Posts by Warm Braw

Queensland creep cops charged with snooping through police records

Police would ordinarily access such a file less than 50 times

You mean in Oz you would expect the police to review your file 5 times every year?

Given that QPRIME contains records on road crash, crime (reported crime victims, reported crime offenders, prosecutions of offenders and offender criminal histories), missing persons and domestic violence applications/orders that either suggests that the population of Queensland consists entirely of prolific criminals or that the police are constantly nosing unnecessarily.

Three non-obvious reasons to Vote Leave on the 23rd

Re: So where is the post to balance this out?

Better the Devil you know than the devil you don't know

I think that's the point. We know what we've got. but everyone wanting out has a different view of the sunny uplands that apparently would await us. UKIP - and large chunks of the population - want an end to immigration, but I've got a "Vote Leave" leaflet from James Dyson and the Bruges Group who want us in EFTA (which means reciprocal freedom to live and work with EU citizens just as does the EEA). A large section of the Conservative leavers seem to be more concerned about moving the domestic government to the right than they are with international trade - the EU is simply a proxy for opposition to Thatcherite economics.

And I'd like to see the evidence that immigration is pushing down wages for those at the bottom of the pile - the minimum wage keeps going up. It's the "squeezed middle" that are suffering from wage stagnation. The pressure on housing and services is real - more so in some areas than others - but that's at least as much a result of a failure to invest in affordable housing and public services over decades as it is of recent migration patterns. Tellingly, it's the areas with least EU migration (like the North East) that are most concerned about it as an issue.

Membership of the EU isn't stopping us doing many of the things that need to be done in Britain - it's mostly down to a failure of public policy and an electorate who complain they can't get GP appointments and that their children are living at home but vote for the party that's promising further cuts. In or out, that's going to be the situation and all the fabulous plans of the leavers will crumble to dust when they're exposed to the poisonous atmosphere of British politics.

Leaving the EU would just be a hissy fit - it doesn't actually address any of the issues, it's just an attempt to deny any domestic responsibility for them. In some ways, it would be worth leaving just to see the gradual meltdown of politics as the grandiose promises fail to materialise. But it would be an expensive way of learning a lesson.

Apple's 'lappable' iPad Pro concept is far from laughable

Re: "When Apple familiarised me with the iPad Pro..."

What's more remarkable is that there seems to have been actual contact between some (possibly distant) representative of Apple and El Reg.

I wonder if there's been some perturbation in Jobs' posthumous rotational frequency.

Quantum is shutting down sync'n'share biz Symform in July

From acquisition to closure in 23 months

Long live the cloud!

Well, maybe not that long...

Should we teach our kids how to program humanity out of existence?

50 years of masturbatory teenagers

There is an obvious way to interest teenagers in robotics while simultaneously keeping them distracted from thoughts of human annihilation*.

*Though I suppose there is a risk of diminished fertility.

E-books the same as printed ones, says top Euro court egghead

Re: I write books

On his sixteenth birthday, orphan Tristram finds he has a legacy of millions if he will undertake to research time travel

I suspect that if I were reaching for my guillotine it would not be for the purpose of making unauthorised digital copies.

But that does make for an interesting point. It may actually be in the greater interest of authors (and composers/song writers) who are unlikely ever to make much money out of their work to have an audience for it rather than to collect small sums from a few select followers that will in no way compensate them for their effort. At least they then have an established market that they can monetise in other ways. That's already the default position for much of the music industry - the musicians make the money from live performance and merchandise, not from the recordings.

I'm not suggesting (in case Orlowski has his hands hovering over the keyboard) that authors should be denied the right to collect lending fees or digital royalties, just that in many cases it really isn't a great business model.

UberEats into food delivery with new app launch in London

A fairly saturated market

Much like the fats in the foods they'll be delivering no doubt.

It does seem absurd that when many fast-food outlets are using increasinlgy inferior and substitute ingredients to get their prices down in a fiercely competitive market the same people people who are clearly not prepared to pay for quality food are quite happy to pay a premium to have the crap delivered to their doorstep.

When DIY is not enough: Web-snack firm Graze has an offline awakening

Graze, Oracle, SAP - what do they have in common?

High margin fashionable fads?

Japan travel agency fears leak of 7.93 million records, passport deets

Re: Why?

Travel agencies, particularly ones that make short-notice travel arrangements for business people on behalf of their employers, will likely not only have scans of the passport, but probably the front and reverse sides of credit cards and driving licences.They ought *not* to need them, but some travel suppliers insist on being faxed (ir)relevant documentation before they'll confirm a booking and as the agency is acting on behalf of the end usere, they often need to supply the end user's credentials.

Agencies are making some, slow, efforts to become PCI compliant but even the card companies realise that they have to be cut some slack owing to the nature of the business they're in.

