Posts by Dave Pickles

Google to allow Android users with high pain tolerance to sideload unverified apps

Frog - Boiling

Google are moving Android towards another walled garden, one small step at a time. They are steadily making AOSP harder for packagers like LineageOS to use, and now their sights are set on Fdroid.

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

Inevitable

Because phones are now too big to fit into a pocket we get stuff like this. How about a James Bond - style shoulder holster instead?

VodafoneThree to offshore UK network jobs to India

All the same...

I was just about to move my phone from O2 to Vodafone as punishment for weaselling around OFCOM, now Voda are tarred with the same profit-grabbing brush. What to do??

Windows Insiders get special anniversary desktop wallpaper

"Your feedback is invaluable."

Perhaps they think that "invaluable" is a synonym for "worthless"?

UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI

Re: 75,000 working days a year

254 days doesn't include annual leave, which depending on seniority and length of service can be up to 30 days. Taking 25 days as an average gives 229 working days per year so 327 civil servants can be shown the door.

China's CR450 bullet train clocks 453 km/h in pre-service tests

China's maglev train recently reached a speed in testing of 650 km/h in seven seconds

That's about 2.6G. I bet more than a few passengers spilled their coffees.

"China's maglev train recently reached a speed in testing of 650 km/h in seven seconds"

Really? I make that about 2.6G. A few passengers are going to spill their coffee at that acceleration, and don't even think about using the toilets..

Everyone wants a fancy phone – even the folk buying them second-hand

Re: I must be a weirdo

Upvoted. The Pixel 5 is the last phone I've found that will fit in a shirt pocket.

Mars’ powerful whirlwinds blow dust everywhere, could affect future missions

"It's difficult to understate the importance of the dust cycle."

Overstate.

Facial recognition works better in the lab than on the street, researchers show

Re: An emotive subject it seems

No, that would be Fecal Recognition.

Don't give them ideas...

Breaking the nerd internet: Three overlapping generations of tech history – in one selfie

Sure it's not an AI image?

That arm seems strangely disconnected from both Dave and Linus...

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

Re: This is all for billionaires like Musk

London to Auckland via Hong Kong is around 24 hours in the air.

British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack

Re: M&S Store shopping - no stock at the best of times

As a 29" leg person I share your pain...

Thunderbird joins Firefox on the monthly treadmill

I believe that long long ago there was a strain of malware which relied on the fact that the default profile was called 'default', so a random string was added to the name.

TalkTalk Business pulls disappearing act on customer emails

It's always DNS...

I've been seeing problems with mail from TalkTalk for a couple of weeks. Their outbound mail comes from virtual servers in the domain tt.xion.oxcs.net, however they seem to have added more VMs recently but have forgotten to add them to DNS (or have reused an existing IP address causing a host mismatch), causing my picky MTA to bounce their mail.

25 years on from Y2K, let's all be glad it happened way back then

Re: And for other reasons

Because years are Ordinal Numbers not Cardinal Numbers. There cannot be a year zero for the same reason there isn't a zeroth entry in the pop music chart.

European datacenter energy consumption set to triple by end of decade

Data Centres don't actually consume any energy...

they just transform it from a high-grade form (electricity) to low grade heat. The trick is to site the DC somewhere where the heat output can be used to replace other forms of heat generation.

Smart homes may be a bright idea, just not for the dim bulbs who live in 'em

Re: X10

$ky have recently extended their contract with Astra until the end of 2029, which is realistically EOL for the constellation at 28E.

Freesat is basically just an EPG; the channel data is exactly the same as Sky receivers use.

Revenge for being fired is best served profitably

Re: New PCs too fast, need older slower ones

I remember when my 16MHz 386 work PC was swapped for a 20MHz one. I complained because I could no longer read text files as they scrolled up the screen.

