Posts by Dave559

Pretend starship captain to take trip in real space capsule

Re: Use the force Kirk

Klaatu barada nikto?

Element celebrates The Great Facebook Outage with a Signal bridge for Matrix

Re: How does Signal fund itself?

Not quite. Signal was originally and is developed by Moxie Marlinspike and others, and then at a later point in time WhatsApp liked what Signal were doing regarding encryption and so they also adopted Signal's encryption technology in WhatsApp.

Even later, after WhatsApp sold itself to Facebook, and after he didn't like the direction that Facebook was going in, Brian Acton, one of the WhatsApp founders, decided to more strongly support Signal and helped to set up and finance the Signal Technology Foundation (using some of the money he earned from the sale of WhatsApp to Facebook), which supports the ongoing development of Signal.

[Interestingly, the support for the Signal Technology Foundation is apparently in the form of an interest-free loan (see page 31 of non-textual PDF), rather than a donation (thanks to Signal Technology Foundation article on Wikipedia for the link).]

We have some sad news about Facebook. It has returned to the internet after six-hour mega outage

Re: Facebook was down?

"Oh dear. How sad. Nevermind."

Here we are now, entertain us? :-P

Re: OM!

I saw what you did there, adam 40. That's a very enlightened pun.

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram deplatform themselves: Services down globally

include ‘windsor-davies.gif’;

Re: I just need someone to know

Yeah, but: Pics or it didn’t happen! ;-)

What if Chrome broke features of the web and Google forgot to tell anyone? Oh wait, that's exactly what happened

Re: Chrome?

Google stole the name from Netscape/Mozilla, who half-jokingly-half-seriously used the term "chrome" [1] to refer to everything that made up the shiny parts of the browser interface: things we know and love, and nowadays mostly sadly miss (thanks to the arrival of equally accursed short-screen low-resolution laptops), like proper (accessible/usable) menu bars, navigation controls, tool bars, etc.

The irony being that Google Chrome has virtually nothing resembling an attractive or usable interface at all (its settings scrapheap being perhaps a particular case in point.)

[1] At this point, I'm obliged to add "There is only XUL!" [2], otherwise something large, white and squishy (and smelling slightly of marshmallows) will come along and trample us all underfoot. Whew, thank goodness that didn't happen…

[2] And XUL did allow all sorts of clever (and multi-platform) interface stuff, but was perhaps a bit too clever and potentially insecure (having great powers) for its own good in the end.

"Web standard browser"

Once upon a time, the W3C actually did have Amaya (and previously Arena) as a "web standard browser". Amaya was interesting, it had web editing actually built-in as an intrinsic function of the browser (the web was always intended to be a two-way medium, not just read-only).

Xero, Slack suffer outages just as Let's Encrypt root cert expiry downs other websites, services

Re: Why make changes on last /first day of the month?

These are sound ideas, but here the problem is that LetsEncrypt was relying on another organisation's existing intermediate cert (created a long time ago, when people perhaps didn't think of that) and it happens to expire when it happens to expire, so there's not really a lot they can do about that.

tz database community up in arms over proposals to merge certain time zones

"And the EU is spread over at least five time zones with Greece on one end and Cabo Verde on the other."

And parts of the EU spread even further around the world than that: France isn't just "metropolitan France", for example. In fact, perhaps that's the current "empire on which the sun never sets"? ;-D

One-size-fits-all chargers? What a great idea! Of course Apple would hate it

VGA

A sensible move: USB-C is a robust connector that will likely be good enough for a decade, at least. Eventually, maybe it'll be necessary to squirt more power or data down it than the standards will eventually allow for, but in the meantime, a common sensible standard for all power connections is definitely a Good Thing.

The next thing that it would be useful to turn our attention to is why on earth new monitors, generally with 1920×1080 or higher resolution, are still being shipped with effectively useless VGA cables in the box when this resolution is beyond the limit of what VGA connections can reliably output. Surely we can safely assume that everyone buying such monitors nowadays has a device with an HDMI (or DisplayPort) output, and if, for some weird reason, you are one of a surely tiny number who do still need to plug the monitor into something with only a VGA output, you should just buy a VGA cable separately. Manufacturing and supplying all these near useless cables by default is a very real waste of resources.

Metro Bank techies placed at risk of redundancy, severance terms criticised

Re: Moving to Agile working

Why does this sound like we can fairly soon expect Metro Bank to join RBS/NatWest and TSB on the growing list of spectacularly mismanaged IT systems failures…?

