Posts by Not also known as SC

NRA gives FCC boss Ajit Pai a gun as reward for killing net neutrality. Yeah, an actual gun

Re: Face it, dweebs

Maybe it's too early on a Saturday morning, but who lost what?

A game to 'vaccinate' people against fake news? Umm... Fake news

Re: 'Fake News' - I hate that Term!

@ I ain't Spartacus

Good analysis - my son was diagnosed with severe autism (20 years old and still non-verbal, he'll require 24 hour support for the rest of his life) about the time this research was released. I never believed in the vaccination link but I met lots of other parents who did. Very sad for a lot of them as it gave hope of a cure when there isn't one.

Also your comment re The Guardian. Totally agree. They currently seem to be trying to instigate some new conflict based on peoples' ages. Apparently all of the UK's current problems are due to Baby Boomers and older who have it all and won't give their homes away to Millennials if you believe some of their latest articles.

'Fake News' - I hate that Term!

I wish people would stop calling it fake news. It is either lies or it isn't Calling it fake news seems to legitimize the lies in some way and makes it less of a lie.

Take the joke comment about vaccines and autism above. When Dr Wakeman (?) said that the MMR vaccine caused autism did he really believe it or not? The prevailing opinion at the moment is that he didn't believe his conclusions while he told people about them. In that case he wasn't spreading 'fake news', he was lying. Even if he had believed his research was true, then again it isn't 'fake news' - it was just wrong as subsequent research has shown. The nearest I can think of to a legitimized use of the term is when statistics are cherry picked in order to present a certain view point. But then if the statistics are picked to give a misleading view that again is lying and if the statistics are just poorly chosen that is a mistake on the pickers part.

Use ad blockers? Mine some Monero to get access to news, says US site

Giving stuff a way for free is always a bad idea if you want to make money (no sarcasm intended). I understand (although this might just be an urban legend) that one of the free competitors (OpenOffice?) to Microsoft Office was discontinued because not enough people wanted to use it because as a 'free' product compared to Microsoft Office at £££/$$$, so the free suite couldn't be any good.

Same happens with web content - give it away for free and it becomes worth precisely that - nothing.

Re: How about

"They are providing content which has a financial cost to them to generate, host, etc."

But does the content have any value to the reader? If the content isn't good enough to persuade people to pay to view it, is it worth even publishing?

Mueller bombshell: 13 Russian 'troll factory' staffers charged with allegedly meddling in US presidential election

Re: I'm Confused Still

@Mikel "The conclusion that these efforts had no effect is not in this document release, nor in any other of the Special Prosecutor, nor of the wider Intelligence Community consensus. You made it up."

From the article

Rosenstein: “There is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charge conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election”

I'm Confused Still

I'm confused about this on at least two points. I'm not in to US politics so forgive me if I make some stupid sounding comments. I'm genuinely trying to understand this.

Russian trolls were publishing things to social media but the conclusion is that this had no outcome on the US election. I understand that politics in the USA is very polarised and there are very few floating voters who might be swayed by anything said to them so if it had no impact, and most Americans have very set views, why the big fuss? Is this just a political smear campaign (Surely the POTUS has managed to do enough damage on his own to the Republican party - he has severely damaged the reputation of the USA abroad at least)? If social media has so little impact, why does it now appear to be the main way the POTUS communicates with the world?

Then we have the fact that Russian trolls either posted lies or the truth.

If lies, then theses lies resonated with a large number of Americans so they believed the posts - confirmation of existing beliefs - and these people weren't influenced because they already think what was being said (isn't this more worrying in the first place). Wouldn't it be easy (although possible futile) to show the lies for what they were?

If the trolls were telling the truth then why isn't America more concerned about the problems being highlighted by the trolls (whatever they might be) and taking steps to fix the issues?

Rogue IT admin goes off the rails, shuts down Canadian train switches

Re: What sort of Switch?

@dmacleo

Thanks for the clarification - I thought that might be the case but as the rail switches are computer operated I wasn't entirely sure. Moron in either case though.

What sort of Switch?

In the States isn't switch a term for points? Was it railway switches he accessed or network switches?

Roses are red, Kaspersky is blue: 'That ban's unconstitutional!' Boo hoo hoo

'Kaspersky' is the problem

'Kaspersky' even sounds Russian. Talk about making things difficult for themselves. Why don't they just rename the company to something like 'Mom's Apple Pie AV' and then there won't be any more problems.

