Posts by OhDearHimAgain

Researchers trick Tesla into massively breaking the speed limit by sticking a 2-inch piece of electrical tape on a sign

Re: Sigh.

A friend failed his bike test for this - they are quite strict on it for bike tests. They use it as an indication of your confidence on the bike.

Bloke takes over every .io domain by snapping up crucial name servers

"Somewhat unusually, .IO TLD decided it wanted to continue to run the .IO name servers, but outsourced the rest of the registry operations to Afilias."

*** WE NOW KNOW THIS IS NOT TRUE ***

Afilias bought outright the operator "Internet Computer Bureau Limited" (aka "ICB"), which is also has the alias "IO Top Level Domain Registry", which is the "ccTLD Manager" - i.e. they bought dot-IO and all its control - lock, stock & barrel.

http://domainincite.com/23650-afilias-bought-io-for-70-million

https://www.nic.io/terms.htm

https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/io.html

But they didn't pass it by ICANN - naughty, naughty - A change of ccTLD Manager needs ICANN approval.

So those poor Chagossians got ripped off to the tune of $70M - as dot-TV will tell you, a good ccTLD can go a long way to fund a traditional island heritage.

So who did get the $70M ... well checkout who resigned their directorship at about the same time the company changed hands

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/03226374/officers

And what did the UK Gov know about all this ... they're keeping quiet, but then they just lost at the UN

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/25/un-court-rejects-uk-claim-to-sovereignty-over-chagos-islands

What a mess - time to call time on colonialism, eh?

Russia threatens to set up its 'own internet' with China, India and pals – let's take a closer look

Re: Kremlin, lying? Colour me astonished ...

Its about all control - if you control the ROOT zone you control all DNS, which means pretty much everything.

e.g. he could remove the NS records for the Verisign COM zone and install his own - running his own COM registry operator (PutinNet) - then people would have to buy all COM domain names twice - once from Verisign and once from PutinNet.

Given there are 145M names in COM & NET and they bring in ~$8 a year each - wouldn't you want a slice of the action, if you could?

I wrote a document about this in 2009 - https://names.of.london/press/root_hints_file.pdf

Raspberry Pi Foundation releases operating system for PCs, Macs

Xubuntu for the win

Personally, I'd prefer Xubuntu

Is your Windows 10, 8 PC falling off the 'net? Microsoft doesn't care

Have you tried switching it off & on

A Linux VM-Host I was running, that hosted about 20 guests all running multiple live internet facing services, went for over five years without a reboot.

Pass the 'Milk' to make code run four times faster, say MIT boffins

Sounds a lot like SCSI queue re-ordering to me.

Also, if the program needs the data before it can proceed, then what does it do before the cache has fetched it? Presumably blocks. OR do you have to register all your data requirements from the start? Not commonly easy to do.

That said, I've often thought that programmers write code in the order that make sense to them, but often the code can be completely re-ordered and still work the same, but I assumed modern compilers & processors also know this and do it already.

EU uncorks €1.8bn in cybersecurity investment. Thirsty, UK?

misleading journalism at its best

Currently the only money we receive from the EU is money we had already sent them in the first place - only to allow them to decide how much, and to where, to send it back.

The suggestion is therefore, that after we leave we will "miss out" on getting some of our money back - this assumes that after exit, we will still be giving the EU quite so much money.

Once we have left we will not be "missing out" on EU funding as the Commission does not actually make any money itself, it only takes money from member states, then gives a proportion of it back.

If I give you £100 and you give me back £50 - should I stop giving you the £100, i am not "missing out" on getting the £50 back - it was my £50 in the first place.

Martha Lane Fox: Yeuch! The Internet is made by men?!?

Its not men holding women back

My daughter just made her GCSE choices - she chose IT - but the school isn't going to let her do it - becuase not enough girls (four to be precise) chose to do the course.

She goes to an all-girls school run by a female head, a posse of female deputies, and a female heavy staff. All the usual excuses of why girls aren't doing IT (too many boys in the class etc) simply don't wash.

She was offered French, Spanish or Childcare instead - you couldn't be more patronising if you tried.