Macmillan best-biscuit list unexpectedly promotes breakfast cereal to treat status

Re: Cherry Jaffa Cakes

As well as normal orange jaffa cakes, Lidl does not only cherry ones, but also raspberry ones and strawberry ones whenever the weekly specials globe of international delicacies spins its way around to Polish week. I'm not particularly keen on the strawberry ones, but the other two are yummy!

Apple's M1 MacBook screens are stunning – stunningly fragile and defective, that is, lawsuits allege

Dear Apple, please forget about this stupid, destructive, obsession with thinness already

Dear Apple, please fuck off with this stupid, destructive, obsession with thinness already!

Did you learn nothing from those several iterations of defective keyboard designs (which also, you will recall, cost you a lot in repairs and compensation)?

Yes, I expect that some of these instances of damage may be a result of things inadvertently left twixt keyboard and screen, but not all.

I'm sure that literally absolutely nobody will object to their laptop being a couple of mm thicker, if that helps to make it rather stronger and more resilient to risk of damage.

Yes, of course there's now malware for Windows Subsystem for Linux

Re: How this works

"We know it's broken, we don't care, use it at your own risk sucker!"

If we're being fair (and I have absolutely no fondness for MS-Windows myself), don't pretty much all OSes have this sort of disclaimer? (Possibly some specialist real-time OSes might be an exception to this)

Brits open doors for tech-enabled fraudsters because they 'don't want to seem rude'

Re: Please, call me!

No, it's simply that "We're calling from (your bank / the IT Helpdesk), and you need to (transfer your money to this safe account as your bank account has been compromised / fill in this form with your login details to prevent your mailbox being deleted by tomorrow)" sadly takes in more people than you would think. The scammers don't actually say up front that they are going to steal your money or hijack your account…

We're all cynical B(OFH)s here, but sadly still far too many people are instinctively trusting and all too easily get taken in by something that sounds alarming and urgent, and, as long as the call/message is at least rudimentarily official sounding/looking, it all too often works.

Apple debuts iPhone 13 with 1TB option, two iPad models, Series 7 Watch

Apple Watch battery life

"overall [Apple Watch] battery life remains unchanged, at about 18 hours"

A watch that doesn't even last a full 24 hours is a bit of a joke. At the very least, that's the minimum baseline target they should be aiming for. Accidentally forget to charge it overnight and it becomes useless, possibly requiring a spare charger (and extra expense) at work, to make your expensive gadget become useful again: just think of the hundreds of steps and hours of panicked heartbeats you won't have logged in the intervening period!

What exactly does a smartwatch do that sucks battery life quite so insanely hard? Does it really need quite as much bling as it presumably must have? A plain old digital watch (not really a fair comparison, I know) usually has battery life of at least a year, if not two or three. A smartwatch obviously does a lot more computing than that, but there must surely be a sweet spot somewhere where you can have greater power efficiency and battery life lasting for at least a long weekend, no?

Samsung: We will remotely brick smart TVs looted from our warehouse

Lord Elpuss v Samsung

Good for you for trying to fight back against this sort of ad-pimping shit!

If The Reg wouldn't be willing/able to help follow up, perhaps NOYB (None of Your Business: Max Schrems' campaign group) might be?

Re: Everybody can do that

I thought that most (not-so-)smart TVs tended to effectively brick themselves after a couple of years anyway? This app doesn't get updated, that app doesn't get updated, a TV channel switches to a different app or technology and leaves owners of existing TVs in the lurch, etc.

Before you know it, your 'smart' TV is thoroughly lobotomised and you wonder why you didn't just buy a normal, cheaper, TV, and stick a TV stick of some flavour into a spare HDMI port?

Firefox 91 introduces cookie clearing, clutter-free printing, Microsoft single sign-on... so where are all the users?

Re: That's not a very useful option

@DS999 You want the Firefox Cookie AutoDelete add-on, then!

Edit: oops, I see others have already mentioned this. Well, at least I linkified it nicely…

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Re: Mars Bar

There are chip shops in touristy areas that will sell them to anyone daft enough to want one (I think there is at least one of the chip shops on Edinburgh's Royal Mile that does), but, yes, I'm pretty sure that hardly anyone eats them normally.

Deep fried Mars bars were invented in a chip shop in Scotland, the story got picked up by the media, and so there was a brief fad of some people being curious to try them. Sadly, the "legend" still lives on, as these things tend to do.

There is at least some truth that chip shops (possibly not just Scottish ones) will dip all sorts of things in batter and fry them (hence the horrible deep-fried pizzas, which really ought to make any self-respecting Italian-Scot chip shop owner feel the shame of many generations of their ancestors upon them). On the other hand: pakora! Unfortunately, the fact that "munchie boxes" (look them up) are quite popular items in some chip shops sadly speaks for itself!

