pretty well, and is now used by 40% of the world's online stores. In other words, WordPress is the most popular e-commerce platform in the world.

NHS IT bod sends test email to 850k users – and then responses are sent 'reply all'

Re: ....and they don't stop coming

After a mere 240 shots? Lightweight!

Smart Meter rollout delayed again. Cost us £11bn, eh?

Re: What's the advantage to the consumer?

Your calculations seem quite off to me. I recently replaced all the bulbs in my 5 bed house with LEDs. They were previously a mixture of filament, CF and halogen GU10. The monthly leccy bill went from around £80 to under £50. The bulbs cost £90 delivered. They paid for themselves in 3 months!

The biggest hurdle was persuading the missus to try LED. She really liked the warm glow of tungsten filament, to the extent of hunting down the bulbs from dodgy corner shops. She hated CF, and I agree, the light is awful, with a cold purple-green cast. But LED has come a long way recently - you can get warm 3400K bulbs with the same colour temperature as tungsten. You can even get clear bulbs with LED "filaments" that are almost indistinguishable from tungsten. And they're dimmable too. For around £5-6 a bulb.

MtGox boss vows to keep going despite $429m Bitcoin 'theft'

Re: Hands up who's shocked?

I have to disagree, based on my experience with IceSave in 2008. I had £300K in that and got a cheque for the full amount from the FSCS within 2 weeks. I had written it off...

Paedophiles ‘disguise’ child abuse pages as legit websites

Re: I have never understood how peadophillia can exist.

I think a lot of paedophiles were abused themselves as children, and are caught up into perpetuating what was visited on them. - "man hands on misery to man". They must also be some of the loneliest people on earth, which I suppose is part of the motivation for "sharing". The sad thing is that there is so much hysteria and revulsion over this topic that there is almost no sensible discussion of treatment, any treatment centres get shut down because no-one wants them in their neighbourhood and the whole thing gets driven underground.

Early Bell recordings live again (kind of)

Facepalm

Yup, those techies built a complex optical scanner for reading these cylinders, then stored the recordings in... MP3 V2

Entering a storage jail

Sounds like hard work

Yes, this illustrates the fundamental problem for content publishers attempting to control user behaviour - regardless of whether content is "streamed", "rented", DRMed etc., it has to be played at some point. In other words, the decoded digital 0's and 1's are present on your machine/device and can be recorded.

However, from your experience, it certainly seems that the publishers have succeeded in making you jump through hoops to free your purchased data. Recording the playback to an audio editor and manually cutting up and resampling the files? Really? You'll lose a lot of quality that way, not to mention hours out of your day.

May I suggest a little programme called eac3to? Using this, I've liberated HD audio from DVD-Audio discs, DTS Master Audio from BluRays, all in original bit-perfect form, packaged in nice portable FLAC.