Posts by Flywheel

Das geeks hit crowdfunding target: IBM mainframes are coming home

All they need now is ..

An IBM 1419 MICR - no practical use of course, but it's such a beast of a machine and is really cool when it's running. It's also really loud!

In the living room, can Google Home hear you SCREAM? Well, that's what you'll need to do

Re: Scream

!RemindMe 6 months

(tips hat to Reddit)

Uh-oh .io: Question mark hangs over trendy tech startup domains as UN condemns British empire hangover

Sea level

Apparently the sea-level around Chagos is proving a real risk, so giving it back to whomever might be a bit of a pointless exercise.

This situation will of course be monitored and reported on by Warsi, our very own Minister for Chocolate Fireguards. Lucky us!

Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence?

Re: Been there

Oil? Ha! We don't need no steenking oil!

My 1974 Simca Saloon ran for nearly a year on a combination of mainly pink Dulux emulsion and a little bit of something that vaguely resembled oil. Ran really quietly!

Tesla's autonomous lane changing software is worse at driving than humans, and more

Re: "performed worse than human drivers when trying to change lanes automatically"

Tut! You beat me to it!

Jeff Bezos finally gets .Amazon after DNS overlord ICANN runs out of excuses to delay decision any further

Re: Objection your honor

amazon.com

So will I need to start visiting https://amazon.amazon soon? And will I be able to register a web site with a .amazon TLD?

Tesla big cheese Elon Musk warns staffers to tighten their belts in bid to cut expenses (again)

Re: Servicing

said he's glad he's retiring as when everything is electric they will have hardly anything to do

Hmmm.. that never seems to stop them finding something. Are you sure you took it to an actual garage?

Wine? No, posh noshery in high spirits despite giving away £4,500 bottle of Bordeaux

I'd be very careful not to snip near anything that cost £4000 !!

Quit worrying about killer robots, they are coming whether you like it or not – and they absolutely will not stop

I despair

If just half the global defence/defense budget went into curating the Planet and generally making it a better place to live, we'd all be living in paradise by now.

Get in line, USA: Sweden reopens Assange rape allegations probe

I suspect that if the US get their way, "the rest of his life" will not be a long time and he'll have an unusual accident in prison.

Special Relationship

Wot?! Do Sweden have a Special Relationship as well? I thought the whole idea of that was making sure Britain paid off the WW2 debt incurred when the US gave us a loan?

Panic as panic alarms meant to keep granny and little Timmy safe prove a privacy fiasco

Re: who exactly is going to bother

How about a situation like "..my rich, obstinate and elderly father still chooses to live alone in his semi-rural farmhouse property with the nearest neighbours 3 miles away". GPS and online maps are the ne'er-do-wells' friend in this case.

Japan on track to start testing Alfa-X, fastest train in the world with top speed of 400kph

Chris Grayling has expressed an interest

Apparently he's going to fit wings to it and use it to fly supplies to the UK after Brexit!

Amazon agrees to stop selling toxic jewelry, school supplies to kids, coughs up some couch change ($700,000)

Re: Market share and madness.

The real problem here is that, yes, China make some very good quality products (many of which I use on a daily basis), but then they spoil it by manufacturing vast piles of junk products. As you say, many of these are self-destroying, and this is having a calamitous effect on the planet's resources, both in raw materials and in waste disposal.

If we are at all serious about even the short-term future of this planet, something needs to be done to stem the flow of instant landfill, and China needs to understand that they can't keep giving so-called developing countries aid paying despots a backhander then robbing them of mineral wealth just to make new trading posts from which to produce more junk that no-one wants.

Re: If I were a betting man...

selling blatantly toxic products in China

That's why they sell them in places that are not China and that's why Amazon is full of this cheap sh*t.

US foreign minister Mike Pompeo to give UK a bollocking over Huawei 5G plans

Re: 51st state

I'm not sure how they still have the nerve to call it the "United" Kingdom - pretty much every other country in the Kingdom wants to follow Scotland's lead and even South Yorkshire's devolution plan is now being taken seriously.

Hate e-scooters? Join the club of the pals of 190 riders in Austin TX who ended up in hospital

Also works for (Non)-E-scooters!

