Posts by Roj Blake

Only true boffins will be able to grasp Blighty's new legal definitions of the humble metre and kilogram

Beauty

What about the SI unit of beauty? Is the milliHelen still defined as the amount of beauty required to launch exactly one ship?

Re: Tine to redefine Pi(e)

You're literally talking cobblers!

Australian privacy watchdog sues Facebook for *checks notes* up to £266bn

Re: The court will wimp out

I'm sure that once Zuckerberg privately lets slip to the judge that he has his full browsing history this will go away.

Re: Is this the new tax grab?

Yes they are, but proving it might prove difficult.

Like a Virgin, hacked for the very first time... UK broadband ISP spills 900,000 punters' records into wrong hands from insecure database

Only if your name really is Theo C. Cupier

Sure, check through my background records… but why are you looking at my record collection?

Re: I suppose they'd raise an eyebrow or two ...

Thanks. I'll now be humming it for weeks.

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now: Brexit tea towel says it'll just be the gigabit broadband

Since when did a hedgerow need gigabit broadband?

Hedgeporn finally enters the 21st century!

The Wristwatch of the Long Now: When your MTBF is two centuries

Re: Beware survival bias

Is one of them Harrison's "lesser watch" that was unearthed by a couple of Peckham market traders in 1996?

London's Metropolitan Police flip the switch: Smile, fellow citizens... you're undergoing Live Facial Recognition

Re: Adversarial glasses

That's precisely the sort of thing that will get banned if it becomes popular.

Re: Big Brother is here and he isn't going away.

In the UK the police's primary mission is to maintain public order. That thing about solving crimes and keeping the public safe is just a means to that end.

Re: "appalled that [city mayor] Sadiq Khan has approved such....surveillance technology for London"

It wasn't the cards that people objected to so much as the massive insecure database that propped the system up.

The most egregious thing about this...

...is the way the warning signs are propped against the van, so you only see them once you've been scanned.

Life in plastic, with a classic: Polymer £20 notes released into wild sporting Turner art

141 Double Decker Buses

Laden, or unladen?

One man is standing up to Donald Trump's ban on US chip tech going to Huawei. That man... is Donald Trump

Re: Trump leads where others follow

Johnson is an idiot's idea of what a smart person is like.

That doesn't mean that he's actually smart.

Tutanota cries 'censorship!' after secure email biz blocked – for real this time – in Russia

Re: Backdoored encryption isn't for censorship. It is for surveillance.

It's for both. People who think they're being constantly watched tend to self-censor.

Coronavirus to decimate server supply chain, analysts claim: Sales to fall 10% as factories stay shut

Re: STOP IT NOW!

What needs to stop is the use of viri as a plural of virus.

Crypto AG backdooring rumours were true, say German and Swiss news orgs after explosive docs leaked

Re: 6 eyes?

Germany is a member of 14 Eyes.

Re: "over a hundred states paid billions of dollars for their state secrets to be stolen"

Or indeed their German counterparts, like Tutanota.

Fujitsu warns HMRC Projects team that 30% of them could be out of a job come April

Re: So Fujitsu has no other work?

Did you read the article?

"We are working to minimise the number of compulsory redundancies through... ...redeployments to other areas of Fujitsu."

Uncle Sam tells F-35B allies they'll have to fly the things a lot more if they want to help out around South China Sea

Re: UK planes can't patrol Chinese seas...

The North Sea is also defined as international - but imagine the uproar over here if China sent a carrier to patrol it.

Like other tech giants, Netflix gets govt takedown demands – and impressively, none of them involve Adam Sandler

Re: Singapore's notoriously strict anti-drug stance.

Free at the point of delivery - unless you don't qualify for free prescriptions, free dentistry, etc

Day 4 of outage: UK's Manchester police deploy exciting new carbon-based method to record crime

Impact

If there's only minimal impact from the system going down, then is that system really worth £27M?

Hey GitLab, the 1970s called and want their sexism back: Saleswomen told to wear short skirts, heels and 'step it up'

You're no son of mine, SonofRojBlake

The winners and losers of infrastructure clouds revealed: AWS, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba get fatter

Re: Who are the others?

If you want big but not that big, then it's OVH.

Somewhere, Google's financial bods are playing on repeat... What do you want from me? It's not how it used to be...

It's almost as though they want you to rely on the paid-for results or something

Twitter says a certain someone tried to discover the phone numbers used by potentially millions of twits

Re: vast majority of trollish twits are not that clever

Well-connected parents don't hurt either.

Gin and gone-ic: Rometty out as IBM CEO, cloud supremo Arvind Krishna takes over, Red Hat boss is president

Re: Cargo cult science.

They already did that, in 1994.

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

Re: a recurring theme ... was that the three laws didn't really work all that well

The character of Sherlock Holmes was originally based on a doctor who once taught Conan Doyle.

You're always a day Huawei: UK to decide whether to ban Chinese firm's kit from 5G networks tomorrow

Re: Yellow Devil

Crimean War?

