Posts by Warm Braw

Linux kernel's Torvalds: 'I am truly sorry' for my 'unprofessional' rants, I need a break to get help

I blame the source code management...

Typing "git" constantly can't to anything for the civility of your general demeanour.

Perhaps it could be rebranded "pet" or "luv"?

Trump shouldn't criticise the news media, says Amazon's Jeff Bezos

Amazon have the most unpleasant press office in journalism

At least they speak to you. Apple, however...

UK.gov finally adds Galileo and Copernicus to the Brexit divorce bill

I think you can be pretty sure that there won't be another ISS-like project. It was conceived at a time when it was thought that post-Soviet Russia intended to follow a Western model of government and that such projects could help cement that position. Well, it was probably worth a try...

Re: The punishment beating will continue

One of the many things I don't understand is why, having chosen to leave the EU, the people who advocated leaving are choosing to characterise the consequences of leaving as "punishment". This is what we asked for and it seems to be what we're getting. Why isn't that being welcomed by those who wanted it most?

Re: TL;DR

demanding more votes until the "correct" result is returned is unreasonable

By that logic, we might as well not have elections at all and stick with the government we've got for ever more. Mind you, given that both the present government and opposition are essentially so riven by internal divisions as to be completely ineffective, I can see the merit in your proposition.

How an augmented reality tourist guide tried to break my balls

Who'd invest in such crap?

I found myself asking that question when I went to view Stephenson's Rocket at the Almost-imperceptible Exhibition of the North. Clearly concerned that visitors might not be sufficiently impressed by the skeletal remains of a piece of engineering history, long since cannibalised for its reusable parts, organisers had provided a "Virtual Reality Experience" that promised the opportunity to:

Travel back to 1829 via virtual reality to experience the sight and sound of the early steam age as Stephenson’s Rocket is digitally brought back to life.

What is actually consisted of was a first-person view of a simulated trip down a seemingly American railroad line, while a modern city sprang up on each side of the track. With a silhouette of the Rocket pasted across the front as if it were being observed by a disembodied head welded to the top of the boiler.

When I pointed that out to the attendants, their response was that, although they'd watched it on several occasions, they'd never noticed the complete absence of the 19th Century or the UK and its tradition of trains travelling on the left, like the cars.

Conclusion: people expect crap, so just give it to them. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be the policy of the Discovery Museum to thwack 'em in the balls if they complain, though I would be unsurprised if the hardware has the capability: I'm sure more clients will be demanding it.

UK.gov tells companies to draft contracts for data flows just in case they screw up Brexit

It would greenlight the transfer of UK data to other member states

Well, it would then seem that the simplest way to achieve legal certainty is to do that ASAP.

Top Euro court: UK's former snooping regime breached human rights

Re: Yeah, as expected. And they knew what they were doing when they broke the law.

they knew what they were doing when they broke the law

That's why they keep changing it, it's much harder to bring down a moving target.

The grand-plus iPhone is the new normal – this is no place for paupers

Re: Typical Apple

You can't compare them

You can: they both perform a basic primary function at a cost orders of magnitude greater than is necessitated by their purpose. Why they cost more is irrelevant. The reason people pay the increased cost is much the same.

If you keep you Rolex serviced...

...you will merely add to its inflated lifetime cost.

Apple in XS new sensation: Latest iPhone carries XS-sive price tag

Re: Yawn....

a pocket device

Increasingly hard on the pocket in more than one sense...

First it was hashtags – now Amber Rudd gives us Brits knowledge on national ID cards

Our first duty is to keep people safe

I'm very tired of that old chestnut - the best way to achieve that would be to lock us all up for our own protection.

And given that successive British governments have covered up renditions, torture, extra-judicial killings, undercover police malpractice whilst simultaneously crying "nanny state" whenever there is an attempt to deal with alcohol abuse, smoking or obesity, politicians clearly don't believe it either.

Maybe they should lock themselves up for our own protection.

It's here! Qualcomm's new watch chip is finally here! Oh, uh, never mind

How many of you and your friends exercise?

I realise I'm a data point of exactly one - and not, as far as I know, a friend of the original poster, but I exercise and don't have any kind of fad-device, in much the same way as I've exercised for the last 50-odd years. I can exercise perfectly well without knowing my exact heart rate, having an inaccurate assessment of the number of steps I might have taken or needing to plot my run or ride on a map.