Speaking from personal experience and actually being old enough to know better I bought a discounted alloy-with-skateboard-wheels scooter when they were just falling (!) out of fashion. I lived in a coastal town at the time and while the pedestrianised town-centre areas were fun, they were too crowded, so off to the promenade I went. Sadly, the Council hadn't kept up with the pavement (UK definition) repairs, and my speedy glides became a nightmare obstacle avoidance test. I lost. My front wheel got diverted by a large crack and I ended up sprawled AOT. Not fun. Not clever.

'Software delivered to Boeing' now blamed for 737 Max warning fiasco

Re: Management's job

I wonder how many of their managers and bean-counters fly in their own product. That could be an interesting FOIA (or equivalent) request!

Google jumps the shark from search results to your camera: Nest Hub, Pixels, and more from ad giant's coder confab

We recognize that we’re a guest in your home, and we respect and appreciate that invitation

Absolute B*LL*CKS - the "respect" part at least.

They "appreciate" the invitation because presumably that'll stop us complaining when they do their next accidental data slurp: "but you agreed to it .. in the T & Cs".

I'm not forward to Google getting their slimey mitts on my NestCam feed!

Airbnb host thrown in the clink after guest finds hidden camera inside Wi-Fi router

Re: Pornhub

There's already 101 videos there (so I'm told) if you search for AirBNB. No category as yet though..

*cough*

Take a hike: Grab a flask of tea – South Korea is opening hiking trails in the DMZ

Wrong DMZ !

Who are all these Koreans and what the heck are they doing in my firewall !?

May Day! PM sacks UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson for Huawei 5G green-light 'leak'

Re: About time too

Just send Mr Grayling in - what could possibly go wrong!?

(mushroom cloud coz .. well, it'll end one way or another)

A2 Hosting finds 'restore' the hardest word as Windows outage slips into May

Ironic....

https://www.a2hosting.com/blog/security-breach-plan/.. and

"here at A2 Hosting we provide free Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates, regular site backups"

Mind you, "regular" could mean once every 6 months, I suppose.

NordVPN rapped by ad watchdog over insecure public Wi-Fi claims

Re: And to think:

You mean I'll have to get on a train to watch porn? Oh dear ...

Julian Assange jailed for 50 weeks over Ecuador embassy bail-jumping

Re: After 50 weeks

Australia appear to be saying nothing at this stage - you'd expect them to be eager to help a fellow countryman!

Extortionist hacks IT provider used by the stars of tech and big biz, leaks customer info after ransom goes unpaid

He's trying to get his £350 million a week back...

Come friendly bit barns and fall on Slough: Equinix opens £90m data centre in London rust belt

Somewhat like "London Luton Airport"..

Short-sighted IMHO

Why not move it/them further North? Everything (including land) is generally cheaper and we do actually have fast ADSL as well as motorways that don't generally resemble car parks.

There's NordVPN odd about this, right? Infosec types concerned over strange app traffic

They see our traffic anyway so probably not to hard to roll out

Let's see them get Democracy right first before tackling VPN. I'm looking at you, UK, in particular.

It's your what in a box? Here's a thing to make your bosses think about malware responses

Failed at registration confirmation

It was going so well.. I watched (most of) the cheesy video, was inspired by the possibilities of it all and took the plunge and registered. I even read the T & Cs!

Then I had to confirm my email address: they sent me a link and it could "only be opened in the browser that I used to register". So I had another go, disabling Ublock and Privacy Badger in my Linux-based Firefox-ESR - still no luck, and after 4 turns round the loop I gave up. I sent feedback - I even signed it with my GPG key to prove how L33t I am .. I wonder what'll happen next!?

UK cautiously gives Huawei the nod for 5G network gear sales

No one buys telecoms services based on how secure they are

Hmmm.. I'd say the first paragraph negates that statement. And bearing mind that I'm a self-acknowledged tin-foil wearer along with the fact that we're still on course to move our emergency services onto mobile networks (correct me if I'm wrong) I'd say that a secure network is of paramount importance!

Google rolls out Android Easter Egg for Europe – a Microsoft antitrust-style browser, search engine choice box

Re: What if Brexit already happened?

"Proper" mobile phones? You mean the ones you could carry from the table to er, somewhere not too far away due to the short cable to the junction box?

Corbyn would certainly remember, and appreciate those!

iOS 13 leaks suggest Apple is finally about to unleash the iPad as a computer for grownups

Re: file system access

It should really be a device that's user-agnostic: as a techie I shouldn't have to be discouraged from buying one just because I'm a techie.

