Posts by Warm Braw

UK spy oversight body updates rules to include right of appeal

The six-week consultation closes on 10 November...

...at the moment the clocks strike thirteen.

Ghost in Musk's machines: Software bugs' autonomous joy ride

The solution is to modularise neural networks

The solution is probably to bury a wire in the road - it seems a bizarre idea to want to replace human drivers with machines but leave in place the infrastructure that machines struggle to process.

However, it is interesting that we seem prepared to accept a much greater degree of carnage provided it originates from people like ourselves. Speed limits, seat belts and alcohol-testing were all the subject of strong opposition despite burgeoning road fatalities. Yet if a professional driver causes an accident, there is an outcry. And as for a machine... Autonomous vehicles will have as much trouble negotiating the double standards as they will the road network.

Developers' timezone fail woke half of New Zealand

The nation's civil defence agency Tweeted its “sorry”:

They should have waited an hour and sent another text...

The axeman strikes again: Microsoft has real commitment issues

Word and Excel get buggier

I find that hard to believe. I used to be obliged to write a lot of 100+ page documents with tables, figures and cross-references and I never found a version of Word that would not randomly corrupt page numbers, headings, ToCs, formatting and cross references.

And the reason for that is largely that Microsoft wanted Word to (a) do everything and (b) be compatible with poorly-designed previous versions. I think it's a good thing that Microsoft have realised that they can't do everything, can't be in every space in the market and can't ignore a growing diversity in the ecosystem. The real problem is that they need to identify things they can do well and do them better whereas they are simply shedding the increasing number of things at which they're failing.

Equifax couldn't find or patch vulnerable Struts implementations

Re: Perhaps

They know a lot more about Equifax's customers

The victims of the data theft weren't Equifax's customers, they were Equifax's raw material...

Roku tweaks Apple's nose with telly-friendly vid-streaming boxes

Have they fixed the frame rate issue?

Earlier Roku boxes only supported 60Hz frame rates, so while they're fine for North American content, there are complaints of significant motion artefacts for content originated elsewhere.

Smart burglar alarms: Look who just tossed their hat into the ring ... It's, er, Ring

Ring Protect

I think they'll have to change the name. I assumed it was some sort of defence against screwdriving.

Dildon'ts of Bluetooth: Pen test boffins sniff out Berlin's smart butt plugs

These toys can be located fairly accurately using triangulation

Perhaps it's just me, but I'm now trying to erase a very unsavoury mental image involving a Toblerone.

Guntree v Gumtree: Nominet orders gun ads site must lose domain

The explanation is tenuous to say the least

Given some of Nominet's recent decisions, the words "pot" and "kettle" spring to mind...

Java security plagued by crappy docs, complex APIs, bad advice

Re: RTFM

The SO problem mostly results from the fact there isn't an FM to R any more.

An automatically-generated list of methods and properties doesn't become "documentation" just because that's the title of the link to it - but that seems to be considered the gold standard these days.

Alleged dark web drug baron cuffed – after he flew to US for World Beard Championships

Re: inb4

I bet the airport was bristling with the fuzz

Out, damned Spot! Amazon emits Echo ball with screen, inevitable ever-listening mic

Re: That reminds me

You've got to careful of ageing radios.

Trump accuses Facebook of bias, collusion with his least favourite newspapers

Trump accuses Facebook of bias

What sort of an idiot thinks a massive international business that makes money off the back of its gullible providers of free data would be the place to find disinterested analysis.

Oh, hang on, ....

Dot-Amazon spat latest: Brazil tells ICANN to go fsck itself, only 'govts control the internet'

Re: For what?

Welcome to the Internet

I think this is all you really need to know. The rest is all just a big self-referential bubble.

Smartphone SatNavs to get centimetre-perfect GNSS receivers in 2018

Re: "...will let SatNav systems advise which lane you should drive in"

The 30cm accuracy is probably required to detect the separation between the Audi in the outside lane and the car in front of it...

Why Uber isn't the poster child for capitalism you wanted

The biggest is actually getting and keeping a TFL license

If you've ever used a minicab in London, I think you'd realise that the bar is set fairly low. If you look at Uber's business practices around the world it would appear they've actually put considerably more effort into finding ways of evading regulation than would have been required to comply: that would be the action of a psycopath, not a victim.

