Posts by Cuddles

More Brits have access to 1Gbps speeds than those failing to muster 10Mbps – Ofcom report

Re: WAIT

"The who?"

I believe they're on first.

US citizen sues France over France-dot-com brouhaha

Re: Eh?

"Sounds like he wanted way too much for the domain"

That is not what the word "fair" means.

Exposing 145m Equifax customer deets: $240m. Legal fees: $28.9m. Insurance: Priceless

Re: Nah, keep it simple, save jail costs.

"Just have the execs ( the C suite - a US expression? ) and the top IT bod, each and everyone of them, publish ALL* of their personal details on the web for a period of 1 year. In an easy to reach and well publicised site."

They probably already have Facebook accounts.

Astroboffins peep at the largest orgy of galaxies banging into each other

Re: The odd random thought ....

"how far out the other side does the light shine?"

The same distance. While there are still questions about exactly how big and what shape the universe is, there are a variety of limits we can put on it given what we can see. While we can only see light that left things around 13 billion years ago (which actually equates to around 46 billion light years distance, due to the expansion of the universe), we can infer what is happening some distance beyond that through observations of the things we can see - the furthest things we can see would behave differently if there was a sudden edge just past them, or if things were wrapping back around, compared with if the universe carries on in a similar manner. Based on observations of the CMBR, it appears the universe must be at least 78 billion light years in diameter. Of course, most theories say it's actually somewhere between much bigger and infinite, but it may well be impossible to actually get evidence beyond a certain point.

Re: Number query

"I thought there were some 10**11 stars in our own galaxy. Some of those are rather small, of course. The remote one may therefore be more massive than us, but not to the extent that justifies headlines."

I think the confusion comes from the difference between the mass of gas, and the total mass (which includes a significant portion of dark matter), and the difference between the colliding galaxies and the larger cluster. The Milky Way has a total mass somewhere between 10^11 and 10^12, which is close to the mass of gas in this cluster, but significantly less than the estimated total mass in the region of 10^13. It's further noted that while this is the mass of the 14 galaxies seen colliding, the theory is that this will form the core of a cluster, not be the whole thing itself, with the total mass being somewhere around 10^15 and making it the one of the largest (although probably not quite the largest) galactic clusters known (shown in figure 2 of the paper).

Academics: Shutting down Facebook API damages research, oversight, competition

Academics?

"You shouldn't stop people spying on Facebook users because we really want to spy on Facebook users. But we're totally trustworthy so you shouldn't worry about us. Worry about all those naughty people instead."

There are good reasons real academics have to jump through all kinds of hoops involving ethics boards, informed consent of subjects, and so on. If your research and/or job relies on anonymously scraping data from the internet without anyone knowing about it, you're doing it very wrong and have no right to complain when you're stopped.

Time to ditch the front door key? Nest's new wireless smart lock is surprisingly convenient

"Without knowing the ins-and-outs of the security involved I'm can't help but feel this is the triumph of hope over experience"

I'm sure I'm not the only one who reads "buffer" as "additional attack surface".

Amazon, LG Electronics turned my vape into an exploding bomb, says burned bloke in lawsuit

Re: Health Hazard?

"Take too much and it will kill you."

I'm considering starting a campaign to make this a mandatory warning label that will go on everything.

Here's another headline where NASA is dragged through the mud for cheap Mars wise cracks

"I just wonder how mud on supposedly exposed rock has managed to survive 3.5 billion years of wind erosion? Does the article mention anything about that kind of thing?"

It's not mud any more, but rather mudstone; essentially sandstone but with smaller particles. The idea is basically that it used to be mud at the bottom of a lake, but formed a sedimentary rock through the same processes that occur on Earth. So don't think of it as mud surviving billions of years of exposure, but rather a rock that we can look at and figure out what it used to be a few billion years ago.

BBC extends Capita Audience Services contract to 25 years

Re: Books were expensive.....?

"I was in Waterstones a week ago - £10 for a softback....

They were £4.99 in the early 90's...going on £7.99 later in the decade and early this century.

A tenner lifts it out of a mid casual purchase for me"

£5 in 1990 was worth the same as £10.43 in 2016 (so closer to £11 today given inflation still well over 2%). It's not a significant price drop, but complaining that they're no longer a casual purchase despite costing slightly less than they used to really doesn't make a lot of sense.

