Posts by CommanderGalaxian

No more holidays for US telcos, FCC is cracking down

Re: Age Tokens

Zero Knowledge age verification could be done - but since that would mean those offering the services couldn't earn a penny from your browsing habits, I wouldn't hold your breath.

<Shrug>

Best plan of action here is to cut Louisiana off from the Internet. It doesn't really contribute much anyway.

How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling

WTAF!? I really don't think this guy is going to be solving World hunger problems soon.

How important are tech and other contractors to UK? PM candidate promises tax review if elected

"IR35 is a reform unveiled in 1999 by the UK tax authorities..."

Not really. This was a punative tax regime brought in by Labour's Gordon Brown and his side-kick Dawn Primarolo in order to try and kill off self-employment and freelance working in the IT sector. Ironic that it is was under the existing Tory government that that task has now all but been completed.

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

Re: Deja vu again

Probably useful practice though for them when they don't have the option of letting things burn.

UK Home Office signs order to extradite Julian Assange to US

Re: A truly dreadful day

"...the fact is that the First Amendment gives people like..."

iirc, only US citizens are protected thus, not foreign citizens,

Whatever you do, don't show initiative if you value your job

Re: Backup and restore capability for mission critical files?

Surely during testing of the machine they did a "black restart" - i.e. simply pulled the plug suddenly in the middle of it doing its thing and then re-applying power to make sure it recovered ok?

Re: "So was James truly the guilty party?"

"With simple tools such as Regmon and Filemon from Sysinternals ..."

Because obviously a newbie will completely familiar with that approach...

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Re: lottery ... numbers are in practice always a random distribution rather than a numeric sequence

"PS - I haven't done any statistical analysis of the distribution of chosen numbers."

That's ok. Somebody else has.

tl;dr version - pick the least popular numbers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/240734.stm

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: Optional Chargers

Vote with your "monetary sense" and shop elsewhere then.

Engineer sues Amazon for not covering work-from-home internet, electricity bills

"In the UK, it is accepted that expenses paid to an employee to travel between work locations is not taxable,,,"

Only up to 45 pence per mile. Any mileage related expenses over 45p per mile are taxable.

Linus Torvalds debuts 'boring old plain' Linux kernel 5.18

Re: boring old plain 5.18

No, they mostly don't deliberately hobble good CPUs.

What actually happens is that you have a target chip performance of (e.g.) 2.5 GHz. - and then during manufacturing and chipcheck is that you will find that some don't work at that frequency, while others work beyond the design frequency. Most though tend to work around the initial design frequency. [Think about something called distribution curves].

However, not all cores on chips are equal. So typically poorer performing cores are diabled and those chips sold for less, while those with all cores performing well are sold for more.

Of course, where you have chips with disabled cores, you have the option (if you know what you are doing) to run things at lower clock speeds and see if you can re-enable those poorly performing cores and get more bangs for the bucks you spent.

Germany advises citizens to uninstall Kaspersky antivirus

Sad.

Kinda sad that we now have to consider Kaspersky (and even Acronis (RTFM where it came from)) as fatally compromised. They are both great products, but the scenario though that a gun isn't now being put to the head of Eugene Kaspersky is no longer something that can be ignored as a possibility.

Kinda makes the case (if it wasn't made already) for doing your day-to-day surfing and web shopping, only ever in a virtual machine.

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

What an utter fucking load of bollocks.

Absolutely, we here in Scotland must decolonisalise.

And we will begin by kicking the Putin funded Tories and the associated British State out of our country.

Shame on you TheRegister for printing this utter piece of fabricated garbage.

IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

The really sad thing about not adopting IPv6 universally is that it makes it easier for whistle blowers to not be identified.

UK Treasury and Bank of England starting to sound serious about 'Britcoin'

Re: Reinventing the wheel takes you nowhere different

You do get that a crypto called BritCoin actually already exists (for several years)? So the UK Gov and Bank of England will potentially be trying to fool the mug punter with their counterfeit version.

