Posts by Dave559

Who would cross the Bridge of Death? Answer me these questions three! Oh and you'll need two-factor authentication

Re: Robots and boxes

"If you don't use Chrome that's considered as suspicious and the chances are you'll be asked to click on more images."

I suspect that it's not that not using Chrome per se is deemed to be suspicious, but that Chrome is designed to slurp up profiling data for its masters and therefore it more likely knows much more about the users (and that they aren't robots, as it's tracking their movements all over the web), and that other browsers (and especially their wise and sensible users) are more likely to be set up to not slurp as much data as Chrome (clear cookies, local storage, etc, etc, on exit, using NoScript, etc) and so Google has less to go on when a user arrives on a site containing its horrible CAPTCHA. There surely has to be a way to implement CAPTCHAs that doesn't compromise the privacy of users.

UK urged to choo-choo-choose hydrogen-powered trains in pursuit of carbon-neutral economic growth

Re: No all electric

@EvilDrSmith, I've heard from proper train bods that 90 mi/h is just about pushing the limit of what the Southern third rail power supply can cope with. Possibly some trains do reach 100 mi/h in a few places, but for widespread use at those speeds, or (hypothetically) faster, apparently the network power supply infrastructure into the third rails themselves would need to be beefed up substantially (or it would "brown out" essentially).

You can zip around OpenRailwayMap (switch map style to "Max speeds"), if you want to see what the actual line speeds are.

Re: My thoughts

"That said is someone fitting 3rd rail to the highland lines? I have seen the pictures of the Southern region electrics there."

You are probably getting confused with when ScotRail temporarily hired a few (dual-voltage OHL/third-rail) Class 365s from dahn sarf while waiting for their own new EMUs to come into service.

ScotRail used them only on routes with overhead lines: the only railway in Scotland with third rail is not part of Network Rail and there are at least three reasons why the trains wouldn't fit/work there [1]!

[1] wrong track gauge, wrong size, wrong voltage

Re: Huh

Correction: "the train from London to Penzance - 305 miles - has only the first 53 mlles electrified" so far.

It's an ongoing project that they are still working on. It may not get further than Bristol or Cardiff for the forseeable future, but that will still be a good step forward when that project is completed.

Re: No all electric

There is a limit to the amount of power that you can get out of third rail, compared to higher voltage overhead line electrification. I understand that it's just generally not regarded as having enough oomph for trains running at 100 mi/h or more. That's one of the reasons that eurostar was indeed rather limited running on third rail track, not just that the lines themselves weren't designed for high speeds. The fact that the electrified rails are dangerous hazards to people trespassing onto the tracks (not least, incidents stop the trains, and someone has to clean up afterwards) is also a reason for discouraging further extension of the third rail networks.

Re: No all electric

"On N Wales coast line to Holyhead for the ferry to Ireland, the wires end at Crewe."

I'm sure that at some point EU Regional Development Funds and Trans-European Network funds, helped by the expanded powers of the Senedd, and the increasing focus on improving more sustainable modes of transport, would help to see this route get electrified as part of a key route to Ireland. (The A55 road certainly benefited from such.)

Ah, oops.

Electrification

"Probably a good idea, but as the UK can't even electrify its lines competently, unlikely to happen."

Scotland has been carrying out electrification works almost continuously since the Airdrie - Bathgate line reconstruction started in 2008, with all routes between Edinburgh and Glasgow now electric, and work ongoing to electrify the few remaining non-electric commuter routes around Glasgow (which the regional authorities have been fairly steadily wiring up ever since the 1960s). Medium/longer term plans exist to electrify the other InterCity routes.

England has been electrifying the Great Western Main Line and extending electrification at least some way further along the Midland Main Line. Hopefully the "Northern Powerhouse" railway upgrading plans will come to fruition. HS2 will, obviously, be electric.

Wales is (hopefully) planning to electrify commuter lines around Cardiff. Northern Ireland's railway network is currently sadly rather minimal, but that's still 3 out of 4 making progress.

So, not perfect, but it is definitely very unfair to say that the UK railway network hasn't been making good progress on electrification in recent years. Even in the anti-rail days of Thatcherism, the East Coast Main Line electrification managed to happen, albeit on a very tight budget and one that resulted in some shortsighted economies, such as overhead line masts being spaced further apart than desirable, which is why, to this day, it still suffers breakdowns more than it should in high winds.

