Posts by Voland's right hand

Chip company FTDI accused of bricking counterfeits again

This is not killing people (yet)

This is killing people

No it is not. Yet.

Now, counterfeit life jackets on which Turks are making a killing (literally and figuratively) are. However, we are doing nothing and shall do nothing about it as it is not politically convenient.

Same as in this case actually - it is not politically convenient to apply proper penalties for counterfeit goods which potentially matter in human lives such components (and again - life jackets). Now, Luis Voiton handbags - we are going to f*** nuke the counterfeiter because the civilization will end if counterfeiting handbags for rich tw*ts will be allowed to occur.

Brit airline pilots warn of drone menace

Registration will not help

Frankly, the only way of policing them is to patrol with other drones and jam from point blank range (so you can overwhelm any form of remote control including mobile). Failing that follow the violator until you are over an area where you can safely shoot them and shoot them.

Nothing else like registration, etc will help. That horse has already bolted.

Land Rover Defender dies: Production finally halted by EU rules

Exactly. The Russians replaced AK47 with AK74 for some very good reasons.

Re: If it was tax-deductible as a capital asset

It is tax deductible

Weird. The rules when I was buying my pickup were load based for things that are not an obvious van. Based on the explanation from Isuzu, you had to be able to carry 1 ton to be classified as a commercial. No ifs, no buts, no coconuts. I still ended up paying all of it and VAT as I bought it private at the end of the day, but I did the checks.

So by that rule most sane Defender models do not qualify: http://www.landrover.co.uk/Images/DEFENDER_tcm295-140413.pdf

All 90-es do not qualify unless they are in an obvious "2 seats and no windows" van incarnation. The 110 station wagon does not qualify either, you need to have the "obvious" pickup version of the 110 for that or 130-es which are as rare as a white swallow. I cannot think of when I saw one recently.

Re: Just

Actually, it is not just the Eurocrats. In fact they should be second in line for the spoilsport title.

The death knell of the Defender sounded the moment Blair and Co made into a "car" out of a commercial vehicle while keeping crew cab trucks as commercials. It has been selling less and less from that point onwards.

The 2020 emission regs are just the final nail in the coffin. The remainder of the coffin has been put together by Brown and Osbourne for many years.

If it was tax-deductible as a capital asset the same way you can do with an L200, Denver, Navarra, etc it would have sold enough for Tata to try to find a way around the regs. After all, everyone who is building pickups have managed to get something lined up for that date somehow.

SpaceX breaks capsule 'chute world record

Re: The correct number of parachutes to own is n+1

It is - different redundancy models.

Soyuz has a full parachute backup for its one and only. Apollo could land (albeit quite bumpy) after losing a chute. 4 chutes look like adding an extra redundancy +1 to the existing 3 on the unmanned one to get the required reliability for man-rated landing.

'Printer Ready'. Er… you actually want to print? What, right now?

I can point you to some code

I can point you to some code and buy you a beer if you are able to trace it through without a color printer (to get syntax highlighting), pen, highlighter and a bucket of vodka.

In fact, I bet most of the El Reg readership can.

Like it or not paper is better than a monitor if you are trying to comprehend something mindboggling with a pen/highlighter in hand.

Oracle kicks Amazon after Glacier download bill shock

Re: Archive != backup

In fact there are 3 levels, not two.

1. Backup for PEBKAC - stuff from which you can recover files lost today. Or yesterday. Or anythime this week. More - sorry, read the manpage of luser, pay attention to -g2 option and go to step 2. Similarly, if you need to use point 3 as backup, read the description of -g3 option in the same manpage.

2. Backup for disaster recovery - something that guards against major incidents. You read it regularly in mock recovery exercises to ensure it is viable.

3. Archive (if you have reached reading from it for anything but "go to court", you are doing something wrong).

Glacier is 3. You still need to sort out 2 and 1.

Hell, high water, and ice: Facebook's Dublin data center choices

Re: Yes tax

Your point is?

Is the population speaking English is f*** irrelevant. The question for a multinational company is "is the workforce speaking English?".

That in computing and telecoms equates to No in France, Meah, maybe in Germany, Spain, Italy and Portugal (*) and a resounding YES everywhere else in Europe.