Another UK government limb that can't get IR35 right: Court service pays taxman £12.5m

Re: Wedge

"If a company wants a worker to be inside IR35 then they write a contract that puts the worker in scope. The individual circumstances of a contractor don't matter at all."

Not really. If a contract puts you inside IR35 - i.e. makes you an employee - then you are an employee - that's actually really always been the case for all practicle purposes (from even before IR35) - regardless of your actual working conditions.

The problem is really the opposite of what you describe - if your contract puts you outside of IR35 - HMRC are free to disregard your contract AND then you will have to prove your working conditions put you outside IR35 - even if any reasonable person would regard then as barn door conditions that illustrate self-employment.

How many Brits have deleted life-saving track and trace app from their phones? No idea, junior minister tells MPs

Freedumb day!!!1!!

Now that Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have said that you don't necessarily need to self-isolate (and aren't bothering to do so themselves) just because you have been in contact with somebody who has #Covid19 - there doesn't seem to be much point to this App anymore.

Linux Foundation celebrates 30 years of Torvalds' kernel with a dry T-shirt contest

What sort of weirdo is still using Adobe Illustrator!?

NHS England staff voice concerns about access controls on US spy-tech firm Palantir's COVID-19 data store

LOL. Who would have thought that BoJo and Co. would monetise people's health records - while simultaneously denying the people themselves and pro-bono researchers access to those records.

America tops ITU's Global Cyber Security Index, UK in tie for second with Saudi Arabia

Re: Tectonically

A good part of Sicilly - not Italy - is on the African plate. And Turkey is mostly part of the Eurasian plate - not the Arabian plate.

Mensa data spillage was due to 'unauthorised internal download'

Re: Wow

IIRC, Mensa recommend doing 2 or 3 practice tests to familiarise yourself with the format. Further practice beyond that doesn't tend to yield improved IQ scores in the tests.

Bitcoin is ‘disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization’ says famed investor Charlie Munger

Adam Smith warned against his kind.

LOL. Me thinks he doth protest too much.

How annoying it must be that Bitcoin is beyond his control. And how annoying it must be that little people ganged up using Gamestop and poked him in the eye.

British IT teacher gets three-year ban after boozing with students at strip club during school trip to Costa Rica

Because they wanted to?

Signal app's Moxie says it's possible to sabotage Cellebrite's phone-probing tools with booby-trapped file

Re: I don't consider a locked phone to be safe anyway...

User policy will then be to write down said 10 character PIN because they keep forgetting it.

For blinkenlights sake.... RTFM! Yes. Read The Front of the Machine

Can't remember, but was probably there for a few days. These places do tend to operate a policy of "oh while you are here, could you also take a look at...".

Got called offshore (helicopter to an installation in the North Sea) because the system (used for metering) wouldn't accept input from the keyboard and the mouse cursor had frozen.

I plugged the keyboard and mouse into the KVM switch. For some reason somebody had disconnected them.

Free Software Foundation urged to free itself of Richard Stallman by hundreds of developers and techies

Should Stallman come out as a woman?

Why does he not just put on a dress and self-id as female like Eddie Lizard and everybody can go back to sleep again?

US govt indicted me because I make privacy tools, says crypto-chat app CEO accused of helping drug smugglers

Re: So tomorrow Signal, Telegram?

Yes.

We know there are a lot of, er, distractions right now but NASA's got some sweet video of its asteroid rubble raiser

Amatuers.

After all that, the video doesn't even have sound.

What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases

Re: *Takes a deep breath*

"sometimes" shouldn't come into it. It should always be "always".

Re: Design

Billion.

Re: Familiar kind of scenario.

Why go for the plain vanilla stuff? We need OLE for Process Control everywhere.

Probably could do with a decent SCADA front end too.

Re: Familiar kind of scenario.

Couldn't they just have tweaked their DCOM settings appropriately on their systems and done it all via OPC?

Why not in Excel?