"25 years?"

7 years. It's an extension to a contract that started in 1999; they're not planning quite that far into the future. It's also nothing to do with license fees, the contract for which was already extended back in 2012, as noted in the article. The contract in question here is about outsourcing all their customer services - Crapita don't just collect your license fee, they're also the ones who deal with your complaints when they screw up.

Elon Musk's latest Tesla Model 3 delivery promise: 6,000... a week

Re: The Model 3 is coming.... er??? 2019 or is that 2020?

"They are having issues scaling their production up to levels exptected by the arse talkers from Wall St."

They are having issues scaling their production up to the levels that Musk has explicitly said they will manage. It's not Wall Street setting the targets that keep being missed, it's Tesla themselves. It can be fair enough to blame speculators and "analysts" when share prices jump around the place because reality didn't match with their imaginations, but when a company consistently misses its own production targets and has steadily growing losses, there's no-one else to blame.

Surprise! Wireless brain implants are not secure, and can be hijacked to kill you or steal thoughts

Improving security

"the transmissions of the implantable medical device in question are not encrypted or authenticated"

"how they believe its security can be improved"

Step 1: Actually have any kind of security at all.

NHS given a lashing for lack of action plan one year since WannaCry

Re: Kick me whilst I'm down

"If next time it takes out the 999 service, then there WILL be deaths caused by it."

That's exactly the point I was making - if something with low probability happens at some undefined point in the future, there might be some consequences. That kind of "if" simply cannot compete with "people are dying right now on a daily basis because there aren't enough beds/doctors/nurses/etc.". It's like telling a soldier in the middle of a firefight that they should eat more fruit and vegetables; no-one's going to argue that it's bad advice, but sometimes there are more pressing issues to deal with first.

Re: Kick me whilst I'm down

"I'm asking for funding"

And this is ultimately the whole problem. People love to complain about managers and the like not caring enough, as seen in the comments here, but those managers have no more control over the NHS budget than you do. When we're facing serious shortages of doctors and nurses, constantly growing waiting lists, ambulances queueing up for hours, entire hospitals having to shut down for days to everything except emergencies, and so on, the idea that IT security would be the only department actually getting the funding it needs is laughable. Sure, we here know the potential dangers of lacking security, but even then we have to admit that the dangers almost always remain potential, and to date very little actual harm has been done, even when things like Wannacry make the headlines. When you can see people actually dying every day due to the lack of funding in every other area, IT is simply not going to be a priority.

ZTE now stands for 'zero tech exports' – US govt slaps 7-year ban on biz

Re: "...ZTE...cut off....from American manufacturers."

"Selling products through shady middleman to avoid export controls/bans/sanctions will get found out eventually."

Indeed, just remember where this all started in the first place - ZTE were the shady middleman supplying American kit to Iran and North Korea.

"On the foreign side, the local government gets some US aid to ensure prosecution and the offenders end up in a prison that is a few rungs down the ladder from hell on earth."

Not so much. The foreign side effectively are the local government (ZTE is publicly traded, but the biggest shareholders are state-run companies) and far from being sent to prison, the offenders are given bonuses.

Having ended America's broadband woes, the FCC now looks to space

"Since when does the FCC regulate satellite launches?!"

If only there was an article we just read that covered questions like this:

"The FCC notes that regardless of where it is launched, any satellite that wants to communicate with a base station in the US needs its clearance to operate"

Anon biz bloke wins milestone Google Right To Be Forgotten lawsuit

Re: I think that this judgement is pretty fair.

The irony is that it's impossible to tell whether the judgement is fair, because its very nature makes it impossible to find out what it was actually about.

India completes its GPS alternative, for the second time

Re: Compatibility...

"Without arguing about the techy element of how compatibility, is actually delivered in hardware, many modern devices , from phones to smart watches, include GLONASS compatibility and the latest Huawei smartphones, unsurprisingly, integrate Beidou compatibility."

The "techy element" is the only relevant thing about compatibility. Many modern devices can use multiple different satnav systems because they include multiple different receivers, along with different software to interpret the signal. Doing this costs more money, takes up more space, uses more battery, and so on, which is why most devices don't do this, and even those that do generally only cover a couple of the more regionally relevant systems. From a consumer point of view it doesn't make much difference, but when it comes to criticising India for "not being compatible", as the OP did, noting that it's possible to include lots of different hardware to cover different systems is utterly irrelevant.

