Posts by Androgynous Cupboard 952 posts • joined 7 Mar 2012
Improving my eyesight would only give me a better view of the misery squalor and degradation that is modern britain, as we plunge headlong into the bleak winter with our international trade ruined, national health service stretched to breaking, food shortages likely, on a train driven blind by the least capable political leadership in living memory. Improved eyesight? All I can see is death. Death death death.
Have a super day.
In the UK? Go to your "NHS patient access" page (https://app.patientaccess.com) detailing al your medical records. It loads the google-analytics.com/analytics.js, as well as content from googletagmanager.com
Click on anything llisted on your health record, and it takes you to a site: "patient.info", which - as well as the usual batch of advertising cookies (doubleclick, amazon-adsystem, plus a huge number of behind-the-scenes trackers), it also loads google-analytics.com/analytics.js
Can we conclude that google are able to link the two? And that google could have a reasonable guess as to which medical conditions you have?
Britain has a shortage of affordable housing. A woman starved to death in scotland last month, and we are widely expected to have nationwide supply issues after brexit. We are not without gang rape, and a falling conviction rate. We have political incompetence and corruption (Robert Jenrick and Richard Desmond being the most recent). We have a long history of sectarian violence and religious prejudice in several flavours, and up to and including politicians and journalists inciting hatred of and violence against muslims.
I don't want to downplay India's obvious social issues, but people in glass houses etc.
Indeed. In fact if you think about it, this change is actually good for advertisers. First, they're paying for 50% less impressions so that's 50% less spend. Second, the people that are seeing their ads are the ones that don't have any major issue with internet advertising, meaning the click-rate should - in theory - go up.
The only people that stand to lose from this are Facebook. I can not imagine a violin small enough to play the appropriately sad music for this.
As Frankie Boyle observed when playing to his home crowd in Glasgow, they swear so much that "fucking" just means there's a noun on the way. Would have made for some more interesting edits:
In fucking Greek meethology, the fucking Minotaur wis a fucking creatur wi the fucking heid o a fucking bull an the fucking body o a fucking man or, as describit bi fucking Roman poet Ovid, a being "pairt fucking man an pairt fucking bull". The fucking Minotaur wis eventually killed bi the fucking Athenian hero Theseus.
I've built a very simple Json parser in Java. Hosted on github, no dependencies, single package, ant script to build it is about 15 lines. I thought I might integrate it with a Java Json benchmark suite, for which I needed to have it building under Maven and distributed from bintray.
I spent literally a day on this before I gave up. Getting it to compile under maven was manageable, although more verbose than it should be. But the precise incantation required to get it distribute from bintray and make it a "proper maven module" was beyond me. The sheer complexity of the layers wrapper around what is a very simple requirement made me weep for the industry. I can't sum it up better than in this image.
Well you say that.
But I just bought a watermelon for half the price of an apple. It has pips, just like the apple, and it also has a green outside just like the apple. The watermelon is a decent 17", and unlike your overpriced apple I can eat it all day without it running out of juice.
So you apple-loving sheeple go ahead and pay your malus tax, we watermelon eaters will continue to think you're crazy, and will wittily demonstrate this by throwing in an out-of-context "you're holding it wrong". For japes.
A quick google and I expect our anonymous, paranoid-sounding colleague has been on the reddit forum linked to above. In particular they may have had a read through this research paper: https://penetrum.com/tiktok/Penetrum_TikTok_Security_Analysis_whitepaper.pdf
I've had a read through. Yes, I can see they harvest a huge amount of information, but it seems to be harvested by a SAAS component from appsflyer, an American company. A bit shit, yes, but also seems a bit rich to point out a chinese company for harvesting data if they're using an american service to do so.
As for the rest of the research from that paper, I would grade it "poor". They've established that a call is made to Runtime.getRuntime().exec(), but have failed to establish what for. I suspect this is the grounds for the breathless "can download and run ANYTHING !!?!?!" claim. They've also picked out use of the MD5 hash algo as some sort of evidence that Tiktok are cryptographically incompetent, which annoys me - MD5 is fine for general hashing, just not cryptographic hashing. Without analysis of how it's used it's a baseless claim.
There are a few other areas which are a bit more concerning - a possible SQL injection in particular - but with virtually no analysis beyond what looks like a quick scan through after reverse-compiling, I'm left more concerned about the sorry state of todays reverse engineers than I am about TikTok. The "oooh, China" factor is getting in the way of any useful conclusions.
You've misunderstood. £6.5m is the threshold above which you can no longer file abbreviated accounts. All we've managed to evidence is that two lads running what is not much more than an extremely well-marketed corner store were unable to turn over more than £3.25m each, which isn't going to surprise many.
I say good luck to them, beards and all. It's not like they're dumping nuclear waste in Africa.
I had my phone linked to my motorcycle helmet headset. What I didn't know about was that the iPhone has - on, by default - a feature where you press the button on the side 5 times and it dials emergency services.
Naturally it did just this halfway down the A3, with the phone safely tucked in my bag out of reach. Explaining to the operator that I had no idea why my phone had called them was awkward, but not as awkward as saying "no, YOU hang up" when he asked me to end the call - I hadn't yet worked out the buttons on the unit. The best bit was I got to do it again 10 minutes later.
Using a symbol used by the Nazis to indicate left-wing or anti-nazi sympathies, to attack a group that has left-wing and anti-nazi sympathies? While it's possible it's because someone just liked triangles, I think it's likely to be either deliberate, or ignorant and stupid. Both should concern you.
(edit: Rush Limbaugh? Hannity? Dearest irony, I see bob is unaware of your presence as always)
Not that it will probably be a popular opinion around here, but while it was bad for you sitting around doing nothing, it was probably worse for your boss - as an ex-boss and old-friend observed, hosing away million quid a month on salaries with no income to back it is not sustainable for long. A few friends have set up service companies only to fold them a few years later - they expanded in the good years, then suffered some bad ones.
> They only turn the donors into useful meat when they need the meat, until then they're alive. You really don't have a problem with it?
I most certainly do have a problem with capital punishment / state-sanctioned murder, but that applies to many countries - China, the US, Saudi Arabia. What they do with the corpse afterwards doesn't seem to be the important part.
> I'd really love to know how you feel about this in 20 or 30 years time. Either you're naive to the risks or you're already self censoring
America is evidentially an imperialist power; China, less so. Don't get me wrong, it's a poor choice either way, but China are already at arms length - it's easier to keep them out. America has wormed it's way into our culture, or legal system and more. The closer the ties, the more they have to gain by exploiting them.
Finally, you've again tried to bring up a moral argument. You can if you like, it's a reasonable one, but to repeat - it's not the one influencing this decision. I can promise you that Iain Duncan-Smith doesn't give a flying fuck about the Uighurs.
Funnily enough, of all the things the Chinese government do wrong I think I have the least problem with that. Once you're dead you're just meat, you may as well be useful meat.
But it's also a distraction. No one in government at any point has said this was to do with human rights or anything other than concerns over the state security apparatus. And on that argument, I find China to be considerably less of a threat than the US.
They won't work you know. This is a purely emotional response from a bunch of ra-ra-brexit backbenchers who will do whatever it takes to try and find a trade deal that's not with Europe. And "whatever it takes" currently involves dancing to the strings of the lunatics running the US (into the toilet).
Technical, financial or any other sort of rational arguments are irrelevant. The only way you'll get Huawei kit into the UK is by offering us very, very cheap chicken to go with it.
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