Posts by Phil O'Sophical

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: "?

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

Re: Pascal has always been great

That's your opinion

Not just mine, see Brian Kernighan's paper Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language. Others have disagreed with him, of course.

Re: "Pascal was a horrible language for real work"

But when Apple and Borland implemented their commercial versions, they extended the language

Which was the problem, the original was so basic and theoretical that implementations had to extend it. If you only ever used one system, especially a well-specified one like Borland it could be OK, but portability was non-existent.

Don't know about the UCSD version, because I never used it.

I did, for a while, on an Apple II (that dates me :) )

At least UCSD Pascal was OK there, if a little resource-limited. Others were less so, for some weird reason the p-system Fortran implementers decided to make REAL numbers use 5-bytes to get enough precision, but left INTEGERS as 4. A violation of the standard, and it played havoc with COMMON blocks.

The problem with Wirth is he never improved and update a language, he designed new ones

As you say, that was what he needed as a teacher, but it was irritating. Probably the reason why most of them are long-obsolete. Pascal's still around, I haven't seen anything in Modula 2 in years.

Re: Pascal has always been great

Pascal was a horrible language for real work, at least in the 80s when I first encountered it. Being designed as a teaching language it had very limited I/O features, so almost every implementation had its own subtly-different ways to format stuff with writeln & friends, and input was worse. Linking to external libraries and objects was also sometimes challenging, except perhaps on VMS where the VMS Calling Standard made interoperability simple.

I much preferred Wirth's follow-on language, Modula 2.

Can AI-enhanced virtual sports presenters do the job? It's a big ask

I can envisage BBC's post-Lineker Match of the Day studio being populated entirely by virtual presenters reciting clichés, faking in-depth knowledge and generally talking arse to each other. Who'd know the difference?

They could do the same for the players, think of the money they'd save. Who'd know the difference?

We're afraid it might be terminal: Tesco top-up box looking less than tip-top

Re: Can Be Your Toilet Paper Scratching You Ow!

So, do we now know where amanfrommars works?

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

Re: Anonymous Contractor

Avoidance is another way of saying evasion. Avoidance is used as a polite term by press because they think it sounds less accusative than evasion.

Not at all. Tax evasion is a specific criminal offence for which you can be prosecuted. Tax avoidance is a legitimate use of tax law to reduce your tax bill. If you get paid under the table and stash it in the Caymans, that's tax evasion. If you pay into your pension from pre-tax income, declared on your tax form, that's tax avoidance.

What they mean is they're not paying a tax they should be because they found some loophole in the law.

If there is a loophole which allows someone to legally pay less tax they would be foolish not to use it. Government makes the laws, if they leave a loophole it's their fault and up to them to close it, but until they do it's the law and can be used quite legitimately.

Re: HMRC doesn't care either way

Taxing freelancers - who have no workers rights, sick pay, holiday pay or employee benefits paid by their client - as if they have all of them.

If you're a freelancer you're self-employed. That means that you are your own employer, and you are responsible for providing your sick pay, holiday pay and employee benefits. You should charge your client a daily rate which is sufficient to cover them.

If you choose to skimp that's up to you, but it isn't a reason to justify paying less tax.

Crazy idea but hear us out... With robots taking people's jobs, can we rethink this whole working to survive thing?

Re: They toooock ewre joohbs!!!

So although historically there has been a growth of jobs with mechanisation it hasn't necessarily lasted, at least not in its original locations.

That is the key point. What matters isn't the impact in the mechanised industry, but the overall impact. As mechanisation reduces job availability in one place, other, different, jobs appear elsewhere. Historically the net result is more jobs, and more wealth.

Certainly, that's no consolation for the person whose specific job has been replaced, and who cannot, or will not, retrain, but that's a separate problem. A healthy society needs to consider that, and provide help, but it shouldn't block the progress just to avoid the problem. That way lies stagnation, and eventual collapse as other societies deal with the problem constructively.

Re: They toooock ewre joohbs!!!

This leaves 3 types of jobs, intellectual jobs, extremely dynamic (requires adaption, but will be automated at some point) and extremely poorly paid jobs.

What do you consider an "intellectual job"?

I'd say there's a far great range of jobs than that. Where does footballer, or actor, or other entertainer fit in your scheme? Or robot designer/builder? Or plumber?

In the paper they go on about the gig economy,

Which is just a new name for a very old idea that's never gone away. Pre-industrial revolution, agricultural workers used to go to hiring fairs, where landowners would bid for their services for harvetsing, etc. More recently, shipyard workers like my grandfather would line up outside the gates each morning to see if there was work for that day. Today it's Uber.

