Posts by phil dude

Facebook, Google, etc: Yeah, yeah, we'll work on the nasty stuff about bombs – but we ain't doing no backdoors

not quite correct...

the "free speech" test for encryption regards protecting the computer language that performs the mathematics required being protected speech.

See Phil Zimmermann's essay regarding PGP.

Free speech for political discourse is essentially supported by encryption. Hence, the above article is a good checkpoint to observe, when discussing how governments try and complain about encryption.

The arguments which emphasized mathematics as a form of free speech (and by extension computer instructions) are much purer in intent and delivery regarding the governments ability to interfere with technology, and have the benefit of being widely discussed in the context of "munitions".

And of course there's the obligatory.

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US ATM fraud surges despite EMV

Re: Almost no US ATMs use EMV

Pay by bonk is appearing rapidly via the backdoor (oo-err!).

Many of the new EMV terminals come with the "NFC" logo via "user screen", which so far works for Apple and Android, and perhaps some other services.

I know for Android/Apply pay the number of locations is growing steadily locally, and probably more so in bigger cities.

Quite by chance last night, I found I was able to pay for *beer* with phone NFC bonk at a local off-license/restaurant. ;-)

Now that's progress...

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Did your in-flight entertainment widget suck? It's Panasonic's fault, claims software biz

editing...?

Nah - puritan censorship plain and simple.

I will say the Delta wifi was ok for a few hours in the air. Longer than that, you're much better off downloading something.

If the wifi worked as proper internet, perhaps I (biz) might pay for it, but it was TooSlow(tm).

Finally, it would be nice if "wifi" intersected with seat power a bit more often.

For those us that [write/read/play] [code/publications/games]* , it may detract from the dehydration and low pressure...

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*mix or append as appropriate.

Huge if true: iPhone 8 will feature 3D selfies, rodent defibrillator

medical uses...

The laser scanning, if true, has potential medical uses.

In fact, improving phone tech is generally lowering the bar to some very cool med-tech advances.

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If Linus Torvalds works well in airports, Linux 4.10 will land next week

Re: Kernel Bogey

slow news day?

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Mr Angry pays taxman with five wheelbarrows worth of loose change

El Reg, missed the point...

The background for non-US (and perhaps non-Virginians), is that in Virginia they *tax* the car you ALREADY own. They called it a "personal property tax", and you pay it if your parked in the state for more than 10 days (or some other arbitrary limit), EVEN ON PRIVATE LAND.

My buddy was happy to keep my car covered, but the State of Virginia encourages neighbours to spy on covered cars....and then fine you (@#$%#@$!)

Paying tax when you buy something, OK got it.

Paying tax when you use a resource, OK got it, though it is always abused.

Paying for parking a car in a *PRIVATE* garage?

WTF?

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Outage-hit Lloyds Bank in talks to outsource data centres to IBM

documentary...

I think it was called "The Bank of Dave", channel 4.

Illuminating about the "labels" of the 18th century, slapped on modern "businesses".

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Uber, Apple, Amazon and Sully Sullenberger walk into a bar – er, self-driving car committee

Re: Sullenberger: the movie

Tom Hanks?

Gotta Be.

Apollo 13 was very good.

The Airport was too, I think ( but because I resonate with the "Stuck in Charles De Gaul for $RANDOM_HOURS , finding something to do (other than drink....)".)

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Google floats prototype Key Transparency to tackle secure swap woes

paranoid...not too much!

Agreed. The point of gpg is that you can generate your own keys for different purposes.

Some identified (work, bank, medical records!)

some semi-anonymous (el reg, facebook...)

some anonymous (my holiday snap, other *private* media).

Identity != Intent.

We need to keep educating the "others" about this...

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Fatal genetic conditions could return in some 'three-parent' babies

Re: Prediction...

There are a number of genes from the mitochondria co-expressed within the nuclear genome.

Every picosecond of your existence, is dependent upon the mitochondrion electronic transport chain.

If your mitochondria doesn't work well, identity linked traits are the *least* of your problems.

Biology was not engineered, it evolved, making the search for knowledge of the functionality *complex*

We are still trying to account for all the bits needed that sum up to make up *you*, and that includes the mitochondria.

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Guessing valid credit card numbers in six seconds? Priceless

google pay or fruity equivalent...

i have been using Google Pay with my Nexus 6P for a few months.

It presents a fake CC number to the merchant, that nevertheless carries payment.

