Posts by Cuddles

Fairytale for 2019: GNOME to battle a patent troll in court

Re: Prior art not that important

"Yeah, but in the US they have granted patents on perpetual motion machines.. so i don't think a great deal of checking goes into these."

Have you actually seen any patents granted for one? Perpetual motion machines are actually an interesting exception in US patents, because they're considered so self-evidently stupid that they're the only claim requiring an actual working model be presented before a patent is granted (mainly due to a flood of such applications at one point). No other claim has any requirement to be physically possible, let alone to provide evidence you've actually done it. There are still plenty of crackpot patent applications that are effectively claiming to produce free energy, cold fusion being a common favourite, but they're always very careful to never say anything about perpetual motion or free energy because that would guarantee they'd be immediately thrown out.

HMRC slaps Getronics with winding-up petition: It'll be sorted out today, blurts tech services firm

"Wow, those Dutch were really ahead of the game, they had electronics in 1887!"

Yes, they did. As did many other countries. Not in the sense of integrated circuits, obviously, but electricity and control systems have been around for quite a while now.

I do have to admit I had the same immediate "That must be a typo" reaction. But fortunately the wonders of modern electronics means it only takes a few seconds to do a basic bit of research on the matter before making snarky comments about it.

WeWon'tWork: CEO Adam Neumann enters Low Earth Orbit to declare, I'm outta here

Re: Is it just me?

I don't see the problem. People will always want tulips.

Trump-China trade war latest: Brave patriot Apple decides to do exact same thing, will still make Mac Pro in US

"because the output is very low, the price is high. Very high."

That is not the reason Apple prices are high.

How to fix the global slowdown in broadband rollout: Redefine what broadband means

Re: Rural Broadband?

"So 4G and 5G wireless is quite possibly the only way to go for rural areas to get broadband."

Or, you know, don't rely on private, for-profit companies to provide important infrastructure.

After complaints over leaked Voice Assistant recordings, Google says: We hear you

Missing the problem

"audio snippets are never associated with any user accounts"

The big problem that makes listening to recordings worse than all the other shenanigans involving personal data is that it's fundamentally impossible to anonymise it, since the recordings can contain personal data. If I buy a widget, it's entirely possible to strip out all the payment data, tracking, and so on, and just note the fact that x widgets have now been bought. If you record me having a confidential conversation with my doctor, which begins with me verifying my name, address and DoB, it doesn't matter how much effort you make to strip out metadata, the personal information is still right there in the recording.

No-one gives a shit whether things are associated with user accounts or not. It's having people listening in on private conversations at all that is the issue. No amount of faffing around with privacy settings and metadata can affect that.

It's ace that UK.gov 'in 2030 will be joined up, trusted and responsive' – but what about now?

"surprisingly small in detail"

Well, not that surprising.

Exploding super-prang asteroid to pepper Earth, trigger deadly ice age – no, wait, it happened 466 million years ago

Units?

Is one thousand semi trucks the same as five hundred whole trucks? This would be much easier to understand if everyone just used the standard adult badger.

Imagine if Facebook could read your mind: Er, I have some bad news for you...

Electro-sensitivy

You know, that's not actually a bad excuse. My electricity provider has just started nagging me about having a new meter installed. Instead of just ignoring them as I have done so far, I can instead claim that their imaginary benefits will aggravate my imaginary medical condition. Maybe the French aren't all nuts, they've just figured out the loophole in the system.

Three UK slammed for 'ripping off' loyal mobile customers by £32.4m per year

Re: Best choice here

"Last time I looked, Three were the only network that make calls and SMS work over WiFi calling (would be interested to know if others now support this)"

Others have been supporting it for about as long as Three. The problem is, it's a bit of a mix in how it's implemented. Three's version is actually rather poor from an interface standpoint - everything done over wifi is treated completely separately, so you can't keep conversations going if you switch over to wifi and then back again later. But the upside of doing it that way is it pretty much always works without fuss, no matter what phone you have and what you're connected to. Others (EE I've actually used, I think others work similarly) have a much friendly interface that merges everything together regardless of whether you were on a phone network or wifi at the time, but suffer severely from simply not working at all if you have the wrong phone.

So yeah, wifi calling/texts are available on more than just Three, but how well any of them will actually work in a given situation is a bit of a crapshoot.

