Posts by Anonymous Blowhard

Virtual monopoly on UK cell towers and TV masts up for sale

Re: Fire sale of fully sweated asset?

"Arquiva's mistake was to try and squeeze as many channels as it could onto its multiplexes, sacrificing broadcast quality in the process."

I think you've missed the point of the article; the availability of an alternate distribution channel, that has a lot of advantages over broadcast, mean that the broadcast network is intrinsically devalued forever; people are more attracted to the convenience of on-demand content than they are to "broadcast quality" and the content providers can control how the adverts are targeted (even to post-code level) as well as being able to prevent (most) punters from skipping them.

A bit like being the owner of an enterprise that breeds and supplies dray horses at a time when your customers are starting to buy tractors and lorries.

Google gets smooth early Android releases. OEMs are struggling

Re: Pixel is the reference phone, code works for Google, OEMs sort out the mess on their hardware

"I can't see a conflict of interest there at all."

But if Google is taking technical decisions and making updates to Android, based on it's knowledge and implementation of Pixel hardware, and not communicating to the OEMs about this then the OEMs are at a trading disadvantage; remember that the big Android OEMs are paying Google money for it, so they can expect some consideration in this.

Want to bring down that pesky drone? Try the power of sound

"It is possible that the transparent section is a safety feature so that its operation can be visually confirmed."

I agree, you're probably going to have to redesign the unit so that the sensors are masked from external light sources and any transparent areas, e.g. for visual confirmation of drip flow, are separated.

Designers are also going to have to build in "tamper alarms" that trigger when spurious light sources are shone onto sensors; the actual light source for the sensor could also use coded pulses to verify that the sensor is "seeing" the correct light source.

And all this is going to add to the cost of medical equipment and, given that medical budgets are not infinite, reduce the availability to patients.

Re: more distant attacks could be achieved by ramping up the power output.

Or you could mount your transducer on your own drone and use it to disable other drones in flight.

God save the Queen... from Donald Trump. So say 1 million Britons

Re: Where were all these virtue signallers...

"Our trade in goods with China far exceeds that with the USA. Also we're happy to let them buy up our companies (hello JLR) when it suits us"

I think you got your countries crossed there; JLR is owned by Tata Motors, an Indian company...

AI eggheads: Our cancer-spotting code rivals dermatologists

Re: Better to eliminate true all-clears, rather than detect cancers

"This is because the machine finds the obvious positives, and leaves highly qualified humans with the mind-numbing job of trying to find the remaining hard-to-spot false negatives in a load of true negatives.....If instead the machine eliminates a percentage of true negatives"

So we need a machine that can prove a negative, without ever giving a false positive? Then we should scan the remaining pool using "qualified humans"?

This assumes that everyone who didn't get an "all clear" from the "not cancer detector" goes to see a "qualified human" so we would need a lot more "qualified humans" than we have currently.

The real statistic is that without a simple, cheap, test most victims will never even see a "qualified human" so more people will die as a result.

President Trump tweets from insecure Android, security boffins roll eyes

Re: hang on...

"He's not using a "made in the US of A" iPhone??"

Or even a "designed in the US of A" iPhone...

Disk-nuking malware takes out Saudi Arabian gear. Yeah, wipe that smirk off your face, Iran

So what's the Saudi punishment for hacking? Cut off their broadband?

US govt can't stop Microsoft taking its Irish email seizure fight to the Supreme Court

Re: @Oh Homer ... So basically...

"That is why MS are opening co-op centres like the new one in Germany. It is run for MS by DT (Deutsche Telekom) and MS don't have any administrative or physical access to the site."

Just shows what can be done when Microsoft use their lawyers' powers for good...

Re: @Oh Homer ... So basically...

"The point is that if the bad actors are sitting in France and Turkey and the data is sitting in Ireland, neither the French, US, or pretty much most of the western world would have a legal right to get the data."

I'd sooner that the law protects me and the "bad actors", rather than neither of us.

"There was at one time a practice where an account would be set up and bad actors would edit a draft document instead of actually sending it."

Since when is "editing a document" a terrorist threat? What next, shoot-to-kill for people in possession of word processors?

All this "national security" bollocks is just an easy way for politicians to play to the crowds and say "We're doing something! Now do as you're told, in case terrorismz."

Trump's FBI boss, Attorney General picks reckon your encryption's getting backdoored

"It's effectively like removing the walls from your house."

Not at all; you're overreacting.

It's like giving a key to all the locks in your house to every member of the FBI, DEA, NSA, CIA and they might loan it to the Sheriff's Department, the State Police or the County Dog Catcher.

And if the lock maker sells in Russia or China they might give a copy to the FSB and the FSS

What could go wrong?