Anyone still using cash? British £50 banknote honouring Alan Turing arrives

Chips

Wow, you can still get chips for £1 in your chippy? Lucky you! They've been about £2 here for a long time, and many places seem to have jumped up to £2.50 recently, which is way too much. I'd much rather the price was still £1 - £1.50 and you just got a smaller bag: chip shop portions often still seem to be based in a long-ago world which assumes that their customers are mostly manual labourers who will barely have anything else to eat all day, rather than, like most of us, soft desk jockeys for whom too many chips won't get burned off so easily. :-(

(And, yes, my local chippies do contactless, although one of them has one of those annoying stupidly-designed readers where the NFC pad is on the top end, and so you can't see the screen when they wave it at you, leaving you with a worrying distrusting feeling that they might not have keyed the right price (so I don't go there any more))

Re: That looks cool

"It feels very different handing over notes and getting back coins"

"different" = annoying, in this case (in my opinion) ;-)

I used to have a personal "rule" of never paying by card for anything less than £10, but, with public health recommendations during the Covid pandemic, and the rapidly increasing use of contactless payments by even small retailers over the past couple of years, I've barely used cash at all over the past year.

Yes, bank notes are sort of cute, but British coins are still mostly quite bulky (arguably not helped by there being quite valuable £1 and £2 coins, that you are likely to get in change) and getting any sort of change, especially over more than 2 or 3 transactions, means that coins start taking up an awkward amount of space in your wallet (and, even worse, damaging or wearing out the wallet).

I used to think that wallets with no coin pockets were a very frustrating design, clearly designed for countries where the value cut-off between coins and notes (or the relative value of the main currency unit itself) was such that coins given in change were generally of a sufficiently trivial value to be able to be left as tips or put in charity boxes, but meaning that this style of wallet is useless if you live in a country with a more valuable currency or larger value coins. But now that making card transactions for even small payments is normalised, I think I will continue to do so: yes, the merchants have to pay (fairly) small debit card fees, but they also have to pay bank fees for handling cash at the end of the day, so I can see cash continuing to become less popular (not that we should do away with it, however).

Amazon says it's all social media's fault for letting fake review schemes thrive

Re: Fake reviews?

There are just so many fake reviews on Amazon (UK) that it's almost unreal.

And, like spam, they are also nearly always quite easy to spot. Often posted by users with very odd-sounding (ie, very non-British) usernames, far too much effusive praise (in a language almost, but not quite, resembling English, a sure sign of a company stooge writing in not their native language) about how they love the product, or are sooo happy with the company (no real person is ever that enthusiastic about the supplier, "pleased that it arrived quickly" is about as praiseworthy as real people generally get), odd fixations about nice packaging, odder fixations about how they are "sure" this will be an excellent product that is definitely high quality and will last them well, even though they have only had it for a few days (or even "just received it thanks to speedy delivery"). Other signs are an even odder emphasis about how helpful the company's support helpline is (surely virtually no genuine reviewers would actually know this as very very few products are likely to go wrong within a few days/weeks - and, if a larger proportion did, it would be a good indication to steer clear of a shoddy product: "this piece of junk broke down and/or fell apart almost immediately but they replaced it quickly" is not exactly a great endorsement) and, best of all, emphasis on how "unlike rival products" they are sure that it will definitely not overheat and catch fire (!) (an odd thing to note explicitly in a review, since that's a baseline expectation that we would normally have of any product).

Yet, when you report these reviews to Amazon, they never seem to do anything about them. Or is it whack-a-mole, and new fake reviews for the product keep getting added as soon as they remove others? Or do simply not enough people report (or are able to see through and identify) suspicious reviews to be able to trigger the removal/review-of-the-review process?

And, while I have no objection to China trying to earn a fair place in modern manufacturing (if they can comply with expected quality, safety, and environmental standards), how come for many product searches, it is only multiple Chinese brands (many/most of which seem to be of variable or indifferent quality (or lack thereof), and I have suspicions that many of these are actually just rebadged products from the same actual factory, so not even genuine alternatives) that you seem to find on Amazon, and very few, if any, known/trusted brands? Yes, many known brands outsource the manufacturing to China themselves, but you would hope they have at least some decent quality controls in place so that the products manufactured for them to their design can have at least some reasonable guarantee of quality and safety?