Woman sues Lyft, says driver gang-raped her at gunpoint – and calls for app safety measures we can't believe aren't already in place

Re: prove innocence

"If the above is true, I'm assuming the first thing she wants is for Lyft to cooperate fully with crime enforcement"

This is the part that really confuses me. Lots of people commit crimes, and most of them have a job of some sort. The fact that a company employs someone who commits a crime does not generally reflect badly on said company. If a doctor steals a bottle of whisky from Tesco, you don't sue the hospital for employing him before that. So why would Lyft not cooperate? One among thousands of low-level workers they don't give a shit about commits a crime, the police ask for information, Lyft say "Here's everything we know about him, he's just some guy we employ and we don't give a shit about him". If he's found not guilty, or not charged at all, they continue to employ him, otherwise they don't.

I know all these so-called gig economy companies tend to be as shitty as they possibly can in pretty much every circumstance, but that's usually in cases where they actually stand to benefit from their shitty behaviour. For something like this, there doesn't appear to be any possible benefit for Lyft. They don't have a problem finding employees, so losing this one guy isn't relevant to them. The absolute best possible outcome is that no-one does anything about it and they have net zero benefit; every other outcome where they face increased police scrutiny, lawsuits, and regulation is a serious negative for them. So I just don't understand their behaviour at all. Have they just spent so much time being shitty to everyone that they forgot to check whether it's actually beneficial to their bottom line first?

Gasp! Google Chrome kills uBlock, Adblock ad filters – grab the pitchfo- no wait, it's OK: They were evil fraud clones

Who copied whom?

Hang on, I'm pretty sure Adblock Plus is called that because it was an improved version of the original Adblock. Same for uBlock Origin, which is a fork of the original uBlock. It's certainly possible the removed apps are malicious imposters, but that can hardly be seen just from the names which are actually the original ones, with the names of the popular add-ons they're supposedly similar to being the copies.

The Central Telegraph Office was serving spam 67 years before vikings sang about it on telly

"Comms discipline was pretty poor back then. Codes weren't all that good, or rigorously designed. And lots of stuff got sent in the clear."

Yes, "back then". Certainly not like today at all.

We trained an AI to predict how bad a forest fire will be. It's just as good as a coin flip!

Re: Fair to middlin'

"Right half the time - that's not so bad."

It depends what it's compared with. Pure chance isn't a sensible comparison because no-one has ever tried to predict how bad a fire will be by rolling a die. The much more relevant question is how this compares to a firefighter, disaster management person, or whoever else might generally be tasked with making such predictions.

Scotiabank slammed for 'muppet-grade security' after internal source code and credentials spill onto open internet

Re: Morons

Convenience. The perennial enemy of security.

We asked for your Fitbit horror stories and, oh wow, did you deliver: Readers sync their teeth into 'junk' gizmos

Re: Pebble

"Never ever buy a Fitbit is my advice."

If they release a Fitbit that makes Spectrum sounds when synching, I might actually buy one. Maybe it can make modem noises when it's using wifi instead of bluetooth.

This image-recognition roulette is all fun and games... until it labels you a rape suspect, divorcee, or a racial slur

The problem with racism

Is that it exists. If you want to use machine learning for some task, you can't pretend things like racism and various other offensive terms don't exist, because then when your tool comes across them it won't have a clue what to do. But if you do include them in the training, it will inevitably use them and offend someone. It's not a simple problem to solve. People are offensive to each other, so training machine tools on real data will result in them being offensive, but failing to do so will result in them not being able to handle the real world.

Revealed: The 25 most dangerous software bug types – mem corruption, so hot right now

Not all that different

Although they split them into different categories, an awful lot of these boil down to simply checking your input properly. Are "Input validation on a website", "Input validation with SQL" and "Input validation" really different types of bug (and there are more of the same in the full list? Quite a few of the others seem to be just different ways of saying "Privilege management" as well. Sure, there can be different ways of making these mistakes depending on the systems involved, but in a general list of the kinds of mistakes people make it doesn't make much sense to split them all up.

Just as Ecuador thought it had seen the back of leaks, over 20m citizen records are exposed

Re: Logic error

Beat me to it. Quite a weird logic error to make as well; the population of Ecuador has increased, as is the case with most countries, so if the data were out of date it should have fewer entries, not more. The only ways to have more entries than the actual population is to add new entries but not remove obsolete ones, have duplicates, or include people who are not citizens.

The first seems likely. The second is inevitable, especially since this seems to consist of data from multiple different databases. The third is potentially more worrying for non-Ecuadoreans who might have visited at some point.

Eco-activists arrested by Brit cops after threatening to close Heathrow with drones

Re: Good work MET Police

"They should be made to pay double the road tax that cars pay"

They do. Fortunately double zero is still zero, so it's not a terrible hardship. There is no such thing as road tax; if you're going to indulge in bizarre anti-bike rants, you could at least make some effort to connect your fantasies to the real world.