When is a phone not a phone? When it's an Android security key

"Android 6,7,8 and 9 are patched every month with the same security fixes"

Every month? Wow, my Moto G5, allegedly a modern phone, was last patched on December 1st 2018. The Kernel is from December 14th 2018.

As the UK updates its .eu Brexit advice yet again, an alternative hovers into view

I'm looking for a .brexit extension - that'll teach Johnny Foreigner to try and put one over on us!

If there's 5G connectivity but no 5G devices on it, does it make a sound? Wait, no, that's not right

Re: Sincere comment

"Magic Leap" - that'd be a great name for a horse!

Just the small matter of the bill for scrapping Blighty's old nuclear submarines: It's £7.5bn

sink containers in deep sediment with location devices

Wow, the [insert rogue nation state here] Governments would just love this idea. Just take a large vessel. find the location device signal and recover all that lovely radioactive material. I'm sure some of those states are cavalier enough to do that!

'Safety will always come first,' insist Arizona biz org in response to Uber self-driving car death

"Safety will always come first"

Yessir.. we'll always make sure that the driver and passengers are never put at risk by hitting a few randomly-moving meatbags that our software engineers never anticipated. Bah!

Apple redesigns wireless AirPower charger to be world's smallest, thinnest, lightest, cheapest, invisible... OK, it doesn't exist anymore

"Move quickly and break things....

HEY! DON'T FORGET TO FIX WHAT YA BROKE!!!!

What made a super high-tech home in Victorian England? Hydroelectric witchery, for starters

Re: It's a marvelous place

Actually, Dungeness is quite an experience. There's the power station, a pebbly beach, a bohemian artist community and a pub/bar which served "locally caught fish" the last time I was there. They tend to only open for lunch.

ProtonMail back up in Russia after regime chokes access over 'terrorist activity'

Re: ProtonMail's trustworthiness

> They are probably using a VPN of some sort.

I heard that VPNs were banned in Russia, so accessing a banned email system using a banned transport is really going to p1ss Mr Putin off...

Raiding party! UK's ICO drops in unannounced on couple of dodgy-dialling dirtbag outfits

Re: Why stop there

It must have been leaked, because the callers knew the make, model, colour and registration number of my car. Most of them didn't know the accident details, but some did, leading me to surmise that it was either my insurer or the repair company.

Why stop there

It's good news that these B******* are getting fined etc,but what the ICO really needs to do is find out where they got their information from.

I had 6 months of these calls and eventually contacted everyone involved in the vehicle repair chain (including my insurer) to find out who'd leaked

my data. They all denied it strenuously of course, but I'm sure that a visit/chat with the ICO would be well worthwhile. I doubt the ICO have the resources though!

Freelance devs: Oh, you wanted the app to be secure? The job spec didn't mention that

Re: Yeah...

make it a mandatory first-year high school course

I'm almost with you on this one, but you forgot the Dilbert module in which you now have coding skills, but you haven't encountered the reasoning(?) and demands of the PHB.

UK's ICO event on targeted ads opens floor to the adtech industry: Anybody? No? Speak for 10 minutes. Hello?

North/South divide again

undisclosed location in central London

I know for fact that 90% of the bloody ambulance-chaser advertisers are in Manchester and Liverpool. Typical Southernist thinking again! Bah!

Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

Re: The man in the mirror

Hmmm, I look like remarkably like Randy Quaid (the one with the beard). Fortunately the similarity ends there and I don't have his lifestyle/debts/etc.

UK.gov's Verify has 'significantly' missed every target, groans spending watchdog

cost us, the tax-payer a lot of money

So is Chris Grayling involved in this as well? Gawd, is there no end to this man's versatility?!

Sniff the love: Subaru's SUVs overwhelmed by scent of hair shampoo, recalls 2.2 million cars

Methane Gas?

I take it that they've not issued a directive about not farting in the affected vehicles? Mind you, the potentially flammable nature of farts offers a potential contact cleaning effect if flashpoint can be reached...

BT 'UK's most powerful Wi-Fi'? Why, fie, for shame! – ads watchdog

Maybe they haven't told the regulator that they're using an Orgone Accumulator - that'd make them feel greater....

'God, Send Mobiles,' the industry prayed back in the '90s. This time, 5G actually has it covered

Data plans

So, apparently you'll be able to download a full-length movie in under 4 seconds! Fantastic .. and you have, er, a 10Gb/month data plan? Oh dear...