Posts by Nick Kew 2841 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2007
Anyone can bet against the UK. George Soros famously made gazillions doing it in 1992.
But what if your hedge fund bets against UK while you are a member of parliament and pulling the prime minister's strings? Insider trading against the UK sounds to me like treason.
"throwing out any jurors who might return the wrong verdict by sympathising with the accused."
Yeah, we learned our lesson there in Iraq, where we assumed the UN jury headed by Hans Blix would reach the right verdict, and had to throw them out very publicly at the eleventh hour of the trial when it was evident they were heading for the wrong verdict.
So if your provider were, say, to ignore EU roaming rules and illegally charge you £220 extra for your usage whilst on holiday, and the court then ordered them to repay you, you'd want the government to legislate to add that £220 to your next year's contract?
Thought not.
A repository can link to vendors' own sites for those who want to charge. Possibly that could involve an arrangement with phone vendors and/or telcos. Especially if we could produce a Code of Conduct that would preclude them blurring the line between store apps and their own dodgy adware.
The more challenging issue is how to deal with malware being peddled through the store: it's inevitable the villains will try. But first things first: it needs infrastructure, community, and mindshare.
What is clear from today's news is that the world needs not merely an Open phone OS (this could provide a boost for some of the available options to mature), but also an Open App Store. The latter based somewhere in the Free World (neither US nor China, though freedom-loving citizens of those countries are welcome), with multiple nodes (so no single point of failure when another government turns rogue), and a fundamental commitment to universality.
Where do we start?
Cray itself holds no memories for me. But the reminder of SGI ... I worked on an SGI workstation back in the mid-1990s, and I remember the hardware as pure pleasure. Not something I've encountered in a professional capacity either before or since.
T'was nearly a decade ago Oracle borged my then-employer Sun. IBM had long-since shifted away from being a hardware-shop. Is there a place left for box-shifters, other than consumer devices and low-end commodity products?
Hmm. I seem to recollect 1980s rules in Blighty specifying a minimum area per person. 40 sq ft from memory, which is just under your 4.6 sq m but in the same ballpark (and it may have been fortysomething).
I first encountered it because someone at my employer at the time (I guess the person with elfin safety somewhere in his job description) was mildly unhappy that its office space was violating the law, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Some of us knew nothing about it until the news reports of the last few days. Kind-of like I didn't even know "News of the World" was the name of a rag until the new of its disgrace and closure hit the headlines.
Don't tell me. I don't want to know. Any more than I want to know about other celebrities whose shows take their names.
The story is about network kit, not consumer devices.
On a consumer device, you get spied on by software. AKA spyware. See this week's whatsapp story for a really big example.
And what that article describes is perfectly normal: many things on a modern consumer device routinely communicate back home (how do you think your PC or phone knows when there's an update available for the OS or any of the apps you have installed)? It even says he uses a password manager, which explains what is keeping a backup of his passwords.
Of course the fact that it's perfectly normal doesn't preclude it *also* being shady: that's a big grey area, and a subject that regularly comes up in El Reg. But to suggest he's discovered something that wouldn't happen on any other android device in the world needs a lot more than that to justify it.
Dearlove is *the* Mr Dodgy Dossier on Iraq. Not just one of many, the lie was specifically his.
He's also *the* National Security insider (senior enough to get reported) supporting Brexit.
Oz's reason for cheerleading Trump is probably that they need US cooperation to put spies into crypto communications to implement their own snooping law. At least, without anything so crude as an outright ban on software such as Whatsapp.
Not shouty, but a similar principle in action ...
I was in the supermarket today, at the checkout and getting hassle from a woman behind me in the queue (if our sexes had been reversed it could've qualified as a #metoo, and I like my personal space). So I packed my stuff more carefully (and slowly) than I otherwise might have done, and before paying. Then when the supermarket's card reader kept telling me "card error", I persisted through about 20 attempts (helped by the checkout girl, who was great) rather than switch to a different card.
Don't Cisco have a back door into their kit which will allow American authorities to access the infrastructure its placed into?
In common with everyone else, they are required to by law. That's nothing new.
The speculative question that Trump's behaviour thrusts onto us is how far beyond that law vendors are being required to go in practice.
No body should be able to do whatever they want without oversight. It just leads to abuse of the powers.
The Supreme Court can do exactly that.
As can lower courts, in the absence of anyone with the resources to challenge them.
Perhaps it's the complete absence of either democracy or accountability that enables them sometimes to do sensible things in matters of public policy.
Oracle called it extremely overvalued at half the price HP paid.
Even commentards here thought the deal absurd.
Oh, the alleged fiddling is indeed a crime in the US.
More to the point, where is Hussain in relation to the US penal system? Already in their grasp? Or subject to an extradition battle? Or still able to flee to somewhere that doesn't take orders from Uncle Sam?
Interesting read. Yes, telecoms is highly competitive. AIUI Vodafone are looking for growth into new areas of connectivity, with IoT as a growth plan (deals like that with Amazon to offer free-to-the-user connections for Kindles look like an early prototype for that). But that too will be competitive and low-margin.
Not a problem while a company is healthy. Only when it runs into trouble, then the debt gets priority, and that can become a millstone around the company's neck.
It's akin to buying a house with a mortgage. If your income drops too far, you have a problem. If you hit negative equity, you may have a problem. But people still do it.
For what it's worth, Vodafone debt still trades above par, meaning the market is not worrying about a risk it might go the way of Debenhams (which couldn't service its debts). Or even companies like Premier Foods that got caught by its debt and zombified in 2008, but remains alive.