If you have a pyramid of accounts (imagine the leaves at the bottom can't see up), then populate the electronic accounts with the leaves.

Hence, your attack surface is just then what they can social engineer after a few beers...

For the rest of the world without Google Pay (or fruity alternative), perhaps just use some leafy debit cards...

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Three certainties in life: Death, taxes and the speed of light – wait no, maybe not that last one

Re: Creates more problems than it solves?

This chap (Mike McCulloch) at lease proposes ideas that can be tested...and I like the fact his proposed solution doesn't need adjustable parameters (apart from the size of the universe...)

https://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com

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Living with the Pixel XL – Google's attempt at a high-end phone

fast charging...

I was recently on a trip and the conference ran long days, so I had to recharge my Nexus 6P, before the evening.

1) Since nougat, battery life has got worse.

2) Fast charge does what it says - and better still , it *tells* you how long on the screen...

3) Google Fi is very cool - the phone picks up signal from a range of carriers, and worked perfectly on my trip to Vancouver. Better still there's an app (Fi Info) which shows a list of all cell towers and phone companies you connected too!

So google, Nexus us not bad. fix 1) and we'll see about the rest...

The Pixel doesn't look "enough better" to prompt an upgrade...

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Robots blamed for wiping 10 per cent off the value of sterling

john oliver...

Good old John in an interview was asked his opinion of Brexit and he said "if they had only waited a few months perhaps the EU would have fallen apart, but as it is the rest of Europe is desperate to make Britain the bad guy for moving first" or something like that.

Put simply, the media is massively biased but also fundamentally bandwidth limited. The EU cannot afford to lose Britain, as there are only 2 1/2 big countries (France, Germany and Italy/2 ) paying for all the other small countries - including the other ones lining up to join. Britain will also have a difficult time disentangling from the EU. The real answer is somewhere in the middle....love/hate/need is all in the mix. It's still not clear the PM has the authority to invoke the leave action; is it?...

It's all a bit fantastical.....

The southern countries with borders facing the middle east have unprecedented numbers of refugees/migrants and no infrastructure to absorb them (don't forget youth unemployment is 50% in some of these countries) - funny how selective the news is. eh?

So the pound falling is no surprise, because uncertainty is reflected by market volatility. But anyone who thinks Brexit was "planned" is having a laugh - and who knows what might happen in the next 2 months (US President....something in Russia? China? Greece?)

In short, volatile markets are not the story -the underlying uncertainty is...

Let's all have a pint ;-)

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These diabetes pumps obey unencrypted radio commands – which is, frankly, f*%king stupid

Re: selected evolution

Yes, "We'll need a bigger Petri dish".

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Re: Unhappy luddite

despite what you read, creating an "antibiotic resistant E.coli" is really not the issue. Generally, anything we create in the lab does not compete well in the environment - the real world is *really* noisy.

However, if you pump every living thing in the food chain full of antibiotics, you will select (as in Darwin's Natural Selection) for some really nasty variants, since they have survived the microbiological gladiatorial arena of every cell they enter.

Read about phages, a 3 billion year old experiment into molecular robots...they're an interesting topic.

If we lived in a rational political universe, this would prioritize research into the mechanisms of disease so we could create solutions to the problems. but our media prefers novelty to progress.

The Dark Ages are only one lost generation away...

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Stingy sapphire lens in Apple's iPhone 7 is as scratchy as glass

further details?

A nice video and the *useful* information on hardness, flame resistance(!) and bendyiness (?).

But the "liquid cooling"? At what temperature?

The only reason I mention this is I build a dual Xeon-phi research box for the Uni, and it has a "vapor chamber" which implies a liquid at some point. No matter how much I shake it , there's no liquid sounds at ambient temperature...For those that don't know the Xeon-phi is a toasty CPU, functional all the way to 137C (yes I tried it!) - takes some cooling!

It would be nice at some point for someone to jump in who actually knows what M$ did...because I personally like someone else destroying their device so I don't need to destroy mine and accuracy is important ;-)

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Self-driving Google car T-boned in California crash

solved...

So if all cars were autonomous, this accident would not happen.

Unless we fit the cars with side radar to look for approaching collisions...but what would be the best course of action? The person jumping the red light probably wasn't paying attention anyway....

The "dodgem" feature might be fun in a robot derby though.... like a full scale robot wars!

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Double-dipping malware steals iOS creds and roots Android

icons...?

