* Posts by Phil O'Sophical

6274 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: One more reason

If the Firefox developers would stop fucking about with the UI and breaking stuff then they might keep more users.

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Impressive horns

So you want to cross-breed sheep with mice, to create mini-sheep that are better at hiding?

The huge holes in the skirting board would be a giveaway, though.

Ten nations tell social media, banks, and telcos to get better at stopping scams

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

make social media, banks, and telcos jointly and severally responsible for all losses

All losses? It's not that easy, for several reasons.

Many of these scams work because greedy or stupid punters are willing to ignore the "if it looks too good to be true" rule in the hope of making a quick buck. If you buy a too-cheap Rolex from a guy down the pub, and it turns out (surprise!) to be a fake, should the publican be required to reimburse you? Why should the honest, sensible, customers of those businesses be on the hook to bail out all the dumb ones? Make no mistake, if a bank has to pay out compensation that money won't come from the bank, it will come from the bank's customers, which after all is where the bank gets all its money.

There's also the risk of unintended consequences, if people get used to the idea that they will always be bailed out when they do something stupid there's a risk that they will be more careless about scams: "It might be a scam, but who cares, I can't lose either way". There still needs to be some level of personal responsibility involved, even if that's not very trendy in these nanny-state days.

If there's negligence on the part of the bank or other platform then by all means make them pay, but it can't be a blanket rule.

Cryptocurrency laundryman gets hung out to dry

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Reminds me of a colleague who refused to pay motorway tolls with a credit card because "they" would know where he'd been. He could never explain who "they" were, nor why he thought anyone would care where he'd been.

Incidentally, paper cash usually has unique serial numbers, so is also very traceable.

Japan's first private satellite launch imitates SpaceX's giant explosions

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: I can't get the video to work

Oddly enough, if you right-click & ask Firefox to open the video in a new tab it plays (from YouTube) just fine.

Airbnb warns hosts who use indoor security cameras they may face eviction

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Other side of this.

Use a bell on the door, it worked fine in the days before cheap CCTV cameras.

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: All those were the days

A colleague discovered that the audio device on early Sun workstations had world write permissions, so you could rcp audio files to someone else's system. On one occasion he sent the noisy bit of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus to a machine being used by a fairly new team member on the floor below.

With impeccably unintentional timing she had just completed a successful demo to a visiting VIP when the system boomed "Haaallelujah! Haaallelujah!"

Apparently she just looked stunned, and stuttered "it's never done that before!"

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Pint

Re: In Beer, Strength...

Greene King is in Bury St Edmunds, are you sure you're not thinking of Tolly Cobbold which had a brewery in Ipswich docks?

It's been a long time since I had a pint of Tolly (fortunately!)

UK finance minister promises NHS £3.4B IT investment to unlock £35B savings

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Zero sum game

Just ahead of the Office of Budget Responsibilty.

Toyota, Samsung accelerate toward better EV batteries

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Seeing is believing

For our flying cars?

Olympic-level server tossing contest seeks entrants – warranty voiding guaranteed

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

I think I'd probably put my back out if I tried that style of tossing. Are we allowed the hammer-throw spin-and-release approach?

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

You can't assume that dates like 2100 will only be of concern to programs that deal with "now", though. Anyone born today has an excellent chance of still being alive in 2100, so any programs that are expected to deal with life assurance or pensions for them may well have to handle dates up to 2120 and beyond. You don't want pension forecast reports to fail just because someone didn't care whether 2100 was a leap year or not.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: How many days in a leap year

And presumably it will continue to fail for the next 12 months.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Add the Swedish ICA supermarket chain to that list

And Paris street lighting, some French papers are reporting that it all went out at midnight on the 28th, and had to be switched on again manually.

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Came to say the same thing

which sends and records your GPS position continuously.

No it doesn't, that would be illegal and unusable (there are over 250 million cars in the EU). eCall makes an automated call to the emergency services if it detects that the vehicle has been in a crash, or if someone pushes the "help" button, and will then transmit position data.