This _INCLUDES_ Ireland - while English has an official status, it is officially the second language. First one is Irish.

While tax is a major factor tax is not the only one and the locations of data centers and research facilities in Europe are indicative of that. If it was just tax nobody would have put anything in Scandinavia or Switherland. That as we know is not the case.

You've seen things people wouldn't believe – so tell us your programming horrors

Apple's cut'n'paste blunder

Gotos are a way of life in C.

The error there is not the goto, not the double goto, but the lack of brackets around the if-ed operand. That is what is asking for a clusterf*** and what I have seen clusterf*** so often it is not even funny.

I usually prohibit it as "unacceptable coding style" internally and bounce any code which uses it at review. Bracket it, so it is clear what you are doing. End of story.

31 nations sign data-sharing pact to tax multinationals

Too late

Horse has already bolted. Last week I bought a shed (actually something closer to a log cabin). When Iooked at my card statement the sale was booked across the globe in Signapore despite it being produced less than 100 miles of where I live.

Multinational As A Service and Tax Avoidance As A Service are now a reality. Sharing data will do little to stop them. You need to actually change the rulebook.

Can't upgrade, won't upgrade: Windows Mobile's user problem

History repeating itself?

Why do I feel the smell of Windows of yesteryear in the air all over again?

Back to the Future's DeLorean is coming back to the future

Re: A couple points ...

Well, it was made for the American market. If you try a lot of the USA sports cars from those days they do not handle any better (though most have significantly more power on tap).

What did you expect? A Renault 5 GT Turbo? A Peugeout 205 GTI? Both date from about the same time.

Oh, I forgot, something like that would have never made it into the USA market by the pure nature of it being too small. And driveable too.

The original DeLorean best likeness are those fake Ferraris which people make out of a Fiat Coupe. Put a fake Ferrari body on top + horse badge and a HUGE fart pipe. Under-powered, handles like a coffin and has the safety level of a coffin (I would really not like to try to get out of those gull-wing doors after a roll over).

Ban internet anonymity – says US Homeland Security official

Re: "ignored most of the time"

The readers automatically scan the plate number of EVERY vehicle in front of them

Not just USA. When I drive across Europe the state of affairs is:

UK - In theory, a nation under ANPR. In practice, the smaller roads and small cities are not covered

NL - well, the birthplace of GATSOMeter corp, shall we say more

DE, CZ, A - All motorways, supposedly for toll enforcement. They read all plates, unclear what they do with them

Hu - All motorways, road tax enforcement, considering the inclination of the government there ....

Ro - A camera here and there for road tax enforcement, not even close to rest of Eu (they are surprisingly law abiding down there).

Bg - All A roads and all motorways, supposedly for road tax enforcement which interestingly enough is not done. So god only knows what is done with the data.

Greece - what camera? Camera? You expect a country which did not even have a national birth register till less then 5 years ago to have working ANPR? You mean someone will pay tax? You are joking, right.

E - I have not noticed any cameras, but that does not mean there aren't any.

F - camera at every toll and by god, they have more tolls than USA.

Google DeepMind cyber-brain cracks tough AI challenge: Beating a top Go board-game player

Re: Very Impressive

formal education or doing formal research in the field

I have and this is exactly why I expressed that opinion: "It is not". I will stand by it because I have done _NOT_ _ONLY_ _AI_ and I have seen other real scientific fields and how they work.

I tried doing a PhD in AI and theory of cognition and dropped it after a year. I found it disgustingly fuzzy, full of blah-blahisms and massive hand waving (+/- smoking large amounts of pot by a lot of people involved which is not my fav pastime).

To put things into perspective I have done work and published quoted papers in 3 different fundamental scientific fields: Chemistry, Molecular Biology and Applied Mathematics. So based on the perspective from these as well as doing the first one third of an AI PhD, I will quote Heinlein: "If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion".

This, unfortunately, describes the present state of AI all too well. Once you remove bits which originate from Probability and Stats, the rest contains way too much of voodoo, alchemy and "tricks of the trade" to qualify for the label science. It also contains sparingly little numbers.

Engineering - sure. Science - nope. Not even close.

Re: Very Impressive

It's AI

No it is not. Neither by Turing nor by Azimov's criteria.