What's that hurtling down the Bifröst? Node-based network fun with Yggdrasil 0.4

Re: What's with the Ös?

I guess that "Paranoïd" is sort of legit, if you read the letter as i-diaeresis rather than i-umlaut, where the diaeresis dots indicate that the vowel should be pronounced separately from the preceding vowel (rather than lengthening the pronunciation of the vowel), such as in words like naïve or Citroën. It's probably a bit of a tenuous pronunciation in this case, however.

Re: Prior usage

I'm glad I'm not the only person whose first thought [1], when reading the headline, was, "Wow, has someone decided to dust off a venerable old Linux distro and start developing it again…?"!

[1] I mean, apart from the Norse gods, of course…

Mayflower, the AI ship sent to sail from the UK to the US with no humans, made it three days before breaking down

Re: "With no one onboard to fix it"

"The simple answer to that is convoys. Even if you can't eliminate people entirely, having a single fairly small boat full of engineers escorting a bunch of autonomous ships would still likely be a lot cheaper than having to have staff on every boat."

I'd feel sorry for those poor engineers having to endure their ship radio chiming into life every few minutes with plaintive automated announcements: "Unexpected breakdown in the boating area." (And the autonomous ships' consoles spewing out endless bonus point coupons for big hammers (and the occasional spanner) after each maintenance visit…)

Open standard but not open access: Schematron author complains about ISO paywall

Re: Negotiable Virtue

But should you deviate from the standard, you must be corrected! And I understand some people are very willing to be quite thoroughly corrected.

Three million job cuts coming at Indian services giants by next year, says Bank of America

Re: I'm half crazy, all for the love of Infosys.

Desi…, Desi… give me your answer… do……?

Stob treks back across the decades to review the greatest TV sci-fi in the light of recent experience

Re: Outstanding

The author definitely deserves a glass of the finest synthehol for their work! (Or even the real stuff, if they are friends enough with the bartender to know to ask!)

Debian's Cinnamon desktop maintainer quits because he thinks KDE is better now

Re: KDE = Kmail

There's nothing stopping you running Kontact or Dolphin under a different desktop environment if you prefer, of course. Theme sharing between applications built under different toolkits and running under a different DE isn't perfect, but it's not too bad (although it probably wouldn't hurt if they all collaborated a bit more closely on this).

And the fact that you can sftp: or smb: (or whatever) seamlessly to remote servers through your file manager is common to pretty much all Linux file managers, I think? It is a fantastic feature, I agree (and a great example of modular design). It's a little annoying that MacOS only supports this for smb: and you need to acquire additional software there if you need to connect to other servers (especially sftp, which should surely be regarded as a "first class citizen" on any unix-based OS, bah!).

I detect a theme here

Apologies for the bad title pun (wait for it), but I'd say that all of the major nix desktop environments are actually pretty good these days, but just in different ways. (I am even that fairly rare beast, someone who really likes that Gnome 3 gets out of your way, but is quickly summoned back with a simple press of the <super> key. I love that it has window switching thumbnail previews ("Mission Control") enabled by default, but I really don't like that they have more recently gone down the stupid path of trying to kill off proper window menu bars (one of the key pillars of the whole WIMP interface, and an essential keyboard-shortcut accessibility feature), so I have, with a little sadness, moved away from it (and, by extension, Gnome applications).)

After doing a grand tour, I have currently settled on Cinnamon (which also features window previews, but you do have to know that it actually does have this feature and that you can enable it (it's in Hot Corners, I don't think you can use a keyboard shortcut for it, unfortunately?), but also the handy feature of allowing window previews (not just icons) in the alt-tab switcher (as well as cover flow, last used, and several others, according to taste)). The thing that none of the DEs sadly seem to have got right for the window preview switcher is that if you have too many a typical power user's number of windows open, the previews end up being too small to distinguish easily (defeating the point): a better way to do it would perhaps be to show a defined maximum number of preview thumbnails on screen and flip down or right to show the next screenful of them if you have many windows open?