Imagination: Come back to MIPS, Wi-Fi router makers, we have an FCC ban workaround

Re: Not just "American geeks"

Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear. What I meant was that if the US wants locked-down firmware, everyone will get locked-down firmware because the market demand for hackable devices is negligible,

Not just "American geeks"

Manufacturers aren't going to produce locked-down devices specifically for the US market - not enough people load their own software to make it worth having a separate version for the rest of the world.

US plans intervention in EU vs Facebook case caused by NSA snooping

Privacy IS the real motive (of Schrems)

If privacy was the real motive

You say this, anonymously, as if this is some sort of EU conspiracy against the US. But it's not the EU, not even one country in the EU, it's a single individual saying to the EU - "these are your laws, uphold them" and being doggedly persistent so that the government functionaries that have been dodging their responsibilities consistently have found themselves in court.

Schrems was able to target the US because there is evidence in the public domain of their mass surveillance and because of the "Safe Harbor" provisions. It would be possible to build a case against other EU countries with similar sureveillance (not under "Safe Harbor", but for their failure to comply with data protection laws) but you'd need evidence - and there's no sign yet of a British or French Snowden.

EU national governments really don't want cases of this sort being brought precisely because they could be the next on the list for prosecution, and are doing their best to keep the lid firmly on their own surveillance activities - witness the fact that the "Snoopers' Charter" makes it illegal for any ISP to tell anyone the extent of the surveillance they are being obliged to conduct.

Microsoft buys LinkedIn for the price of 36 Instagrams

Office suggesting an expert to connect with via LinkedIn to help with a task you're trying to complete

There is a profile for at least one Clippy on LinkedIn, but I don't see a Microsoft resemblance.

there must be something better to spend $26B on

Well, that amount of money would have bought nearly 4 Nokias - and despite the burning platform crashing in Microsoft's ownership that money at least bought Microsoft something it could have built on and some tangible assets.

But LinkedIn? An evanescent user base and 10,000 employees with titles like Talent Solutions Solutions Consultant (I kid you not)? Whose operating income is increasingly negative?

In obesity fight, UK’s heavy-handed soda tax beats US' watered-down warning

A soda tax is regressive

You could look at that another way.

If people on lower incomes spend a disproportionate amount of their income on expensive, branded, unhealthy drinks, they will equally be proportionately much better off if they stop buying them.

FFS, Twitter. It's not that hard

It is where we all go

1/ It isn't.

2/ If attention-deficit teenagers turn into attention-deficit adults and instant messaging eventually becomes as ubiquitous as you suggest, it won't be able to continue as a monopoly platform.

Twitter had a narrow window between popularity and commodity in which to make money and it rather looks like it missed it,

RIP ROP: Intel's cunning plot to kill stack-hopping exploits at CPU level

Gradual retreat of the von Neumann machine...

While modern CPUs may still have a single physical memory bus, it's interesting how we're moving towards a virtual Harvard architecture in which the program and its associated control structures are logically separate from the data.

This latest change is not exactly a simple and elegant fix - it's not just shadow stacks, but a new "endbranch" instruction (which borrows a NOP from existing CPUs), so you'll need to recompile programs to get the full benefit.

At some point, it might be nice to start with a clean slate. Perhaps Windows 10 is providing that opportunity, albeit as an unintended consequence...

Not-so Secret Rulers of the World gather to talk cybersecurity, AI and, er, TalkTalk?

The meetings, held since 1954...

... have achieved nothing but to confirm the human propensity to form self-promoting cliques.

Dyfed-Powys Police fined for publicising pervs' particulars

For some reason, the identities of sex offenders are kept confidential in the UK

Well, the names certainly appeear in court reports and are recorded by the media, so it is entirely untrue to say with that News International innuendo "the identities of sex offenders are kept confidential", There's also a procedure for people who have genuine suspicions about an individual with whom they or their family have contact to have them checked out.

Even the US don't give you their phone numbers and e-mail addresses, though. And given the database reports that in DC alone there are 1100 registered offenders, knowing where a few of the locals happen to be doesn't really increase your security, it simply encourages the local paediatrician-haters to ignore the rather mealy-mouthed warning:

Abuse of this information to threaten, intimidate, harass, or harm registered sex offenders, their families, or their property will not be tolerated and is subject to prosecution.

Surveillance forestalls more 'draconian' police powers – William Hague

"Lord" Hague

The title alone demonstrates that "public opinion" and "parliament" means "them" and "us".

FBI tries again to get warrantless access to your browser history

Re: Why are they so scared of getting a warrant?

Because if the friendly judge is going to sign it anyway, why bother with the sham?