Can we please have some icons in the headline telling us the nature of the "hack".

So for example, perhaps a "bucket and spade" for modded phone, a "win98 flag" for $BROKEN_WINDOZE_VERISON, and a "clowns face" for everyone else who has bog standard software and doesn't click on dodgy links or play poky mon (sic)

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The Internet of Things isn't just for Bluetooth toothbrushes, y'know

alternative view....

OK, there's alot of fluff in this IOT thing.

However, on the serious side there is a pressing need to capture clinical information in non-clinical surroundings.

Forget just the toothbrush - which could sample the chemical composition of the patient, and also exhaled components - it is possible to get heart disease from tooth decay... who knows what we could find from other devices...;-)

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Chubby Chinese students refused top bunk

Re: High BMI not necessarily blimp

Yes, it is in fact not strict enough...I assume you have a specific protest or are a body builder?

Recent data suggests that as little as 0.6g too much on your pancreas. So perhaps fat distribution is the problem? That would be one in the "genetics" camp!

The problem with all metrics is that they need to apply to a population - and there is a prevalent dogma that as you age you get fat, rather than calorific overload and being fat. So we have obese teenagers now, that skew the population 30 years from now. So what is the right number?

Perhaps we should all use VO₂^max in combination with some other metric?

Then we could calculate "percentage of metabolic load required to maintain unused tissue", because it's all down to physics. If your mitochondrion cannot produce the energy, you are dead...

Beer Icon. A much misunderstood food...

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BBC will ‘retain your viewing history’

Re: Arrgh Beeb

I notice from that link that in the FAQ "What do I do if I have a license? Your address will be automatically approved...."

they'll tie it to your IP address apparently....the cynic in me says to start scanning downloads for embedded watermarks...

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Brexit government pledge sought to keep EU-backed UK science alive

Re: brexit government?

see my post on the other thread....I agree, I think this is all a circus. The only real information we have is that someone *can* activate Art.50, not that anyone *will*.

Again, there is surreal nature to the whole Bojo mayor becomes Bojo PM, because now he can't be Bojo president...that's gone to another Blondish Pretender...

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Time to re-file your patents and trademarks, Britain

distraction...

My cynical side, can't help but think, that the entire panic this "vote" has generated is all a show - for the ringmasters.

The legally binding point was almost completely missing from *both* campaigns, and since the current PM will not activate "$POKE 50,1", the new *Conservative* leader will be negotiating - and you want to bet that this panic, has made the *countries* of the EU look at the *unelected* commission and migrant volume think "this is a problem".?

Oh and Bojo has been angling to be PM from before his mayoral campaign, I see this as his way of being the savior of the EU and winning a General election...

Too soon?

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'Leave EU means...' WHAT?! Britons ask Google after results declared

google search....

I did a google search, though I didn't get to vote.

I searched "Is the Brexit vote binding" and there was an article a few days before the vote, about how this was barely mentioned in the campaigns.

So my prediction is there will be political fight in the Tories, a great deal of argument with the Europeans, but it is possible the Brexit will be reversed by a General election.

Anyone else notice the time the UK was in the EU coincided with the end of Monty Python?

OK, back to molecular stuff...

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Fujitsu picks 64-bit ARM for Japan's monster 1,000-PFLOPS super

Re: This is why AMD and NVidia are making ARM chips

If you're lucky ($DISCIPLINE) the libraries will take the weight of whateveryouwanttodofast...

That's why LINPACK is useful as it at least solves an important problem that is common across the sciences.

The biggest limitation with *all* of these technologies, is the parallel infrastructure has a huge-latency built in.

PCIE(v4?) or NVLINK have enormous bandwidth, but latency in the 1-4 us range just to get off the node.

I could find alot to do with a 1 EF machine, but for tightly coupled problems, limit is the densest component.

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Re: This is why AMD and NVidia are making ARM chips

If it runs LINPACK efficiently, we'll use it.

There is very little legacy code in scientific computing, as we write it from scratch on libraries... e.g. solvers etc...

What I (and many physicists want) is faster 3D FFT's....

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Inside Nvidia's Pascal-powered Tesla P100: What's the big deal?

fft's and molecules....

Well the half-precision can be used for FFT's , thought since it appears they have homogenously clocked all the units a la Intel/AMD? (5 DP/10SP/20HP)? Probably will not harm our MD....

