Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Tech won't save you from lockdown disaster: How to manage family and free time while working from home

Re: Three fingered salute.

They badly photoshopped out the gun she's aiming at the guy?

Germany says nein to Euro Unified Patent Court, pulls plug and leaves it nearby if anyone wants to put it back in

Re: Good idea, poor implementation?

An EPO seems logical, even if poorly managed. One Union, one place to file a patent in one large market rather than 28.. I mean 27 seperate states.

The EPO already has 38 members, it isn't an EU body.

It's time to track people's smartphones to ensure they self-isolate during this global pandemic, says WHO boffin

Re: Huge opportunity

the Tories saying rubbish like "people in this country have had enough of experts",

Why single out the Tories? It's sadly true that many people prefer to believe the nonsense they read on social media over the advice of qualified experts. That is, at least in part, because the "experts" often overreact for fear of being blamed for not having done enough. Then when the predicted calamity doesn't happen, people say "huh, experts, what do they know?".

That's not a recent phenomenon, though. People preferred to believe priests instead of scientists, but they mostly learned better, eventually. No doubt the same thing will happen to the armchair 'experts' on twitter as well. Eventually.

Firefox to burn FTP out of its browser, starting slowly in version 77 due in April

Re: "FTP is an insecure protocol and there are no reasons to prefer it over HTTPS"

but for ad hoc stuff it is the perfect solution.

What's wrong with Kermit?

Reach for the sky: Pixar founders win Turing Award for pioneering 3D animation – and getting rid of jagged edges

Re: So well deserved !!!

Very much so.

Mid-80s I remember going to a computer graphics show in London, and they showed Pixar's first short "Luxo Jr.". Absolutely stunning, had the audience in awe, and still looks good today.

Times change, though. That show also featured an animation of a flag fluttering in the breeze. Might not have looked too special to an inexperienced eye, but the maths behind it was impressive, especially since it was running on a BBC Micro! Today we get blasé about even the most clever graphics: "Oh, it's just CGI, it's not real".

Oh-so-generous ransomware crooks vow to hold back from health organisations during COVID-19 crisis

Re: Look at the super markets.

Meanwhile in San Jose, CA, police told a local store owner that he had to obey the rules and close, despite the line of people waiting outside.

It seems that guns aren't considered essential supplies...

You get fibre, you get fibre, you all get fibre: UK Ministry of Fun promises new rules to make all new homes gigabit capable

Re: Self-build?

See, those old "Come home to a real fire. Buy a cottage in Wales." jokes did have an effect!

Theranos vampire lives on: Owner of failed blood-testing biz's patents sues maker of actual COVID-19-testing kit

The US government has the right to take over a patent and manufacture (or contract out the manufacture of) the items which it covers, subject to paying "reasonable compensation" to the patent owner. It's a sort of "eminent domain" for patents, look up "section 1498".

Maybe they could even argue that "reasonable compensation" to a patent troll for a patent to solve a public health crisis would be a tidy $0.00?

Build goes digital, Brexit goes virtual (really): El Reg gets some unexpected lessons from WSLConf

Re: The challenges of remote trade negotiations

Maybe having a beer and swapping jokes is why trade negotiations have often taken 7 years or more.

Or maybe it's because the British government are completely inept?

I think the 7-year reference was to the EU/Canada talks. The Canadians aren't usually inept, so...

it's clear that chemistry and rapport is rather thin on the ground with our EU counterparts.

Hardly surprising when you see who's been doing the negotiating.

Yeah, Barnier doesn't strike me as someone who'd be bundle of laughs over a pint.

Re: The challenges of remote trade negotiations

f you get good at these things you can get a tremendous amount of stuff done but there are some things, usually little but very important such as chemistry and raport, that are very difficult to replicate digitally.

That's true. Weekly status updates, project discussion, all work fine by teleconference, although video rarely adds much. 30 years ago when it was new we did video all the time, but with a scattered team people rarely even activate their camera these days.

Even so, those meetings tend to be at least semi-formal. Nothing beats getting together in person a couple of times a year to have a beer, swap jokes, and just learn what the person (as opposed to the engineer) is like. I've made good friendships that have long outlasted the project where they started that way.