But the thing that currently annoys me the most is the lack of nice themes these days (the window borders, titlebars, and buttons). It seems that you can have anything you like nowadays as long as it's a not-quite-right-looking clone of MacOS Aqua, or an unending bottomless pit of horrible, horrible, "Material" ugly flatso design clones (and all of which seem to be almost identical to each other?!): all with titlebars so painfully blackly black (and with no shading, gradients, etc, to give them at least a little bit of "life") that it is almost impossible to tell where one window stops and the next starts, minimal highlighting of the active window/titlebar, and (most annoying to me) too-minimal or no side or bottom window borders and no active window highlighting extending to them. Call me old-fashioned but I like my windows to have a few pixels of clear visibility showing their edges and clearly highlighting (in a visibly different shade, or preferably, colour) which is the active window (also useful for accessibility reasons as well). It's so sad that several decades of good UI design methodology seems to have all been thrown away and forgotten about over the past few years. The whole flatso fail really can't go away soon enough for me!

We've been shown time and again that strong encryption puts crims behind bars, so why do politicos hate it?

Re: Old encryption is returning?

Are you aware of the Bazalgette sewer system in London? Some of its sewers really are quite impressively large constructions, and are certainly large enough to flush away even the most odious of foul wastes!

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Re: Obvs

No need to change the name in leap years, that's just them trying to stay on the right side of "honest descriptions" with regard to the accumulated periods of downtime…

Re: Windows 10 is the last version of Windows,

They're just secretly jealous that Macs go all the way up to 11…

(It's a shame that with a joke that good/bad (and that took them long enough to get there), Apple are now going to go ahead and spoil it so soon…)

The Eigiau Dam Disaster: Deluges and deceit at the dawn of hydroelectric power

Yes, a really interesting article. I know about the aluminium smelter + hydro schemes at Kinlochleven and Fort William in Scotland, but never knew there was similar in Wales. It makes sense when you think of it, though, similar landscapes and rainfall!

BT 'welcomes' whopping £2bn investment by French telco Altice

Re: But what about Brexit?

"It's got feck all to do with EU or Brexit. French owned water companies for one. EDF nuclear power for another."

And, back in the day, what was then one2one was bought by Deutsche Telekom, and Orange UK was bought by France Télécom, but both are now owned by, guess who…

International investments and buyouts are strange and entangled things, sometimes.

Linus Torvalds tells kernel list poster to 'SHUT THE HELL UP' for saying COVID-19 vaccines create 'new humanoid race'

Re: What gets me

"After all, if I went on there and posted that Linux works by magic fairies running around inside my laptop, he would probably say that was ridiculous."

That's obviously ridiculous, any fule kno that Linux (and especially also FreeBSD) works by magic daemons running around inside one's laptop… ;-)

BT promises firmware update for Mini Whole Home Wi-Fi discs to prevent obsessive Big Tech DNS lookups

BT… Phone… Home…

"BT… Phone… Home…"

Wait, no! Not like that!

This sounds like the dumbest way of checking for internet connectivity imaginable, essentially trying to DDoS well-known sites. Hopefully a future "Who, me?" article will confess why someone ever thought that was a good idea…

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

Re: Fastly 'fesses up'

"I notice they don't bother to mention what the 'customer configuration change' was. If I was cynical I might be inclined to think it was something so simple they'd be embarrassed by revealing it."

If that's the case, it could easily be any one or more of [missing|extra] [semi-colon|comma|space between parameters|line-continuation character], unquoted or otherwise not-properly-escaped string containing spaces or other special characters, etc, etc, etc.

With the best will in the world and trying to always get these details right, I'm sure most of us here have probably made that sort of typo/mistake at least once?

Version 8 of open-source code editor Notepad++ brings Dark Mode and an ARM64 build, but bans Bing from web searches

"Fluent"?

Fuck me, but those are some seriously ugly (and less distinguishable from each other, surely defeating the whole point?) icons. Is there nothing that the plague of "flat design" won't infect?

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

"If they are working, websites load more quickly and you've only got seconds before the user goes somewhere else."

That's actually a misfeature for me. I genuinely thought the web was a much more fun place when you had to wait a few seconds for the interlaced GIFs and progressive JPEGs, that you had carefully created, to do their rendering thing before your very eyes… «wistful sob»

And, of course, such constraints meant there was none of the third-party bloatware and spyware stuffed into web pages then that we have to put up with now.

