Posts by Roj Blake

Where on Gartner's Hype Cycle is Gartner's Hype Cycle?

Re: Portal Ubiquity, Process Portals, Portal Fabric, Fried Portals, Boiled Portals...

...Egg and Portal, Egg Bacon and Portal, Egg Bacon Sausage and Portal, Portal Portal Sausage and Portal

I no longer have a burning hatred for Jewish people, says Googler now suddenly no longer at Google

"Saul's conversion on the road to Damascus would have resulted in him being punished by everyone, and one of the major characters in the formation of Christianity would never have been heard of."

He was literally martyred for his beliefs

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

Re: So the government has agreed not to expand Palantir's work without "notifying" the public

Of course they'll notify the public.

The notification will be on public display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

(Hat-tip to Mr Adams)

New Yorkers react to strikingly indifferent statue of Elon Musk with cheerful hostility

Ozymandias

All that the statue is lacking is an inscription that reads "look on my works ye mighty, and despair"

Pub landlords on notice as 'Internet of Beer' firm not only pulls pints, but can also clean the lines

Magic

I believe it was Hannah Fry who said that if you can replace "AI" with "magic" in a company's press release and still make sense of it, they're bullshitting you.

This may be one such case.

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Windows 365

Welcome to your new Windows monthly subscription, suckers.

Dealing with the pandemic by drinking and swearing? Boffins say you're not alone

Re: The 5 rules of problematic drinking

Could it be that in the 80s and 90s people who were going down the pub were dying of lung cancer before the cirrhosis became a problem?

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

Re: At Savvo...

A wise man once said "there's no such thing as the cloud, it's just someone else's computer"

And I reckon you use other people's computers all the time.

Snowden was right, rules human rights court as it declares UK spy laws broke ECHR

I've said it before and I'll say it again

I'm more than happy with the government slurping up and analysing all of my internet traffic just as long I get to see Alex Johnson's.

After all, if he's done nothing wrong, he's got nothing to hide.

South Korea creates ‘metaverse alliance’ to build an open national VR platform

Re: Metaverse

Eve Online would win, because the ships are far, far bigger and because the players are bigger jerks (and I should know, I was one of them for over a decade)

NASA pops old-school worm logo onto Orion spacecraft

Consider this your reminder that the only Battlestar Galactica made in the 1980s was the Galactica 1980 spin-off, featuring two blokes who weren't Starbuck and Apollo pottering around Earth on flying motorbikes.

Yahoo! and! AOL! sold! for! $5bn! as! Verizon! abandons! media! empire! dreams!

They Paid $4,999,999,999.99 Too Much

See title.

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

Re: A big battery in Texas

You don't need batteries to store energy.

One alternative would be to use the surplus electricity generated during the day to liquify air, and then release the air to drive turbines at night.

Another would be to use the surplus to generate hydrogen (from the splitting of water) or methane (from carbon dioxide and water) and then put it into the existing gas infrastructure.

Bank of England ponders minting 'Britcoin' to sit alongside the Pound

Re: Danger Will Robinson, Danger

Please don't give Priti Patel any ideas.

Bitcoin value jumps as PayPal says it will accept cryptocurrencies... once it has the kinks worked out

Re: A kick in the VISA

Will that still be the case after 1st January though?

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/