Alexa and her kind let the disabled or illiterate make the web work

Isn’t it better to ask Google or Alexa ... ?

Let me rephrase that for you.

Isn't it better to have the economic interests of a secretive international conglomerate determine the information to which you have access ... ?

I suppose it depends on whether you think it's social progress to hope that those less blessed with literary and physical skills will be content to be distracted by cat videos and the miracle of light that can be turned on and off at will.

Welcome to the future: Bluetooth jackets you can only wash 10 times. Gee, thanks, Google

The cuff presently supports four gestures

I' suspect they'll find they've implemented "Brush off" without necessarily being aware of it.

Web devs griping about iPhone X notch: You're rendering it wrong

where have we seen that before

Given that an entire website is required to explain what browser features are supported in different browsers and to what extent - it's clear that "what we have seen before" is to product designers what videos of extreme violence are to jihadists.

Want to keep in contact with friends and family without having to sell your personal data?

The video conferencing is pixilated

It certainly would be in my family. Perhaps it needs a gin o'clock cut-out.

Spanish govt slammed over bizarre Catalan .cat internet registry cop raid

Re: Curious Spanish attitude

It's effectively the same attitude as that of the UK - the Scots don't get a referendum without the permission of Westminster.

The difference is that Westminster has said yes, twice, and is being asked to say yes for a third time. So, clearly, the demos don't get to make a final decision whether a referendum is held or not.

You've been baffled by its smart thermostat. Now strap in for Nest's IoT doorbell, alarm gear

I got the upgrade to fully transparent without having to pay a monthly fee.

Also, I find that people can rap smartly on it to attract my attention. Of course, if I'm away from the house, I can't hear, but my non-presence is nevertheless communicated wirelessly to any disappointed visitor.

Manchester plod still running 1,500 Windows XP machines

Re: Entirely unrelated to reduced funding by central government…

I mean, it's how it should be, right?

Not unless you consider it a good use of the "big back end system" to be taking an interrupt for every character typed and keeping a map of the screen contents so that it can redraw it when the noisy and unreliable async connections suffers a parity error. And, indeed, be intimately bound to the minutiate of the user interface.

The whole point of multi-tier systems is for each layer to do what it does most efficiently and appropriately in such a way that it can be swapped out without the adjacent layers noticing if and when it becomes necessary.

If you're going to implement code with hard-to-maintian and short-lived technology, it's at least marginally better that it isn't built into the back-end logic too.

Incidentally, since you mention VT-100s and their ilk, the terminal driver was the most complex part of the RSX operating system and even minor patches tended to cause chaos as nearly every character-based UI depended on some undocumented behaviour or another and would break randomly if something changed. That's the downside of monolithic systems.

Compsci degrees aren't returning on investment for coders – research

JavaScript developers were most in demand

That's so sad on so many levels.

Stack Overflow + Salary Calculator = your worth

if I asked for the salary this tool quoted me in an interview, I'd be laughed out of the building

Interestingly, the more skills you add, the lower the salary seems to get - though not by much.

And on my tablet the site seemed very reluctant to let me add more roles or skills without pressing submit and back for each addition. Perhaps they're not paying their developers enough...

Equifax's IT leaders 'retire' as company says it knew about the bug that brought it down

Re: admin/admin

degree in music composition

She will now have the time. as well as the skill, to write an elegiac piece for a really tiny violin.

BOFH: We're only here because they said there would be biscuits

Quicklime

I'm surprised Its abandonment by Apple wasn't a sufficient reason to cancel the videoconferencing idea - or perhaps an excuse to order up the remaining stocks.

'All-screen display'? But surely every display is all-screen... or is a screen not a display?

Re: Say what you mean and mean what you say

things like gym membership

Gym membership contracts are probably the ultimate piss-take - I congratulate anyone who can find a way of turning them to their advantage.

Tech biz must be more export-focused, says defence kit minister

It can't possible backfire, can it ?

It's not really in the interests of the military-industrial complex if it even fires forwards - that would be the end of the R&D funding...

Chirpy, chirpy, cheap, cheap: Printable IoT radios for 10 cents each

Re: Official reg units please

4,800ft2 (for non-Americans, about 445m2)

When we've agreed on the units, can we also agree on the number of digits of precision?

