Posts by joeW

Trump attacks and appeals 'fundamentally misconceived' Twitter block decision

Re: Personal brand

I imagine a person could make a lot of money by running a loss-making casino.

Not legally, of course.

My god, it's full of tsars: A gun-toting Russian humanoid robot is on its way to the International Space Station

Re: "the bot will be carrying out menial tasks"

Hopefully into the folk metal cover version by Turisas.

Re: "the bot will be carrying out menial tasks"

Here's an article about it from two weeks ago:

http://news.ifmo.ru/en/science/cyberphysics/news/8710/

Uncle Sam is asking Americans if they could refrain from slapping guns on their drones

Re: But...but

Well that's handy. The bits that suit you still mean the same, the bit that don't are just misinterpreted.

Reminds me of another old document that's still causing arguments.

Overstock dot-gone: Surplus biz CEO now surplus to requirements, ejects after Russian spy fling, deep state rant

Re: "our keiretsu of blockchain firms"

We're well past benzohydrophenylatrium here.

Nurse, fetch the dried frog pills.

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

Re: The laptop was on and you were logged in...

You can certainly talk about doing it at least.

Re: The "Cowards" comment

I've stepped into fights twice in my life, and in one of those I took a few hefty hits and needed three stitches for my trouble. I'd do it again if someone was getting beaten on, but no fucking way would I do so for someone else's laptop or phone.

The "Cowards" comment

"everyone in the coffee shop, save two guys who came and talked to me afterwards, chose to ignore the whole thing and wouldn't even make eye contact afterwards. Cowards, I muttered under my breath."

Mate, I'm not sure why you think other people should risk their necks to protect your shiny tech toy. Fair enough, if you were being beaten or otherwise physically harmed, calling people cowards for not intervening would be somewhat justified.

Don't panic! Don't panic! UK IT job ads plummet as Brexit uncertainty grabs UK tech sector by the short and curlies

Don't worry, the NHS will be getting an extra £350 million per week soon. I heard it from a most trustworthy source.

Ask Jacob Rees-Mogg.

iFrame clickjacking countermeasures appear in Chrome source code. And it only took *checks calendar* three years

Re: iFrames are evil

They certainly have their place in a deveopler's toolbox, but I agree they are one of the more frequently abused tags out there.

Dropbox would rather write code twice than try to make C++ work on both iOS and Android

"He said the open-source culture in the C++ dev community is weak, especially when it comes to mobile, so they had to build frameworks to address cross-language type declarations and interface bindings"

Presumably they then open-sourced these frameworks, to help strengthen the culture he thinks is weak?

Police costs for Gatwick drone fiasco double to nearly £900k – and still no one's been charged

Re: They did exist

Do you have a link to the CCTV footage?

Six-day cruise lies ahead for India's Chandrayaan-2 probe before the real lunar shenanigans begin

Re: Earth First!

And the last thing will be purveyors of lazy jokes.

Cisc-o-no! 'We’re being uninvited to bid' on China deals admits CEO as Middle Kingdom snub freaks out investors

Re: The Great Wall of "Thanks, but no thanks. We're good."

They could have used chemical weapons that caused birth defects!

Oh wait....

J'accuse! Amazon's Rekognition reckons 1 in 5 Californian lawmakers are crims in ACLU test

Re: 1 in 5 lawmakers ...

Great idea mate, Nullus Anxietas!

Tor pedos torpedoed again, this time Feds torpedo four Tor pedos – and keep how they unmasked dark-web scumbags under wraps

According to a police detective I know who works in this area, it's pretty rare for anyone to remain in the department after they have kids of their own.

I could throttle you right about now: US Navy to ditch touchscreens after kit blamed for collision

"The review is also pushing for more commonality between ships of the same class so that functions and information on screens appears in the same place and on the same menus"

Why in heaven's name would this not already be the case?

Xbox daddy bakes bread with 4,000-year-old Egyptian yeast

Re: Its all in the temperature

Nobody is talking about fine tea - we're talking proper stuff, tea that you can stand your spoon up in before you even add the four sugars. Tea that would tarnish gold. Tea that counts as a meal as well as a drink.

Tea that makes me (an Irishman) think "Maybe that empire the British used to have wasn't *all* bad".

Hey dudes, we need to start living together in Harmony: Huawei puffs up new distributed OS

"and it remains unclear what Trump will do next"

I think that goes without saying at this point.

Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's personal MiG-29 fighter jet goes under the hammer

According to my extensive research (I checked Wikipedia), the A4 isn't supersonic.

Re: I ♥ Mig 29

Yes, that paint job on the tail is absolutely beautiful.

BOFH: Oh, go on, let's flush all that legacy tech down the toilet

Re: Check everyday

Sure, if you want to take all the fun out of it...

Fed-up graphic design outfit dangles cash to anyone who can free infosec of hoodie pics

Pitching their contest at Infosec bods

And yet I had to enable/trust javascript from three different domains (their own, and two alphabetti-spaghetti cloudflare subdomains) in order to expand the Terms and Conditions fine print sections on their website.

Omni(box)shambles? Google takes aim at worldwide web yet again

Re: Promises made…

Not sure how you feel about Vivaldi, but tab groups (and tab tiling) and my number one reason for switching to it as my daily driver.