Re: Compatibility...

"From what I remember, IRNSS is not compatible with the other GPS systems"

The only systems that are compatible are Galileo and GPS block-III, which hasn't actually launched yet. If you want to use multiple different satnav systems, you need a different receiver for each one. India is no different from all the others in this regard.

What a time to be alive: LG and Italian furniture-maker build smart sofa

Re: Not as bad as it sounds

"It won't do things automatically."

Indeed, but far from not being as bad as it sounds, that actually makes it even worse. There are already a whole bunch of different ways you can tell things what to do - every phone has at least one voice assistant whether you want it or not, Amazon and Google, among others, are trying to fill our homes with listening devices, people forget that both the Xbox1 and before that Kinect were both initially advertised as constantly spying on you (and that actually brought complaints at the time rather than everyone now paying extra for a device that does nothing else), and of course there are plenty of smaller niche solutions to mess with lights, heating, and so on.

Having yet another different solution that only works when you're near one specific piece of furniture and can only interact with a few specific devices is completely worthless. At least a sofa that does something automatically when you sit on it would have a unique selling point. A sofa that essentially just has a half-arsed Alexa taped to the side is pointless, since you could achieve a better experience by literally taping Alexa to the side. Even if you're concerned with fashion, you could still buy a Nattuzi sofa and hide your Echo behind a cushion on something. An automated sofa has rather limited use, but what they're actually selling appears to have no use at all.

Rudd-y hell, dark web! Amber alert! UK Home Sec is on the war path for stealthy cyber-crims

Re: Lots of our money being spent

"Actually, a trivial amount of money being spent."

To put in context just how trivial this amount is - in 2010-11, total police spending (for England and Wales) was £13.6 billion. In 2014-15, total police spending was £11.7 billion. Exact current figures aren't available, but estimates say spending has basically remained about the same (central government cuts being offset by increased council tax), equating to a further cut in real terms due to inflation. A one-off pile of £50 million is utterly irrelevant given cuts of over £2 billion per year.

https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/bns/bn208.pdf

Edit: That's not to say I actually disagree with Wil Godfrey, he's just missed half the story. The problem isn't that they're throwing money at things without any plans on how to use it, the problem is that they don't have a plan or a meaningful amount of money.

Get ready for the Internet of Battle Things, warns US Army AI boffin

"Robin Williams film 'Toys' and more recently 'Enders Game'"

I think you'll find that's the other way around.

Re: Better Not

"Attaching it to anything that can fire is guaranteed to provide both blue on blue and civilian slaughter."

No noticeable difference then.

Want to terrify a city with an emergency broadcast? All you need is a laptop and $30

Re: That wasn't a design goal

"False alerts are not really a big problem, unless they actually happen rather often."

False alerts are a huge problem, even if they're rare. There's a reason the parable of the boy who called wolf exists, and it would only take one or two false alerts for people to lose trust in the system. Hell, just look at people's behaviour when a fire alarm goes off, even in a building that has never had a false alarm - a significant number of people will almost always refuse to take it seriously.

And of course, that's on top of the significant economic damage and disruption that could be caused by forcing everyone in a city to drop what they're doing and leave work. At best, you're looking at the best part of a day's work and the equivalent of millions of pounds being lost. Throw in injuries and the like caused during the panic, potential for looting while people are out, and so on, and the effects of even a single false alarm can be very serious. Just look at the already mentioned Hawaii screw-up - blocked roads, reckless driving, jammed phone lines preventing emergency calls being made, delayed flights, and so on - and that was a partial text alert with no sirens, early in the morning, that was cancelled in under 40 minutes.

Sure, you don't want your system to fail to give a real alert, but you really don't want it giving out false alerts either.

Cinema voucher-pusher tells customers: Cancel your credit cards, we've been 'attacked'

Re: UK Law Must Introduce Guest Checkout

"The UK must be changed to allow for a guest checkout, such that your card details are NEVER stored on their systems"

From the article:

"bank details were stolen from the payment page"

Demanding changes to the law to avoid storing details isn't going to help when storing details didn't have anything to do with the issue in the first place.