El Reg is hiring an intern. Apply now before it closes

It probably counts as cruelty to subject an enthusiastic PFY to the cynical, curmudgeonly gloom of Register Towers. It might even be worth joining Facebook to see the pictures before and after...

Everybody without Android Oreo vulnerable to overlay attack

A view containing a quick little message for the user

If you're toast after you click it, you could perhaps claim there was at least nominal documentation of the problem.

Stuff the movement of celestial spheres, let's sit down and watch Bonnie Tyler on TV

Drones can check out any guests

Did they get the idea while staying at a Travelodge?

Stand up who HASN'T been hit in the Equifax mega-hack – whoa, whoa, sit down everyone

Re: Co-incidence?

treat them like plumbers

Judging by the number of irritating minor problems in the plumbing of my new house, I'd swear it had been installed by IT staff. Fortunately, plumbing is mostly open source and you can fix it yourself, which is more that can be said for the credit oligarchyindustry.

The real problem is actually that IT staff pass themselves off as engineers when they really don't understand the meaning of the term. Many of them work on the same principle as plumbers - take a bunch of manufactured components and connect them all together - but have less understanding of what each component actually does, let alone how they will act together as a system. If management understood that most IT staff shouldn't be trusted to deliver secure solutions (partly because generations of IT staff before them have built incredibly shoddy foundations) they might be a bit more cautious in their ambitions.

Google rushes to curb Oreo's massive appetite for your 4G mobile data

Re: You can see how they'd miss this

Never, ever, upgrade to version X.0.

Especially an OS that explicitly prevents you from rolling back to a working version.

How the CIA, Comcast can snoop on your sleep patterns, sex toy usage

Apart from smartphones

Well, given that your smartphone can watch and listen to everything you do, a remote observer can probably figure out you turned the light on without needing the input from a "smart" switch...

Trump-hating Iranian is the new Uber CEO

Re: Typical US corporate way of life....

the lack of that freedom doesn't improve anything

If "freedom" doesn't change anything, its benefit is merely hypothetical.

FTC told to cough up informants' memos in Qualcomm antitrust row

What's interesting about this...

... is that none of it apparently has anything to do with whether there is an anti-trust case to answer. Who or what might have caused the FTC to start investigating doesn't seem to have any relevance to what they might subsequently have found and any prosecution would presumably depend only on evidence available to the court.

London Mayor hires former PR man as Chief Digi Officer

Re: You didn't publish a piccy

I hope he fails

I don't think we'll notice, either way.

AccuWeather: Our app slurped your phone's location via Wi-Fi but we like totally didn't use it

Re: "as far removed from the Unix Philosophy as you could possibly imagine"

Any mobile OS following the so-called "Unix Philosophy" would be utterly unusable.

Not utterly. Even Emacs gets used for productive work. Just not by people you'd want to share an office with.

Cybersecurity world faces 'chronic shortage' of qualified staff

Re: Actually, there are plenty of us out here.

I've been offered a number of security jobs and on closer examination they all turned out to involve form-filling, box-ticking and writing screeds of arse-covering documentation. It's not really the kind of job that anyone would actually want, particularly if they're going to be the sacrificial goat when the inevitable happens.

What's the solution? The only ultimate solution is to have less vulnerable systems: there are going to be orders of magnitude more of them and they're going to be increasingly critical to the maintenance of life and it's simply untenable for them all to require their own Praetorian Guard.

Simply changing the law so those EULA clauses about limited liability have no validity would rapidly change the landscape.

Seriously, friends. You suck at driving. Get a computer behind the wheel to save your life

My lane departure warning is audio only

That's the advantage of rails: you get some haptic feedback too.

British snoops at GCHQ knew FBI was going to arrest Marcus Hutchins

some people... have managed to avoid extradition

And it appears we haven't attempt to extradite the NSA folk who managed to loose the EternalBlue exploit on the world - the one behind Petya and WannaCry. It would be interesting to see how far that got in a US court.

Defra recruiting 1,400 policy wonks to pick up the pieces after Brexit

Re: 1400?