Telcos scolded for unwanted erection of utility poles in race to wire up Britain

Re: Like any other superhighway

Party Line - the two phone wires ('A leg' and 'B leg' I think was the terminology) were connected to two houses. In one the bell and dial were wired between A leg and ground, in the other they were between B leg and ground. Hence dialling and ringing could be handled separately but the speech circuit was common.

UK's 'electricity superhighway' gets green light just in time for AI to gobble it all up

Re: Hmm

Also it's less easy for a Russian trawler to 'accidentally' cut a cable if it's 20 miles inland and 100 feet up in the air.

A long buried or submerged cable has a significant capacitance to ground, which in an AC system has to be charged and discharged 100 times a second. That current creates extra I^2R losses.

Rite Aid admits 2.2 million people’s data stolen by criminals

"The stolen data appears to be limited to a relatively short timeframe – only purchases made between June 6, 2017, and July 30, 2018, were affected."

Why were they holding data on purchasers and purchases from seven years ago??

Elexon's Insight into UK electricity felled by expired certificate

That explains why the National Grid monitor at https://grid.iamkate.com/ stopped working shortly after midnight...

Has Windows 11 really lost marketshare to Windows 10?

Re: Faulty statistics?

Win-11 is no longer identifiable by the User Agent string on http(s) GETs, it always returns "Windows 10.0" (maybe M$ were afraid that takeup might be a bit slow and didn't want to provide ammunition for their detractors). There is an alternative "Client Hints" API available but Firefox refuse to have anything to do with that. I assume that StatCounter have found another way to collect the OS version information.

Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it as a tax write-off

Re: Myth of charging Nokias once a week

You could also use the alarm function without the phone needing to be switched on. I still use a Nokia mobile as a travel alarm clock; it needs charging maybe once a year.

Flaws in Chinese keyboard apps leave 750 million users open to snooping, researchers claim

“The scope of these severe vulnerabilities cannot be understated”

I presume they meant to say OVERstated.

FTX crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in prison

Re: This morning's local news

Nice comment by the Judge (reported by BBC News):

"A thief who takes his loot to Las Vegas and successfully bets the stolen money is not entitled to a discount on the sentence by using his Las Vegas winnings to pay back what he stole."

Virgin Media sets up 'smart poles' next to cabinets to boost mobile network capacity

The saying is "it's volts that jolts but mils that kills".

Re: color matched with the street cabinet beside it

Aha, now I know who's been installing the grey cabinets around our estate lately.

Watchdog calls for more plugs, less monopoly in EV charging network

Re: It is still not as simple as pulling up in a forecourt and filling up a tank

The idea is to allow those who cannot charge at home to pay the same price for electricity as those who can. As noted they would also have to pay for the parking space separately.

Re: It is still not as simple as pulling up in a forecourt and filling up a tank

Why can't chargers work like ATMs?

I don't need an account with every bank to get cash from their ATM. The money is taken from my home account.

The electricity companies could issue an electricity debit card; energy I extract from a roadside charger is added to my home electricity bill at the same cost as if I had plugger the car in at home.

Obviously the charger supplier will have to be paid, this could be done on a time basis in the same way as car parking.

Greener, cheaper, what's not to love about a secondhand smartphone?

Re: Mmmmmm

The Pixel4A is still supported by LineageOS with Android 14.

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

I've been in 217.155.0.0/16 since 2002 and haven't been notified...

Samsung’s Galaxy S24 pitch: The AI we baked in makes you more human

Re: Seven years of support

Yes tabulatory gigantism* has severely afflicted the phone market. My Pixel 5 will just about fit into a standard shirt pocket, anything newer has no chance.

* Term nicked from "The Peter Principle".

Manchester's finest drowning in paperwork as Freedom of Information requests pile up

Nominative Determinism?

Ian Cosh, Senior Information Risk Owner (SIRO) at Greater Manchester Police...