Corporate debt is just one means of financing a company. People like lending money to companies like Vodafone: it's a better rate of return than putting it in the bank, and a much lower risk than holding shares (today's news cuts the dividend to shareholders, but doesn't affect bondholders).
The fly in the ointment is that the market is distorted by tax anomalies. Loan interest is paid out of untaxed money; dividends are paid out of taxed money. That encourages companies to over-use debt.
Nope. What's needed is a market in ways to distribute apps to end-users. Where those ways are located is immaterial, and in any case it'll probably be somewhere cloudy.
For Apple to offer a high-price curated app store, with its own endorsement (whatever that's worth) on contents available from there, is perfectly fair. For it to prevent distribution outside that channel is not - that's an abuse of monopoly. As if Amazon took technical measures to prevent us downloading from Gutenberg to a kindle.
I never heard the result of it, as I moved back to Blighty ...
One colleague I knew throughout my time in Italy was a Swiss man. I also knew his family. When I first moved out there the eldest daughter was 11; by the time I left she was late teens, and spending a year abroad on an exchange programme. In Jamaica.
Somewhere out there, perhaps in Italy or Switzerland, is a lady by now in her late 30s, with very blonde very typically Northern European features, but who probably speaks English with the blackest of black accents!
Heh. Perhaps it's because I've lived in so many different places that I don't get that kind of thing in English? Well, except in the fairly distant past when I've occasionally been taken for foreign, or when I was taken for posh public-school (which I found offensive, because it's associated with unfounded prejudices about a privileged background).
But in other languages I regularly get "interesting" placings, the most consistent of which is getting taken for Dutch when I speak German.
South Yorks is many different accents (Barnsley is one of those that can be utterly incomprehensible to outsiders). Dammit, Sheffield alone has more than one variant, though on the other hand the difference between Sheffield and Leeds tends to be rather less than between either of those and some of the areas geographically between them.
Sexiest?
Or perhaps rather, who's most likely to be shagging. Especially sports-shagging: i.e. outside the context of relationship where you have feelings for each other. Fairly or otherwise, that's an image we associate with Essex.
Hmmm. On that train of thought, where in the pecking order are, say, Cardiff or Newcastle?
The Swedish prosecutor is just doing her job. But I bet the Swedish government is less than thrilled at the prospect of having to deal with an extradition request from the US.
If he goes to Sweden, I wonder how it'll play into the scenario that's been speculated on whereby Uncle Sam, having grabbed him, then presents a much more serious charge than on the extradition order? It is said that the country that handed him over has a veto on that. Blighty vs Sweden: who would exercise such a veto vs nod through whatever the 'merkins might try?
I have a memory from right back when I were a lad in the 1970s, of a protest song, whose memorable line was "we will save Kalix Älv". The Kalix river, in the far north of Sweden, is about as remote as anywhere in the developed world. The protest was against proposals to build a dam for hydro power, as had happened on some of Sweden's great rivers.
Of course, hydro power in the arctic would be seasonal. At this time of year the melt will have started and there'll be lots of water flowing, at least at the lower altitudes.
Perhaps in the event of a real-world emergency, being tracked by script-kiddie might even be a Good Thing? As in, one more person to notice the alert, and perhaps also more clued-up than panicking relatives about what it means and what to do.
Just a thought ...
The On Call was on outdoor-grade stone steps. And he's propping himself up, with head raised and laptop poised. But yes, they do look rather alike.
Is it coincidence, or is falling head-first down the stairs a remaining bastion of white male (and other common characteristics) domination? Where's the Reg's commitment to Diworsity?
No, not me either.
But I've a nasty suspicion I might have a stake in it, by virtue of having some portion of my assets in various managed funds. I suspect most of us here are in the same position. Or at least those of us who have reached the time of life where we have financial assets such as a pension or ISA.
That is, we will have reached a stage at which data will be both written and read by robots without the need for any human participation at all.
Someone already mentioned the electric monk. Adams was giving it form and even personality, but the underlying idea wasn't new. We could trace it back to automata from long before the computer age. Perhaps even to religious notions: the supernatural entity that speaks through a person, or the stars, entrails, tarot cards, tealeaves, whatever.
Meanwhile, Exhibit A: negligently-designed machines without human intervention.
More interestingly, the data that reveals the NSA spy.
Who's going to reverse engineer the protocol for communicating with a clandestine messenger in a router, to phone nsahome without making an IP connection that would soon be spotted as suspicious? Resolve the question of all the sound and fury over Huawei?
I can't tell from the article how well the data would be anonymised in training AI.
But I spot a possible analogy to data we used to train and evaluate computer speech recognition systems, when I was doing post-doc in the subject. The big speech sample datasets we used came from third parties (the most standardised was compiled by TI and MIT), and were designed specifically for that purpose. There was no data that we'd ever thought of calling "personal" on there. The maximum possible extent of our interest in any speaker was "what's that accent, mannerism, or speech impediment, and why does it cause the algorithm to do XYZ". But if we had wanted to ask, that information would not have been traceable.
That was back in the early 1990s. Ideas of privacy and personal data have obviously changed since then.
Damn, you got there first.
Though in a military context, Boeing's (low) catastrophic failure rate would look pretty good. A handful of fatal crashes are just a price you pay for overall dominance.
I wonder who they'll source the electronics from if, for example, a Chinese vendor could supply technology that's ahead of anything they can produce themselves?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