Watch as 10 cops with guns and military camo storm suspected Capital One hacker's house…

Re: A little sensationalism?

No, but they do often leave bullets behind in those situations.

Azure consultant to sue Google for linking his cached pics to cloned site, breach of copyright

Alternative headline - "Azure Consultant Has Apparently Never Heard Of A Fucking robots.txt File"

The pro-privacy Browser Act has re-appeared in US Congress. But why does everyone except right-wing trolls hate it?

Re: BROWSER Act

In my former life as a call center phone drone, we derived some giggles from the "DP Training Sessions" we were occasionally expected to attend.

BROWSER Act

Apparently stands for "Balancing the Rights Of Web Surfers Equally and Responsibly Act"

What the fuck is up with the Yanks having to slap torturously contrived backronyms onto every piece of legislation?

Microsoft adds Internet Explorer mode to Chromium Edge, announces roadmap

Re: 2019 ?

A year ago I was hired to modernise the front end of an in-house application that was written for IE5 and is still in use today. Framesets, it had been a while since I had to deal with those... especially when the top frame had a load of hidden input fields which were used to persist user data across different pages of the application.

We've come a long way baby.

Bulb smart meters in England wake up from comas miraculously speaking fluent Welsh

Re: monthly readings not appearing on accounts

Before I managed to bite, kick and drag myself into an IT career, I used to work in the call center for a large electricity provider. A few things to note about that trick you mention:

1 - a lot of people did it

2 - we, the front-line phone drones, knew very well what you were doing

3 - we really didn't give two fucks if you went for a believable number of units or not :)

Humans may be able to live on Mars within halls of aerogel – a wonder material that can trap heat and block radiation

Re: Why not test it on earth?

It's more translucent than transparent.

Scientist, war hero and gay icon Alan Turing is new face of the £50 note

Re: Captcha

Really? Because I feel his legacy has been sullied by people thinking he's only getting the attention because of "gay advocacy" and the like.

Literally rings our bell: Scottish eggheads snap quantum entanglement for the first time

Re: Nice symmetry.

"As above, so below"

Scots NHS symptom checker pings Facebook, Google and other ad peddlers

Re: Typical bureaucratic crassness

"do Google et al pay off the third-party website creators to add all this spycruft?"

Not in my experience, no. Usually added by client request (probably because it gives them some pretty visuals to wow their senior management with).

Internet imbeciles, aka British ISP lobbyists, backtrack on dubbing Mozilla a villain for DNS-over-HTTPS support

"the police have complained about the 'unintended consequences'"

Good enough for me, where do I sign up?

Microsoft has Windows 1.0 retrogasm: Remember when Windows ran in kilobytes, not gigabytes?

Re: "Why Windows 1.0?"

Bravo, I almost downvoted you on instinct.

Samsung tears wraps off Bixby Marketplace, tens of people go wild. (One at the back whispers, 'Siri, what's Bixby?')

Re: Why?

Why would a non-American tech company be devoting a lot of time and effort into "rolling their own" versions of existing American-owned services?

It's a YUGE mystery.

Cloudflare hits the deck, websites sink from sight after the internet springs yet another BGP leak

Re: The Cloudflare...

Same description could be applied to the Internet in general.

Good old British 'fair play' is the answer to vexed Huawei question, claims security minister

Re: "we're British, we believe in fair play"

Only lately?

Now you can have a twist of 2019 in your 2012: Microsoft goes back to the future with Edge on Windows 7/8

Re: Do M$ have a clue.

[CTRL]+[F5]

Japan drops banhammer on drunk-droning for the sake of public safety

Gatwick

Was it ever proven that there really was a drone near the airport?

When customers see red, sometimes the obvious solution will only fan the flames

Re: Dolt

Yes, especially when it was (in Harry's own words) a nice quiet morning to begin with.

2,500 years ago, these folks weren't cremated – but their funeral-goers were absolutely baked: Earliest evidence of pot smoking discovered

I don't disagree with any of that, but no matter how much harder THC hit them than me I doubt it would result in hallucinations.

“We deduce that they communicate with the nature, spirits or the deceased people in a hallucinogenic state,” Yang said

I've never associated weed with a hallucinogenic state. Yang must be getting some serious shit.

This is grim, Vim and Neovim: Opening this crafty file in your editor may pwn your box. Patch now if not already

"Invader Vim" gave me a chuckle.

Silicon Valley doesn't care about poor people: Top AI models kinda suck at ID'ing household stuff in hard-up nations

This confused me too. Surely if something isn't actively cooled then it is not, in fact, a refrigerator.

These boffins' deepfake AI vids are next-gen. But don't take our word for it. Why not ask Zuck or Kim Kardashian...

Re: Flashed list of IP addresses.....

I was seeing angled text protruding from both of the embedded Instagram posts, could be related to those perhaps?

Wholesome: Waste heat from coal power station turned data centre to help grow veggies

Re: While reusing waste heat is undoubtedly beneficial

Young man, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.

Crime doesn't pay? Crime doesn't do secure coding, either: Akamai bug-hunters find hijack hole in bank phishing kit

The real Criminal Activity...

...being the use of PHP.