Automation will push down the wages of people that still have jobs.

There's no historical basis for that statement. Certainly, a mechanised loom might push down the income of a hand-loom weaver, but it creates a whole new industry of skilled loom-makers & repairers. In turn they look for ways to spend their money, and ironically we end up in a situation where people who can will now pay more for hand-made goods than for those made on industrial machines. Even in the realm of foodstuffs people will pay more for hand-made bread & cake, which has spawned a whole industry of "artisan bakers". The market adapts.

Re: They toooock ewre joohbs!!!

Hence, the stagnation or retreat of standards of living for most of the population,

Funny, it seems a lot higher now for most people than it was before the industrial revolution that created and automated all the factories, and most jobs today are of considerably better quality than minding a loom in a cotton factory for 6 12-hour days a week.

As the article says, it's not a simple situation. Automating some jobs creates job losses in that field, but the additional wealth creates other fields, and other jobs. The pizza delivery is a case in point, 50 years ago that job wouldn't have existed because the average person didn't have the disposable income to pay for fast food to be couriered to their home. Today they have the money (due to good jobs) which allows that standard of living, and so the service jobs which it enables also get created. Some are low-paid, like pizza delivery, but those pizzas are made in restaurants which also employ staff at various pay levels. We're even seeing the appearance of ludicrous services like home delivery of gin & tonic kits, for those with an excess of cash. I'm sure the suppliers and their staff make a tidy income from that. It's far from the case that all the replacement jobs are lower-quality.

Google Chrome to block file downloads – from .exe to .txt – over HTTP by default this year. And we're OK with this

Re: Doesn't make any sense

Oh, the filters don't blindly block ZIP files. They work out that an attachment or download is a ZIP file (no matter what the extension) and then they look inside to see if it contains any 'forbidden' formats. .odp is fine.

Re: Doesn't make any sense

Doesn't matter what I rename a .zip file to, my company's web & mail filters still figure it . As they should.

Social media notifications of the future: Ranger tagged you in a photo with Tessadora, Wrenlow, Faelina and Graylen

Re: Oh, dear

@John Savard "good enough for the Royal Family, after all."

Yet "John" isn't :-)

Re: Ministry of names...

I think France requires names to be those of Christian saints or national heroes.

There used to be an approved list, but that was dropped in the early 90s. French parents can now use any name that isn't considered to be prejudicial to the child. Even so, some names can be blocked. Last year a town hall took parents to court to prevent them calling their child Jihad, and another family were prevented from calling their daughter Nutella...

MWC now means 'Mobiles? Whatever! Coronavirus!' as Ericsson becomes latest to pass on industry shindig

End of MWC?

In the days when this was called GSM World it used to be seen as a useful place for technical meetings, but I get the impression that it's now become one of those trade shows that's mostly a marketing junket on expenses which none of the companies really needs, but none wants to be the first not to go. Maybe they'll decide now that it's had its day?

NASA's Christina Koch returns to Earth as the longest-serving woman astronaut – after spending 328 days in space

Re: Question : What's more import ?

why are we making such a fuss about his person being a woman

I agree with the principle, but it does have some significance in the medical arena. As noted it gives NASA doctors a chance to catch up on their research and see how long periods in space can affect the half of the human race that hasn't been exposed to such conditions as much. Think of it as rectifying an omission (which probably shouldn't have happened in the first place).

Fed-up air safety bods ban A350 pilots from enjoying cockpit coffees

Re: Euphemisms

Doesn't that depend on whether you can walk away?

Re: Gobsmacked!

There's a lot to be said for allowing pilots to use a relatively benign stimulant when they need it.

True, but making them get up and walk around to get it, then drink it "away from the office", is probably also useful in terms of keeping them alert.

EU tells UK: Cut the BS, sign here, and you can have access to Galileo sat's secure service

Re: foot, shot.

Union Jack flutter properly in space

Technically it's only a Union Jack if flown from the jackstaff (of a British spaceship, one assumes). Otherwise it's just the Union flag. As for fluttering in space, didn't NASA solve that one for Apollo 11, with springs?

Ah, night shift in the 1970s. Ciggies, hipflasks, ADVENT... and fault-prone disk drives the size of washing machines

Re: DEC field service engineers

Not just acceptable, but shipped as default, and privileged accounts as well. Always handy when some on-the-ball PFY changed SYSTEM/MANAGER and thought they'd secured their system!

DEC field service engineers

Great guys (and gals)

Mind you, if my experience is anything to go by they probably supplied the original tape with the games on it. For "testing".