Apple reopens stores in China as Middle Kingdom regains control of COVID-19 – after closing all its outlets in Italy

.Well, last night that's exactly what my President did on French television.

Yes, while insisting that the local elections would go ahead to "ensure the continuity of our democratic life". Just remember to take your own pen!

Re: Golf Course in UK and Ireland

Trump is a fool, no argument there, but as for "Does he think people will go golfing?", maybe they will. Which is better, sitting in your office with 20 people, or at home with family, touching the same door handles and coffee machines, or walking around in the fresh air with only 1 or 2 mates, touching only your own clubs?

Re: So what did China do...

it would be impossible for parents to stop children playing with their friends for 13 weeks because kids will be kids eh?

Which is quite correct.

Kids pay much less attention to hygiene than adults, and touch each other far more freely, so they always spread any bug that's going. They'll do that playing in the park as much as they will in a playground. Forcing them to sit in class, with compulsory and supervised hand-washing before drinks, food or play is likely to be much less risky.

Also, if you close schools and send the kids home someone will have to look after them, and if both parents are working it's most likely the grandparents who'll step up to do it. Since this virus has far more serious consequences for the elderly than almost anyone else it doesn't seem rational to put them in a position of increased exposure.

Broken lab equipment led boffins to solve a 58-year-old physics problem by mistake

Re: But that is Australia

Or both ways. It's quantum.

Re: No good enough!

In terms of chips, or of Olympic swimming pools of mash?

Schermata blu di errore: Italy might be in lockdown, but the sh!tshow must go on

Re: Language pedant

Nel blu dipinto di blu ?

Appareils électroniques: Right to repair gets European Commission backing

Re: Good!

I think that there is a UK company working on building a recycling plant, and anything which encourages this is certainly to be applauded.

It's not just a right-to-repair issue though, it's something that seems to be completely left out of all the push for battery-electric cars. There's some half-hearted planning for charging networks, but seemingly none at all for end-of-life recycling.

White House turns to Big Tech to fix coronavirus blunders while classifying previous conversations

Re: So it is OK is elderly and those with existing respiratory conditions die?

Is it too much to hope that such a decision would be taken by those medically qualified to do so, and not as a result of social media-inspired ignorance and stupidity?

Re: The entire world would be better off if all politicians everywhere ...

I'm not so sure about that. Survival of the fittest would mean that those who come out again would be the meanest, toughest ones.

Microsoft nukes 9 million-strong Necurs botnet after unpicking domain name-generating algorithm

Whac-a-mole

Not on the already-compromised systems. No doubt the next round of malware will have some more-reconfigurable algorithms.

Avast's AntiTrack promised to protect your privacy. Instead, it opened you to miscreant-in-the-middle snooping

AntiTrack forcibly downgrading browsers to TLS 1.0

Really? Do they have any competent security people on their code review team?

What's inside a tech freelancer's backpack? That's right, EVERYTHING

Re: Ads in spaaaacccceeeeeeee!!

Tregonsee on Rigel? Time to reread them, I think.

Re: I got the mental image of Dabbs giving pole dancing lessons to Mr. Johnson

BJ dancing for Dabbsy.

Surely that would depend on who's performing the BJ?

OK, coat is on, I'm off to the pub.

Australia down for scheduled maintenance: No talking to Voyager 2 for 11 months

Re: S-band uplink

An antenna that size must have 60+dB gain, so pumping 400kW in would give you a very toasty 400GW ERP. That sounds crazy, are my numbers anywhere near right? If so I can certainly see why they don't want it running below 17deg elevation! I'm not sure wildlife flying into that (very thin, admittedly) beam would have time to notice it getting warm before they were turned into a puff of smoking plasma.

If you're wondering how Brit cops' live suspect-hunting facial-recog is going, it's cruising at 88% false positives

Re: By all means be against facial recognition but please stop getting the maths wrong.

we don't know how many people walked past the camera that were actually wanted criminals.

Stats tells me it missed a lot more than it found.

Your second statement is nonsense, given your first one. You have no idea how many people it missed, since you don't know how many there were to miss.

Statistics are frequently non-evident, that's why gambling earns so much money for casinos and lottery companies. The post you're responding to described a perfectly correct and well-known situation when it comes to system errors, and the article's reference to an 87.5% failure rate is indeed complete nonsense.