Without a doubt, over 90% of the girls in that school will have a smartphone, but clearly not enough of them are interested in shaping the smartphone experience to be more female friendly. Probably becuase most of the staff don't really understand IT, so aren't advocating it.

And so, yet another generation of women will grow up feeling technology is not a female thing, some will become teachers and in turn steer the next generation of girls away from IT.

but it's all men's fault, of course.

We’re so over Uber: Italy ponders slapping taxes on workers in the ‘sharing economy’

Tax the lot

I don't see why it shouldn't all count as "earns for tax purposes", subject to whatever rules & exemptions may apply - why should a taxi drive pay pax, but an uber drive not??

Remember Netbooks? Windows 10 makes them good again!

Re: Pah!

I prefer Xubuntu - its not quite a light as Lubuntu, but pretty close - however, its lot easier to look after.

We have it on our 1Gb/1.2Ghz dual-core atom netbooks and its like having XP back, except secure :)

Insall Xubuntu

Once you Linux, you will never go back.

This whopping 16-bit computer processor is being built by hand, transistor by transistor

Re: stack based

I still have my 16kb Oric-1 and it still works fine - remember "zap", "ping", "shoot" & "explode" ?

Totally brilliant, but not exactly "transistor by transistor"

There's a lot of chips on there - presumably LSI discrete logic, but all the same - not "transistor by transistor"

Hate Facebook? Hate it enough to spend $9k fleeing it? Web 'country club' built for the rich

its for the kids

I can't see the R&F wanting this for themselves, but I can see them paying for it for their kids - keep them away from the rif-raf, make sure they mix with the "right" types, like the lovely Paris Hilton (above) - what a role model to us all.

Re: Privacy?

That's just the lawyers covering everyone's ass - if you guarantee it, you have to compensate when you don't achieve it, and if humans are involved it WILL leak.

Women! You too can be 'cool' and 'fun' if you work in tech!

So may be the problem is too many women running HR?

Re: Utter Crap!!!

There was a campaign to get more men to teach in primary schools, but the fact you never saw it speaks of its success.

My son is at college right now doing a B-Tech and there are 2 girls & 32 guys - pretty much the same ratios when I was at Uni 30 yrs ago.

Prez Obama cyber-guru: Think your data is safe in an EU cloud? The NSA will raid your servers

its always about the bottom line...

The US have been using their hacking to pass commercially sensitive information to US firms to give them a competitive advantage.

So where's the difference?

Wii got it WRONG: How do you solve a problem like Nintendo?

Try "Dolphin" - its what the WiiU should have been.

I bought a WiiU and have been disappointed for two reasons (1) No games - even now more than a year on (2) they abandoned the motion control (instead of building on it), which is what made the Wii *so* successful - you don't even get a Wiimote with the high-end version.

They just made another me-too console with a silly tablet. The other console makers must have breathed a sign of relief (after the storming success of the Wii).

All they need to do is release a Pokemon MMO and they won't be able to make enough WiiU.

Eurocops want to build remote car-stopper, shared sensor network

The system can never be secure - crims will chip it out of their cars, and use it to car-jack innocent motorists.

It may inconvenience casual joy riders.

Also said above, I also see a big problem with cars running on fake plates.

I suspect the purpose of this story is to get more funding for a useless little department that was about to be shut down.

I'd think its unlikely that could easily target a single car in a high speed pursuit situation.

Much more likely is that the car will have a device that shuts down the vehicle in response to a low frequency radio signal.

Thought you didn't need to show ID in the UK? Wrong

I think this is how most people felt about the ID card - it wasn't the card, but the tracking & tracing they objected to.

A smarter government would have implemented it in stages...

Re: I think we should become more European with this

living under a different chosen name (pseudonym) is not an offence in the UK.

It was one of the changes that Labour were going to bring in with the identity card bill.

A lawyer friend of mine says it is his opinion this would not stand up in court as it is unreasonable to expect a lay person to be suitably qualified to make the correct assessment of the documents it takes border officials many months to train for.