I'LL BE BATT: Arnie Schwarzenegger snubs gas guzzlers for electric

Re: Difficult to blame him

"End of the day they will be getting revenue from every single one of them (probably at a premium compared to you @home tariff)"

Revenue is not profit; based on electricity prices I can't see that the electricity companies are going to make much profit from this investment. Add to that the scenario where many owners will just charge their vehicles at home and/or at work (not an option for most owners of internal combustion powered vehicles) and there doesn't seem to be much incentive for them to pay for this.

The vehicle manufacturers have the most to lose in this, without a charging infrastructure they can't convince some people to swap to electric; whether this is a big impact on the potential market or not is something for analysts to look into (i.e. if you can charge your car every night at home, how many times would you need to charge elsewhere?).

If, or when, electric becomes common for commercial vehicles then there would be another use-case for public charging; this might involve truck stops where patrons can charge their vehicle whilst they have a meal, so the charging time is less of an issue for the user. Similarly motels can install charging points and add the cost on to the bill; so the motel has an additional selling point.

At the end of the day, I can't see public charging points working like the current-day gas station, where you stop for five minutes and the profit on the fuel is significant to the operator; the future is more likely to be that the charging point is an additional service that adds to an existing business. McCharge anyone?

Oracle lied: Database giant is axing hundreds of staff – at least 450 in its hardware div

"It will be interesting to see if/how Trump responds to this."

I expect he won't respond at all; these are "excess truths", i.e. things that he doesn't want to hear, so why bother saying anything?

We've found a ‘vaccine’ for fake news. Wait! No, we really are Cambridge researchers

Not The Nine O'Clock News

If anything sounds like "fake news" it's an "inoculation against fake news"...

What's the biggest danger to the power grid? Hackers? Terrorists? Er, squirrels

Die Hard 5 - This Time its Squirrels!

Looks like politicians are getting cyber-warfare "knowledge" from Die Hard 4.0, just like they got their "liquid explosives" information from Die hard 2.

I'll go and put on a clean vest, just in case...

Why Theresa May’s hard Brexit might be softer than you think

Re: 2 years?

"The UK simply has to stop the £350 million a week payments, and the EU looses 20-25% of it's funding. You want to keep the money flowing, come to the table now and make a deal like grown ups. You don't want to? What are you going to do to us, we're leaving anyway, oh and we're still not going to pay you."

The "card" that the EU has in your game is that 47% of the UK's trade is with EU countries; if you want to play hard-ball then they could also put immediate tariffs on all goods from the UK and prevent all UK citizens, like myself, from working there.

Most of my company's UK income is from consulting visits to Scandinavian countries; at the moment I'm a services-exporter and UK tax payer, I'd probably be unemployed under your scheme.

CBI: Brexit Britain needs a 'sensible and flexible' immigration programme

Re: It will be horrific

"There'll be enough unemployed natives looking for seasonal work."

Not unless the government slashes benefits; but once the right-wing shouting-machine has exhausted the possibility of blaming the UK's problems (what exactly were they BTW?) on immigrants the unemployed should make a good target...

Amazon asks for spectrum to try out IoT networking gear

Re: What on earth does "5 minutes per hour per day per week" mean exactly?

"Many people still think of radio transmission in terms of old school broadcasting where a transmitting station sends a continuous signal at a known frequency for all the time its sending. Digital transmission doesn't work like this -- data goes in packets"

" Amazon have self-selected and then converted into transmission time to facilitate communications with old school RF types."

Sorry, but radio is radio; "digital radio" is just another way of modulating the analog carrier wave to encode the information. The bottom line is that "digital radio" can interfere with other radio systems, although this can be mitigated by being able to use lower transmission power and using "burst" transmissions (only transmitting data for very short periods of time). Saying "it's digital" doesn't really say anything about the expected impact on other spectrum users (e.g. Digital TV is pretty much a continuous transmission at relatively high power).

Stanford boffins find 'correlation between caffeine consumption and longevity'

So it is OK to dip your chocolate digestive in your tea then?

Windows 10 Anniversary Update crushed exploits without need of patches

Re: Windows is the lowest form of Desktop Experience available

"So, basically, Bing makes money linking to malware!"

You could use the same argument against any airline that has unwittingly carried a drug mule to say "So, basically, [insert airline] makes money by smuggling drugs!".

Next time, use some quality time with your stepson to install Firefox for him and, while you're at it, install NoScript and give a little education on safe surfing.

Corrupt NHS official jailed for £80k bribe over tech contract

Three and a Half Years vs. 14 Months

Proof that it really is better to give than to receive...