Yeah, I might grumble if a web page were to take 30 seconds or more to load, but I really could care less about 5 - 10 seconds (streaming content being one of few exeptions, and even then any sensible browser or app should be caching a good dollop before trying to play it).

European Parliament's data adequacy objection: Doubts cast on UK's commitment to privacy protection

Re: Just

@Graham Cobb "I choose what data I put where"

I commend your stance, but are you absolutely sure that your bank, your doctor's outsourced online prescription ordering system, your employer's email, personnel records and payroll systems, any online job application site you might ever have to use, any online shopping website you might happen to use, and goodness knows what else, haven't already made unfortunate choices about where they have decided to store your data for you? I suspect that the vast majority of them (if they even know or vaguely care about such matters) will have seen the worthless self-certified Safe Harbor Privacy Shield Max, what do we call the new green curtain this month? "guarantees" and thought no further about it.

First Forth, C and Python, now comp.lang.tcl latest Usenet programming forum nuked by Google Groups

Re: Upside down

Well, I just blew the dust off my newsreader and cranked it up to see what the state of affairs is…

Surprisingly, but rather pleasingly, about half of the groups that I used to read that were still quite busy with intelligent discussion the last time I looked are even now still quite busy with intelligent discussion (and I even recognise some of the same posters' names).

But, oh dear, some more local groups that, perhaps 5 - 10 years ago, had had a moderate number of users are now just despoiled wastelands, polluted with what appears to be endless spam posts offering drugs (semi-legal or otherwise) and nothing else. Automated spam machines, endlessly churning out grey goo that (surely) no human being will ever actually read, what a waste of a once-useful technology…

Re: Denial of service attacks?

"Hell, Usenet doesn't even depend on the Internet to propagate."

That's very true! My first home usenet feed was provided via the (excellent) Spuddy BBS, which literally used sneakernet to transfer tapes with its usenet feed from and to its upstream provider every day!

Re: Ban Google

C'mon jake, I'm sure you know as well as anyone that if some google luser manages to post spam into a newsgroup, it'll get distributed to any other usenet server that carries that group.

Yes, anyone with a bit of technical nous (and that's a barrier to entry for some) can write a scorefile/killfile to score down or delete matching posts, but, as Kevin says, once the amount of spam gets too large, it becomes very difficult to try to keep up manually, short of perhaps just killing everything with a google header, which might perhaps have been a bit unfair to their legitimate users. I don't know if there ever was a SpamAssassin-like filter that usenet server admins could apply to their feed to try to make things better in that regard (I thought that in the usenet heydey their involvement was in general usually only for some providers just to not carry the dodgier groups, rather than per-post filtering)?

Upside down

The perspective of this article is all topsy-turvy. It makes it sound as though these groups are something owned, or at least "managed", by Google, which also "happen" to be available by other means, when the reality is of course that these are usenet newsgroups, well older than Google, older than the web, and available from any usenet server (such as, for example, the appropriately named Eternal September, or you could even set up your own).

It just so happens that, once upon a time, a company called DejaNews decided to start permanently archiving usenet (which, up until that point, had generally been ephemeral, with usenet servers generally only storing the posts from perhaps the past few weeks, or perhaps months, before deleting older ones), and eventually Google acquired DejaNews and the newsgroup archiving service. If Google are failing to manage their newsgroup archive properly (no surprise), people can still participate in newgroups using a newsreader program in the traditional way [1], as usenet is, of course, a distributed service. Maybe for a historic archive of usenet, those who are interested should perhaps get together and set up an alternative archiving service, as Google don't seem to have sufficient interest to do it properly. I would have thought that it would be the sort of thing that the Internet Archive, or a similar organisation, might perhaps be interested in.

[1] although, to be honest, with the relentlessly increasing spam levels, the sharp drop-off in new usenauts since about 2000 or thereabouts, and the minor and moderate technical hurdles of having to know how to set up your newsreader and manage your scorefile/killfile effectively (slrn FTW!), respectively, it is (sadly) definitely a dying medium. But it always surprises me when I pop in occasionally that some groups somehow do still manage to maintain a good core of posters and sensible and interesting discussion, even nowadays.