I am predominantly interested in the latency characteristics, and how many of these you can get in box before it melts...;-)

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Remix OS: China's take on an Android operating system – but for PCs

kernels and...

if you are reading around, you will have observed reports of "converged kernels" are now available.

In other words, you can boot linux as normal and could run this "remix" or android apps, as a normal app.

Of course this has been available for a while (libhybris? chrome apps), but it is nice to finished product arise...

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Microsoft adds 'non-security updates' to security patches

Re: I'll jump in before everybody starts to state the obvious....

I just wanted to repeat my motivation for ditching M$ and embracing FOSS and Linux for as much as my work as possible.

The last time I booted a piece of hardware with Windows (vista - stop laughing), I deliberately disconnected the network cable so that no "phoning home" was possible. I kept bypassing the "you need a network connection" box, until it finished installing and left me with a login box (I set the only user as admin).

I logged in and was deposited at a desktop with nothing on it apart from a logout button.

Depending on what state of denial you are in (and I guess we are all in some degree of removal from reality...), you might think this recent spike in paranoia.

I encourage everyone who *can* change, to try anyone of the many FOSS environments. If necessary keep a virtual Windoze on a leash.

Just remember it is illegal (wtf?) for Microsoft to disclose if there are backdoors in Windows.

And yes a modicum of paranoia suggests this is a pretty big one.....

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Crap IT means stats crew don't really know how UK economy's doing

Re: Install R!

well with maths illiteracy being an acceptable social phenomena. The govt and corps don't want everyone educated - they want you to *pay* for education, just not get above your station. The lowest common denominator are the numbers that can be fudged.

This makes the hand waving hierarchy of the media (source -> media A -> media B -> media C -> BBC -> Daily Mail), nicely confusing to fill up the news cycle.

You cannot trust any analysis without seeing the working.

True for molecules - And would true for economics, if it wasn't all made up....

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Behold, Microsoft SQL Server on Linux – and a firm screw-you to Oracle

Re: PostgreSQL a better choice for transition from Oracle

I can confirm Postgresql is a nice replacement for *SQL.

Source: Used for large-scale medical project (for use by physicians), that combined realtime genetic data compared with genomic, statistical, GWAS and PHEWAS analysis for use with anonymised patient records presented in clinical setting.

When M$ starts using GPL, wake me up...

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Fifth time's the charm as SpaceX pops satellite into orbit

humble thoughts, movie....

How many others watched this live?

To the critical comments -> This cannot be so common you cannot continue to be *amazed* at the technology?

However, the violently shaking images and then cut to the colour card.....

Surely this is the promo for a new movie about invading aliens :-)

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Samsung is now shipping a 15TB whopper of an SSD. Farewell, spinning rust

price point, writing on the wall...

I think what we all want is to upgrade our X TB spinning rust to Y TB SSD, where the cost is within %20.

Since X can be values of 4-8, this is the curve to follow.

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NSA boss reveals top 3 security nightmares that keep him awake at night

Re: US critical cyber infrastructure?

@walter bishop

Implement a full irrevocable audit trail on the data and don't put your secret records on the Internet.

We can start with the websites of governments, newspapers and corporations.

The last few decades has seen the "blurring" of what used to be fact via the update process.

Scientific results we can (mostly) reproduce - historical facts we cannot.

Is it not enough that we have ISP's and other data inter-mediaries rewriting webpages?

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Hitchhacker's Guide to RSA clones conference badge with a towel

meego...

My old Nokia N9 could do this - write some of these tags.

Never found a use for it...

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Phew! No evidence found for global criminal hacker conspiracy

@allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

"No evidence found for global criminal hacker conspiracy"

That's the government's job, and they DON'T like competition...

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GitHubber wants to revive the first Unix in a PDP-7 emulator

Re: All I have to say

tesseract (now FOSS'ed by google, originally from HP?) is pretty flexible for learning dirty text.

How do I know this? I had to OCR my sodding bank statements. Subject Access Request in UK, gets you a pile of photocopies typewritten paper - even if you ask for electronic format .Funnily enough, the same happened with my credit union account. I am assuming for security reasons the machine that accesses the records has no output except a printer. Anyone out there know if this is true?

I had to write some perl code to get sense out of tesseract and this is a clue for anyone else who wants this challenge. tesseract is pretty good at putting boxes around characters, but seems to be unable to detect machine printed lines. I wrote a perl alignment code that put the boxes on lines and grouped chars as a machine would - for numbers and mixed text works very well as word lengths are highly column correlated.

