Posts by MOH

Apple takes another swing at Epic, says Unreal Engine could be a 'trojan horse' threatening security

Aren't Apple actually arguing against themselves?

Hang on. So Apple are arguing that they should be entitled to preserve the sanctity of their App store and its 30% cut, which is justified because they vet apps in order to protect their customers' data (and children's data!).

And that they have the right to kick Epic off the store, because Epic submitted (and Apple approved) a wildly popular app which contained an entire payment mechanism as a Trojan horse .... thus demonstrating that Apple's much vaunted scrutiny isn't nearly as thorough as they claim.

At least Epic's hidden functionality was clearly designed to be very publicly visible once activated and spark a confrontation with Apple.

How many other apps might there be on the app store which secretly harvest customers' data (and children's data!).

If anything, Apple's line of argument just proves that the security they supposedly provide doesn't actually exist, and thus the 30% is completely unjustified?

Russian hacker selling how-to vid on exploiting unsupported Magento installations to skim credit card details for $5,000

Are they selling the exploit on a Magento store?

It's not so much an upgrade as a quite different product though

Shine on you crazy diamond: We don't know who needs to hear it but NASA's explained the weird shape of the Bennu asteroid

Interesting. Both as an explanation of the asteroid shape, but it also has personal ramifications. The mirror shows a thinning of material from my northern pole, and I've noticed a similar accumulation of material resulting in a bulging out around my equator, particularly in recent months since I'm at home much more often. I'm relieved to know this is just down to solar radiation and my microgravity environment.

Forget Fortnite and FIFA: India wants to develop games based on local legends

"But then again, twenty years ago it was hard to imagine an Italian plumber with Japanese cartoon sensibilities as capable of inspiring endless hours of entertainment."

I know it makes us all feel old, but you might want to revisit the "twenty years" figure. Possibly by a factor of two.

Google wants to listen in to whatever you get up to in hotel rooms

"Whatever reason is driving you to consider staying in a hotel room, you know you want to take as many precautions as possible," wrote Tom Franklin, product manager for Google Assistant"

Quite true. And the first precaution on the list will be running your spyware under the shower. Or possibly using it briefly to report that the toilet is clogged, just in case the Nest doesn't flush.

NASA to stop using names like 'Eskimo Nebula' and 're-examine' what it calls cosmic objects

Re: Ban all Homonyms!

Careful now. Master? You're clearly a monster

Q: What’s big, red and pulses UV light into the cosmos three times a night? A: Mars

Re: The Chances Of Anything Coming From Mars Are A Million To One He Said

Genius. *checks calendar* Uh oh. Just when I thought 2020 couldn't get even worse ....

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

Re: I must be missing something...

Or page -2

WTF is cloud-tethered compute? We're not sure either, but it just made a hype cycle for the first time

Seriously. Have any of Gartner's predictions ever happened?

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

Re: Reply to Linus Torvalds

No, there isn't. There is absolutely zero body count related to the terminology used in the Linux kernel. Or to people failing to comprehend words like blacklist and ascribing some non-existent racist connotation. Suggesting otherwise is the kind of idiotic nonsense that is rapidly propelling me along the road towards becoming an indifferent arsehole.

Another anti-immigrant rant goes viral in America – and this time it's by a British, er, immigrant tech CEO

They are now, apparently

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

When are we changing traffic lights?

... and associated phrases such as "to greenlight something"

Clearly green indicating safety, something positive, while orange indicates a warning, negative, is offensive to certain section of the community in Northern Ireland.

Traffic light colours must be replaced with something more inclusive without delay.

The internet becomes trademarkable, sort of, with near-unanimous Supreme Court ruling on Booking.com

This would be far more clear-cut if it had actually applied to washingmachines instead of booking, since it would clearly have been necessary to ensure the company's long-term survival.

Everyone knows that washingmachines lives longer with .com

Remember when we warned in February Apple will crack down on long-life HTTPS certs? It's happening: Chrome, Firefox ready to join in, too

Re: Microsoft Doesn't Matter at This Point

Well they've a great track record on that front

Amazon's not saying its warehouse staff are dumb... but it feels they need artificial intelligence to understand what 'six feet' means

Maybe they could get the employees to wear wristbands that electrocute them in real time if they get too close? For their own good, of course

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

That's exactly the problem.