It is a learning system all right, but a very specialized one. We use these to learn to build generic ones and those for the time being suck and fail both Turing test and Azimov criteria.

'Here are 400,000 smut sites. Block them' says Pakistani telco regulator

Re: Eliminate pron

All good things in a country fighting internal racialism to increase frustration and murky association.

Well, that may be the goal you know...

Islamic fundamentalists force Yorkshire IT shop to chop off brand

Re: coming soon...

You missed one: A petition to stop the Internet.

After all, 9 out of 10 top providers use ISIS as a routing protocol.

Stop the music! Booby-trapped song carjacked vehicles – security prof

Exactly

The problem is that there is ONE MORE OBD port and in most recent cars it is wired to the infotainment unit. That was fine while the infotainment unit was your typical prehistoric POS which also showed some numbers about fuel consumption, etc (hello GM). It became a problem after idiots connected it to the Internet with no security whatsoever.

Police Scotland will have direct access to disabled parking badge database

Re: Also Parent and Child bays

is there some kind of ratio they need to stick to with regards to total number of bays and percentage of disabled?

For disabled - yes - determined by local council planning committee.

So if you want to offer a total of X spaces you have no choice but to offer Y disabled spaces. There are councils, especially in London which have the ratio set to a very high number because of the short supply of on-street parking and hence the requirement to provision sufficient on-street disabled bays. Due to the well known fact that brains and local planning law do not mix, the idiots in the council planning dept still apply the same ratio to a shopping center or supermarket regardless of the fact that it will result in a massively under-used disabled section.

Parent & Child, loading bays, etc are "courtesy" of the retailer. AFAIK there is no planning guidance requiring those.

Retailers urged to create 'CCTV-like' symbol to inform customers of mobile tracking

You are not the target audience

Joe Average consumer who has the retailer "shopping list" app which doubles up as an internet shopping, shipping and store navigation is the target audience. When you dig into the app permissions you are guaranteed to find that it will connect either to WiFi or BT. So even if the Mac is switched by OS, the app will authenticate at app level, because Joe wants it to so it can keep on ticking off his shopping list.

Re: "... retailer’s smart phone app. "

You will find quite a few people installing it if it doubles up as the "shopping list" and "internet shopping" app.

Standard strategy - if you need to shovel a dubious feature down the punter's throat, attach it to 20 ones they would not do without.

Safe Harbor 2.0: US-Europe talks on privacy go down to the wire

Re: simple question.. @ YAAC

and the US Justice Department want them to hand over the data, because Microsoft Ireland is a subsidiary of Microsoft Corp. in America and therefore falls under US Law and not Irish law...

They went one step further - they sell a "product" which can be summarized as "Azure and operating Azure it you" to a 3rd party and 3rd party like DT runs the customer facing part of the service. AFAIK< the other services, including Office 365 are in the pipeline to join Azure

Can't blame them, they have near-monopoly on government business in Eu with Office 365, making that an embargoed product will not go well with their bottom line. That reminds me, we are in a leap year. Does this mean that Office 365 will take a mandatory one day lie down at some point to comply with its naming?

Microsoft struggles against self-inflicted Office 365 IMAP outage

Not like it worked even before that

IMAP support in both MS Exchange and Office 365 is a complete and utter joke.

All people who actually need to have it working use davmail. That works (TM).

Folk shun UK.gov's 'expensive' subsidised satellite broadband

Re: Satellite Broadband?

SAT as provider up/downlink technology for really far off locations will never go away. There are places where fiber is just not worth running for now.

SAT as a consumer broadband tech has been dead in Europe for 10+ years and is now dying in the 3rd world. It beggars belief how this ended up money having thrown at it in the first place.

Flock of sheep ends NZ high-speed car chase

Improbably

Are you sure you spelled that right?

In NZ that should have been "probably" or "certainly" - based on sheep to inhabitants ratio.

Oracle blurts Google's Android secrets in court: You made $22bn using Java, punk

Re: Wait a minute

Bare = take. Thanks - lesson for the future - should not post before 4th espresso. Damn... there is no coffee icon. Probably so that Oracle does not ask El Register to hand all of its measly profits for violating their "hot java" copyrights.