France says 'non merci' to Facebook-backed Libra cryptocurrency

Money laundering

"And he expressed concern that the digital credits could facilitate money laundering and terrorism."

On the one hand, he's not wrong. But on the other hand, surely it won't facilitate them any more than bitcoin and the like already do?

MPs would love to hear all about how UK.gov plans to ratchet R&D spend to 3% of GDP

How far overseas?

"the rest coming from areas such as overseas investment"

It's a good job none of that funding comes from the EU, otherwise it might be a problem keeping investment at the same level, let alone increasing it, post-brexit.

Psst. Wanna brush up your supervillain creds? Get a load of this mini submarine

How would we know?

""incorporates features developed for systems used by the RNLI", that well-known operator of low-observable mini submarines."

We may not have seen the RNLI's fleet of low-observable submarines, but surely that's the whole point?

Mozilla Firefox to begin slow rollout of DNS-over-HTTPS by default at the end of the month

Re: Dubious

"It only protects against one phantom menace, that your current DNS provider or ISP is spying on your queries. But they're not."

I admire your optimism.

Now on Amazon Prime: The Amazing Shrinking UK Tax Burden

Re: Revenue and profit

"The article gives two wildly different values for 2018 revenue - 2.3Bn and 10.89Bn - which is it?"

From the article:

"Profit & Loss accounts for the UK Services subsidary... £2.3bn"

"from all of its UK activities, not solely the services biz – generated a total of £10.89bn in revenue"

Doesn't seem all that complicated.

Royal Navy seeks missile-moving robots for dockyard drudgery

Re: Cart b4 horse

"Most high-energy lasers are chemically-powered. The spent cartridges and waste products are viciously toxic."

It's a problem that solves itself. Shoot enemies with laser; throw cartridges at survivors. Some kind of catapult may be in order. Ideally one with an automated loading system.

Re: mousetrap

"But the Victories cannons are made out of fiberglass to reduce the strain on the decks that are older than the USA, and rather non-functional."

Are they truly non-functional, or just single-use?

Apple and Google trade barbs over bugs, digital lothario arrested and Bluekeep gets busy

NHS loses 2,000 records from gender identity clinic

I'm not sure "loses" is really the correct word here. "Disclosed" or "broadcast" or something similar would be more appropriate. If all they'd done is lost the things there wouldn't be any privacy issue involved, they'd just have a bit of trouble contacting people.

Like a grotty data addict desperately jonesing for its next fix, Google just can't stop misbehaving

Presumably you're missing the fact that it doesn't matter what search engine you use if every site you subsequently visit has Google's tracking service embedded in it. Noscript and ad-blocking are pretty much required for any semblance of privacy, but with all kinds of fingerprinting methods that don't rely on third party scripts there's very little you can do to truly eliminate every way Google (and others) try to spy on you. Whether you use Google to search or not is largely irrelevant.

Look, we know it feels like everything's going off the rails right now, but think positive: The proton has a new radius

Re: The classical electron radius is roughly 3 times that of the proton

"This, article suggests that the classical electron radius may not be the correct way of measuring it."

It depends what you mean by "correct". Electrons, like all other fundamental particles, are thought to be point particles with zero physical size. Some theories suggest it might not be exactly zero, but instead something like the Planck length, but certainly far smaller than anything we can even dream of measuring in the foreseeable future. The classical radius of an electron isn't actually a measure of its physical size, but rather a sort of representative parameter that can be useful in some calculations. It gets its name from the fact that it shows up as the non-relativistic (ie. classical) limit of certain equations, such as calculating scattering cross-sections for low energy particles.

The proton, on the other hand, is a composite particle with a real, finite, physical size. The quarks and gluons inside are also thought to be point particles, but since they're separated from each other we can measure how much space the whole ensemble actually takes up. It's a little more complicated since, like atoms, there are the usual quantum probability clouds involved rather than nice little solid balls orbiting each other in a sensible manner, but depending on exactly how you define what it is you want to measure, there is definitely a real size there somewhere.

So it's not that the classical radius is not correct, it's just not measuring the same thing and so can't be sensibly compared. In the size talked about in this article, in the sense of what you'd get if you used a really, really small micrometer to measure them, protons are infinitely bigger than electrons because they actually have non-zero size. In terms of classical radius, the electron is much bigger since it scales with 1/m. However, since that means the classical proton radius is much smaller than its actual physical size, it's not a very useful parameter since other effects will always dominate.

Welsh police use of facial recog tech – it's so 'lawful', rules High Court

What's the problem?