Kernel kerfuffle kiboshes Debian 12.3 release

Not just Debian

I run Arch Linux on Raspberry Pi, currently kernel 6.1.64. Last weekend I discovered the root filesystem (on a USB SSD) was read-only due to a corrupt journal. Thinking that the SSD was faulty I copied the contents to other media and got it working again. It now seems that this kernel bug is likely to blame.

The latest kernel for the Pi on Archlinux ARM is 6.1.66. So do I install that or wait for 6.1.67? I think I'll wait.

How to deorbit the Chromebook... and repurpose it for innovators

It wasn't hard once

I've just retired my Acer C720 Chromebook, which has been my backpack companion for just short of 10 years. Back then it was possible to flash a custom BIOS (SeaBIOS?) and then install a standard Linux distro. I gather it's not so simple now.

The only thing wrong with it is a lack of memory - 2GB (soldered-in) is very limiting nowadays.

If you're brave enough to move fully-laden datacenter racks, here's the robot for you

Try that on a false floor

And with typical DC rack densities...

Meet Honda's latest electric vehicle: A rideable suitcase

One thing you're not going to do with that thing is fly. It won't be allowed as hold baggage due to the lithium battery, and I doubt that even the most determined bag-slammer would be able to get it into the overhead lockers.

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

Re: Resiliency – we've heard of it

There's a lot of Educated Guesswork by folks knowledgable in the subject here:

https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/654461-u-k-nats-systems-failure-4.html

Posts 61 and 80 are particularly interesting.

How to spot OpenAI's crawler bot and stop it slurping sites for training data

Too late

The abstrads slurped my social club website last week...

Microsoft will upgrade Windows 10 21H2 users whether they like it or not

Re: I've run out of ways to hax0r the gui

What?? How long has this been a thing?

It's in the KDE docs for version 4.5 dated 2010. So I could have been using this for the last THIRTEEN YEARS!

Re: Windows 11 use has jumped from almost 9 percent in March (2022) to 23 percent in April.

Something that doesn't seem to have been widely publicised is that it is not possible for a website to distinguish between Windows 10 and 11 using the User Agent string. Naturally there is an alternative which is vastly more complex and only available for the Chrome family of browsers, but it means that measurements of Win11 uptake need even more than the usual pinch of salt.

Parts of UK booted offline as Virgin Media suffers massive broadband outage

PHB: Show us what you were doing when the network went down.

PFY: Well I just did this, and this, and ... oops.

Boeing Starliner's 1st crewed trip to the ISS delayed again over battery overheating risk

Been here before

Maybe Boeing copied the battery design they used on the 787. That ended well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Boeing_787_Dreamliner_grounding

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

Re: South don't work in the North

In the early 70s I had a summer job at a major manufacturer of colour TVs. At the time all TVs used the RCA shadow mask tube which had three electron guns in an equilateral triangle (the Trinitron was invented later to get round the RCA patents). Sets for the UK were built Blue Gun Up, those for the antipodes were Blue Gun Down (ie the CRT was installed the other way up).

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

They don't only like cables

When the Rugby radio masts were being demolished in 2004, three of the eight masts failed to fall at the first attempt because the detonation cord had been eaten by rabbits.

How to track equipped cars via exploitable e-ink platemaker

Re: Solution in search of a problem

How about the system used in New Zealand for taxing diesel vehicles.

NZ has a lot of non-road use for diesel fuel (eg farm vehicles and off-grid generation) so there isn't a fuel tax on it. Instead, diesel vehicle owners have to buy mileage vouchers which are tied to the vehicle's odometer reading, and it is illegal to use a vehicle on the road if its mileage exceeds the voucher figure. The odometer is checked for calibration and tampering as part of their MoT equivalent.

Five British companies fined for making half a million nuisance calls

Companies House info

AUKL is unknown to Companies House.

BCBL and BBL have the same directors and seem to be ongoing companies.

RPUK has filed to be struck off but the action has been suspended.

UGL has also filed to be struck off.