Having a "fitness" device seems to serve the same "need" as taking pictures of your lunch...

Arms race: SiFive, Hex Five build code safe houses for RISC-V chips

If someone said "yes", could you believe the answer?

Not that a "secure enclave" is necessarily something to fear, any more than a DMA controller (which could just as easily be exfiltrating your data) is inherently something to fear - but basically, if someone other than you has control of the hardware design, then what they "allow you to know" is very much at their discretion.

Microsoft's next Windows 10 release creeps closer with a cluster of builds

Re: @warmbraw

That's certainly the theory! However...

Re: I was syncing and sending SMS from my PC circa 2001...

There are several applications that claim to do that for Linux - can't seem to get any of them to work over bluetooth on Ubuntu LTS. A long time ago I had a simple problem with MacOS that would support some phones, but not others. I suppose having the cloud in the middle solves the problem of buggy local communication - while adding dollops of slurp potential for good measure.

Boffins bash Google Translate for sexism

Re: It's statistics darling

If you use the terminology machine learning algorithm, it's not a surprise. When it gets labelled artificial intelligence there's somehow an increased tendency to assume, erroneously, that the results will be free of human bias. There does seem to be an enthusiasm right now to over-sell the capabilities of machine learning.

$200bn? Make that $467bn: Trump threatens to balloon proposed bonus China tech tariffs

What's wrong in finding a nice comfy niche

In theory, it's exactly what you want - sustainable businesses generating steady income. However, income is taxed differently to capital growth, so it's exactly the opposite of the incentives.

Tesla's chief accounting officer drives off after just a month on the job

Re: The product is strong, and the vision is excellent

Still compares well to $80-ish

67% of $80 is around $54 and is the amount of current tax that needs to be replaced. Add that to your $12 recharge and you get $66, not $36...

Y'know what? VoIP can also be free from pesky regulation – US judges

I think that's just the flip side of "but over the Internet" patents: if the service to the end user is essentially the same, the specific technology should not be an isssue. Regulation of the phone service survived the demise of Strowger exchanges and the introduction of fibre trunk connections; adding some packet-switching is a fairly trivial difference by comparison. If you're selling it as a phone service, it's a phone service.

Microsoft tells volume customers they can stay on Windows 7... for a bit longer... for a fee

Re: Divorcing Microsoft

privacy-raping at OS level

Having just acquired a new Windows 10 laptop (on which Windows 7 won't easily run), it's the bloody patronising advertising that I find most annoying - "helpful" suggestions, presumably paid for, turning up in the start menu for software I don't want & blandishments about registering for "Microsoft Rewards" on the lock screen. These can all be turned off, with a myriad of different controls in different places, though the control to disable Cortana is now gone (apart from the registry hack). Except the day after I did, the major update to the factory image finally downloaded, occupied a vast amount of disk space and turned back on everything I'd turned off.

It's not an OS any longer - a way for you to run application software on your computer. It's a platform to allow application software to run you, once you've been beaten into dumbed-down submission. I don't want it. Nobody over the age of 12 could possibly want it.

I'll also be moving to Windows 7 in a server VM for legacy applications and Linux on the laptop where RDP will offer the occasional backward glance.

'World's favorite airline' favorite among hackers: British Airways site, app hacked for two weeks

Revolut

On the other hand, they don't (currenty) have a banking licence or FSCS protection.

Useful article on protection and customer services issues with e-money firms here.

Strewth! Aussie ISP gets eye-watering IPv4 bill, shifts to IPv6 addresses

Re: Another IPV6 article which exposes issues with IPV6

What more do you want?

As I understand it, NAT64 provides a means for a host with an IPv6 stack to communicate with legacy IPv4-only hosts by means of a gateway. I gave up trying to pin down the shifting sands of IPv6 migration some time ago, so please correct me if any of the following is untrue regarding NAT64.

1/ it needs a specific form of address allocation for the local IPv6 network, the host needs to "know" when to embed IPv4 addresses in IPv6 packets and the gateway has to "know" what to do with them so it effectively adds a third mode of operation (IPv4, IPv6 and IPv4 in IPv6).