Other than that little code exercise, OCR of dirty paper has greatly improved and linux a good platform to do it on.

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Investigatory Powers Bill to be rushed into Parliament on Tuesday

Re: Not Bad News for everyone

worse than that, it's an Island....

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Carolina cop cuffed for 'carjacking'

viz url jacking?

I couldn't read this "article" without "FNAR FNAR" echoing around my mind...

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Confused as to WTF is happening with Apple, the FBI and a killer's iPhone? Let's fix that

another plausible scenario...

@Frank N Stein: Well that's another scenario, parallel construction defence.

I have read a few comments along these lines that the feds have all they need, and they are using this as a springboard for future "behind the scenes" use.

And if you are watching the show with popcorn the NSA just weighed in with "Paris wouldn't have happened if we could read your phone" or something along those lines...sorry no link, its late ;-)

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Re: @Christoph @toughluck

@Kurt Meyer: Thank you for clarifying that.

It is all too easy for us desktop jockeys to assume we have the whole story, when over the centuries has shown that it is not so easy to trust the loudest voice!!

The way my engineering brain sees it is this - it is a high bandwidth world and media is a low frequency sampling mechanism. Hence, we don't get all the components and aliasing is a real problem...;-)

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Re: an afterthought...

Hence my ~thought - but we still have a problem so long as there is the "you must lie for us" laws, that creative despots find a way to deploy.

Still Google and Apple are a start. We need IBM, Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia and some of the other phone, motherboard, tv manufacturers, before we can can start to be confident this is not a false flag operation.

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Re: Which raises an interesting question,...

I have an image of the room in Terminator 2 where the T1000 hand is kept, with a gigantic Apple on the wall with a usb port.

But then, that's scifi and none of that stuff comes true....

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an afterthought...

It occured to me as an afterthought, that this current situation may explain why Apple does not buy it's chips and designs them in house.

Perhaps they had a spook awakening some years back, and this was their defensive tech.

Ultimately Apple's closed garden, may be a double-edged sword, if it means the phone cannot be backdoored...

Disclosure: I have a Huwaei Nexus 6p fully googlfied - I want to hear Google come out and agree with Apple, and also to demonstrate the same level of security...

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Why Tim Cook is wrong: A privacy advocate's view

a few thoughts....

1) A nice article Trevor, seems to have the right tone.

2) Until I read the excellent slashdot comment (regarding the feasibility of Apple caving), it was not clear *how* thorough Apple had been. I urge all other commentards to read this thread, as it is informative on a complex topic.

The optimist in me, wants to see what Google proposes for Android....

Maybe the tech industry will recognise their future depends on their devices being secure, against all foes....

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Louisville says yes to Google Fiber. Funny story: AT&T, TWC didn't want that to happen

Re: Good.

Well I'm still getting twice weekly "High Speed (1.5Mbs) Internet !!!!!!!!!!" offers from ATT. </miffed>

See, they KNOW I have DSL via a competitor, and so they pitch the prices to initially lower (put them out of business) and then higher (now they have you hooked).

Hence, until we get Google Fiber to announce, we have laughable duopoly of ATT and Comcast, both promising the Earth and delivering derisable services.

It would help if bandwidth could be unbundled from digital services (e.g. movies, audio etc..).

The conflict of interest to screw up net neutrality (slow competitor, bless their own) and impose bandwidth caps (except for their service), and insist 1.5Mbs is "fast enough".

The point about 1Gb/s , is not that you may EVER need it, but it enables future of much great service distribution.

Bandwidth caps are the rusty bearings on this wagon, heading west on the internet highway..

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Good.

Now let's see if our local politicians get a notice.

I might have to write a letter...

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De-anonymising data should be a criminal offence, says MPs report

Re: Numpties

only because there is no "none of the above" candidate.

If "none of the above" wins, we should discard the candidates and start with a new list.

Perhaps political parties would start to take the process seriously, rather than promoting candidates whose only skill seems to be being electable.

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Three storage upstarts hit back at doom, gloom 'n' layoffs news

owncloud...

I have owncloud on my phone(s), desktop, and remote as well.

I paid for the app on the phone, everything else was FOSS, and it makes sharing data with third parties very straightforward.

They get a secure URL which you can password protect, and time limit.

So far, it does what it says on the tin.

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