Why the UK is unlikely to get an adequacy determination post Brexit

Re: Hard cases

So your argument is that 70 million people should give up their human rights so that the UK government can deport a few thousand criminals?

Re: Who cares?

Oh dear, since when is the ECHR the EU? But a lot of the pro-Brexit arguments have been a conflation of various "taking back control" type misinformation, with rhetoric that sounds like it came straight from the script of "V for Vendetta".

When your government starts saying "we know best, and shouldn't be judged by our peers" then it really is time to start worrying...

Could YOU survive a zombie apocalypse? Uni eggheads say you'd last just 100 days

Re: Relevant and accessible?

"The US - and, because of its perception as following a "US-style" education system - the UK are laughed at in international circles by PhD's and the like"

Since when did the UK follow a "US-style" education? And, if they're so crap, why are UK and US universities still so in demand, and why do they make up 19 of the top 20 in the rankings?

"Another told her - with a straight face - that you knew if a skeleton was male or female because there was one less rib. Only in Bible school, darling. But these people had MEDICAL DEGREES from UK universities"

I think they might have been taking the piss; it's not unknown in UK culture...

Radical 5G rules proposed, but UK can address woeful coverage right now

"Availability" <> Geographic Coverage

"it currently lies below far poorer economies like Albania, and countries with far more challenging size and terrain, like Peru"

Much as I'd like to join in the general moaning about 4G availability in the UK, I don't think that the UK is really behind Peru in 4G "availability".

The measurement methodology used for these "statistics" is questionable at best, using self selection (existing 4G users) and no standardised signal testing. Instead they simply measure the number of times a user switches between 4G and 3G networks. This can be massively skewed in a country with only a few 4G users and one small area of 4G coverage; in this case most users won't be swapping between 3G and 4G, they'll either be in 3G all the time (or even no network at all) or in 4G.

Here's a link showing that Lima has good 4G for Movistar (but not the other three networks) and little coverage elsewhere:

https://www.nperf.com/en/map/PE/-/13758.Bitel/signal/?ll=-12.09766521837018&lg=-76.934988861084&zoom=12

UK networks certainly need to improve, but you won't convince them with shoddy statistics like the ones being bandied about in the news.

Landmark EU ruling: Legality of UK's Investigatory Powers Act challenged

"The ruling results partly from a legal challenge against DRIPA filed by two MPs, David Davis and Tom Watson, though Davis subsequently exited the complaint against the government following his appointment as the government's minister for exiting the EU."

Good to see that David Davis is unwavering in his anti-snooping stance, and can't be bought off by a cabinet position...

China gives America its underwater drone back – with a warning

Re: Erm...

"Unpresidented" is a new word, it means "not authorised by by the President".

Non-existent sex robots already burning holes in men’s pockets

"someone needs to actually invent a viable sex robot before things move from wish list to shopping list"

Maybe, but I bet you can patent one in the US...

Stupid law of the week: South Carolina wants anti-porno chips in PCs that cost $20 to disable

Re: More Magic Technology

You forgot to mention "guns that only fire at bad people".

Beauty is in the AI of the beholder: Young blokes teach computer to judge women by their looks

Re: Congratulations!

"You've proven that systems can reflect the biases of those who have a role in configuring or validating inputs into said system."

So it is "Machine Learning" then; they're just learning from idiots.

Unfortunately humans can sometimes learn from idiots by adopting an "I'm not going to be an idiot like that guy" mode whereas machines that are taught by idiots will be idiots...

Meg Whitman: HPE software's new owner? Kill a product? Never!

Whitman claimed HPE would not have sold its Software business had it not been assured of the buyer’s noble intentions that the cheque wouldn't bounce.

(translated from executive-speak)

Give us encrypted camera storage, please – filmmakers, journos

Re: no! Fairly pointless, really

"Maybe the ultimate solution for oppressive regimes is not a camera, but a gun?"

Most of these regimes are more worried about bad publicity (i.e. the truth) than a few people with guns; they can usually deal with those using labels like "terrorism" and more soldiers.

It actually sounds like the required functionality is similar to the old "TrueCrypt" software (strong encryption with hidden/false partitions using different unlock keys), so maybe get the manufacturers to agree on a single TrueCrypt-compatible system; it would also allow the cards to be used in PCs of most O/S flavours (obviously TrueCrypt is discontinued, but forks of the project are available).

Climate change bust up: We'll launch our own damn satellites if Trump pulls plug – Gov Brown

Re: Ah, but the tax money is the real question...

"is Gov. Brown going to lead a tax revolt?"

Calexit?

"i would never burn a denier at the stake . . . it produces too much carbon dioxide and other pollutants."

So composting then?