At the end of the day, all it's really doing is a telephone-type directory lookup with a couple of bits of information cross-indexed. You'd really need to be a complete idiot to get such a simple thing so badly wrong.

Paragon 'optimistic' that its NTFS driver will be accepted into the Linux Kernel

Re: @DrXym - Whatever for?

Why exactly would you be wanting to defrag a Windoze NTFS drive by booting into Linux (rather than Windoze) on your dual-boot machine?

Now don't get me wrong, you might want to be booting up some Linux based password cracking utils and file manipulation tools to be deployed against a Windows system - but these aren't the sort of thing your average user or business is likely to be doing on a day-to-day basis.

If your purpose is really wanting to run some heterogenous network, you'd already have some common platform command-interpreter tool installed on your systems that received a command and told the system to get on with defraging in its own native way (and tell me when you are finished).

Physical locks are less hackable than digital locks, right? Maybe not: Boffins break in with a microphone

Re: So we need to upgrade the physical locks....

With a modest level of signal processing you'd be able to pickout the clicks from the background white noise. What you would actually want is something that puts our random fake clicks.

Breaching China's Great Firewall is hard. Pushing packets faster than 1Mbps once through is the Boss Fight

Once-upon-a-time import/export financial tariffs were imposed to ensure free trade.

Now it will be data flow tariffs.

China has taken the piss for too long. This is easy to fix though.

Oh what a feeling: New Toyotas will upload data to AWS to help create custom insurance premiums based on driver behaviour

Re: I'd much rather have my insurance rate...

They do now. Clearly you have been a maniac just waiting for the right time to outfox them.

GDPR says that people cannot be judged or disavantaged on the basis of automated algorithms. And that they have the right to opt out of such algorithms without prejudice.

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

Re: Wishy washy

Except that doesn't capture the essence of the relationship - since it is the Slave (/Apprentice) where the bulk of the work is done - the Master is dependent on the abilities and knowledge of the Slave to do its job properly.

Splunk to junk masters and slaves once a committee figures out replacements

This would be funny, if it wasn't for the fact that the loony tamperers of language are actually serious (and seem to be in the driving seat).

Book burning parties can't be far off now.

ZFS co-creator boots 'slave' out of OpenZFS codebase, says 'casual use' of term is 'unnecessary reference to a painful experience'

Re: My first thought:

Loads. It is a common and well understood terminology in bus-based protocols. There's a gargantuan amount of code out there. People randomly changing terminology will cause a massive amount of confusion because one person's terminology will be meaningless to another person.

His choice of "dependent" is wrong as an alternative term for "slave" device. Slave devices are not dependent on the Master device to function - if anything it is the other way around - the Master device is dependent on the Slave device to be able do its job.

Something like Requester/Supplier keeps with the conceptual Master/Slave in terms of representing the functionality.

Slave devices aren't "dependent" devices though - if anything it is the Master device that is dependent on data from the Slave device.

Surely a better terminology would be Supplier (for Slave) and Requester (for Master)?

Switzerland 'first' country to roll out contact-tracing app using Apple-Google APIs to track coronavirus spread

Re: Why bother?

Dystopia, you mean.

Re: UK app

Why not just leave it at home?

Fancy some post-weekend reading? How's this for a potboiler: The source code for UK, Australia's coronavirus contact-tracing apps

"Not everyone, it needs about 60%."

Last time 60% was mentioned was with the government's scientifically illiterate "herd immunity" strategy.

Just saying.

"My previous comments about contact-tracing app vs privacy were viciously down-voted. And maybe I deserved it then. Before down-voting my comment (again), put yourself in the shoes of the people who have died and their family."

Anyone using emotional blackmail deserves to be downvoted for that reason alone.

(The fact that you even resort to emotional blackmail probably means your arguments are pretty shit too).

Source code for seminal adventure game Zork circa-1977 exhumed from MIT tapes, plonked on GitHub

GRTX (Glasgow Real-Time eXecutive) was much better than that Edinburgh pish.