Posts by This Side Up

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

Unibus

Ah yes, at one location I worked at we had a staff canteen that was popularly known as the Restaurant at the End of the Unibus.

Ex-barrister reckons he has a privacy-preserving solution to Britain's smut ban plans

Re: This could actually make $$$

Type your comment here — advanced HTML and hotlinks allowed

"... it could cut out the vast majority of smut on little Johnny’s phone. Which is 100% more that is achievable at the moment."

Doesn't that imply that currently we can cut out approaching 50% of smut?

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

Re: Never understood this

"Consumer grade appliances are trash, with no longevity and (usually) no repair options[0]."

I bought my Servis washing machine c.1989. It was one of the first to use full microprocessor control instead of a big clunky rotary switch. It had a new mother board under warranty and has been extremely reliable since then. It's only now starting to go up the back end of the bathtub curve. Sadly the company was liquidated in 2011.

Go on, hit Reply All. We dare you. We double dare you. Because Office 365 will defeat your server-slamming ways

Why stop there?

It would actually help if they could ban top posting and quoting the whole of the preceding conversation unnecessarily.

Also users should stop gumming up the internet by sending megabytes of html, css, js, logos, tracking links, etc when a simple text message would do.

From Brit telly presenter Eamonn Holmes to burning 5G towers in the Netherlands: Stupid week turns into stupid fortnight for radio standard

No specific evidence

Type your comment here — advanced HTML and hotlinks allowed

"there's no scientific evidence to substantiate any of those 5G theories. I hope that clears that up."

There's no scientific evidence to substantiate any of those God theories. I hope that clears that up.

Bad news: Coronavirus is spreading rapidly across the world. Good news: Nitrogen dioxide levels are decreasing and the air on Earth is cleaner

Well, we won't want runway 3 now will we?

But if people are self-isolating themselves and working at home you would expect emissions from domestic heating and cooking equipment to increase.

Attention all British .eu owners: Buy dotcom domains and prepare to sue, says UK govt

"It has long been industry practice not to actively remove domain names from the internet "

Try telling that to EE!

Guilty: The Romanian ransomware mastermind who infected Trump inauguration CCTV cams

Windows powered?

"Each of their CCTV units consists of a camera attached to a Microsoft Windows-powered computer"

Do you need to know any more?

BT pushes ahead with plans to switch off telephone network

Re: Oh well

What about loop disconnec t phones? Will they be catered for by the legacy interface.

Btw it used to be 48v (traditionally backed up by 24 x 2v glass accumulators in the basement). Are they using 50v now?

'Every little helps'... unless you want email: Tesco to kill free service

There's a lesson here

Never use your ISP's domain for your email address or web site. Register your own domain then you can keep your address when you change your ISP. All you have to do is update the DNS servers.

Here we go again... UK Prime Minister urges nerds to come up with magic crypto backdoors

Back door and not back door

"... there is a way to both have a backdoor and not have a backdoor ..."

No problem.

Just don't open the box.

Brit transport pundit Christian Wolmar on why the driverless car is on a 'road to nowhere'

Autonomous vehicles

http://www.tvgam.org.uk/articles/auto.html

Something I wrote last year along similar lines.

Prosecute driverless car devs for software snafus, say Brit cyclists

Driverless means there isn't a driver

1. Please stop using "driverless" and "autonomous" interchangeably. A driverless car (SAE level 5) doesn't have a driver, hence the name "driverless" (no driver). So it doesn't have driving controls and can't switch to being driven by a person. Vehicles with lower levels of automation can.

2. Software will have bugs in it. It's only a matter of time before the right combination of circumstances will arise to reveal them.

Car insurers recoil in horror from paying auto autos' speeding fines

"Our view was that when you're talking about a ton of metal that's travelling at high speed on the roads, you should potentially lose that right to take risks with other people's lives. Our input would be that we think the updates should be implemented right away."

What if the car is parked in a location where there is no data signal? Do you set out on a journey only to come to an abrupt halt as soon as the vehicle picks up a signal and discovers that an update is available - possibly when you're doing 70 in lane 3 of a motorway?