Thunderbird 91 lands: Now native on Apple Silicon, swaps 'master' for 'primary' password, and more

Re: So far so good

Regarding version numbers (from 78 to 91), I think they are just trying to keep in sync with the Firefox version numbering system; there haven't actually been a huge succession of Thunderbird releases while you haven't been looking! (Well, a few minor point-updates now and again, but that's it.)

Zorin OS 16 Pro arrives complete with optional 'Windows 11' desktop

And, even worse, when there actually is a nice and professional looking Linux desktop "look" (theme), such as Ubuntu's Ambiance theme, they then later get bored with it and decide to drop it in favour of Yet Another Really Ugly Flatso Clone (and if you go to gnome-look, it's sadly full of dozens of similar equally boring and visually unpleasant themes these days).

The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

Re: Eh?

I'm not so sure that the whole rest of the world was already there at that time; unix-type systems, yes, but probably not the rest: I'm pretty sure I had to sneakernet AmiTCP or MIAMI onto my Amiga before I could get my first SLIP/PPP internet connection up and running. I think additional software was also needed for Macs, too (was it MacTCP?). I'm sure the Archimedes and BeOS fans will be along in a minute to fill in the information gaps there…

In the early-mid-90s, getting on the internet did sort of feel like you were embarking on a journey along a long bridge, like the Storebælt bridge, while the construction workers were still adding new innovative bits to it while you went along…

84-year-old fined €250,000 for keeping Nazi war machines – including tank – in basement

Re: Most Brits have a fair idea of Germany before, during and after WW2.

@veti: "over two years was spent learning about the development of the EEC"

You either had an unusually good school/syllabus, or an unusually good teacher (who recognised which things were important for pupils growing up in a modern world to really learn about, perhaps spending a little more time than scheduled on such matters?).

I grew up in Scotland around the same time, and I always thought it bizarre that history was a whistle-stop tour of everything from the dinosaurs to the Renaissance (with a smidgen of 2nd WW in passing, in primary school (mainly Anderson shelters and shillings, nothing really about the whys and hows and what happeneds or any of the horrors of the war, perhaps understandably for young children)), but absolutely nothing at all about what had happened in the past few hundred years that really shaped modern Britain, Europe and the rest of the world.

It seemed that if you wanted to know more about the 2nd WW or more recent geo-political history, you were expected to have parents and/or grandparents who were existing, willing, and able to explain such things to you.

I think I learned more about the EEC (as it then was) from the Young Scot book which every schoolchild got from a certain age (12, I think?), and you got a new updated version each year if you renewed your Young Scot card for a fairly token fee.

Even the book didn't go into very much detail, but it really was a mine of very useful information (the nearest thing a young person at that point in time had to an actual HHGTTG, essentially) about all aspects of life (legal rights, voting/politics, further/higher education, banking/housing/work, etc), and it's interesting to note that England didn't join the EURO<26 scheme (which Young Scot was a part of) until many years later (late 90s or possibly even early 2000s?).

I have half a suspicion that that delay might have played at least a small part in ignorance about the EU for a large cohort of English people (and there are so many who seem to know nothing, other than the untruths that the reactionary tabloids feed them (I'm not saying that similar people don't also sadly exist in the other countries of the UK))?

Re: WTF?

"when you hit your midlife crisis (40's) ... you invest in a Jaguar....

then.. your second midlife crisis.. (next 40 years.. so 80's)... you drive around in a Panther....

what is next? A Tiger? @ 120?"

That seems, as the Germans would say, "Alles in Ordnung".

Once you get bored of the Tiger, you obviously then upgrade to a Leopard, and then to a Snow Leopard, etc…

This particular series of tanks all have rounded corners and are beautifully thin, but repairing the fuel tanks is a real pain. On some models the controls get easily clogged with dust and dn't wrk very reliably.

Redpilled Microsoft does away with flashing icons on taskbar as Windows 11 hits Beta

Paper prototyping

"They used paper to choose the layout of the Start Menu?"

Paper prototyping is a well-known and commonly used way to quickly draft up mockups, and is actually quite a sensible part of a design process. You can basically note the items that you think your interface will need on sticky notes and shuffle them around (or add or remove things) until you get the layout that seems to work best.

(Whether they achieved that result in this particular case might be another question…)

Thinking about upgrading to Debian Bullseye? Watch out for changes in Exim and anything using Python 2.x

Re: I'll hold on for as long as poss.