It's the typical fallacy of "We have to do something. This is something. Therefore we have to do this".

Instead of anything that might be actually effective MS can point at having done this and get a load of good publicity out of it. In the process it introduces practical downsides which will irritate people, so when the next thing comes along which might actually make a different they're just a tiny bit more jaded and less likely to get on board.

It's actually worse than useless, which is why it's so annoying.

Re: Master copy

If some people choose to force a completely unrelated context on a word being used in a completely different sense, that's on them.

But if we're going to go down that route, 'git' itself is fairly problematic since it originates from beget and is a related insult.

I find it highly unprofessional and insulting that there's no move underway to change the service name from B*stardHub.

BBC voice assistant promises to summon streams even if you're just a little bit Brahms and Liszt

"The voice assistant will only start when it hears the "OK Beeb" cue. Though the BBC warns that Beeb can activate itself it if hears something similar."

That's clearly going to cause some problems for Twiki

Software bug in Bombardier airliner made planes turn the wrong way

" the software turned their aeroplane in the wrong direction while it was following the published missed approach, something that generally does not happen"

Generally?

Surprise! That £339 world's first 'anti-5G' protection device is just a £5 USB drive with a nice sticker on it

Googling the "resident professor" attached to the project yields a fairly insane website that I'm not going to dignify with a link. Also because it's physically painful to read.

There he's also selling the "Tesla Radiation Balancer" (a sticker with a picture of Nikola on it) that protects you from the likes of microwaves, radios, wifi routers, and mobile phones, which were actually designed to give you cancer.

He also has a whole spiel about his research work, which appears to involve crystals, dodecahedrons, and a new "energy unit" that responds to love and thoughts.

Oh, and he also developed the only safe nuclear waste management system.

He makes Timecube look almost sane.

Dude, where's my laser?

If they did think at the time the beam was going to melt the steel plate, were they not worried about where it might have actually ended up?

Like maybe, London? https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-23930675

(And they tried to cover it up by blaming it on a poor building)

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

Welcome to Friday the 82nd of March

It's the 83rd, surely? 52nd of April?

IBM Watson GPU cloud cluster Brexits from London to Frankfurt – because GDPR

Re: Pointless And Political

You sure about that?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/23/uk_snoopers_charter_sequel/

Internet root keymasters must think they're cursed: First, a dodgy safe. Now, coronavirus upends IANA ceremony

I got as far as "“This bag will not be opened until within the ceremony so that each TCR can witness their key is in the same condition as when they released it." and my brain started playing the Mission Impossible music, along with images of shocked looks as the bags turn out to be empty. Meanwhile, they keys have been intercepted and used to .... meh, probably just to redirect news sites to 5G coronvavirus penis-enlarging lizard-men conspiracy sites.

Trello! It is me... you locked the door? User warns of single sign-on risk after barring self from own account

Re: handing over access of said personal data to a 3rd party that had no right to it

It's not up to the user to prove that the company has no right to their personal data.

It's up to the company to demonstrate that they have a right to store and process the user's personal data.

That you think the onus is on the user is not supported by law.

FYI: When Virgin Media said it leaked 'limited contact info', it meant p0rno filter requests, IP addresses, IMEIs as well as names, addresses and more

"Virgin Media added it is developing a tool to allow customers to search exactly what of their account information was exposed."

I can't help feeling part 2 of this story is yet to come

Reddit gets downvoted as site takes a Wednesday tumble

That's quite a long lunch break!

We're afraid it might be terminal: Tesco top-up box looking less than tip-top

I'm quite interested in "Schools that are best to Get Ready to get a Job in Astronomy". Apparently they can often be found in bags of 5.

Then there's the hilarious "Omnivend Launches Next Generation Kiosk" from 2013, with a picture that looks very like the one in the article. Next Generation indeed!

Attention! Very important science: Tapping a can of fizzy beer does... absolutely nothing

Tapping a can seems like a lot off effort. Surely it's much more efficient to tap a keg?

BOFH: When was the last time someone said these exact words to you: You are the sunshine of my life?