2/ It does nothing for the problem of IPv4-only hosts (either legacy systems or system sitting behind an IPv4 ISP) that want to communicate with IPv6-only systems, which would seem potentially to be a significantly greater number.

Lyon for speed, San Francisco for money, Amsterdam for fun: the best cities to be a techie

Why is it always Vienna?

Dunno. It means nothing to me...

Huawei's Alexa-powered AI Cube wants to squat in your living room too

Re: Errm...

The panaudicon solution to the "problem" of end-to-end encryption?

Space station springs a leak while astronauts are asleep (but don't panic)

Re: Then they're hurt or killed

Aren't you thinking of Fourecks?

Not sure if XXXX sells in Germany owing to the cultural power of the Reinheitsgebot, but if it did, I wonder if they'd use square cans.

Golden State passes gold-standard net neutrality bill by 58-17

Social liberalism and economic liberalism are very different things.

Re: no surprise

On the other hand, it would prevent ISPs charging extra for the timely transport of capital letters.

A decade on, Apple and Google's 30% app store cut looks pretty cheesy

30% of paid for content also covers the cost of Apple/Google distributing free content

They wouldn't have to distribute free content if they allowed other people to do it (the famously permissive Apple) or didn't make it a scary "untrusted" process (the famously trustworthy Google).

Huawei elbows aside Apple to claim number-two phone maker spot

There's noticeable value ... upgrading from a $200 or $300 smartphone

No value that I've noticed.

I've just replaced an old Moto G (which was about £120 a few year back) with an Honor 9 Lite (£140) and I couldn't see any value at all in spending any more money. I'd need some considerable persuasion to be convinced that a £900 phone offered me a more-than-sixfold increase in utility.

AI image recognition systems can be tricked by copying and pasting random objects

It cannot infer context

Indeed.

And what would seem to be the biggest problem is that you can't selectively untrain parts of the model, as far as I'm aware. If there's an irrelevant feature in the source images that happens accidentally to correlate with the presence of another feature then the model is always going to have a correlation bias and even if you detect it (which often you won't), you can't get rid of it without retraining the entire model from source images from which the irrelevant feature has been removed.

That alone should be sufficient to refute the claim that "intelligence" of any form is in play here.

Cobbler feels the shoe-leather: An IP address is still not a human

Re: what’s with Adam Sandler?

a drive-in movie theater

Can't you drive out?

Smut slinger dreams of AI software to create hardcore flicks with your face – plus other machine-learning news

Replace that real tumor by some extrapolated healthy tissue

I hope they don't get their technologies confused. The last thing* anyone wants is to take home a copy of their MRI to find it's a video of their diseased pancreas banging a pneumatic porn star.

*There will be Rule 34 exceptions.

Surprise! VAT, customs likely to get a bit trickier in a Brexit no-deal world

Possibly engaging a customs broker

If the volume of export declarations is going to increase by roughly a factor of 5, you'll have to marry one - and soon.

Tax the tech giants and ISPs until the bits squeak – Corbyn

Independent journalism

Says the man who took part in a staged "interview" with an actress whose support for Corbyn is so democratically balanced that she said in The Guardian:

Terrible thing to say. But we need a coup!

Ex-UK comms minister's constituents plagued by wonky broadband over ... wireless radio link?

Heat and wooden poles don't mix

Promises of warp speed service were clearly open to misinterpretation.

UK.gov agencies told to drop fancy tech or risk 'reinventing the wheel'

Several departments are investigating ... AI

Perhaps they could begin with small steps and try some real intelligence first?

Et tu, Brute? Then fail, Caesars: When it's hotel staff, not the hackers, invading folks' privacy

Re: Staff cost reductions maid

bet they're cheaper

Probably cheaper than maids-a-milking whose number is strictly limited and who are to be found only for a short time each year.

Re: "Et tu Bruté"

Be insured

Toujours de bons conseils

I reached much the same conclusion from watching an episode of CSI! I assume it's not the history of Mob corruption and violence, the 171 murders (excluding the 58 in the mass shooting) of 2017, the brutal climate, the permanent twilight of the casinos or the fact the entire town only exists to separate people from their money that makes it such a desirable destination. Because, if it is, DEF CON might as well pack up and go home: humanity has chosen a different path.