Linux Beep bug joke backfires as branded fix falls short

Re: Eh..

"They can also be useful in the event of hardware failure as sometimes a motherboard can beep the problem to you"

Most motherboards also have an LED 7-segment display that gives boot and error information in a much more readable format though. Trying to figure out a pattern of beeps is a lot more difficult than just reading an error number. Unless the fault you're trying to diagnose turns out to be that the LEDs aren't working, there's really little use for the speaker.

Danish Navy expert finds no trace of exhaust gas in private submarine

Seems unlikely

"found no carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide or nitrogen oxide in the air"

No carbon dioxide in the air? That's simply not true. I can't read Danish to see what the original report says, but I assume it is supposed to say something along the lines of there not being elevated levels compared to normal atmosphere, and has been mangled by a journalist at some point.

Facebook can’t count, says Cambridge Analytica

Re: Numbers

"If Cambridge Analytica had 30 million records it does not automatically mean that so many millions of people had their minds changed about who to vote for. Yes, they like to brag, but they have no proof."

Intent can be criminal in itself. You can be guilty of attempted murder even if your effort had essentially no chance of success. If a company brags about their ability to manipulate elections by questionable means, they don't actually have to be successful in order for people to get upset about it.

Re: Eh?

"Perhaps the pertinent questions now will be: what data DID you use in the 2016 US election, where did it come from, are you still using it. "

Also, which elections did you use it? According to their CEO, they were involved in 44 US election races in 2014. That would be the year the data in question was collected. Even if we believe everything they say, the US presidential election is far from the only one; they claim to have been involved in a great many others, as well as having openly boasted about manipulating elections in other countries. That one specific data set can't be tied to one specific election doesn't really seem particularly important.

Shhh! Don’t tell KillBots the UN’s about to debate which ones to ban

Still not convinced of the logic

"started to consider autonomous weapons due to fears they struggle to pick out combatants and therefore kill or injure civilians."

Unlike the weapons (and their operators) up until now, who have always done a bang-up job of avoiding civilian casualties.

I say, I say, I say: What's the difference between a king penguin and liquid?

What's average airspeed velocity

Of a spherical penguin in a vacuum?

No Falcon Way: NASA to stick with SLS, SpaceX more like space ex

Rocket cost

The thing about the cost of rocket launches is that it's not necessarily all that important, depending on the context. For launching a bunch of relatively small satellites into low Earth orbit, launch costs are one of the biggest costs, especially when you're looking at the trend for small groups with similarly small budgets wanting to send up things that you could fit on your desk. And for that sort of thing, SpaceX and others pushing for significantly reduced launch costs has been a big deal.

But for larger missions to send significant payloads to the Moon, Mars, and other distant places, the cost of the actual launch is a much, much smaller proportion of the overall cost. The Mars Science Laboratory mission (including the still running Curiosity rover) has so far cost in the region of $3 billion, with the launch cost being around $140 million. If they'd used a Falcon 9 instead, it might have saved maybe $40m at best. This is why NASA has tended to focus a lot less on worrying about the cost of rockets. No-one looking at manned Moon or Mars missions cares if Falcon Heavy or SLS turn out to be cheaper, because as long as they can get the job done the difference in launch cost will be a rounding error on the total cost of the mission.

India: Yeah, we would like to 3D-print igloos on the Moon

Re: What to use as a binder?

"The mirror array can be relatively lightweight, seeing as how it doesn't have to withstand any wind, and not too much gravity. However, it will require a mechanism to shed off lunar dust that settles on the mirrors"

A second, larger array of mirrors to burn off any dust that settles on the first one. Of course, that will then have its own dust problems, but the solution at this point should be obvious...

Google lobbies hard to derail new US privacy laws – using dodgy stats

Re: Socially speaking, we are technological infants

"Society is still learning and adpting to the Internet and its ramifications, so it is normal that tech companies get a head start in a given direction before society catches up and decides what it needs to do."

Not that I disagree with the sentiment here, but the part I always find amusing about statements like this is the idea that society will ever catch up. Society is still learning and adapting to things like the discovery of fire, the wheel and writing, and not doing a particularly good job of it much of the time. The internet may be the newest and shiniest thing for people to worry about, but given our track record we'll still be worrying about it 100,000 years from now.