What if the update contains a bug? Can the vehicle revert to the previous version or does it have to stay where it is until the manufacturer fixes the bug?

This obviously hasn't been thought through.

2040

Once again we read this nonsense about the government banning the sale of diesel and petrol engined vehicles after 2040. This is not what has been said. They are only proposing to bena the sale of NEW diesel and petrol vehicles (excluding hybrids) after 2040. It will still be possible to buy and sell existing vehicles at that time, barring further restrictions.

Flash... Nu-uh! Tech folk champing at the bit to switch off life support

OK, so you get rid of Flash

from the browser. I won't mourn its passing. But what do you do about all the sites that contain flash and don't get updated but do continue to be hosted?

Ten new tech terms I learnt this summer: Do you know them all?

Re: Broadband

and Bandwidth - this used to refer to the width of a signal within the frequency spectrum. Now it seems to mean capacity or throughput, or just the amount of time you have available for something.

Re: AKA iPhone?

Ah, Spam fritters! They served them at the canteen when I worked on the BSC Redcar complex in the dim and distant past. We reckoned they were made from dumper truck tyres.

Re: Testiculate

Wasn't it Adam Hart-Davis who coined that one?

Ultrasonic Sound

Surely it's an oxymoron, not a tautology?

BT installs phone 'spam filter', says it'll strain out mass cold-callers

"Presumably only a UK phone can generate a CLI number itself? BT should not allow a CLI to be different from its allocated number unless pre-registered."

A phone (handset etc) doesn't know its own directory number. It's connected to a line card at the exchange or local concentrator which has an equipment number. The software on the switch translates between equipment number and directory number. So presumably to spoof a CLI you'd need to access the switch e.g. by using a particular command sequence, but I'm not a BT technician.

Re: A Typical Scam Call I Get

Call from withheld, unavailable or international number comes in.

10s.

Answering machine pickes it up.

"Hello, thank you for calling. So that we can deal with your call efficiently please select from the following menu:

If you're a claims management company press 1;

If you're a boiler room press 2;

If you're a bogus Microsoft engineer press 3;

etc."

For some reason they don't seem to want to play ball. Can't think why.

School cyber safety spiel shows smut to 'Strayan students

Logging in

Ignore this post. Other login forms don't work on this browser.

Google nukes ad-blocker AdNauseam, sweeps remains out of Chrome Web Store

Re: Maybe they should've thought the whole video ad thing over

"Preferably big expensive adverts that they can persuade their punters are getting them value for money."

If I see a big, expensive advert I think "Why should I pay for that?" Same with a big, flashy shop.

Re: Maybe they should've thought the whole video ad thing over

"pissed off people are not going to be good customers."

You can say that again!

"pissed off people are not going to be good customers."

Thanks.

'Didn't you read? "Love me or hate me, as long as you KNOW me."'

No I don't buy that. There's no way I'm going to uSwitch or Go-compare because of their irritating tv ads. If I KNOW a brand then I'll remember to avoid it. If you stick a pop-up window in front of what I'm trying to read what makes you think I'm going to buy your stupid product anyway?

Stupid law of the week: South Carolina wants anti-porno chips in PCs that cost $20 to disable

Re: More Magic Technology

<<"Meanwhile the UK's own DaFT is proposing "new technology" that blocks mobile phones in cars."

So what if there's a crash and someone has to call the emergency number?>>

It's legal to call the emergency numbers so any device would have to permit it.

Anyway they can't even block mobile phones in prisons which ought to be possible using microcells or by erecting a faraday cage around the whole caboodle. Actually it might be more productive to snoop on prisoners' calls which of course they can't be making because mobile phones aren't allowed.

Re: More Magic Technology

<<"Meanwhile the UK's own DaFT is proposing "new technology" that blocks mobile phones in cars."

So what if there's a crash and someone has to call the emergency number?>>

It's legal to call the emergency numbers so any device would have to permit it.

Anyway they can't even block mobile phones in prisons which ought to be possible using microcells or by erecting a faraday cage around the whole caboodle. Actually it might be more productive to snoop in prisoners' calls which of course they can't be making because mobile phones aren't allowed.