The system description is quite clear:

" Your eCall system is only activated if your vehicle is involved in a serious accident. The rest of the time the system remains inactive. This means that when you are simply driving your vehicle, no tracking (registering your car's position or monitoring your driving) or transmission of data takes place.

When a call is made through your 112-based eCall system, your personal data is processed according to EU data protection rules. This means that the emergency services only receive the limited data they need to deal with the accident situation, your data is not stored for any longer than necessary, and is removed when no longer required.

It would be a violation of GDPR to do anything else.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: can I turn them off

Somewhere in the car there must be a SIM Card

These days it's an embedded SIM - pure software, no physical card.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: These days...

only with better software

Sorry, not the current models, they have same crap software as VW & Audi.

They do have real knobs for some things which are touchscreen-only on the "upmarket" VWs, which is another plus.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

These days a Skoda is a VW under the covers, just like an Audi is. The only real difference is a few more pennies spent on the quality of the interior plastics and fabrics for the VW and Audi. A Dacia isn't quite at that level, it's more like last-year's model Renault, but with fewer gadgets. Makes it quite appealing, more chance that the electrical bugs will have been worked out & fewer silly gadgets to get in the driver's way.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: There is way too much 'Because they can' in todays vehicles,

Your dashboard lights up with warnings about Front Assist system problems. Happens every time it snows...

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Came to say the same thing

Chinese manufacturer BYD already outsells Tesla worldwide.

Lenovo to offer certified refurbished PCs and servers

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

My wife and I both bough laptops (Lenovo & Dell) from one of those refurbishers, and are very happy with them. They even offer a build-to-order service, choose your keyboard/memory/storage etc. and they'll assemble it for you.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Corey is aware this was probably not his finest moment.

Unfortunately it's the sort of moment you regret the day you walk into a meeting for the job/deal of your dreams, and find Growler sitting behind the desk...

Oracle Cerner system implementation risks future patient deaths, coroner warns

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: £7.9bn

The system was written by Cerner, which was acquired by Oracle in 2022 (lafter the health trust installed the new system). Oracle may have buyer's remorse now...

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Joke

Re: I know why they didn't discover this earlier

Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym

CLWNPA? Perfectly pronounceable in Wales, I'd think.

Plans to heat districts with datacenters may prove too hot to handle

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

This means heat exports during the early years could be light, creating uncertainty for the stakeholders in a district heating network.

I'm not sure that's a valid argument, if you consider the whole picture.

An apartment building will need to be heated, say from a heat pump, and will consume a certain amount of electricity which can be known/planned. If the data centre is empty, then all the apartment heating comes from the local pump, but as DC capacity increases and heat generation rises the flow to the apartments will increase, and their electricity consumption will drop. At the same time, the DC consumption will increase. Rather than consider DC heat ouput as "waste" which can be used, consider the DC + apartment block as a closed system. Worst-case the apartment heat pump will be oversized at the start.

I'm still sceptical about the overall idea. I know people who live in buildings with a district heating system which is so uncontrollable that they adjust temperature by opening windows, even in midwinter, which is hardly an environmentally-friendly solution.

Odysseus probe moonwalking on the edge of battery life after landing on its side

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Failure is an option

The design should accommodate this.

Moon Weebles?

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: "replete with AI-based noise cancellation"

If they could find a way to cancel all the noise about AI, I could be interested.

BOFH: In the event of a conference, the ninja clause always applies

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Biscuits

Pink wafers? What sort of subversive are you? You can't call them biscuits.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Are we allowed butter?

AI comes for jobs at studio of American filmmaker Tyler Perry

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

So what's new?

Even when using real scriptwriters and directors Hollywood is quite capable of making films so bad that they're never released. Is "AI" really going to make things worse?

NASA warns as huge solar flare threatens comms, maybe astronauts too

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

There's not much to ionize between the sun and the earth.

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Why?

In my part of the Midlands they can't even find enough candidates to stand in local elections, so some posts get filled by cooption after the election. Basically anyone who sticks their hand up is in, and there are still vacancies. Adding exams wouldn't help in the slightest.