Leaning tower of NASA receives last big arm

Re: Mobile launcher

"Interesting idea except for the transport part. The thing won't fit under "normal" overpasses."

Maybe they could fit some sort of rocket to it to hop over them?

F-35B Block 4 software upgrades will cost Britain £345m

Re: mmmm..not sure thats correct

"if a swarm of birds can fuck a jet engine then a swarm of drones will be just as effective!"

The vast majority of bird-in-engine incidents occur at landing or take-off when the plane startles a grounded flock of birds into taking off directly into its path. Since small drones are very limited in range and altitude, that's pretty much the only thing they'd be able to do as well; there's basically no chance of positioning a swarm of drones exactly in the path of a jet when it's flying at normal speeds and altitudes. If your enemy is able to fly a swarm of drones around your runway, you have much bigger problems than the chance of a plane losing an engine.

"We keep reading about rail guns, drone swarms, hypersonic missles. Is this another case of preparing for the last war instead of the next one?"

No, none of those things are in any way relevant to aircraft. Rail guns are basically just a replacement for gunpowder; you might be able to throw shells a bit further and more efficiently, but they still won't be any more effective against aircraft than existing ship guns. Drones can be used for things like dropping grenades, but they're useless as anti-aircraft weapons and can't replace regular aircraft unless they essentially are regular aircraft - ie. things like the Reaper may replace the F35, but swarms of small, cheap drones certainly won't. Hypersonic missiles are for sending nuclear warheads to the other side of the world and, again, are useless against aircraft and don't fill the same role.

So no, war hasn't suddenly changed to the point that aircraft are no longer needed. The nature of the airpower required will vary depending on who you're fighting, but the need for large, fast planes that can control the skies and drop things on the ground is still very much there. The only things likely to change about that in the near future are whether there are actual people sitting in the planes, and whether carriers remain a useful way to get them where they're needed.

2 + 2 = 4, er, 4.1, no, 4.3... Nvidia's Titan V GPUs spit out 'wrong answers' in scientific simulations

Re: Redlining memory? Buhahahaha! Not a chance.

"important to understand if this affects all parts, indicating a design bug, or some, indicating a manufacturing defect. If the article indicated which is the case, I missed it."

The article said that one person tested 4 GPUs and found problems with 2 of them. Given the small sample size, and only being tested on a single problem, I don't think there's really enough information to figure out which it might be.

We sent a vulture to find the relaunched Atari box – and all he got was this lousy baseball cap

I still don't get it

I'm sure I said something similar regarding one of the other various failures at making a nostalgia-focussed box, but how do they all manage to make this so complicated and difficult? Literally all you need is some low-end, off-the-shelf parts stuffed into a nostalgia-shaped box with a pre-installed software emulator. Even if you don't really know what you're doing and mess up on manufacturing time, cost estimates, and the like, how is it possible to be so incompetent that you find yourself months after your expected release date still with no idea what chips you're going to put in it? How can anyone be so oblivious to reality that they can claim they've solved all the hardware problems in the same breath as admitting they don't even know what hardware they're going to use?

As far as I can tell it doesn't even seem to be the usual scam, since they've repeatedly delayed crowdfunding and pre-orders. They've genuinely just taken this long to make a box with nothing in it.

British Level 4 driverless pods are whizzing along ... er, a London path

Re: Pedestrians Getting in the Way

"Why should a pedestrian, walking along a pedestrian path which cyclists are also allowed to use, be expected to move for one of these pods?"

Because it's the polite thing to do? Just because you're legally allowed to be massive cockbadger doesn't mean it's actually a good idea. Normal people generally make the tiny effort required to let other people go about their lives instead of deliberately getting in the way at every opportunity. If there's plenty of space on the marked pedestrian side, why would you not use it instead of going out of your way to block the cycle lane? It shouldn't need the threat of jail time to get people to show the bare minimum of human decency.

"Do you mean it's better? It would be hard for it to be maintained worse than some of the roads round here."

Indeed. Conveniently, the BBC had an article on this just today. Count yourself lucky if you live in England though, Scotland barely has anything left that still counts as a road:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-43407167

BOOM! Cambridge Analytica explodes following extraordinary TV expose

Re: Team from Facebook are in their offices tonight?

"can anyone explain why a team from Facebook were in the offices of Cambridge Analytica shortly after the story broke ?"