Stop calling, stop calling... ICO goes gaga after home improvement biz ignores warnings

I've given up on the TPS. I now have a landline phone which allows you to either force the caller to respond to a screening message or simply to block the number. If get home from work and find a number I don't recognise and that didn't leave a message it goes straight on the block list. I've gone from about 10 nuisance calls a day down to less than two or three a week.

Edit: As the numbers are blocked the phone doesn't even ring - hence no interruptions.

Who wants dynamic dancing animations and code in their emails? Everyone! says Google

Re: feh

Cheers

Re: feh

Jsu to confirm what you're saying because I think you know more about this than I do.

This AMP thing only happens (at the moment) if viewed through a web browser which allows javascript to run. If an email client is set to display pages in html, with external content disabled (default for Outlook, Safari etc) would you get the AMP content or not?

Wow, MIND-BLOWING: Florida Man gets an earful from 'exploding Apple AirPod' bud

Re: This...

"Is why I insist on using cable and headphones."

Doesn't the bluetooth protocol compress the music signal as well resulting in additional sound quality deterioration (although my IPhone 6S has dreadful sound quality to start with) or is this just a Hi-Fi urban myth?

It's been 50 years since those damn dirty apes took the planet by storm

Re: I'll just leave this here...

That's the one.

Of course a mystery website attacking city-run broadband was run by an ISP. Of course

Re: Great Plains is starting to sound like a city you might like to move to....

Unfortunately my employer doesn't allow remote access and it is just to far to commute to the UK on a daily basis.

LISA Pathfinder sniffed out gravitational signals down to micro-Hertz

Re: "gas molecules bouncing around inside the satellite were sufficient to register as noise. "

Low.

Re: "gas molecules bouncing around inside the satellite were sufficient to register as noise. "

Space isn't a vacuum at all. It's full of planets and stars etc. Very far apart admittedly...

I see you're writing a résumé?!.. LinkedIn parked in MS Word

Re: Could be a positive thing

Well if you live in Alabama it's only 10 miles from Nottingham to Birmingham and lots of bugs are found in gardens...

Uber: Ah yeah, we pay women drivers less than men. We can explain!

"They also have and cause far more accidents per mile driven than men. On average though they drive far fewer miles than men which is why their premiums are lower."

It isn't nearly as simple as you're making out...

I have only quoted part of the report but the rest makes interesting reading about who has most accidents but if TL;DR; the answer is idiots.

http://www.brake.org.uk/facts-resources/1593-driver-gender

Road casualty statistics show a big difference between men and women when it comes to safety on the roads. Men are far more likely to be killed or seriously injured on roads than women, as pedestrians, cyclists and as drivers, and at all ages. This applies not just in the UK, but in the majority of countries worldwide: globally, men account for 73% of all road traffic deaths, with an overall rate almost three times that of women.

Some of this difference can be explained by the fact that on average men travel greater distances; but studies have shown that even when this is compensated for, a striking difference can still be seen, both in terms of the number of men involved in crashes, and in the types of crashes in which they are involved [2].

I thought his too - If the speed difference is only 2.2% I don't see many extra journeys be squeezed in any particular day. Maybe averaged over a whole year with the driver driving 24/7 then maybe, but I'd be surprised if even Uber drivers did that.

Why is Bitcoin fscked? Here are three reasons: South Korea, India... and now China clamps down on cryptocurrencies

Meanwhile, India's government ...signaled an outright ban on the use of Bitcoin ... for illegal purposes...

Does this mean that prior to this decision it was legal in India to use Bitcoin etc for illegal purposes?

Accused Brit hacker Lauri Love will NOT be extradited to America

Barrister Not Present.

Crown Prosecution Service barrister Peter Caldwell, who argued in favour of Love's extradition on behalf of the US government, was not present in court to hear the outcome of Love's appeal.

Wonder why this was?

Ignore that FBI. We're the real FBI, says the FBI that's totally the FBI

Emails from the FBI

Not trolling, genuine question. Is it normal in the States for government departments to send out emails and messages to the general population? Here in the UK I have never had an unsolicited email from any government department so if I was to receive one, I'd be really suspicious of it. I imagined that the States would be the same but since reading about the Hawaii missile incident I'm curious to know if government departments in the States, such as the FBI, do send out routine unsolicited emails etc to people.

Kremlin social media trolls aren't actually that influential, study finds

Re: Electoral College

@Chemical Bob

It was more of a hypothetically question when I mentioned the Electoral College. I was suggesting that maybe US citizens were not actually making a choice either because they effectively chose both candidates due to the Electoral College system and Trump seems really put out that he didn't win the popular vote so it must matter somehow. Anyway from my UK perspective, US voters had a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea as both candidates (IMO) are just as morally reprehensible as each other.