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: changes to things like police and military uniforms, and signage on official buildings

In Scotland, you’re far more likely to find a GR or even VR postbox than an EIIR one.

There are still a few around the UK with Edward VIII, and he never even made it to a coronation.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Coat

Re: FUCK the king twat

Crikey. Which Royal peed in your cornflakes?

The one without the prostate problems?

Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Almost there...

personal jetpack

https://gravity.co/flight-experience

Duo face 20 years in prison over counterfeit iPhone scam

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Phoney

How could you not know you've bought a bag with a phone in it, are Walker's crisps especially heavy?

Biden asks Coast Guard to create an infosec port in a stormy sea of cyber threats

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Not quite a stationwagon…

Loaded with pieces of 8, or bytes as we prefer to call them?

Italy's military mulling space-based supercomputing cloud

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Why?

All that free power inevitably ends up as heat, and getting rid of heat in space is very non-trivial. It's hard enough on Earth, with oceans and air on hand.

Persistent memory to replace DRAM, but it could take a decade

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

One benefit of replacing DRAM with persistent memory is obvious; it keeps its content even without power,

That's going to upset Microsoft support. What will they do when switching it off and on again doesn't work anymore?

Insider steals 79,000 email addresses at work to promote own business

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Slap on the wrist?

Which is exactly why this behaviour will continue, it's not considered any more serious than nicking pencils from the stationery cupboard. At the very least, this moron should be required to personally compensate everyone whose email he compromised.

Vietnam to collect biometrics - even DNA - for new ID cards

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Facepalm

Ministry of Public Security

Good name, very "Big Brother"

there will be a QR code linked to a mass of identifying data.

So all stored on some internet-connected website reachable via an HTTPS link? What could possibly go wrong...

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

It took until the late 1980s for equipment like inexpensive 32-bit computers with onboard graphics, reasonably fast expansion buses (and thus, reasonably fast networking as a fairly cheap option) to start to be mainstream. Then Unix acquired networking support, as it still has.

I'd date Unix networking more from the late 1970s when UUCP became standard, or perhaps around 1975 with RFC681.

Southern Water cyberattack expected to hit hundreds of thousands of customers

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

Mixing up France with the whole of Europe is a common mistake, often made by a certain kind of Briton

What a bizarre comment.

France was actually one of the earliest countries to have proper drains, largely due to Napoleon, but at that time they didn't appreciate the advantages of separating foul and rainwater drains. The disadvantage of being an early adopter, others learn from your mistakes.

When I had a garage built in the UK, I wanted to have it plumbed for a washing machine, and one problem for the builder was extending the foul drain to keep the two systems separate, as required by local law.

The previous poster implied that the UK was behind Europe, in not separating the systems. I'm simply pointing out that this is a nonsensical generalisation.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

built separate sewage and storm drains like they do in Europe.

You've never walked around a French city and smelled the sewage drifting up from the drains in the street, then?

Population increase could have been *planned for*.

Like in Gloucestershire, where Thames Water has been trying to build a new reservoir for 30 years, but been constantly blocked by NIMBYs, who nevertheless complain constantly about hosepipe bans?

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: As a Southern Water customer*, When they said "Sorry we leaked your shit"...

A stern letter might even get sent.

I don't know about that. It might make a staffer cry, and then there'd be calls for resignations for bullying.

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: It's the cost that gets you in the end

No-one needs a 100kWh battery in their car

Well, you could argue that no-one needs a car at all, there are countries in the world where private car ownership isn't viable. I would not want to live in such a country.

On the other hand, if you want an EV with similar range to an ICE vehicle, you do need a battery of that general size.

You seem to have forgotten everything else on a car which is needed to make the petrol do anything useful

Not at all, but most of them have equivalents in an EV, you may not have a gearbox but you still have a transmission. You need a heat pump for heating/AC and various things which are driven from the engine in an ICE vehicle need electrical equivalents.