German scientists, Black Knights and the birthplace of British rocketry

Blue Steel

It's great to see Blue Steel being mentioned in the article. I've often thought that if the boffins had managed to successfully develop its replacement (codenamed Magnum), things might have turned out very differently

This episode of Black Mirror sucks: London cops boast that facial-recog creepycams will be on the streets this year

What I'll Be Wearing While Out and About in London

See pic ->

Beer necessities: US chap registers bevvy as emotional support animal so he can booze on public transport

Re: No beer on the train?

Maybe it only felt like a few hours due to the alcohol dilating time.

We need to make it even easier for UK terror cops to rummage about in folks' phones, says govt lawyer

Re: Vital stuff

I think the Welsh Ambulance Service has access too, so at least if you do get food poisoning they'll already be outside your house waiting for the call.

Flinging resource-hungry apps at landfill Android? Ubuntu daddy wants to lure you into Anbox Cloud

TBH I'd rather they developed a version decent smartphone version of Linux.

How a Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25,000 AI contest with hidden code – and was fired from dream SV job

Re: @Loyal Commenter -- "Harnessing the power of data"

The RSPB did a study a while back that concluded that cats don't affect bird populations much as they tend to only capture prey that would most likely have died soon anyway.

https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/gardening-for-wildlife/animal-deterrents/cats-and-garden-birds/are-cats-causing-bird-declines/

LastPass stores passwords so securely, not even its users can access them

Re: ahh the cloud : somebody else's computers i should trust with my passwords .. no ?

And do you carry this device around with you all of the time? What happens if you leave it at home and need to access something?

Intel server chip shortages continue to bite: HPE warns of Xeon processor supply drought for the whole of 2020

Re: Usually reports of shortages have one purpose...

Or maybe it's HPE who have the massive stockpile of Skylakes.

Wave goodbye: DigitalOcean decimates workforce as co-founder reveals lack of profitability, leadership turmoil

Re: Can a company lacking the economies of scale of Amazon, Microsoft or Alibaba

Yes, but you need to offer something that the big boys don't - things like high security, carbon neutral, or a more personalised service.

The mysterious giant blobs of gas around our galaxy's black hole are actually massive merger stars being shredded

Re: Binars

The stellar density is far higher in a galaxy's core than in its spiral arms. Having stars more tightly packed means that more of them will be gravitationally bound to other stars.

Are you getting it? Yes, armageddon it: Mass hysteria takes hold as the Windows 7 axe falls

Re: Microsoft Win10 Specs

Sounds like someone has PNS* Syndrome.

* PIN Number Syndrome

World's richest bloke battles Oz catastro-fire with incredible AU$1m donation (aka load of cheap greenwashing)

Re: CO2 from Amazon?

In AWS's defence, cloud computing is generally more energy-efficient than doing things on-prem.

Re: Much jealousness here

Does he deserve it all though?

Amazon didn't get where it is today solely because of Bezos.

It also got where it is by paying shitty wages to its workers, and it got where it is by taking advantage of publicly-funded infrastructure.

The idea that Bezos works 10,000 times harder than other people or is 10,000 times more talented than them is wrong.

What was Boeing through their heads? Emails show staff wouldn't put their families on a 737 Max over safety fears

Re: Inconsistent with Boeing values

A fine of peanuts will really upset those monkeys that were supervising the clowns though.

The Six Million Dollar Scam: London cops probe Travelex cyber-ransacking amid reports of £m ransomware demand, wide-open VPN server holes

Re: Is CEO going to be in next honour list

Being the wife of a Tory minister and the daughter of a baron had nothing to do with the appointment, natch.

Back up a minute: Private equity outfit coughs $5bn for Veeam

Re: Community Edition?

Given that the new owners will want to recoup their investment as soon as possible, I'd start looking for alternatives if I were you.

Worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable and royalty-free: Amazon's Alexa NHS contract released

Re: Selling England By The Pound

"Can you tell me where my country lies?"

said the unifaun to his true love's eyes.

"It lies with me!" cried the Queen of Maybe

- for her merchandise, he traded in his prize.

"Paper late!" cried a voice in the crowd.

"Old man dies!" The note he left was signed 'Old Father Thames'

- it seems he's drowned;

selling England by the pound.

Boris Johnson

See everyone? When Boris Johnson told us that he would never sell the NHS, he was telling the truth! He's going to give it away for free!

Newly born Firefox 71 emerges from its den – with its own VPN and some privacy tricks

Re: I find VPNs very useful

VPNs also mean you don't have to ask for permission to view certain specialist sites every time you change mobile or broadband provider.

Taxi for Uber: Ride-hailing app giant stripped of licence to operate in London

Re: No mention of...

Has there ever been any evidence of them using Greyball in London though?

Who loves Brexit? Irish distributors ... after their sales jump by a third

Re: "Boris got his deal"

A deal worse for the UK even than May's.