Apologies for any confusion.

Re: Oh no

"...does that mean that people in the US and UK are choosing for themselves?"

In the case of Brexit the answer is 'no'. To make an informed decision you need to be informed of the facts and both the remain and leave campaigns were remarkable light on those. Lies were in abundance (buses with big numbers on them, portents of immediate Armageddon etc), but actual facts - no. The people of the UK were not giving the information to make an informed choice.

(As for the USA, can't really comment although wasn't the popular vote won by one candidate and the Electoral College vote won by the other?)

Can't login to Skype? You're not alone. Chat app's been a bit crap for five days now

Chat app's been a bit crap for five days now

Only five days?

Trump White House mulls nationalizing 5G... an idea going down like 'a balloon made out of a Ford Pinto'

Re: What race?

Agreed. I also found this quote strange

"The government should pursue the free market policies that enabled the US wireless industry to win the race to 4G."

Especially because looking in terms of penetration (sorry Wikipedia but too lazy to search further) the USA is only 4th in terms of penetration

Rank Country/Territory Penetration

1 South Korea 96%

2 Japan 93%

3 Norway 87%

4 United States 87%

And talking about implementation dates, the South Koreans and Norwegians both beat the States to early 4G systems. So winning means not coming first or having the highest penetration?

Lenovo's craptastic fingerprint scanner has a hardcoded password

Re: Somebody should have T-shirts made

Don't forget Google.

Newsflash: Car cyber-security still sucks

Already Happening?

I think that a large number of cars have been hacked where I live. The exploit involves disabling indicators and forcing the car to accelerate through amber traffic lights instead of stopping. Only two manufacturers are involved though, BMW and Audi. I can't think of any other explanation.

Julian Assange to UK court: Put an end to my unwarranted Ecuadorean couch-surf

Re: Expensive

All very good points. Just annoyed that my tax is being used for this when there are so many other things which the money could be spent on. Liked the comment about trying to get the money back from Ecuadoreans.

Expensive

It does seem strange though that British tax payers have had to pay (according to the Guardian) over £11m by October 2015 for police to guard the embassy to prevent Assange from escaping. How many other alleged rapists have this amount of money spent on them to bring them to justice, especially when the original charges have been dropped? How many other bail jumpers would this amount of money be spent on trying to bring them to court? Why is this man so special?

(I'm not commenting on Assange, his personality, political beliefs or alleged and actual crimes - just the fact that the UK government seem to be spending a disproportionate amount of money on this)

Driverless cars will lead to data-sharing – of the electrical kind

Re: First create the infrastructure for taxes

@Haefen,

I must have had a minor black out - I totally missed the second part of your post! Apologies for contradicting you when we were actually saying the same thing!

compensation? --->

Reading the Meter

Isn't this just forcing remote reporting so that meter readers don't have to be employed to read the meter on each charging point for when National Grid charges the charging point supplier?

Re: First create the infrastructure for taxes

"Even better would be to require EV's themselves to record charging and discharging data and report when plugged into approved charging stations, either at home or away from home so they can qualify for tax credits."

You have this back to front. Government will want to know how much electricity is being used so that they can tax the energy to make up for the loss of fossil fuel revenue. There won't be tax credits, but there will be a taxable charge, either on the cost of the electricity used for the vehicle or an annual tax bill added onto the VED etc?

Microsoft whips out tool so you can measure Windows 10's data-slurping creepiness

Re: 'they still won't switch the slurp off either.'

"only a couple of clicks during setup to disable the slurp" and if Windows 10 comes pre-installed as it does on most consumer machines how do you switch it off then? You can change the setting to basic slurp from full slurp or vice-versa but I didn't see anyway of turning it off last time I looked.

New Sky thinking: Media giant makes dish-swerving move on Netflix territory

"And then throw in the entire BT/OpenReach"

Although I hate to say anything good about BT, whenever I've needed an OpenReach engineer to come out they've been first class.

Maverick internet cop Chrome 64 breaks rules to thwart malvert scum

Re: I keep getting those

Microsoft do the same thing when you change the Windows 10 default browser from Edge to anything else - a stupid little message about how Edge is designed for Windows 10 and do you really want to change.

Mass limit proposed so boffins can tell when they've fingered a brown dwarf or a fat planet

Re: "about ten times that of Jupiter – or ten times 1.898×10^27kg"

Alain obviously meant 2 significant figures instead of decimal places, and Alain is right, anything much more precise is meaningless. It is like giving the distance from London to New York to the nearest 10 whole miles (3470) which is sensible or to the nearest inch / cm which is so precise it becomes meaningless.