As long as the police aren't lying to us about handing over all their data to private surveillance companies, surely it's all fine?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49586582

Let's recap reCAPTCHA gotcha: Our cunning AI can defeat Google's anti-bot tech, say uni boffins

Nice bit of reecursion

Recaptcha is used in large part to train machine learning algorithms in image recognition. Now it's been used enough that machine learning algorithms are able to pass the test used to train them. It does make one wonder exactly what they expected to happen. Take a system specifically designed to train computers to be able to pass a test, then use that test to identify computers that are unable to pass it...

Full of beans? Sadly not as fellow cracks open tin at dinner to find just one

Re: density

"That'll be why the beans always float to the top... or do they?"

You can't know until you've opened the can, at which point the waveform collapses. Like the age-old question of whether the fridge light turns off when the door is closed, we may never be able to answer it for certain.

Allowlist, not whitelist. Blocklist, not blacklist. Goodbye, wtf. Microsoft scans Chromium code, lops off offensive words

FFS

That is all.

Today in tortured tech analogies: Mozilla lets Firefox loose in the hen house, and by hen house, we mean the tracking cookie jar, er...

Re: "builds it into the core product"

"The story doesn't explain it very well, but I think this feature is rather more fine-grained than just 'accept all third party cookies' or 'deny all third-party cookies'. It attempts to identify 'bad' third-party cookies and block those, while allowing 'good' or at least 'not obviously awful' ones, I guess."

More specifically, the default is now that it will block all third party cookies as listed by Disconnect.me, and you can choose between the less strict level 1 list or the more comprehensive level 2 list. If that's not enough for you, you can block all third party cookies, or all cookies. Or none. Or define your own black and/or white lists. It's about as fine-grained as you could want it, and I don't believe that's changed for a good few versions*; the only news here is that the default setting has been changed.

* I have version 53 on an old offline machine, and that doesn't have any options related to cookies at all, so Gene Cash appears to be correct that they did remove these options at one point. It's much better now though, starting with version 63 according to the help page.

Zapped from the Play store: Another developer gets no sense from Google, appeals to the public

Re: Top Failure is MS Windows 10.

"If this was a malicious app and the developer knew it while hoping Google wouldn't find out then all they'd have to do is ask what Google found that violates their policies. Then the dev in question can go away and figure out if they can work around that to avoid detection with a new version or another app in the future."

But that's exactly the problem - Google have been asked what the problem was but they refuse to actually tell anyone.

"Perhaps not an accurate analogy but it's like the police treating someone speeding at 31mph in a 30mph zone as if they were doing 100mph. In reality the police might advise the driver to get the speedometer checked and to be careful whereas Google are fining them, banning them from driving again and destroying their car."

It's not like that at all. It's like the police impounding someone's car but refusing to tell them why. The driver asks exactly what they did wrong, says they're very sorry and they'll try not to do it again, and the police respond by telling them to read the Highway Code. It's entirely possible the driver was speeding, but if you won't tell them that then there's no way for them to get their car back or to avoid making the same mistake again in the future.

Capital One 'hacker' hit with fresh charges: She burgled 30 other AWS-hosted orgs, Feds claim

Re: **** the Cops!

"without including the fact that they knew there was a small cache of guns and ammo on the property is just a gratuitous smear. Partial data is not a fact."

It was in America; the cache of weaponry is just assumed.

I just love your accent – please, have a new password

"Before you used the facility, you had to calibrate it to your voice so for a few weeks, the office was full of people shouting "1 2 3 4 5 6" into their phones."

And that was after the calibration!

Maltese browser game biz flings €1m sueball at Google over Adsense kerfuffle

Re: Seems pretty clear

"IANAL but to my understand at least in the UK, that only applies to consumers and individuals. B2B contracts can say and require anything they like regardless of whether it's fair or not."

Indeed. Statutory rights are governed by the Consumer Rights Act and Consumer Contract Regulations, and their names give a clue to who they are aimed at. Businesses don't have statutory rights. It's true (obviously) that a contract can't undermine actual law, but that doesn't seem to be relevant here. There's nothing illegal about a company saying "This is our service and we reserve the right to kick you off it any time we like". Quite the opposite in fact - having something explicitly stating under what conditions an agreement can be ended by either party is generally the whole point of having a contract in the first place; if you don't say a party can't end it whenever they like, the default assumption is that they can.

Seems pretty clear

"Critically, under its Ts&Cs, Google states that it alone determines what is and is not valid."