Information on smart meters? Yep. They're great. That works, right? – UK.gov

Complete and utter bilge!

Consumer Engagement Strategy "has been informed by a range of UK and international evidence and seeks to drive uptake and support behaviour change to deliver maximum benefits for consumers from smart meters.”

Which tells me exactly nothing. Typical post-truth politician-speak.

Helping autonomous vehicles and humans share the road

Save drivers?

"That might mean requiring cars to save drivers, as Mercedes has already decided to do."

Um, I thought we were talking about driverless cars? I think you meant "occupants".

Hapless Network Rail contractors KO broadband in Uxbridge

Uxbridge?

Obviously it was near West Drayton on the Great Western Main Line and not at Uxbridge. This isn't the first time this has happened. Usually it's the signalling that gets disrupted. The problem is that they don't know exactly where the cables are even if they think they do. The cable ducts are buried under the balast to make it harder for thieves to get at them (most are copper) and every time the track gets tamped and new ballast is tipped on top the cables get pushed a little further into the cess or down the embankment. Even if they are shown on plans they may not be where they were when the plans were drawn.

Btw what's the new measurement train got to do with it?

Twitter suspends 235,000 'violent extremism' accounts

I wonder how many of those 235k accounts were Whack-a-Mole accounts?

DVLA misses out on £400m in tax after scrapping paper discs

Double taxation

The DVLA is clinging on to calendar month taxation so that it can charge double VED when a vehicle changes hands during the month. You pay for the new vehicle from the beginning of the month but you only get a refund from the start of the next month. That still applies if a car changes hands between family members at one address.

They could easily modify the software to charge VED by the day. A day's overlap would be acceptable.

The way to avoid double taxation is to sell the old vehicle at the end of the month, and SORN it to be on the safe side, then become the registered keeper of the new vehicle on the first of the next month. If you have to acquire the new vehicle at the end of the month then SORN it and don't use it until the new month.

BBC detector vans are back to spy on your home Wi-Fi – if you can believe it

Wouldn't it be much simpler...

to pay the licence fee out of general taxation, on the basis of the existing fee times number of households? That would eliminate all the costs associated with administering, collecting and enforcing the licence fee as well as the complications with free over-75s licences. Tax threshholds would be reduced slightly to compensate.

That would automatically cover all UK citizens watching any BBC content on any device at any time in any place. It would only leave out overseas visitors, and special arrangements could be made for large hotels e.g. through a tourist tax. Small B&Bs could be disregarded.

Of course people will cry "why should I pay the licence fee if I don't watch the BBC?". They always do. But commercial tv costs us far more than the BBC licence fee and we don't have any say. And with commercial tv we have to pay for not just the programmes (mostly trash) but also the cost of making the ads (mostly annoying trash). I can't ask Sainsbury's for a discount because I don't watch their adverts or those of any brands they sell. Ditto any other shop.

Btw there is no longer any such thing as "live tv". It's all at lease two seconds old by the time we see it - more for HD.

Adblock Plus blocks Facebook's ad-blocker buster: It's a block party!

When will ad pushers realise that if they interrupt me while I'm reading a post/article/whatever with pop-up windows, or interrupt the tv programme I'm watching and scream at me for 30 seconds, I'M NOT GOING TO BUY THEIR SILLY LITTLE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES,

Stop resetting your passwords, says UK govt's spy network

It's good advice

When I was working we had to change passwords every 45 days so of course I had to write them down. Also you weren't allowed to have any dictionary words or permutations of dictionary words or numeric or alphabetic sequences or repetitions of the same character etc. It strikes me that the more rules you make the easier it becomes to crack the password by brute force, because so many combinations can be ruled out. You can discover the rules by trying to create or change a password because the system will tell you why your password can't be used!.

On the other hand I have a feww critical passwords which aren't recorded anywhere. I can remember them but it's very difficult if you're asked to enter the 7th, 12th and 15th characters for example. And they are completely meaningless character strings so there is no easy way to remember them. On the other hand knowing my interests isn't going help you.

Britain is sending a huge nuclear waste shipment to America. Why?

Get it right!

Please learn the difference between "Sporadically" (here and there) and "Spasmodically" (now and then).