Beam me up, PM: Digital secretary expected to give Tory conference speech as hologram

If they're going to employ technology...

... this is the way to enliven the message!

Now you can tell someone to literally go f--k themselves over the internet: Remote-control mock-cock patent dies

Re: Unencumbered by patents

It's open sauce!

I'm afraid I read that as...

Remote-control mock-cock patient dies

... which would have been more troubling and interesting at the same time.

I can't imagine why my eyesight is so poor these days.

Home Office seeks Brexit tech boss – but doesn't splash the cash

Desirable quality

A graduate of (or clear willingness to complete) the IPA’s Major Projects Leadership Academy (MPLA)

Given the MPLA constists of "three, five-day residential modules delivered over a 12 month period interspersed with a demanding schedule of preparation and assignments", there's plenty of scope for a successful candidate to be away "on a course" at the critical moment.

Foreshadow and Intel SGX software attestation: 'The whole trust model collapses'

That's just speculation...

Ad watchdog: Amazon 'misleading' over Prime next-day delivery ads

Re: Better than things used to be

I think the most important thing is that the mechanics of the delivery should be predictable: in the old days I knew I would have to make a trip to the parcel depot if I placed a telephone or online order and that was a factor in deciding whether to try to source the item locally.

I prefer to have items delivered to an Amazon locker as I don't have to be in (and there's no surcharge). My local locker is in a shopping centre that closes at 9pm. Amazon's next-day delivery, if it is in fact dispatched on time, is only guaranteed to arrive by 9pm, so the likelihood is that by the time the package is in the locker it's too late to collect it same day. Or, like the other day, Amazon logistics arrive at the shopping centre at 21.03 and claim they've "attempted delivery" when they know full well they've tried to access their own lockers when they're shut.

And that's not to mention an item recently that bounced backwards and forwards between the M4 corridor and West Yorkshire for a week before finally emerging in the right place.

There's a whole range of smaller items that are either sold by or fulfilled by Amazon (audio cables, for example) that are not deliverable to lockers: try and you get a message saying the locker is "full", even if it clearly isn't full for much larger items in your order. So you have to order those for home delivery, hoping they come by post and not on an Amazon van as they won't just put the order through your letter box.

And if you have Prime and you want to place an order but are going to be away for a couple of days, it appears the slower delivery options are not available to you, so you have to go to the inconvenience of diarising your future order for your return.

It would be a great step forward if Amazon had an option to guarantee delivery by Royal Mail - at least I know when the postman arrives each day. Everything else seems to be a lottery.

Three more data-leaking security holes found in Intel chips as designers swap security for speed

Re: Looking at the wrong holes

nobody should be expecting to rely on the hardware

My first thought on reading that was to cry "rubbish", but I think you have a valid point.

I don't think it's impossible to have a verifiably secure shared execution environment, but its price/performance is unlikely to be attractive. We haven't really thought the whole cloud idea through thoroughly enough: the economics of sharing look superficially attractive, but the security issues have largely been taken on trust. And, indeed, VMs have been used in the cloud because the technology was there, not because they were necessarily the best solution to the sharing problem.

For large users, the problem is mostly immaterial - you'll be wanting multiple dedicated machines (or at least dedicated for the time they are provisioned). For small users, or for some types of scalability, throwing lambda functions at random compute engines may well be a better model than fractional virtual machines.

Devon County Council techies: WE KNOW IT WASN'T YOU!

the swapped or incorrectly typed characters

Good point. I've often seen "e" and "s" confused (as in "issus"), but the transpositions are odd.

I'd be surprised if Mrs Dawn Stabb (who sounds like someone to avoid in the wee small hours) had actually typed the letter herself - presumably they have some boilerplate text somehwere.

In fact it looks a bit to me as if the boilerplate text was moved from their old system to the new one by OCR from a printed copy. Could explain a lot...

Google Spectre whizz kicked out of Caesars, blocked from DEF CON over hack 'attack' tweet

Cracking jokes about attacking their facilities will get you arrested

And cracking jokes comparing burka-wearers with bank robbers will get you short odds on leading the Tories. Doesn't make it right.

Re: Harrogate...

I'd quite like to see the culture clash when DEF CON meets Bettys.