Judicial oversight has just been a legal veneer in the past to fend off any pesky public disquiet. But the lack of any significant backlash to the Snowden revelations has demonstrated that the public is mostly quite content with constant surveillance, provided it's someone else who gets arrested, so they've presumably decided that the legal veneer simply isn't worth the effort of polishing.

England just not windy enough for wind farms, admits renewables boss

The headline is very misleading

Even The Telegraph, where the linked story originated at the weekend- a paper that seems to believe that the very idea of renewable energy is a hippy-communist plot - managed to conceed that the government has so cocked up the energy market that they're even having to subsidise gas-powered generation.

All our eggs are currently in the Hinkley Point C basket and, despite EDF reportedly planning to sell off assets left right and centre to raise the funds to build it, there is real uncertainty that it will go ahead. If it does go ahead, the experience of Flamanville does not bode well for a timely completion.

Whatever the future of centralised renewable power generation, it's looking increasingly like a sound precaution to have some sort of household solar capability to keep the LEDs on when your compulsory smartmeter is instructed to start shedding load.

You've got a patch, you've got a patch ... almost every Android device has a patch

Re: Where are those monthly updates?

That tablet you have is 4 years old now and was flawed on release, its not gonna get fixed. Not now, not ever

If there's one thing the tech industry has done consistently well, it's been to lower the bar on "merchantable quality". In any other field of manufacturing, a company that would not support its products for more than eighteen months or sold products that were "flawed on release" and "not gonna get fixed" would be closed down by Trading Standards.

Ane we put up with this why? So we can send pictures of our lunch to perfect strangers?

Letters prove GCHQ bends laws to spy at will. So what's the point of privacy safeguards?

Lack of knowledge over ... signing

This is a general problem. Although a secretary of state might be theoretically "responsible" for the decision, in practice they're not going to read everything that passes over their desk. If they do read it, they'll only know what they've been told by officials and in the rare event of asking a question, they're only going to be able to ask questions based on the selective information they've been given and will likely get selective answers in response. The notion that "an elected politician makes the decision to authorize an investigation rather than a civil service official" is purely theoretical, but it's a great form of absolution for the officials involved.

Edit: As the letter clearly shows, the alternative of having a judge approve warrants is of little use if there is a ready supply of retirees from the court of appeal who don't feel the need to keep up with the law or, presumably, rock the boat.

Brexit: UK gov would probably lay out tax plans in post-'leave' vote emergency budget

I can't believe people are letting leave get away with this one

I can't believe the level of debate in general. Or indeed what it says about the state of politics when ministers are effectively calling each other liars individually while still expecting us to trust them collectively in government.

The only thing that is clear is that Cameron's attempt to deal with the Tory's equivalent of the Militant Tendency by winning a decisive referendum majority has backfired quite spectacularly. Even if he secures a majority at all he's toast and we'll be back at the ballot boxes on a regular basis until we deliver the right answer.

Swiss effectively disappear Alps: World's largest tunnel opens

Re: Swiss efficiency

Our local tunnel was built in the UK

Probably a wise decision, they're a bugger to transport.

Brexit? Cutting the old-school ties would do more for Brit tech world

Re: Divide

English wine

At least English wine is, er, wine. Unlike British wine, which is factory-produced from imported grape juice concentrate and drunk only by those who find supermarket cider too sophisticated...

most British people ... don't consider themselves european

Probably also worth pointing out that many "British" people don't even consider themselves British (see previous referendum). It's interesting that you'd get similar observations to those of the author about our hereditary elite from people here in the frozen north - London (by which we typically mean everywhere south of Watford) looks as much like a remote colonial power to Newcastle as it once did to Nyasaland, so the whole issue of "identity" does not play in the same way as it does in the Home Counties.

I do sometimes wonder if everyone would be happier if we simply built a wall around the M25 so the people on the inside could believe they were even bigger fish in the smaller pond of their own independent country and the rest of us could get on with our lives without the constant imposition of change for the sake of appearing to be powerful.

The ad hominems have started early

Given that we have one commentard anxious to make it clear that he hasn't read beyond the first 74 words and another pretending not to know the difference between "Oxbridge" and "Oxford", there's clearly some anxiety to avoid engaging with the argument.

Intel's new plan: A circle that starts in your hand and ends in the cloud

So this is an Internet of Tat device where the ability to remotely hijack it is a feature rather than a bug?

Compatibility before purity: Microsoft tweaks .NET Core again

Re: The strategy is coming clear...

Win32 apps are, by definition, pretty much "tied to a particular operating system implementation", so that definitely isn't the strategy. Being able to develop and deploy server/cloud applications for Azure without a Windows desktop running Windows tools definitely does seem to be on the roadmap, though, which seems like a sensible precaution given the state of the desktop market and the general loathing of Windows 10.