Swedish teen's sex video fine slashed: Unwilling co-star girlfriend furious

Re: Mixed signals regarding privacy

Banged up for 20 years for that!

Microsoft covers Brit who penetrated Windows 8.1 with GOLD

Re: I applaud this approach

But desktops are a severely falling share of people's computing experience.

Like saying "We still own 100% of the horse shoe market".

Full Steam Ahead: Valve unwraps plans for gaming hardware

it will dual-bot - no problems

Re: Watching with interest

The answer is a simple hardware assessment, like Windows does. The game can then choose settings appropriate for your hardware - in reality the only relevant things are the speed of the CPU, Graphics card & to a less extent the RAM. So SteamOS assesses them and tells the game what to do.

The only fly in that ointment (I can immediately think of) is what version of pixel shader you have. Some games are fussy in a way they really don't need to be.

PC gaming is already a big market because, as a lot of gamers mature, they want to get more out of their games than the vanilla game / consoles can offer - hi-res textures, features mods etc. So they turn to PC gaming, but some people are put off by the perceived complexity - the SteamBox is an attempt to address that and so broaden the appeal of choice that PC style gaming has to offer.

Once you've played in 1080p & hi-res textures you'll never go back.

PHWOAR! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, Prime Minister

The main problem I have with this is its a simple Yes / No - well at least my mobile operator's is.

I'm happy to have most stuff blocked, but (for example) they blocked match.com - hardly what you would call hardcore porn, so I had the blocked removed, which then opens the flood gates to everything, including all the illegal stuff(?) - if the filter is too draconian it makes itself useless - but the problem is what we classify as "acceptable" is very much down the the individual.

And that's where all forms of censorship break down - at the margins - we can all agree that kiddy porn etc should be blocked, but download some of the free filtering s/w produced by far-right American groups and you'll find all the gay & bisexual sites start disappearing.

I use a filter list maintained by a group of European Universities - its a pretty good balance, but I can still black / white list sites I want or don't want without the all or nothing typical of blocking at the ISP.

So you want to be a contractor? Well, here's how it works

Re: The one basic attribute ...

The oldest contractor I worked with was Dan, who was 86. Front office trading system for banks. He had built the first Unix system in the UK.

Re: Ltd Co. ?

I use a firm of accountants that does it all on-line now, with a lot of great management reporting.

You download your bank statement and upload it directly into their site and it will guess the reasons for most of the transactions.

OK @£144 (inc VAT) pcm it ain't cheap (+£130 for your SATR), but if the alternative is leaving contracting, I'd say I'm still making a surplus by joining them & staying.

My by I didn't read carefully enough, but I didn't see mentioned the interesting paradox that when the market turns down, often rates go up. Head count freezes mean permies are put on hold, but the world still move on and system need fixing & poking.

Are you being robbed of sleep by badly designed servers?

Doesn't everybody run VMs these days? We ditched the "100s of little boxes" model years ago and run a mix of big Dells, with DRACs, and Supermicro with whatever they call it. The VMs all have VNC console access.

My biggest concern is the lack of security on the remote management cards - typically they don't even have IP filtering.

More Brits ditch Apple tablets for Amazon, Google, Samsung kit

Re: Looking for more?

If you don't like what Samsung have done, there's loads of choice - that's why I've gone with Android - you're not stuck with the OEMs launcher.

The "GO" launcher and companion apps makes a nice alternative and means you can unify the experience across all your android devices, if you wish.

FAVI smacks your dumb TV with £30 Android SmartStick

I have the Justop box (£40 from ebay) - its bigger (1.5 x pack of fags) than this little thing and requires its own external power supply - I use a mains master/slave trip so it goes on & off with the TV, but it has two full sized USB sockets and wired Ethernet, so homeplug gets round the streaming issues.

I quickly realised a mini-keyboard/mouse like the one featured in the video was a big bonus, but found a lot don't have the rage to be used across the living room.

It does a fine job on youtube (inc pretty good HD) & iplayer, but 4od only plays the ads!!!! - had to adjust the TV's audio lag to get lip sync, and its still a little off.