Who gave dusty Soviet-era spacecraft that unwanted lick of paint? It was an idiot, with a spraycan, in Baikonur

Re: Otherwise it might be only the graffiti that remains

Yes, the duct tape plotline (trying to be vague to avoid spoilers) was a bit weird, to say the least. Part of me wonders whether it would actually be a plausible/realistic scenario [1] (the, what seemed to me, anyway, "history actually could have gone this way" feel of the series was part of the attraction), but part of me also just didn't like it (for (…spoilers…) reasons).

[1] Admittedly it's perhaps only a bit ahead of Apollo 13 in terms of unexpected uses of duct tape.

Otherwise it might be only the graffiti that remains

"Otherwise it might be only the graffiti that remains"

Why does this somehow remind me of:

"… Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

It is certainly sad to hear that a piece of space history has been left to rot away, and that it has been vandalised. Really it should be in a museum somewhere, where people can admire it properly.

Although, according to the historical documents that I have seen, Buran went on to be fairly successful… (I have to say, I've really enjoyed For All Mankind, and would definitely recommend it to anyone with an interest in humanity's various space programmes.)

Once upon a time, the UK did embrace the "white heat of technology" quite fully: Concorde, InterCity 125, Advanced Passenger Train (which was arguably cancelled too soon, and the tilting technology went on to contribute to the Pendolino train designs), the whole 80s computer boom, Psion, Symbian, ARM, etc.

Interesting projects do still continue, but sadly the general public rarely hears about them, and so there is much less awareness of them (which probably also contributes to much less government enthusiasm for funding related research, and so becomes a vicious circle). Cancelling "Tomorrow's World" is arguably one of the worst things that the BBC ever did…

Firefox to adopt Chrome's new approach to extensions – sans the part that threatens ad blockers

Re: Forking Firefox ?

Easier said than done, however. There is a lot of development work and knowledge required to build a browser, and while there are a couple of well-known Firefox forks, I get the impression that even they are starting to struggle somewhat as the Matrix is continually reconfigured around them, and that they only have a limited number of developers to start with, sadly.

the blocking webRequest API

I'd like to believe that Mozilla are doing the right thing, but the use of "until" here does worry me somewhat:

"We will support blocking webRequest until there’s a better solution which covers all use cases we consider important"

I can just visualise how, in a year's time, there might be yet another announcement, where they say they're very sorry, but it's just too hard to keep supporting the webRequest API, and they no longer consider extensions which require it to be important to them (not the first time Mozilla has stuffed extension developers, and the whole extension ecosystem still hasn't really properly recovered from that time)…? :-(

Among the extension developers whose views and concerns I'd like to hear, I'd be very interested to know what Giorgio "NoScript" Maone thinks about this.

USB-C levels up and powers up to deliver 240W in upgraded power delivery spec

Re: 240W?

Hmmm, maybe Apple changed the design at some point? Mine is for an 2015 MBP, and the plug (on the supplied plug to transformer cable) is only about half as thick as a normal UK plug, has completely smooth vertical sides (rather than the concave finger recesses that standard(?) plugs have), and is a very tight fit into the plug socket, all of which do conspire to make it (unnecessarily) hard to pull out!

Re: 240W?

Heck, anything that requires certain power cables to be a bit beefier and stronger can only be a good thing. Why, yes, I am writing this as someone whose current weedy MagSafe2 cable has got to the terminally fraying/disintegrating stage, again (and these are stupidly hard-wired into the transformer part, rather than being a sacrificial removeable/replaceable cable). Apart from the actual MagSafe connector, the functional design of these PSUs is appallingly dreadful (their UK mains plug also has effectively no hand grip on it, and so is very hard to unplug, because it's not as if you would ever take a laptop on the move with you, would you?).

It's ridiculous that these are punier and a worse design than decent phone charging cables, which are only fractionally thicker, but are now mostly designed and made with a braided cable outer to make them much stronger and long lasting. This really is incredible advanced technology, well, apart from having been used in power cables for irons for donkey's years…

If Apple are, as rumoured, going to be reinventing the MagSafe cable, let's hope they actually get it properly right this time (although, to be honest, I'd now much prefer being able to use a relatively standard USB-C cable + magnetic adapter for power on either side of the laptop, depending on where the nearest suitable wall socket is).

Apple's iPad Pro on a stick, um, we mean M1 iMac scores 2 out of 10 for repairability

an odd path for Apple to pursue

It may not be "odd" for Apple's current (mal)practices, but it certainly is very frustrating that storage and RAM are not upgradeable.

