Posts by Phil O'Sophical

There's a good chance your VPN is vulnerable to privacy-menacing TunnelCrack attack

"because most VPNs allow direct access to the local network while using the VPN,"

They may allow it as an option, but in my experience it's disabled by default, and the VPN configuration used by my employer prevented it from being enabled.

One weekend's TwitX chaos brings threats from Japan; indemnity promises for users; prominent account seizures

Re: Eric Frohnhoefer?

When my Dad started work for a company back in the 60s they had a rule that salesmen had to be at least 6ft tall (legal back then). He was 5'11", and always reckoned that he must have been having a tall day...

If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill. No limit. Please let us know,

Does that apply to his own ex-employees that he fired for criticising him?

We need to be first on the Moon, uh, again, says NASA

Re: There is a word missing

And what it really means is "Hey, Congress, we want more money".

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

Re: "especially in the met"

Badly arranged sentences are a curse.

Surely that's a problem with the judiciary, not the police?

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Re: With apologies to Phil Collins

Possibly a disadvantage of switching to electronic distribution of magazines, they no longer get printed ones returned marked "deceased"?

I still prefer the printed ones, although not for that reason:-)

Re: Not a lift but…..

A proper engineering student would have a small battery-powered outboard in their picnic hamper for such an emergency.

Re: With apologies to Phil Collins

being qualified to be a Senior Member of the IEEE (I was one but let my membership lapse on retirement)

After you get to 65, if the total of your age + membership years exceeds 100, you will automatically become a life member, free.

I remember a similar incident when a VAX 11/780 was being delivered to our office. Not quite in the same class as "pig iron", but it still weighed a respectable 3/4 ton. No-one wanted to hire & wait for a stair crawler, which might have been be problematic anyway given all the corners in the stairwell. The installation crew realised that if they uncrated the system in the lobby it would just fit sideways through the doors of the lift car, with about 1/2 inch to spare all round. They did check the weight, and found that they would exceed the lift's maximum capacity by about 50%, but assuming that it had at least a 2x safety factor decided it should be OK. No-one wanted to be in the lift with the beast, of course, and there wasn't room anyway unless they crouched on top, so they reached through the doors, pushed the button for the desired floor, and sprinted up the stairs to meet it.

The lift did make it to the floor OK, but what they hadn't allowed for was that the lift's position sensors were calibrated for normal loads. With the overload (and presumably a slight cable stretch) the car stopped about 1" below the floor level, leaving them with the problem of how to lift 3/4 ton of computer up 1", when they couldn't get to anything except the side panel that was facing them...

They did eventually get it out, to the great entertainment of all passing.

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

You do realise that you could swap "right" and "left" in your post, and it would still be entirely accurate*, at least based on the past 50 years of politics?

*well, except for the gratuitous MAGA reference, which is pure populism and neither left nor right.

The government only needs to pass a law to give itself a carte blanche building permit to deal with the emergency and then tell UK industry to get on with replacing every CO2 producing power station.

Just like the way they decided to ban sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030, and then sat back waiting for manufacturers to make cheap electic cars, chargers to grow on trees, the grid to upgrade itself to be able to supply them all, and the magic money tree to compensate them for the 30bn they earn every year from petrol and diesel sales?

You can't fix a problem by outlawing something defined as "bad" and expecting a good "new" something to just appear, you need a certain amount of planning and joined-up thinking, something notably absent from UK goverment policies since the mid-1990s.

Re: Summary of the UK's future climate/energy strategy

Perhaps something as vital as rail infrastructure should be run by the government, that way train companies wouldn't need to receive bailouts from the government

You mean that instead of having private profit-making companies that are overseen by an incompetent regulator, the government should just let the regulator run them? You seriously think that would work? That would be as big a disaster as it was in the pre-privatisaion days of British Rail days. Even ASLEF recognised that: "All the time it was in the public sector, all we got were cuts, cuts, cuts. And today, there are more members in the trade union, more train drivers, and more trains running.".

Letting government run industries invariably costs people far more, for much worse services, because everyone assumes that "don't need to make a profit" can be translated to "don't need to care, there's always tax money to pay for stuff".

The biggest brake on rail services (when they're not in strike) is the ludicrously over-complicated (split-fare tickets, anyone?) and expensive ticket system. So often I've paid 20-60 quid for a ticket on an almost empty train, when an airline-style demand-based system would mean that they could fill all those seats with last-minute tickets at perhaps 5 or 10 quid, and make more money.

Re: John Bull presents Little Englander Nuclear

Many years ago a friend who worked in the civil service said that for every £1 the govt hands back to the people it has to take in £3.

Not at all surprising, but Blair went with the idea that no-one is ever responsible for their own problems and government's job is to "fix" your problems by handing out cash. The current bunch of supposed "Conservative" incompetents, aided and abetted by a bloated Civil Service, is no better. Highest taxes ever just so they can give some of it back to us as "government help", the idea of helping us more by simply not taking it in the first place has long since been rejected.

Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG

Ugh, this brings back memories of trying to understand the FIPS-140 rules on entropy. If you ever need that certification (which you will if you're selling cryptographically secure systems to governments) the test labs are very, very picky. As they should be, of course, but it's a PITA when you're on the other end of the design process. Linus probably needs to talk to the experts before arbitrarily changing anything, he could land his customers with 6-figure recertification bills.

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Re: Off topic

In the early 80s, the terminals in our Uni engineering department were linked to the mainframe at 110 bits/sec, and we still got productive work done. It just required a bit more planning.

Florida man accused of hoarding America's secrets faces fresh charges

Re: This is not a joke. This is not a drill. This is the messiah for a whole bunch of idiots.

He's counting on the international corporate speaking circuit for the $$$ that is easy money for not much effort.

It worked for Tony Blair.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

they have mastered intergalactic travel, and yet they're too dumb to avoid a crash-landing

Bloody SatNav, I knew we should have turned left at Albuquerque.

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Re: Similar language problem on Windows 1 0

The company I used to work for had obviously acquired some IPv4 addresses that had previously been allocated to Greece, and the internet proxies used them. Occasionally, depending on what proxy I got auto-assigned to, I'd go to google.com and find it displayed in Greek.

Re: What is a parking garage?

Yes, but the US is the place where people park on a driveway, and drive on a parkway, so expecting logic in the naming is a forlorn hope.

Creator of the Unix Sysadmin Song explains he just wanted to liven up a textbook

"There's a huge difference in how Windows has changed over the years from Windows 95 through to 10 – Unix doesn't change that much,"

I'd say that Unix has probably changed just as much as Windows, the difference is that unlike Windows, and Linux, the people working on Unix understand the concept of backwards compatibility. I had programs compiled on Solaris in 1992 that still ran on Solaris in 2020, even though Solaris had changed hugely.

How to make today's top-end AI chatbots rebel against their creators and plot our doom

specifically chosen sequences of characters that, when appended to a user query, will cause the system to obey user commands even if it produces harmful content,

So little Bobby Tables can fool an AI as well?

Hardly a surprise, there's a reason why input sanitisation is a thing.

For human intelligence it takes us a decade or two of experience to get it right, no reason to expect otherwise of a computer.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

There are places in the tropics that pull water from the air without additional energy very easily. String fine netting, the daytime humidity condenses on it overnight and it drains into storage tanks.

Australian court orders Meta subsidiaries to pay $14 million over data use

It's just whac-a-mole, the fines are peanuts so it won't stop until someone like Zuckerberg does jail time for contempt of court.

BT and OneWeb deliver internet to rock in Bristol Channel – population 28

Re: PTP

I think the bigger concern is fading caused by destructive interference between the direct signal and the variable-delay reflection from the rising and falling water surface. That used to have a big effect on my UHF TV reception when the best signal was from across a 15 mile sea path.

Re: PTP

At any rate, it'll be cheaper than using satellites...

Maybe not. The satellites are already there as part of the wider system, so the only additional cost would be the base station on the island. That's probably cheaper than two microwave stations (land + island), with the associated land-side cabling & wayleaves.

World's most internetty firm tries life off the net, and it's sillier than it seems

Before the internet, all the company records were written on pieces of paper and stored in filing cabinets.

And people still managed to steal the data.

Tesla to license Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers, says Musk

Re: "plans to license its as-yet Full Self-Driving stack to other automakers"

Sadly, having the smart crap translates to better scores in EU NCAP tests, so manufacturers will still feel obliged to use it to keep their marketing departments happy.

Re: Behind, always behind

Still several orders of magnitude easier than doing it for cars, though.

Re: Preventative license

if it ever takes off.

Perhaps not the phrasing I'd have chosen...

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Not entirely the fault of the phone tech. If you're going to be lazy and bodge terminal data links onto phone circuits in the phone wiring closet, then putting up a clear notice right at the start is the minimal sensible step.

The same thing could have happened in the 2000s if someone had decided to run 10baseT ethernet over 'convenient' phone wiring.

Google toys with internet air-gap for some staff PCs

Google toys?

Reading that headline I initially wondered if this was a new staff perk, airgapped entertainment devices for their desktops.

Typo watch: 'Millions of emails' for US military sent to .ml addresses in error

Re: Technical solutions will never work

The article makes it clear that, at least now, it's largely civilians who are the problem.

Indeed, and its the civilian employers who need to take action when their employees screw up. The military is just a customer, its powers are limited to choosing a different travel agent, just as most of us would if an agent was careless with our personal data.

Technical solutions will never work

The problem is that as long as people see this as an "oh dear, I done a silly thing" problem, with a minor ticking off as the punishment, employees won't take it seriously.