"[we] will never, ever, have to break backward compatibility again"

Oh, famous last words! ;-)

See also: Perl 6, and probably a whole heap of other tech…

Certainly there are far too many web frameworks that seem to delight in making radical incompatible changes on a far too regular basis. It seems to be a miracle that any website these days manages to last more than a couple of years without needing a complete ground-up rebuild (Do I need that hyphen? Possibly yes, solid bricks which have been ground-up into dust seems a reasonable analogy), or possibly even worse, is still creaking away on things which last received maintenance updates 5 years ago, and are a security nightmare waiting to happen…

Google updates timeline for unpopular Privacy Sandbox, which will kill third-party cookies in Chrome by 2023

What a load of PIGEONPOOP

As it sounds like all these rival empire builders have gone to the birds (although, admittedly, they did that years ago), may I propose another alternative spec: PIGEONPOOP. It doesn't actually do anything, apart from shit on everyone from a great height. You are very welcome to dream up expansions for the acronym if you wish.

If only there were some sort of Firebird [sic] which could fly over and raze these fenced-in gardens of poisonous plants to the ground…

In a complete non-surprise, Mozilla hammers final nail in FTP's coffin by removing it from Firefox

Re: Personal opinion

What's your objection to using sftp through a web browser?

It sounds like nothing that sensible modular design would have any problems with.

I don't use it any more, but, if I recall, because of such modular design, the Konqueror web browser could deal with sftp: URIs perfectly happily since a long time ago, and most Linux file managers also have similar features (insert obligatory grumble about how it's really a bit shit that the MacOS Finder can handle the alien smb: but not the native sftp:).

At the very least, any half-decent web browser should pass-through an sftp: URI to your preferred file manager (or sftp client) if it doesn't know anything more about what to do with it.

Re: fond ftp memories

ftp.aminet.net FTW! [1]

Or the name of your friendly convenient mirror: you got a good feeling for the geography of the net back then (and the sometimes non-obvious short domain names that many sites used), back in the good old days; src.doc.ic.ac.uk, ftp.uni-paderborn.de, ftp.sunsite.dk, ftp.wustl.edu, etc…

It sort of did feel like you were playing the game Hacker, tunnelling all around the world to download the latest exciting new freeware or shareware programs (and mega-demos!)…

[1] Of course, the aminet.net domain didn't actually originally exist way back then, as Aminet pre-dated the web, and it was the ftp sites that had all the info, and the mirror sites gained web front ends later on, so there still wasn't really a need for a canonical web presence…

Good news: Jeff Bezos went to space. Bad news: He's back

Re: Ban it!

Yes, we need to seriously reduce the number of flights made (basically, literal overseas flights only, and probably even there we need to be looking into electrically powered ships). We should be using high speed trains (powered by electricity from non-fossil-fuel sources) wherever possible. These have some environmental cost, of course, but are the most sustainable means of long distance travel.

Yes, this means that some journeys will take noticeably longer, but, to protect our environment, that is a price that society needs to be willing to pay (I've always thought that the journey was almost as much fun as the destination, anyway!). Governments could help to 'sell' the idea by passing laws to increase minimum annual holiday entitlements by an additional two days, so that the sort of holiday trips that might take a few hours by air don't cost people additional holiday time (or it's extra free holiday, if you choose to holiday closer to home).

For business trips, while human nature probably needs some in-person meetings, it would be more environmentally-friendly for at least some of them to be done by videoconferencing (which we have all been doing for the past year, and the business world didn't end).

Dutch Queen, robot involved in opening of 3D-printed bridge in red-light district

Re: Junkie bridge

"In Scotland we have underpasses, where people and vehicles move under roads. You can't have that there because sea-level."

Actually, there is at least one bridge in the Netherlands where the road does go underneath the sea (well, former Zuiderzee, but now one of the water channels around the Flevoland island polder).

And in most places where cycleways or roads cross railway lines, the cycleway or road dips down into an underpass under the railway, rather than have the inconvenience and safety risk of level crossings. Even better, where a cycleway is next to a road, the cycleway sensibly enough only dips down just enough to let you cycle under the railway (so that you have less far to cycle back up the other side), rather than descending to the same depth as the road, which needs to be deep enough to let lorries, etc, pass through.

The Netherlanders really have never let a trivial thing like the level where the water would like to be at get in the way of their lifestyle! (The whole history of the polders and the Delta Works would make a fascinating "Geek's Guide" article…)

Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together

Re: Back in the olden days

…and don't forget chip pan fires, too!

I'm pretty sure there's a typically doom-laden 70s public safety film highlighting the dangers of those (and probably one for each of the other causes of fire mentioned, as well).