Humanity produces far too much e-waste as it is: enabling useful upgrades that let people get a couple more years' use out of expensive (both financially and environmentally) devices is a Good Thing (we will all still need to replace them eventually, after all) and it really is shameful that Apple goes out of its way to make this impossible.

We really need laws to require these sort of upgradeability options, as, sadly, it certainly seems like the manufacturers won't do it willingly.

Apple patches macOS flaw exploited by malware to secretly snap screenshots

Re: "Patching" and "updating" cost terabytes

You should be able to change your phone's settings so that it will only do software updates when connected to WiFi, rather than use up mobile data, if that helps (assuming that you have wired broadband at home with a reasonably generous usage allowance).

New IETF draft reveals Egyptians invented pyramids to sharpen razor blades

Clearly this draft was itself submitted over RFC1149, which must be why it arrived so very much later than the traditional 1 April date for transmitting, and receiving, similarly-themed data…

Beyond video to interactive, personalised content: BBC is experimenting with rebuilding its iPlayer in WebAssembly

Re: WOT??

Anyone who uses the word "experience" in this sort of context (it's not an "experience", it's a tv programme) should be taken outside and dunked in the gameshow gunk tank (followed by an attack by Mr Blobby, for repeat offenders), as it's one of the too-many wanky terms that seem to be infesting bizspeak of late. How'd you like that 'experience', huh?

It's a shame that they felt the need to obscure what sounds like an interesting project behind that initial layer of spaff.

UK data watchdog fines 'pandemic partner' biz £8k: It sent 84,000 marketing emails to people who'd given info for track and trace

"commissioner asked complainant to provide further details of any complaint they had made"

"The commissioner asked this complainant to provide further details of any complaint that they had made to TML directly."

This is the most infuriating thing about the way the ICO works. An organisation has misused your data; why on earth should it be up you to follow-up with the dodgy organisation (potentially risking further data misuse in the process, now that you have put your head above the parapet, and at the very least probably continuing to receive spam while you wait for them to get around to replying), that's what the watchdog is supposed to be for, for it to take action on your behalf, with the full force of the law and the state behind it.

This whole sleazy affair shows exactly why "spam me harder" should always be opt-in consent, and never opt-out, and that sleazy "implied consent through existing relationship" loophole (a relationship which does not previously exist before you fill in the form, stretching the truth beyond breaking point) should never ever have been allowed.

Linux laptop biz System76 makes its first foray into the mechanical keyboard world with dinky, hackable Launch

Weird layout

One thing that immediately strikes me as odd is that ctrl, alt, super are in Mac order (rather than PC order: ctrl, super, alt) on the left hand side, and, then, for extra weirdness, their counterparts on the right hand side are in the same order (well, with an extra Fn, instead of super) rather than being a mirror image of the left, as normal.

And the enter key is a bit stunted for no good reason, there's clearly room to make it almost an extra half-keywidth wider, and more tidily line up with the right hand side of the keyboard in doing so. Strange choices.

Another platform on which Java will not run – platform 1 of Newcastle's Central Station

Re: So the second train in the list...

I'm assuming that the second train is actually for (Sunderland and) South Hylton, rather than another South Shields service, as that would seem a bit of a suspiciously large gap in service for that route otherwise (it's a frequent service metro, after all)?

As another vendor promises 3 years of Android updates, we ask: How long should mobile devices receive support?

"[replace] the toaster every 20 - 30 years"

It's all the horrible and wasteful world of "disposable" consumerism. I sadly doubt that you would get 20 or 30 years' life out of a new toaster nowadays.

We did have to replace the toaster in the staff room at work a couple of years ago, as it had finally given up. But then again, that toaster did say "Made in W. Germany" on it! I suspect that the replacement sadly won't last as long.

Crane horror Reg reader uses his severed finger to unlock Samsung Galaxy phone

Post-pub neckfiller

It is perhaps just as well that this unlucky and unpleasant incident didn't coincide with the "Post-pub neckfiller" series…!

And on the subject of pubs, drinks and detached digits…

Re: I use either left or right index fingers.

I think I must have a rather pessimistic "what if" consider-all-possibilities sort of mindset, as, when I first got a mobile phone with a fingerprint reader, it seemed to me only sensible to register a finger on each hand just in case "what if"…