Oh well... beer as closest equivalent (especially on a Friday afternoon).

Wait a minute

While I bare no sympathy to what Google has become, I find it difficult not to notice that:

Neither the play store, nor ads are fundamentally bound to java, infringing on java copyrights (if that happened in the first place) or anything to which Oracle may be theoretically entitled for a chance for remedy.

While we all know that Google uses Android as a scorched earth tactic to ensure that nobody can get even close to their dominance in search and ad slinging, you have to prove that this is its exclusive function via appropriate discovery. Oracle has failed to do that (I do not think they would be allowed by most judges to go on that fishing expedition anyway). So from that perspective, even if there is infringement (which I doubt), this all smacks of racketeering. Oh, such a good 22Bn business you got there, wonder if you would like something to happen to it. Even if Oracle is entitled to any remedy (*), it should be derived from Android licensing agreement numbers, not from Playstore and ad slinging revenue numbers. Oh, by the way, it will be interesting how much do those contribute to G00G bottom line.

(*) A raft of recent cases in Eu went solidly the other way. If it is essential to implement functionality for a system, you cannot copyright the shape essential to implement said functionality. It fails the expressiveness test. Lego, London Taxy company, etc - you name it.

Government in-sourcing: It was never going to be that easy

Re: Yeah, right

And as for buying in talent from large consultancies...

That is a valid proposition. If you write it correctly: And as for buying in "talent" from large consultancies...

Boeing just about gives up on the 747

Interesting

747s writing on the wall was posted when FAA started approving 3+ hour ratings for 2 engine planes. I am surprised it is still around and has not been replaced by 777 on all routes.

In fact, I suspect Boeing did some pricing shenanigans here, because A340 was displaced by A330 the moment FAA started approving 3+ h ratings for 2 engine aircraft.

Why does herbal cough syrup work so well? It may be full of morphine

Re: Off to the local Chinese grocery store

Curious minds want to know:

Did you pick up the organic brownies in Prague or Amsterdam? Also, were they from a shop with a big green leaf on the shop sign.

Samsung sued over 'lackadaisical' Android security updates

Re: Move along, nothing to see

Sure, you will get updates, but they will effectively cripple your device after a certain date.

Sincerely - a disgrunted owner of an original Nexus 7 which became unusable after an update to 5.0

I had to hack the bootloader (the posted downloads on Google website brick the device) to downgrade it to the last 4. It now has updates disabled as there are no more 4.x updates and any update will cripple it by updating it to 5.x

The last time Earth was this hot hippos lived in Britain (that’s 130,000 years ago)

Re: Bring on the warming!!!

I beg to differ. You do not want to be anywhere near western/north western Europe for the next 3 degrees of warming or thereabouts. All mathematical models point to weakening and potentially disappearance of the Gulfstream. It will become like the part of Newfoundland facing Greenland which is roughly at the same lattitude. Ever been there in Winter? Or to be more precise: do you want to be there in any time of the year?

Now once we are past the 3 degrees global it should warm again, but that will take centuries (at least) even if we burn anything we can get our hands on.

Brit boffins brew nanotech self-cleaning glass

Re: Cleaing Costs for Skyscapers?

They are not real windows. They are bolted to a simple structure, not properly framed. More like tiles.

The cost (and more importantly weight) of replacing the lattice which carries the glass panels with proper framing for something like the Gerkin or the Shard will be astronomical. It is much cheaper to put rails around the top, crane on them and get a couple of madmen to clean it (I get nausea from the mere thought of looking down from the cleaner platform).

Ukraine energy utilities attacked again with open source Trojan backdoor

Quoting Londo Mollary

And in purple YOU are stunning.

So, Bernard, what were you saying?

Pentagon fastens lasers to military drones to zap missiles out of the skies

Re: Don't drone's already have hellfire's

A missile will not look like a launch incident. A laser strike leaves no trace.

There is also no window for a missile on missile action. Assuming this is "rogue nation" ICBM which uses liquid fuel (and thus lower acceleration), it will reach 5M in 2 minutes or thereabouts. At that point the interceptor simply cannot keep up with it. Solid propellant driven "usual suspect" ICBM will do that in a minute or so. This means you are required to be within less than 50 km of the launch site and shoot to kill immediately too (no time to ask for fire authorization).