Artful prankster creates Google Maps traffic jams by walking a cartful of old phones around Berlin

Works for Waze too

I've heard of folks doing the same thing for Waze, to make their quiet side streets seem busy & so avoid drivers being rerouted down them when main roads get busy.

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

Re: You are confusing EU with Europe

equivalent staffs of all the member countries that it replaced

It didn't replace them, it just added a layer or managers above them. It makes the rules, those underlying staffs implement them. That's why we have so many.

Re: Those damn Europeans

That is a vile canard.

Re: You are confusing EU with Europe

Actually John Major was pro-EU

Very much so, and a vocal critic of Brexit.

That's one reason why he didn't give us a referendum on Maastricht, the opinion polls were showing that it would have been rejected by 60%, even the very europhile French only voted for it by 51%. A pity, without it we might have just kept a European Community and there would have been no need for Brexit.

Re: You are confusing EU with Europe

So on balance it would probably have been better to remain and work harder to change it for the better.

I think 25 years of trying showed that that's never going to happen.

Re: 3 laws for AI

I don't remember that particular gardening story, but it's true that a recurring theme of Asimov's robot series was that the three laws didn't really work all that well

Not surprising, since he invented them as a literary device just so that he could write stories showing how they wouldn't work.

Need 32-bit Linux to run past 2038? When version 5.6 of the kernel pops, you're in for a treat

Re: What will actually happen?

Well, if you have a backup program that does incrementals based on the dates of files that are on a file system with 32-bit time_t you might just find your backups taking a very long time, as everything suddenly appears newer than the last backup...

Don't wait for 2038 to fix it, though. Just as with Y2K, it's causing problems now. Banks handling 25-year mortgages have been seeing problems since 2013.

Re: Can someone...

DEC Alpha supported 64-bit apps in OpenVMS

Even 32-bit VMS from the 1970s used 64-bit time values, counting from the Smithsonian astrophysical epoch of 17th November 1858. It will finally have a problem at 2:48:05.47am on July 31st 31086, and although it would be nice to think there might be a VAX still running then I think it's unlikely. There was a bug filed against VMS years ago complaining that the 4-digit date field used for display will overflow on New Year's day 10000. It was closed with "Will be fixed in a future major architecture".

Re: Can someone...

And the first Solaris 64-bit SPARC release was in 1998.

SF tech biz forks out $146m in fines, settlements after painkiller makers bribed it to design medical software that pushed opioids to patients

Don't stop with the app maker

What about going after the drug companies, they'll find it harder to vanish without paying. Make them forfeit the rights to any drug they've pushed like this, so that it becomes a freely-available generic.

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

Re: Seen in the wild

Quantum 105MB drives in early SPARC stations would stick after a while. The solution was to lift the front of the pizza box up about 2 inches (no more) and let it drop back to the desk. Then power on. Occasionally you needed an fsck to collect the loose bits afterwards...

Not call, dude: UK govt says guaranteed surcharge-free EU roaming will end after Brexit transition period. Brits left at the mercy of networks

Re: TL; DR

TL; DR

I'll summarize.

Headline says "UK government confirms surcharge-free EU roaming will end"

Article admits that ""From 1 January 2021, the guarantee of free mobile phone roaming throughout the EU .. will end"

and

"Three, EE, O2 and Vodafone – have tried to reassure customers that they do not intend to resume charging for texts, data and calls made within the EU<"

and

"a Vodafone representative said: "We have no plans to reintroduce roaming charges for Vodafone UK customers visiting the EU."

But hey, journalists never let the facts stand in the way of good headline FUD!

If only 3 in 100,000 cyber-crimes are prosecuted, why not train cops to bring these crooks to justice once and for all, suggests think-tank veep

A government policy advisor with sensible advice, how rare. I don't hold out much hope of Trump & pals listening to her though, How long before she's fired on trumped-up [sorry] charges for admitting that the emperor has no clothes?

Anatomy of OpenBSD's OpenSMTPD hijack hole: How a malicious sender address can lead to remote pwnage

The problem isn't with the destination program parsing the data, but with an intermediate (the shell) parsing it with unexpected side-effects before the data gets to the desitination. If one program needs to call another, and pass parameters, it should do it directly with the standard fork/exec model.

The downside is that you don't then have direct access to some shell features like redirect, and lazy programmers prefer to invoke a shell to do it rather than manage the IO themselves.

Re: How?

If a system program needs to run another program, it should not use a shell as an intermediary.

I wish I could upvote you more than once. I've seen this lazy programming technique cause so many security issues that I've lost count. No amount of string sanitizing can make it 100% safe.

Canadian insurer paid for ransomware decryptor. Now it's hunting the scum down

Re: Danegeld

I hear it's exceedingly good.