Re: This needs to be stopped at once

This is a dangerous experiment which needs to be terminated at once.

What makes it dangerous?

If the computer were directly arresting or executing the resulting individuals I'd agree with you, but that only happens in bad SciFi films.

In this case it flagged up a few people as "worth a look", the police looked, and mostly said "nope, not a problem". Is that fundamentally different from having people dial 999 to report "ere, that murderer wot was on the telly last night, he's in Woolworths on the High Street"?

Brit MPs, US senators ramp up pressure on UK.gov to switch off that green-light for Huawei 5G gear

Re: Take back control

do what the USA tells you. That's what the majority of you voted for.

I can see why you post anonymously!

Brexit Britain changes its mind, says non, nein, no to Europe's unified patent court – potentially sealing its fate

Re: "....smacks of ideology over commonsense"

That applies to every uk.gov decision these days.

And even more so to every EU one.

Got a problem? No worries, "more Europe" will fix it. Just keep applying "more Europe", never mind if it isn't helping, it must do, eventually.

It has been 15 years, and we're still reporting homograph attacks – web domains that stealthily use non-Latin characters to appear legit

I just tried it, FF 68.3esr warned me "Deceptive site"

Come kneel with us at UK's Cathedral, er, Oil Rig of the Canal: Engineering masterpiece Anderton Boat Lift

If it really could be designed as a 'relief' valve for flooding areas,

The big problem with flood relief is that all you can do is move the water somewhere else. If the outflow is tidal then a high tide at the same time as lots of water enters the system upstream will still cause flooding somewhere. Ultimately you need a sacrificial space somewhere to take the overflow.

It would take a barrage of consultants 10 years just to conclude that "actually, this could potentially have the potential for potentially being quite a good idea.

And then some treehuggers would complain that it was going to drown some frogs, and it would all get cancelled.

Re: Similiarly...

BTW if you walk up, over and along there’s a section of, grass covered, Antonine wall nearby which gives a good idea of it. A pleasant walk on a nice day.

That bit of the wall is also included on the Segway tour, if you want to play with some other fun machines.

Scottish biz raided, fined £500k for making 193 million automated calls

Won't stop it.

Smack-on-the wrist fines like this are just part of doing business. This won't stop until the directors know they're facing a year or more in jail, and personal fines that leave them penniless.

Microsoft's Cortana turns its back on consumers as skills are stripped from Windows 10

Productivity

The emphasis, according to Microsoft, will be on "productivity."

My productivity would be greatly enhanced if I didn't have to keep accommodating to changes & breakages with every Windows update.

(and to forestall the obvious, I run Linux on systems where it's appropriate, like my desktops, but my company laptop is still W10)

FCC sucks its teeth, clicks its tongue, says: Yeah, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile US, Verizon gleefully sold your location data. Guess we should fine them?

Read the actual regulation

I'm pretty sure GDPR applies to EU citizens regardless of where they are at the time

No, it doesn't. There's no mention of citizenship in GDPR (I've read it).

There's quite a good analysis at: https://cybercounsel.co.uk/data-subjects/

Salient points are:

"The GDPR does not actually mention EU Citizen nor Residents. It instead uses the term "Data Subject".

and

"1. A Data Subject under GDPR is anyone within the borders of the EU at the time of processing of their personal data."

"2. If the Data Subject, moves out of the EU border and say becomes an expat, or goes on holiday then their personal data processed under these circumstances is not covered by the GDPR and they are no longer a Data Subject in the context of the GDPR, unless their data is still processed by an organisation "established" in the EU."

That last item is key. It is the location of the data processing that counts, not the citizenship of the Data Subject.

I am sure the EU GDPR Data peeps would be quite excited about it.

Not if the data is collected in the US. GDPR applies to people present in the EU, it's unrelated to the nationality of the data subjects.

RIP Freeman Dyson: The super-boffin who applied his mathematical brain to nuclear magic, quantum physics, space travel, and more

Never mind living in them, he helped make them interesting. RIP indeed.

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

Re: US Homeland Security

how come the "US Homeland Security" of the US has jurisdiction over a UK-Based Company ?