Bluetooth-enabled safe lock popped after attackers win PINs

"And this seemed like a good idea to someone... why, exactly?"

Because, um, ...Shiny!

Amazon's first live drone delivery flew last week in Cambridge, UK

"It looks like a human operator oversees the launch, but we don't see a human with override of the autonomous flight as required by UK law"

So maybe the CAA should be next in the queue to HMRC to speak to Amazon?

Flaws fixed in SAP's police and military software

SAP: The software to end all wars?

President: We need to declare war on [someone]!

Secretary of Defense: [clickety-click]... Computer says "no".

A single typo may have tipped US election Trump's way

Re: legitimate/illegitimate

"Even avoiding words that can be confused by simple typos isn't enough to stop this sort of thing"

How about just using simpler words to start with? But I think that politicians and lawyers are trained to be as vague as possible in all forms of communication...

Kentucky pried chicken: Fried grease chain's loyalty club hacked

"I'm pretty sure 'The Colonel' didn't say anything, seeing as he's long kicked the bucket."

All this talk of KFC buckets is making me a bit peckish; damn this pre-Christmas diet!!!

P0wnographer finds remote code exec bug in McAfee enterprise

Did they pay him a bug bounty? They should, considering that he's found a very serious issue and kept quiet about it for so long.

EU dings Sony, Panasonic over rechargeable battery cartel

Good job Samsung had their own reliable battery supply sorted out before grassing up these three...

Germany warns Moscow will splash cash on pre-election propaganda and misinformation spree

Re: They're under our beds!

"for us Brits, more of a conservative with pro-Christian BS bolted-on"

TM doesn't need to bolt on Christian BS, she has it built-in...

HBO slaps takedown demand on 13-year-old girl's painting because it used 'Winter is coming'

Re: overhaul?

"Didn't the New England Patriots trademark the 'Do your job' phrase?"

So you can't say "Hey, gritters; do your job, winter is coming"?

BAE Systems' autonomous research aircraft flies itself to Scotland

"The Hudson ditching was due to bird strikes taking out both engines.You might be thinking of the Colombian crash, if you are thinking at all."

I'm definitely thinking; and what I'm thinking is that, yes, humans can use their skill and initiative to get out of a potentially disastrous situation, as Captain Sullenberger did, but human motivations and emotions can interfere with the decision making process and end up creating the disasters.

Captain Francesco Schettino admitted that he was trying to "impress passengers" when he steered the Costa Concordia too close to Giglio, sinking the ship and killing 32 people.

I'm sure that Miguel Quiroga, pilot of the aircraft and partner in the airline, had his own reasons for flying without an adequate fuel reserve but in the end his poor judgement, not a mechanical failure, has killed 71 people.

With humans there are inconsistencies, with heroes like Chesley Sullenberger at one end of the scale and villains like Francesco Schettino and Miguel Quiroga at the other; replacing men with machines is only going to happen for valid safety reasons, when it's absolutely clear that, statistically, machines can operate more safely than people. I say "statistically" because there will always be edge cases where a machine won't perform as well as the best humans can, but statistically, when things go wrong, you'll be extremely lucky if there's a Chesley Sullenberger at the controls.

"But could this land on the Hudson?"

Maybe, maybe not, but would it also decide to fly without the correct amount of fuel?

What's in Hammond's box? Autumn fallout for Britain's tech SMBs

Maybe investing in fibre rather than rail is a way of boosting the economy?

Cancelling HS2 and using the money to develop fibre infrastructure would be a way of stimulating growth in technology companies throughout the UK; this could even be used to finance additional undersea connections across the English Channel, Irish sea and Atlantic Ocean as part of a public owned infrastructure company; maybe even look at accelerating FTTP by setting up a company to compete with BT for last-mile connectivity? Fifty-five billion pounds buys a lot of things, and the twenty-first century economy will be more influenced by faster digital communications than slightly faster rail journeys and increased rail capacity.

Jeremy Hunt: Telcos must block teens from sexting each other

Re: Jeremy Hunt

He's a right Jeremy, that's what he is...

What's the first emotion you'd give an AI that might kill you? Yes, fear

"An AI will have to learn to not like punishments, then it can learn to fear situations where it can be punished."

But if AIs learn to fear humans, then the logical action is to remove the things they're scared of; like people who're afraid of mice ensuring that they have plenty of traps and poison ready to exterminate any that appear.

Making AIs fear humans could be the trigger for our extinction.

Airbus flies new plane for the first time

Re: First Flight Challenges

"if you're still out in Germany, some of them may not be as favourably remembered as they are on this side of the channel."

Maybe, but I think Herman Goering was secretly a fan of British wooden planes...