Re: Is it safe?
No, but since it’s China, no one cares.
Posts by Petalium
76 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Aug 2011
Uber to roll out thousands of robo-cabs built by China’s Baidu
China accuses Taiwan of running five feeble APT gangs, with US help
Sunday 8th June 2025 09:09 GMT
Re: Beijing complains it’s under relentlessly feeble attack?
They have the Communist youth league with 89 million members, used for mass spamming whenever someone writes something negative about PRC. Then you have the 50 cent army (wu mao) with employees, they have become a rather sophisticated outfit and runs pro Chinese propaganda in social media ( They also control payed western actors on, for example YouTube.)
Builder.ai coded itself into a corner – now it's bankrupt
Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft
TSMC pauses production after strong earthquake hits Taiwan
Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch cleared of all charges in US Autonomy fraud trial
End-to-end encryption may be the bane of cops, but they can't close that Pandora's Box
China's mega-telcos are spending billions on AI servers
'AI divide' across the US leaves economists concerned
China – which surveils everyone everywhere – floats facial recognition rules
China succeeds where Elon Musk has failed with first methalox rocket
Astroscale wants to be the world's friendly neighborhood space garbage collector
BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030
EU passes world's first regulatory framework for cryptocurrency
Wednesday 17th May 2023 13:41 GMT
The money laundering excuse again, the only thing it accomplishes is the to make it harder to move legal money around.
I recently moved 300k euros from an Asian country to a European country, legal , taxed money. One of the banks where I’ve been a customer for 50 years flat out refused to do it, didn’t even wanted to tell me what their requirements to allow is. My other bank required a lot of paperwork including a personal letter from the manager of my Asian bank, with a verified translation and the complete transaction history. I bet if I was a billionaire drug runner it would have been much easier…
Astronomers say they've seen the largest explosion yet – and we just had to talk to them
Florida folks dragged out of bed by false emergency texts
Saturday 22nd April 2023 01:46 GMT
First time I lived through an alert was 3 in the morning: A very loud siren in the apartment followed by a recorded message through a speaker in the apartment. The message was in Chinese, I had no idea there was a speaker inside my home and I don't speak Chinese.... It however became apparent what was happening a few seconds later when the bed started shaking.
Exactly what I should do with a four second warning when I live on the 11th floor remains unclear, wake up and kiss your ass goodbye?
Pentagon advised to get agile if it wants to keep up with evolving threats
Cardboard drones running open source flight software take off in Ukraine and beyond
If scammers use your AI code to rip off victims, the FTC may want a word
DigitalOcean waves goodbye to 11 percent of staff
Musk says he ain't going anywhere as Twitter CEO until at least late 2023
Chinese surveillance balloon over US causes fearful gasbagging
China unveils massive blockchain cluster running homebrew tech
Meta axes two Danish datacenters amid shift to AI infrastructure
NASA's Orion Moon capsule to splash down this Sunday
Sunday 11th December 2022 03:51 GMT
Is the Reg making a subtle joke with the unit conversions ? Or have they hired a liberal arts student to write this?
I especially like the “ Slowing down from km/s to m/s” forcing me to some math in my head to get the scale right.
I’m on vacation damn it, yes that’s my brain floating in the gin and tonic, please don’t take it away my dear waiter.
Google's Dart language soon won't take null for an answer
Sunday 11th December 2022 03:38 GMT
Re: NULL is just the pointer analog to NaN
That’s a problem with the language you are using, not the DB. If you don’t want nulls reaching your code it’s trivial to write your queries so they don’t return null.
And in real implementations there will always be data that is unknown, hence Null, how else would you distinguish between a real value and an unknown value? Using some “placeholder” value like -1 for integers? What if your integer can be negative? For strings?
You would have to make assumptions about what value will be stored and handle them individually for each field, and that, imho, is more error prone than a consistent handling of null values.
Microsoft: Whoops, Patch Tuesday might screw your database connections
TSMC triples spending on Arizona advanced chip site with extra 3nm fab
Thursday 8th December 2022 09:07 GMT
That was in the local elections and they are all about local issues, the current president made a big tactical error and tried to make it about international politics. KMT may want to reunite with mainland China, but they most certainly don’t want to do it on Xi:s terms ( and they mostly want to hang the communists in the nearest lamp post)
China reminds world shock and ore can hurt tech supply chains
Friday 4th November 2022 11:43 GMT
Re: An interesting game of tug-of-war has started
There is no lack of rare earth material in the rest of the world, it's just cheaper to buy it from China. China has been dumping the prices (and polluted the environment https://hir.harvard.edu/not-so-green-technology-the-complicated-legacy-of-rare-earth-mining/ ) making it unprofitable to mine and refine it in the rest of the world. Worstall wrote about it in a column in this very publication https://www.theregister.com/2015/09/02/western_worlds_only_rare_earth_mine_closes/
Biting the hand that feeds IT