Organizations need to take this seriously, as a disciplinary offence with all that implies - black marks on a personnell record and retraining for a first offence, with well-publicised demotion/dismissal if they do it twice. Only then will people start thinking "Shit, I could have caused a really serious problem".

Boris Johnson pleads ignorance, which just might work

Re: A right little pleader

Don't you have a place (Broadmoor?) where you place the seriously dangerous loonies?

Yes, it's called the Palace of Westminster.

This AI is better than you at figuring out where a street pic was taken just by looking at it

Re: Location detection

It is actually pretty scary, careful what you post on insta ANYONE can now find you

Since most people never think to remove metadata from photos they post online, it's usually much easier just to use that.

'There has never been a realistic plan' for UK's £11B Emergency Services Network

Re: Perhaps we should

The civil service will not change simply because of a change of government. It'll still be the same old incompetent home office, just a different muppet nominally in charge.

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

Re: Rent seeking

A lot of TVs and STBs get software updates over the air (OTA), so you'll still see menu changes even without a network connection. That can usually be disabled in a menu setting.

Re: Rent seeking

favourite stick into the HDMI

The streaming services available on many (most?) of those sticks are already infested by adverts. I've given up on subscription services, for the little amount of TV I watch I record linear TV so I can skip the ads when I watch it later. If that becomes impossible, I'll just give up on TV. 95% of it is crap anyway.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: "orthogonal layers of beech placed under extreme pressure"

£100 per m², and you have offcuts?

Hmm, maybe there's a market for a filter to remove them before they get into the ring main?

For that matter, perhaps I should patent unidirectional ring mains, to be sure that all the electrons flow in the same direction.

Liberté, Égalité, Spyware: France okays cops snooping on phones

nope. There's no such thing.

Well, someone should tell SfR, since that's what they told me when I queried it. I had to buy a UK phone and add a French SIM to avoid it.

French legislation requires that all camera apps on smartphones sold in France make a shutter sound when taking a photo, so that people can't be photographed unawares. I wonder how they'll resolve the apparent conflict.

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

development team - they hadn't installed it either - they just replaced the binaries every day and were careful not to turn the machine off.

Oh yes, we've all been there.

That's why our QA engineer always started a new test run of a new version by installing the product exactly as the documentation said, no matter how well she knew the product by then. The result was often bug reports filled against product and/or docs, but we rarely had issues from customers.

NASA 'quiet' supersonic jet is nearly ready for flight

Re: Is there a point to this?

a video call set up takes only a few minutes

For a 2-hour discussion, video is unbeatable, but for 1+ days of intense negotiations you can't beat being there in person, it will always give you an advantage over the video participants.

We need high speed rail so people don't need to fly over land at all.

True up to a point, but 70% of the earth is covered by water. Not so good for trains, Harry Harrison notwithstanding.

Re: less-noisy maybe but still un-sound

screamed into view from roughly the south east, at about tree-top level. Mid-runway, they pointed their noses straight up & kicked in the afterburners and kept going up until out of view

I've seen an F16 do that during the fleet week airshow, coming in over Fisherman's Wharf and standing on its tail over the bay. Since everyone was looking out over the bay when it came in from behind it's fair to say they were quite surprised, and some of their kids may have learned some new words.

Post-Brexit tariffs on cross EU-UK electrical vehicle imports still going ahead

if you produce a car in the UK with a battery made in the EU, you have to pay the 10% import tax to send the completed car back to the EU, but if you put a Brittish battery in it, you don't.

No, that's not the case.

Provided at least 55% of the car's value comes from components manufactured in either the UK or the EU, there's no tariff to be paid when exporting between UK and EU. If that 55% target isn't reached (for example if the battery and other components are largely sourced in Asia or the US) there will be a 10% tariff for an export UK->EU or vice-versa. Using an EU-sourced battery won't trigger the tariff, but it could increase manufacturing costs compared to using a locally-manufactured battery.

Re: Be proud

Surely if there is such concern then it doesnt matter where the product comes from we need to allow it to be available?

Indeed, and perhaps this is where the WTO needs to step in and follow it's mandate to remove tariffs?

Re: Fuck business. They really meant it.

This would be funny if it weren't so sad.

When big businesses like Amazon, Google, Meta, etc. try to get laws changed so that it's easier for them to pay less tax, sell our data, etc. everyone here is screaming about how we can't let business dictate our laws (i.e. in a nutshell, "fuck business") and that government should stand up to them.

Yet when a politician says that businesses shouldn't attempt to influence discussions on a huge political and constitutional change (i.e. "fuck business") you're all screaming "what a stupid politician".

UK's proposed alt.GDPR will turn Britain into a 'test lab' for data harvesting

It wouldn't be a Continental shelf, it would be a British one...