My ISP sent me a customer satisfaction survey, which I used to highlight the billing issues I'd been trying to get their support team to fix for almost a year.

They replied very apologetically, promise to investigate the issue, and of course it vanished into the same black hole as all my previous requests.

A few months later, they sent me another customer satisfaction survey. I raised the issue again. I got a snotty reply that I should't be complaining about that because I'd already complained about it the previous time.

I'll definitely be complaining about the response on the next survey.

US court rules: Just because you can extract teeth while riding a hoverboard doesn't mean you should

Re: Misread the title at first

No!! That would be madness!

Behold the Internet of Turf: IoT sucks waste energy from living plants to speak to satellites

Disappointing

... that there's no power plant references.

Interesting idea. Although there's a potential catch-22 if the plant-powered sensor that notifies you when the plant needs care ends up being the reason the plant needs care.

There's something fishy going down in the computer lab

Good point. Otherwise the results would be quite unforthete.

GitLab pulls U-turn on plan to crank up usage telemetry after both staff and customers cry foul

Re: Typical

Snowplowed on with it?

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Re: Would someone explain

Them's the brakes

How do we stop filling the oceans with Lego? By being a BaaS-tard, toy maker suggests

Re: Lego is heirloom material

Two birds, one stone: just build the roof truss out of Lego

Astroboffins baffled after spotting solar system with great gas giant that shouldn't exist

Re: The standard model of planet formation

And this is their sofa, is it?

I'm tempted to downvote you for not saying "rouge" and giving me something to complain about

Behold the perils of trying to turn the family and friends support line into a sideline

Re: Obligatory XKCD

Work experience from college a long time ago, back in the days when people had individual printers connect to their machines. Got a call one Monday morning from somebody saying their printer wasn't working. "But it was fine on Friday!". To my shame I wasted 10 minutes before I noticed the cable was missing. "Well I didn't take it!", the user claimed, looking everywhere except at me.

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw: Well, lookie here! For once a space game that doesn't promise the universe

Enjoyed the original Rebel Galaxy, so this is on the list.

It might sound weird to say about a top down game, but I've just discovered Star Sector, which is the closest spiritual successor to the original Elite I've seen in a long time. In development ten years and still in pre-release, but has an astonishing amount of depth, a dynamic economy which includes factors like pirate attacks and stability of a region, faction politics, fleet level battles with excellent AI, player owned colonies, and probably more stuff I haven't found yet.

Doesn't have 3D or multiplayer, but well worth a look for a single-player Elite-style experience.

Bloke who claimed he invented Bitcoin must hand over $5bn of e-dosh in court case. He can't. He's waiting for a time traveler to arrive

Re: Time

In that case the Basilisk is going to be reallllly unhappy with him

Re: Who is more crazy?

Well, technically it is, but just at the usual rate of one second per second

Beware the developer with time on his hands and dreams of Disney

I remember someone doing something a bit similar about ten years ago. Posted something on the company intranet site vaguely Christmas related and thought it would be cute to decorate the page with a constant stream of snowflakes.

Not sure exactly what they did but the more people who opened it the slower performance got until people trying to access documents they needed for work on the same server were being hit with endless delays.

I think Christmas was banned after that

No REST for the wicked: Ruby gem hacked to siphon passwords, secrets from web devs

Re: Review changes to 3rd party code

51000 weekly downloads ....

Criminal mastermind signed name as 'Thief' on receipts after buying stuff with stolen card

This is pretty much a direct rewrite of the linked story, including some of the original phrasing. I know it's Friday but there's limits.

Green search engine Ecosia thinks Google's Android auction stinks, gives bid a hard pass

We're sorry we abused our dominant position.

Please send $1M to Sorrydude .....

Researchers peer into crystal ball to see future where everyone's ID is tied to their smartphone

Re: "mobile versions will be easy to scale quickly"

I'm not sure even Gartner would have the gall to charge £2000 for the report, which this crowd are unless I'm missing something in the page linked at the end. Hmmm. Maybe it's time to set up my own forecasting company.

Talk about unintended consequences: GDPR is an identity thief's dream ticket to Europeans' data

Or he could be a total stranger who moved in after someone else moved out.