Intellectual Property Office drops, er, patently cool cartoon to teach kids about trademarks

Re: Lets hope

Is there a right to parody in UK law? If not then has the IPO breached these artists' IP by creating characters with names so close to their own?

What do Cali, New York, Hawaii, Maine and 18 other US states have in common? Fighting the FCC on net neutrality

Re: Translation Please?

Three down votes but no one willing to explain what the sentence means. Does the abolition of NN mean that ISPs are no longer made to prioritize their own video calling systems (forced to by the 20165 order) as the sentence implies, or does the abolition of NN allow ISPs to prioritize their own video calling systems?

Translation Please?

I'm having trouble understanding this sentence:

"The order reverses 2015 rules that classified broadband internet service providers as telecommunications services, which made them subject to specific regulations – such as more prioritizing certain network traffic, such as its own video-calling system over Apple's Facetime or Microsoft's Skype."

If I understand it correctly then the 2015 order states that ISPs must prioritise their own video-calling system over Apple's or Microsoft. I thought this was what NN prevented and what the new rules were going to allow. Have I got this all back to front in my mind?

Who's using 2FA? Sweet FA. Less than 10% of Gmail users enable two-factor authentication

Automatic Login

If you enable 2FA does it prevent Google from logging you into their system every time you reopen your browser? If it does then (a) I'l enable it and (b) could this be a reason Google don't make it mandatory - it'll reduce their ability to spy on your surfing behaviour?

EU court to rule whether Facebook should seek and destroy hate speech

Logistics

I'm just trying to get my head around the logistics. I can see active search functions having a hard time locating so called 'hateful' material. For example considering the language used in a post? I imagine some automated language detection routine could determine which language was used but what if a multi-lingual Arabic, Hebrew, English and Russian message is posted but the first language elements do not contain offensive content, just the last ones? Additionally would the language need to be translated into another language before trying to decide if it is offensive or not?

Sure, FB can code for known delivery mechanisms of offensive content but even I can think of many other ways of posting a message to avoid detection routines (At the moment I'm thinking of pictures of kittens holding up placards, a couple of innocent words in each picture, but all combined to be quite offensive) and if someone is determined to get their message out via FB they will.

Dislike FB as much as I do this doesn't seem like something they can win. My advice would be to shut down the whole system (along with Twitter) but I doubt my wife would speak to me again!

Self-driving cars still do not exist even if we think they do

Re: clap clap clap

@Iglethal

I think we'll all need one of those as well to help us forget that joke!

Uncle Sam's treatment of Huawei is world-class hypocrisy – consumers will pay the price

Re: The American consumer will pay in a poorer market without Huawei

"In light of the goverment's failure to protect its citizens in this area, wouldn't keeping possible privacy-abusing products out of the U.S. be a good thing."

So are you calling for Microsoft, Apple and Google products to be banned too?

Transport pundit Christian Wolmar on why the driverless car is on a 'road to nowhere'

Re: It appears from the article that Mr. Wolmar is a railway enthusiast...

"Many fewer people would own one."

Disagree. Cars are for a lot of people a status symbol. It might not be to you, but why do so many people spend £20,000+ on a vehicle when they can get one which does the same functionality for a lot less? Why does Tesla make very expensive electric cars instead of very cheap ones? Status.

I think we'll just end up with the same situation we have now except the cars will be electric and self driving. The numbers won't go down unless the cars are priced or legislated out of ordinary peoples' reach.

"We've seen what happens with trucks engineered to run at 60mph. They then pass each other at 0.5mph"

This - a few months ago I was on a two lane motorway when a breakdown truck towing a van decided to overtake a lorry. It took about ten miles to pass the lorry (from one junction to the next). Extremely frustrating to be behind.

Re: Zebra crossings

Along the same lines how would driverless cars cope with a mixed environment containing cars still driven by people? What happens, as happened to me the other day, a motorist indicates wrongly on a roundabout (indicated one junction too early). From looking at the car's road positioning, the way the driver was looking etc it was obvious that they weren't going to leave where they were indicating towards so I waited. How would driverless cars deal with this? Ignore al indicators and only move when the roundabout is clear?

'Repeal hate crime laws for free speech' petition passes 14k signatures

Re: My view

"Free speech" should be about expressing you views without fear of censorship, no mater what you want to say. Putting limits and restrictions on what can be said, no mater how repugnant those opinions may be, goes against the entire concept of "Freedom of Speech"

It's a difficult one. However if you ever want a reason why free speech should be curtailed can I just say 'Westboro Baptist Church'?