By the time Big Ben strikes midnight on March 31st 2219

Perhaps it would make more sense to get 1400 physicists to work out how to project Big Ben into space at sufficient velocity to give us down here an extra couple of centuries to work it all out. They're already dismantling it: shame not to take advantage of the opportunity.

Nokia's comeback is on: The flagship 8 emerges

Re: Split screen market?

greybeards have already treated themselves to a pricey audio recorder

Musicians of all ages buy audio recorders in quite significant numbers - for rehearsal and to record (their own) concerts. Non-musicians buy them to record concerts (other people's). I'd be very pleased to get access to HAAC recording because even specialised audio recorders tend not to cope very well with high sound pressure levels or wide dynamic range - and you generally can't keep an eye on the levels if you're performing at the same time. I'm not entirely sure I'd want it in an expensive phone - one that's a tempting target for the light-fingered while it's outside your immediate control, but having it in a mid-range phone would be very convenient - something less to carry.

I did consider getting a Lumia for that specific purpose - but the combination of fixed internal storage and firmware updates that successively crippled the audio capabilities knocked that on the head.

Months after breach at the 'UnBank' Ffrees, customers complain: No one told us

Their website says:

The Ffrees Card and associated Ffrees Account is an electronic money product and although it is a product regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, it is not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. No other compensation scheme exists to cover losses claimed in connection with the Ffrees Card and associated Ffrees Account. We will however ensure that any funds received by you are held in a segregated account so that should we become insolvent your funds will be protected against claims made by our creditors.

and:

It’s no longer possible to sign up for a new Ffrees Account

Probably just as well.

Taken a while but finally here's the first proper smart-home gizmo

Re: Smart things need smart solutions!

I've probably said it before in a similar discussion, but your best bet is probably the smart ceiling rose - assuming you want such a thing. At least as houses are presently wired, there is no permanent power at the switch, which makes it a bit hard to embed smarts - the IKEA stuff mostly uses battery-powered (button cell) controllers, which seems like a retrograde step.

Having just moved to a house with one central ceiling light in a large living room, I'd quite like to be able to install some additional lighting without tearing the walls and ceiling apart to add more cables and switches and having individually controllable lights on a ceiling track (for example) would be quite useful. However, I intend to live here for rather longer than any smart lighting system control app is likely to be maintained and today's generation of lightbulbs is likely to be availalble and I notice that the TRÅDFRI Android app has decidedly mixed reviews. Having previously had an X10 system for more than a decade that I could operate with the TV remote, this does seem like a step backwards.

Intel CEO Krzanich quits Trump's Manufacturing Council over response to Charlottesville rallies

Re: What has happened to el reg?

It's what's happening to the world that's of rather more consequence: this is just overspill.

It's not just the Trump US and Brexit Britain, Poland is shredding its constitution, Hungary has more or less finished shredding theirs and is about to militarize its schools - and we know what's happening in Russia and Turkey.

And whatever anyone says about the US rust belt or Britain's disaffected urban north or the white working class, they're not the people funding the right wing "news" sites and the targeted social media campaigns - a very small nexus of extremely wealthy people are doing that in the UK and Britain and we don't know to what extent foreign governments are doing the same.

It only takes a relatively small number of people to redefine "normal": the balance of opinions of the modest cohort of regular commentards here can easily be upset by a dozen or so determinedly active zealots. Analysis of the source of much more widely-read Facebook frothings suggests that they are being promoted by a handful of very active accounts.

What has happened is that we have built technology which, coupled with a human psychological tendency to outrage, is acting as an amplifier of opinions with a response curve that emphasises idiocy. The Internet is the Beats headphone of opinion reproduction - it's the bottom end that's prominent.

What can we do about it? Following the money would be a start. I'm sure there's enough potential outrage to be spawned that way to drown out the malevolent prospectus of the super-rich.

He is setting a very good example

Well, of course it isn't as if Trump has changed since they agreed to serve - they all knew who they were going to be dealing with.

Cynically (me, them, or both?), I might suggest that they had realised that Trump's economic policy is heading for the buffers and that they couldn't pass up an opportunity to jump off without being accused of abandoning their fellow passengers to their fate.

Google bins white supremacist site after it tries to host-hop away from GoDaddy

Re: Nazis love diversity

removes white people from the gene pool

I'm not sure humanity would be severely disadvantaged if a few were to drown in the shallow end.