BBC telly tax drops onto telly-free households. Cough up, iPlayer fans

One more thing

Why can't the Govt just pay the licence fee out of general taxation and reduce the income tax thresholds to compensate. That would abolish the costs of administering, collecting and enforcing the licence fee at a stroke.

And is the licence fee enforceable anyway? We used to have detector vans which could pick up what you were watching on CRT TVs. With LCD screens, tablets and smartphnes it's not quite so easy.

Also there's no such thing as live tv anymore. With digital encoding, compresing, multiplexing and buffering it's several seconds old by the time you see it.

Youtube etc aren't free

They push ads at you all the time, and ad blockers don't stop them.

Why should advertisers object to ad blockers? The people who use them are likely to be so annoyed by ads that they wouldn't buy the stupid products and services anyway. A panel at one side is fine, but if you stick a pop-up window in my face a) I'll kill it straight away, and b) if I happen to notice what it's for I'll go out of my way to avoid buying the stuff at any cost. By all means make product information available - when I need it I'll look for it.

Re: Jim'll fix it and you

Not allowed to advertise? The BBC is advertising all the time - totally irrelevant trails in the middle of specialist music programmes, other trails with gratuitous background music in between programmes, ads for "digital radio" (the initials DAB are too toxic to use), ads for the licence fees ... the list goes on.

How TV ads silently ping commands to phones: Sneaky SilverPush code reverse-engineered

Don't use the tv speakers ...

Feed the sound output to your stereo system via a low pass filter to cut out anything over 16kHz.

Exam board in 'send all' fail: Hands up who knows what the BCC button is for?

Re: Idiots

Yes, but not just the excchange server. I remember somebody sending me a snottygram at work and then sending three or four recall messages, all of which I received. I was using Netscape Communicator on my PC and not the approved Outlook. I had a good chuckle.

My usual reaction to a recall message was to reply saying "Yes of course you can have it back. Here it is." with the offending message attached.

Dry those eyes, ad blockers are unlikely to kill the internet

Re: People who use adblockers...

"Some of [advertising], a great deal of it in fact, really is information about what's available out there."

True, but the essential difference is that if I need information I'll go and look for it. Unwanted ads are those that are stuck in my face when I'm trying read something else, or distract me. Those ad-slingers aren't doing themselves any favours. At best I'll just close the pop-up window; at worst I'll make sure that I never consider buying the offending product or service.

To be honest, EL Reg isn't a problem. I use a platform and browser that doesn't support much of the functionality they require (including Flash). I have ads, pop-up windows, animated gifs and javascript normally disabled. Static ads at the side of the page don't bother me.

Lies from VW: 'Our staff acted criminally but board didn't know'

Why would anyone want to take their car in for the recall? They'd only get it detuned. And how many buyers actually give a damn how much NOx it chucks out the back? Unless there's a whiff of compensation of course!

ZUCK OFF: Facebook nixes internship after student embarrasses firm

Ts & Cs

So Terms and Conditions are meant to protect our privacy? Yes, well that just about sums up Facebooks attitude to privacy and security.

At last, switching between rubbish broadband providers now easier

Not so easy to switch ...

If you have a web site in the ISP's domain. I don't see any provision for the old ISP to forward web requests or email for that matter to the new ISP.

To avoid this problem register your own domain and point it to your web site. You may also get mail forwarding from your personal domain, or use hotmail, gmail etc.

The BBC wants to slap a TAX on EVERYONE in BLIGHTY

The way to do it is pay the BBC out of general taxation on the basis of the agreed licence fee per household. That gets rid of all the overheads for administration, enforcement and annoyung ads. We need more money for the health service so National Insurance should be increased to cover that.

Brit smut slingers shafted by UK censors' stiff new stance

Smut-phobic? The Government?

Noooooooo. They just want to keep it for themselves. Can't have the plebs seeing this sort of stuff can we?

Trolls pop malformed heads above bridge to sling abuse at Tim Cook

Re: It makes you despair

Yes, it's a shame he had to bring god into it.

Video: Dyson unveils robotic tank that hoovers while you're out

A Dyson doesn't Hoover...

It Dysons!