Given that this is a business transaction involving large amounts of money, presumably it's not just T&Cs but an actual signed contract. If that's the case, then if that contract states Google determines what is valid and can kick anyone off at any time, then that's pretty much the end of it. On the other hand, if there was no actual contract, Google definitely doesn't have a case to answer since there wasn't any contract for them to breach. Either way, I don't see this case getting much traction. It might be pretty shitty on Google's part to insist on a contract that effectively gives them the power to do anything they like at any time, but if you agree to such a contract with someone, you don't get to complain when you don't like the results later on.

Today's Resident Evil: Ransomware crooks think local, not global, prey on schools, towns, libraries, courts, cities...

Re: Insurance

Interesting article on Ars just recently about how insurance companies and their relationship with ransomware. Refusing to pay out isn't the problem (they can just crank up premiums if they need to), but rather because it's often quicker and cheaper to just pay up than try to recover yourself, places that might not want to pay up are pushed into doing so by their insurer.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/08/how-insurance-companies-are-fueling-a-rise-in-ransomware-attacks/

Bloke who claimed he invented Bitcoin must hand over $5bn of e-dosh in court case. He can't. He's waiting for a time traveler to arrive

"What proof do they have he did not cash it in in 2013 or 2014 at, say, $150 per bitcoin ?"

That could make things even worse for him. He is supposed to have in his possession assets worth* several billion, but half of it is owned by the estate of a now deceased person. If it turns out he flogged it all for a fraction of the price at some point, said estate still owns a few billion of assets, but now those assets have been stolen. It would change him from someone being an arse about handing over goods to the person who owns them, to someone who has stolen a pile of goods and now has no possibility of repaying the value stolen. If I steal your Ferrari and the court demands I give it back, I can't just claim I sold it for scrap and offer you a couple of hundred quid.

* For certain definitions of the word at least.

Android PDF app with just 100m downloads caught sneaking malware into mobes

Re: How 'bout that?

"I have done and do this to all my phones and tablets (buying only devices that allow LineageOS to be installed) and I can say: it simply works."

Which would be great if there was actually any support. Unfortunately, it's not available on the vast majority of phones, and even if you're lucky enough to have one that is supported, it may well not be in a month or two. It's great in principle that people are willing to give up their time to make something like that available at all, but there's little point in recommending it to people in practice because the chance of it actually being useful is close to zero.

The Tell-Tale Heart! Boffins build an AI that can tell your sex using just your heartbeat

Predict?

"Neural networks can predict your biological age and sex just by analysing the pattern of your heart beats"

Neural networks can determine your age by analysing some data. Prediction means trying to figure out what will happen in the future, not assessing something that has already happened or is already known.

'Hey Google, remind Greg the locks have been changed, and he should find a new place to live. Maybe ask his mistress?'

Re: Wild-ass guess but probably correct: No google exec will allow this to monitor their (in)actions

I'm not sure what's scarier - the idea that they're trying to push this sort of thing on people despite knowing how terrible it all is, or the idea that they might actually genuinely think it's all a good idea and use it themselves as well.

Quick question, what the Hull? City khazi is a top UK tourist destination

Re: Pedant's corner

And is sadly not actually true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpenhow_Hill

Not very Suprema: Biometric access biz bares 27 million records and plaintext admin creds

Re: This is becoming a bit mundane which is the really scary bit

"Perhaps GDPR will help but ..."

While GDPR is an improvement, it's unfortunately rather too late when it comes to bolting the stable door. Even if it all works amazingly and a few years from now everyone has perfect security, that doesn't help if your name, address, DoB, email, favourite passwords, face and fingerprints are already all out in the wild. It certainly can't hurt to try to stop things getting any worse, but so far we're not really doing anything to figure out how to cope with the fact that everything has already been hacked and leaked.

Google to bury indicator for Extended Validation certs in Chrome because users barely took notice

Re: This is hilarious.

"The technology works, the process doesn't."

That's because the process includes the end users. As always, humans are the weak link.

WTF is Boeing on? Not just customer databases lying around on the web. 787 jetliner code, too, security bugs and all

Re: How many networks?

"And, yes, passenger info systems need access to flight info"

Do they really though? Being able to see your current location and altitude might be interesting for some, but it's hardly necessary; it's not like knowing your air speed is going to make you arrive any faster. If they can't provide that information to passengers without compromising the safety of the plane, I'd much prefer they just didn't provide it at all.

Relax, satellite hacking is unlikely to lead to Earth-blinding Kessler effect – at least not yet

Odd attitude

"The complexity of the Iridium air interface makes the challenge of developing an Iridium L-Band monitoring device very difficult and probably beyond the reach of all but the most determined adversaries"

OK, so it's within the reach of determined adversaries. That kind of suggests that security would be a good idea. "Only highly motivate people with plenty of resources would be able to hack us, but why would anyone like that ever be interested in listening in on global communications?"