Check out that documentary made a few years ago: "Team America: World Police"

If you're serious about browser privacy, you should probably pass on Edge or Yandex, claims Dublin professor

Re: GDPR

But the government would not accept any alignment with EU laws as the EU is demanding

In other words, the government won't let the EU tell it what laws to make, it will make those which it deems necessary and appropriate. It wants a partnership of equals based on negotiation, not on "do what you're told, we know what's best for you" paternalism.

Clearly data protection to GDPR is necessary and appropriate to maintain trade with the EU, and since UK data protection law has always been stronger than EU minimum requirements there's really no reason (except knee-jerk "Brexit, woe, woe, I hates it, waaaaaah") to assume it would change.

How many times do we have to tell you? A Tesla isn't a self-driving car, say investigators after Apple man's fatal crash

Re: Tesla never said it's driverless

I thought that most people who disengage traction control do it for macho reasons.

Some do, but although it works well when you're overcooking it on an ordinary or wet road, it's a PITA on snow. When climbing a moderate hill with icy patches, every time a wheel slips the TCS backs off the throttle so that you end up stuttering along barely at stall point. Much better to disable it, let a wheel skip occasionally over the ice, but still keep up steady progress.

Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this

Re: Thank goodness we can turn it off...

Go to about:config and set keyword.enabled to false. Seemed to fix it for me.

Credit Karma's enriched: Turbo Tax daddy Intuit snaps up personal finance platform for $7bn

TANSTAAFL

"free services" are never free. The question is who is paying for them, and how, if you aren't?

My money would be on them selling all the data you give to their apps. Supposedly "anonymised", of course.

'Don't tell anyone but I have a secret.' There, that's my security sorted

I was assuming that the video was of the politician having an affair,

He may have thought he was on the way to one, the woman he sent the video to is allegedly the girlfriend of the Russian activist who posted it online. Sounds like he was well & truly honeytrapped.

Researchers trick Tesla into massively breaking the speed limit by sticking a 2-inch piece of electrical tape on a sign

the car has correctly decided that the worn text was originally an 8.

Which doesn't change the fact that a human driver would know from the surrounding road layout and street furniture that 85 is an unreasonably high limit for that road, and would not attempt to drive at it. Even a Tesla should be able to correlate the signs with a GNSS map.

What do a Lenovo touch pad, an HP camera and Dell Wi-Fi have in common? They'll swallow any old firmware, legit or saddled with malware

Oxymoronic

only install firmware updates from hp.com and the Microsoft Windows Update service, and to always avoid untrusted sources.

And if you don't trust HP or Microsoft not to screw up your system?

Google lives in an Orange submarine: Transatlantic cable will get by with a little help from some friends

Re: Les grèves sur la côte

It will suddenly go dead, and then the cut end will float to the surface with a yellow hi-viz vest attached...

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: He realized he had to rewrite the boot block as well

I remember a colleague who accidentally deleted the on-disk kernel image file on a running Solaris box. Didn't have any immediate effect, the system still had the file open for paging even if the directory entry was gone, but he had a tense few moments hunting round the systems on the network for one with exactly the same OS version. He then FTPed it back to the boot directory, and after a reboot at a convenient time he heaved a sigh of relief when it rebooted OK.

Re: I just got into trouble with terminals

I can't for the life of me imagine why that was implemented,

At the time it was pretty commonplace for a <BREAK> signal from the console terminal to perform the sort of non-maskable interrupt that we associate with Ctrl-Alt-Del today. It was the "stop everything and give me back control" command, useful if the server was hard hung. <BREAK> was sent by having the RS232 transmit line held at 0 (low) for a longish period (IIRC it was between 1 and 2 character times).

The problem was that many terminals would stop sending data and take the transmit line to a low value for a time when powered off, and the server saw that as a <BREAK> signal. I think that there was eventually a patch for Sun systems so that you could disable the <BREAK> response on the console.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a flying solar panel: BAE Systems' satellite alternative makes maiden flight in Oz

Re: Why, oh why...

Who would pay?

Good news: Neural network says 11 asteroids thought to be harmless may hit Earth. Bad news: They are not due to arrive for hundreds of years

Re: A Neural Network ?

a definitive rigorous answer

42.

Cache me if you can: HDD PC sales collapse in Europe as shoppers say yes siree to SSD

Re: The days of spinning rust in lappies looks numbered...

Perhaps because the title gets prefixed by "Re: "?