The simple check is to compare the weights of equivalent cars, for example an ICE VW Golf weights in at around 1250kg, the e-Golf at 1540kg.

and it's already quite possible to convert an ICE to EV

With equivalent performance? Citation Required.

V2G is already popular amongst those who can do it.

There will always be fanbois. I admire your optimism if you think it will ever work for the whole driving population. It is naive to assume that a V2G grid will be run for the benefits of the consumers rather than the suppliers. Once your vehicle becomes a resource on their grid, rather than a customer who pays for supply, they will decide when you get power, and how much. Not my idea of motoring.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Trailer brakes

I'd also considered tapping off the vacuum from both sides of the brake booster, then using this to control air, or vacuum, or hydraulic, or whatever for trailer brakes

Works for trains... :-)

but then it's probably just as easy to tap into the hydraulic brake lines.

I'd imagine it's not so easy to allow quick (dis)connect without letting air or moisture into the lines, so taking a feed from pedal or vacuum is probably more reliable. Or perhaps go for an electric/servo model.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: It's the cost that gets you in the end

FUD territory much?

Where? The figures are correct.

EVs don't need to weigh more than an ICE vehicle, but *all* cars are grossly overweight nowadays.

You know of a 100kWh battery that weighs the same as 50l of petrol? EVs are generally 300-500kg heavier than the equivalent ICE model. I do agree that all vehicles are excessively heavy, but that's at least in part due to obligatory safety equipment and "driver aids".

We seriously need to have a two part VED: an emissions rate (based on point of use emissions) and a mass rate (based on the cube of axle weight) - you pay both, so a heavy car would pay more than a light one, and a more polluting car would pay more than a less polluting one.

If you're going the be that specific, then perhaps there should also be a tax based on the environmental costs of production, like mining minerals and rare metals, maybe on a reducing basis with age over the expected life of the car as the production "eco damage" is amortised? Won't be great for EVs, though.

Of course, beware of unexpected consequences. Paris has just brought in punitive parking charges to penalise SUV drivers, but they included a weight-based element. Even allowing BEVs to have 400kg more than ICE, it's still causing a lot of upset because many EVs are caught. It'll be cheaper to buy a fairly recent ICE vehicle than an EV if you need to park in Paris.

So no, overnight won't become "peak"

I didn't say it would, I said that off-peak will disappear. The total UK energy use for road transport is much the same as current electricity use. Once that all comes from the grid, in evenings and overnight as people come home from work & charge, the demand curve will flatten and there will be no need to bribe people to use electricity overnight. It'll be the same price all day.

the grid will operate more dynamically, since there will be substantially more "delayed usage" loads which can be intelligently scheduled. V2G will also be able to support the grid at times of high demand, reducing the demand for peaker plants - and therefore reducing the cost of *all* energy.

I admire your optimism, but I believe it is misplaced. People like certainty and consistency, and I can't see V2G being popular, it's too altruistic for mass adoption.

so long as you have hot water when you open the tap

Which is why people are delighted to rip-out old hot water tanks and storage heaters, to use gas combi boilers instead, there's a guarantee of heat on-demand, no worries about whether the tank will have been heated enough. It's a question of perception.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: It's the cost that gets you in the end

remember Brown pushing diesel to save the earth?

A classic example of a government picking one easy-to-change issue in isolation and pushing it to be seen to Do Something about climate change while ignoring the big picture. Just like they're now doing with BEVs.

"Drivers are heavily subsidised in this country"

I would be interested to see where this idea came from

From a study carried out by a left-wing environmental pressure group (Transport 2000) in the early 90s, which looked only at the costs of associated disadvantages such as congestion but ignored the corresponding advantages such as the leisure gains and ability to travel to better jobs. Like many such studies, on both sides of the argument, it cherry picked the data which supported the findings it wanted but ignored those which did not.

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: That's why collecting and selling location information needs to be very illegal

And if collecting and selling it is illegal, then the buyers can be charged with receiving stolen property (and perhaps conspiracy to commit wire fraud, always good for a few more years) as well. Two birds with one stone.