Does anyone actually still fry chips in a pan these days, or does everyone use oven chips, takeaways, or deep fat fryers?

BT to phase out 3G in UK by 2023 for EE, Plusnet, BT Mobile subscribers

2G network

To annoy EE, and to allow the law of nominative determinism to apply, such a network could perhaps be called "GG"? :-D

Revealed: Perfect timings for creation of exemplary full English breakfast

20 minutes!

Indeed. The most important thing about a weekend brunch is to start scoffing it as soon as possible after your brain starts to wake up (and/or after the room has stopped spinning), and you've managed to throw some sorts of clothes on.

Ideally you should have a decent and welcoming cafe within about 5 - 10 minutes' walk of your home, so that someone else can do the fiddly (too fiddly for a brain which has only just powered up, at least) and time-consuming cooking part, and you only have to do the eating part.

The PrintNightmare continues: Microsoft confirms presence of vulnerable code in all versions of Windows

Re: You can lead a horse to water, but ...

Gift horses, on the other hand, are quite well-off, but just don't look them in the mouth!

Richard Branson plans to trump Jeff Bezos by 9 days in billionaires' space race

Its last test flight reached just over 89km while the New Shepard went comfortably beyond 100km.

"Its last test flight reached just over 89km while the New Shepard went comfortably beyond 100km."

I guess it's kind of a requirement of being a Virgin to never quite make it to the finish line?

Re: To quote a well known phrase...

I have to say that my thought was: "Those look like somewhat worryingly large windows for something that's going up into the vacuum of space"!

In disaster-movie-land, you just know that a tiny piece of space junk will strike the window, and an initially small crack will slowly but inexorably spread its way across the glass… I hope the windows are made from extremely toughened glass!

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

Re: Calling upon a higher power

It's probably also relevant to note here in regard to this field of work that, should you be asked to supply computing power to a monastery for a contract to enumerate the nine billion names of God, it would be a really good idea to turn it down…

Re: Calling upon a higher power

Being smited (smote? or even smitten – but isn't that something different?) whenever you inadvertently included a bug in your code would start to get quite tiring after a while, though… :-(

Re: Keys

"Lovely piece of engineering!"

I'm sure the typewriter's probably not bad, too! ;-)

Re: Font recommendations

The DejaVu font families are more recent descendants of the Bitstream Vera fonts, and which have substantially better coverage of Unicode characters (the Bitstream Vera fonts really only covered basic Latin characters, which might not necessarily be a problem for some).

Re: Font recommendations

Droid Sans Mono is quite nice, and if you want extra geek points, you can even have it in Droid Sans Mono Slashed or Droid Sans Mono Dotted variants to even more emphatically differentiate 0s from Os.

Ubuntu Mono is also quite nice, and for obvious reasons, there are a fair number of other fonts in the Linux world that are both carefully designed for terminal use and whose licences allow them to be installed elsewhere as well.

There is also a website which will let you download fonts for local use from the web fonts repo hosted by Google, which may make getting some fonts a little easier.

(Aside: I find that setting my terminal font size to 9.5 pt generally works best for me these days; 9 pt is too small to read comfortably, and 10 pt makes my terminal windows just that bit too big to fit comfortably on the screen!)

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

Re: Waiting for the anime version...

While reading the article, I was thinking, "I'm sure there are some scenes in 'Spirited Away' that resemble this…"!

Re: “maths” instead of “math”

Oooh, rímcræft is definitely a good word, though!

(Never having seen an "i" with an acute accent before, I'm going to guess that it's pronounced something like rhyme-craft rather than rim-craft?)

Five words everyone wants to hear: Microsoft has 'visually refreshed' Office

Emulation layer on ARM

Hmm, that emulation layer on ARM, if they were to make it available for other program developers to use, might it be time to think that Micros~1 might be about to do their own Project Marklar, to keep up with Apple and the way that CPU efficiency seems to be going, and for Intel (and AMD) to start getting very nervous indeed?

Re: Is it really "shilling" if what you are pushing is free?

We'll have none of your "Popular" Front of Judea [1] software here!

You wanna stick with the People's Front of Judea, LibreOffice is where it's at these days.

[1] "Splitter!"

Re: Custom ribbon?

"But now it [has] muted pastel colours and rounded corners"

I wonder if Apple's lawyers are planning to have a word with Micros~1 about that…?

‘Fasten your seat belts, raise your tray table, and disconnect your Bluetooth headsets from the entertainment unit’

"plans to give ’em ten inches of entertainment"

Oh, behave!

If there wasn't an airline-based Carry On film, there really should have been: "Carry On, Cleared for Landing", "Carry On in the Cockpit"…?