I think you have that backwards. A team from Facebook were in the offices of CA, before the story broke. Since CA are accused of holding data in breach of Facebook's T&Cs, the reason for their auditors to be there are fairly obvious. They left pretty sharpish after this new story broke, again for what should be rather obvious reasons.

Bitcoin's blockchain: Potentially a hazardous waste dump of child abuse, malware, etc

"What surprises me is that none has been found yet. Embedding illegal material should be a perfect way to get bitcoin banned anywhere you like."

If you read the article, you'll note that the entire point is that it has been found. This is not theoretical; there are links to child abuse images in the Bitcoin blockchain.

However, that does raise an important point that the article doesn't really discuss - having a link to something buried in some code that user may not even have a way to access is not the same as actually having the material itself on your PC. It's not the material itself, and it's not a standard html link that anyone could click on, it requires knowing how to dig around in the blockchain for it, as well as knowing where to find it in the first place. No sane court could consider an unwitting Bitcoin user guilty of child pornography just because they have a copy of the blockchain. While the idea that some countries might use it as an excuse to either ban Bitcoin or go after users, those aren't the sort of countries that would generally worry about having an excuse to do so.

Nest reveals the first truly connected home

The future is disappointing

No flying car, no jetpack, and now "the first truly connected home" turns out to be nothing more than a doorbell and thermostat that can talk to each other for no adequately explained reason. Where's my creepy voyeur robot house voiced by Pierce Brosnan?

Boffins find sign of water existing deep into Earth's mantle by looking at diamonds

Re: Isotopes

"My thought was subduction, too. I imagine the authors did. Unfortunately, I can't find a preprint."

I have access to the paper, although it's far from my field. The authors do mention plate subduction as a source of water in the upper mantle, down to about 410km depth, but say we don't really know much about anything past that. This work seems to be one of only a few trying to figure out how much water is down there at all, while figuring out where it actually came from is presumably a step beyond that which hasn't really been addressed yet. I assume there are theories about it, but this paper suggests there's very little physical evidence so far.

Re: Non standard oddball unit "miles"

"If you're not going to use proper length units like kilo-linguini you should at least convert to metric."

The paper actually uses metric, El Reg appears to have gone to the effort of converting it all into miles for some reason.

Ugh, of course Germany trounces Blighty for cyber security salaries

Median salaries for security pros across Europe

Huh, I could have sworn there were more than 7 countries in Europe.

More power to UK, say 'leccy vehicle makers. Seriously, they need it

Re: This has not been properly thought out.

"You shouldn't write off the whole electric car idea just because it is of little use to you (or me)."

While this is true, the problem is that we may not have a choice in the matter. The UK government has said that petrol and diesel cars will be banned by 2040 - not just new sales, but all of them - and recent reports have noted that this is quite a bit later than other countries have promised (India says 2030, for example) and may well be brought forwards. And this is supposedly considered a long term plan. That's 12 years from now. For comparison, Hinkley Point C was proposed in 2008, and might be finished in 2027 if we're lucky.

That's what some of us are worried about. I'm all in favour of electric cars; they're both necessary and inevitable. But as plenty of other people have pointed out, our current infrastructure is simply not capable of supporting a wholesale switchover. And at the moment, far too many people are talking about forcing everyone to be all electric, all the time, within a timeframe that we're demonstrably incapable of actually upgrading said infrastructure. If it takes 20 years to build a single power station, how can it make any sense to suggest changes that will require many more than that in half the time? Or to suggest we can somehow get the power cables installed to cope with charging demand at every house when we can't get basic fibre cables to more than a small fraction of them?

I don't think anyone sensible writes off electric cars as a whole. They make sense for some people in some situations, and a gradual roll-out with ongoing improvements in support and infrastructure, as well as the underlying technology, sounds like a great idea. What many of us write off as stupid is the idea that we can suddenly change the entire country over to electric cars within the space of a few years simply by banning everything else. There are plenty of reasons why they're not appropriate for many people in many situations, and fixing that will take far more time and money than is currently being allowed.

Chemical burns, explosive fires, they all come free with Amazon power packs

Re: Six? Six hundred?

"There's no way that only six SKUs share this defect."

Probably not, but it's surprisingly difficult to order a recall for counterfeit goods.