Hellfire will not cut it anyway, you are looking at one of the big long range AA missiles which used to be loaded on cold war era interceptors. Some of these are as large as a drone. The right solution is neither laser, nor missile. It is a loitering munition designed for AA interception. An AA version of the Israeili "Hamas commander killer": http://www.janes.com/images/assets/074/52074/1634179_-_main.jpg

Inside Intel's CPU-level multi-factor auth (and why we've got deja vu)

Re: Designed by whom?

Excellent use of bold. You should have used italics and caps too.

End of the day, it comes from the same place as their random generator.

How to get root on a Linux box, step 1: Make four billion system calls

Re: If someone is able to run arbitrary code on your server

That's why code signing,

Code signing is useless on a real world Linux/Unix system. You are not just trying to lock the door after the horse has bolted. You are trying to triple-padlock the barn catflap after the horse has waltzed out through the main door. The main doors have Perl, Python and Shell written on them.

Any of these will allow you to bypass code signing. You can use any one of them to hit most exploits including exploits which require direct syscall access. Sure, theoretically, you can remove all interpreted languages off a Linux system. In practice - you need to recreate the whole distribution to do so and build an embedded system of your own. You are likely to introduce more new vulnerabilities while doing it.

Twitter goes titsup

Re: I miss the Fail Whale

Pity it will not last, having Ark B offline should improve the overall humanity IQ by a few points. Now if we could have both F***book and Tw*tter offline for just a few days... Adding Linked in for good measure would be nice too.

Not for any other reasons - I just want to observe the withdrawal symptoms. Popcorn please...

Nude tribute to Manet's Olympia ends in cuffing

Re: Unsure about this one

"Performance Art" =~ Ultimate form of attention seeking disorder combined with exhibitionism.

The worst thing is to provide her with more attention, it will just reinforce her condition. What she needs is help. Psychiatric help.

Group rattles tin in bid to snatch TfL licence from Uber's paw

Re: £600,000 in 8 weeks...

They are just clocking it using the standard from Heathrow to downtown london route which takes your around Terminals 2,3,5.4 first before you get onto the A4.

Habits like this die last.

SpaceX: launch, check. Landing? Needs work

Re: It is not a step too far, just the opposite

Currently those unused oil tankers are actually full of oil

I thought I wrote "fill it with water to the mark". Oh, indeed I did.

Sell the oil first of course :)

It is not a step too far, just the opposite

Frankly, for rough seas, especially in the Pacific, the barge is way too small.

There is a surplus of supertankers anchored off the Cornwall and USA Mexican bay coast at the moment. Buying a couple of these is a better idea. Just fill it "to mark" with water prior to landing the rocket. Even your 15+ feet pacific waves will not move it (if it is pointing with the bow towards them).

Re: Quick Fix??

Ship it to Eastern Europe. They can make a Merc or a BMW look mint new after a collision which leaves them in a worse shape. You even get (optionally) new engine and chassis numbers :)

KeysForge will give you printable key blueprints using a photo of a lock

Err...

That will work if your lock has a master key in the first place. Not all do. In fact, some countries local regs (Germany if memory serves me right - not 100% sure though) prohibit the sale of end-user consume locks with a master key.

You have to be a company and you have to order a batch to get one.

Forget the drones, Amazon preps its own cargo container ship operation out of China

For themselves - yes

For their sellers - no. These will be "disadvantaged". The usual methodology of avoiding tax by Chinese cheap tat peddlers goes out of the window. They definitely cannot register a 200$ + per item piece of electronics as a "present" any more.

In addition to that, Amazon will have no choice but to start rigorously enforcing VAT and customs duties on all tat sold this way. If they do not, their container service will fail to be competitive compared to the usual suspects (HongKong post and Taiwan post).

So, frankly, I am all for that. Let them do it. Any tax they squirrel by shifting costs into shipping will be pennies compared to what will be collected from all the VAT/Duties avoiders.

Comet halo theory for flickering 'alien megastructure' star fails

Too slow for that

That took days, not years. In any case, you are talking too much. A StarFlyer agent will pay you a visit shortly.