Are EU having a laugh? Europe passes hopeless cyber-commerce rules

Re: They aren't entirely mad.

They know the problem is madly varying shipping rates

Actually one problem is madly varying fraud rates. I know of retailers who have refused to ship to certain EU destinations because of a high incidence of payment card fraud.

The EU can't simply outlaw geography - it is inevitably going to be more expensive to ship and support goods sent long distances from the supplier (try getting a storage radiator shipped to the Highlands) and harder to assess the risk of fraud.

Requiring suppliers to ship anywhere in the EU on demand would likely push prices up in otherwise competitive markets more than it brought them down elsewhere.

Quiet cryptologist Bill Duane's war with Beijing's best

Re: "excelled in plundering highly-secure US firms." - Why is this in the RSA breach story?

old guys who are clueless about the 21st century risks

I'll take someone who's clueless and knows it above someone who thinks he knows it all.

Unfortunately, experience shows that if you are a sufficiently valuable target you are ultimately going to lose against a well-resourced nation state. While this is no excuse for lax defences, it would seem like a good idea to have a viable response plan in place before the inevitable happens - stored in a safe on paper.

Dropbox gets all up in your kernel with Project Infinite. Cue uproar

Re: I don't get the fuss

There is a massive difference between hardware kexts and a data copy agent

Not really - once you've got kernel context it doesn't really matter what you say you are going to do with it. At least you know Dropbox is going to have access to your data and can choose not to use it. Do you really know what your drivers are doing?

Euro Patent Office prez's brake line cut – aka how to tell you're not popular

Totalitarian oligarchs don't give up their power easily

So why do you expect the governments of individual European states to voluntarily relinquish their power to appoint Commission members?

Marketing by opt-in, opt-out, consent or legitimate interest?

Re: The real test, is where the money is to be made ...

And the multiple daily PPI and "new boiler" robocalls that I receive are not optional in any sense - and since they come from spoofed numbers cannot easily be tracked. While the "legal" marketeers need a firm grip on their windpipes, we also need to do something about those who already ignore the rules.

US nuke arsenal runs on 1970s IBM 'puter waving 8-inch floppies

Re: Programming skills .NE. programming languages

It's not that difficult to learn a new programming language

If only it were that simple. COBOL programs rarely have much real COBOL in them - they're mainly glue around CICS or ISAM database macros, The real challenge is understanding those...

Re: Some Department of Commerce weather alert systems use Fortran

Fortran is a wonderfully portable language

FORTRAN can be a portable language, but it was extremely easy to use iolder versions in ways that were not portable: anything that involved text handling, for example, used to be notoriously system-specific. Also, most implementations had vendor-specific extensions to cover stuff that wasn't in the FOTRAN standards of the time. I spent a lot of time at one stage trying to port FORTRAN programs from George 3 to MVS and it wasn't a happy experience.

Modern Fortran has a better chance of being portable, but VAX FORTRAN had a long list of extensions and programmers could rely on being able to call system services and the runtime library directly because of the VAX procedure calling standard. GNU Fortran, among others, will compile the DEC extensions, but can't do much with code that's littered with calls to system libraries.

Hulk Hogan's sex tape, a Silicon Valley billionaire, and a $10m revenge plot to destroy Gawker

Nobody is talking about much else in the Valley

About what you'd expect of people who put their faith in unicorns.

'Grey tech' broker DP Data Systems has gone titsup

Re: Vowed to go clean rather than shut up shop. Shuts up shop

>integrity and probity don't pay

Clearly not. Undermining the free market by using trademark law to prevent buyers getting the best price is the way to go if you want to make money and stay in business.

Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy has data on 1/14th of humanity

I buy golf clubs all the time because I think they will improve my game

Typical CEO - total inability to measure ROI.

Next-gen Tor to use distributed RNG, 55-character addresses

Good question. Proposal 224 only makes reference to the shared result not being "too influenceable" by an attacker and describes the proposal for a protocol as "somewhat broken". I assume it's the somewhat brokenness that the recent test was aiming to resolve and that the answer will emerge when they write it up.

Google to kill passwords on Android, replace 'em with 'trust scores'

Re: Sooo...

>Perhaps my phone will decide I don't exist

Even if it admits to your existence, what precisely is the point of a mobile device that checks you're in a familiar location? I have proper computers in the places I find myself most frequently: Android is for the random places the Cat 5 doesn't stretch.

UK distributor Steljes goes titsup

Steljes, which specialised in ... interactive whiteboards

Couldn't they see the writing on the wall?

Google-backed solar electricity facility sets itself on fire

Re: Supply commitments?

>Cola fired?

It's the surreal thing.

Modular phone Ara to finally launch

That video

Jeans - check

Surfboard - check

Guitar - check

Twenty-somethings - check

Beards - check

Gender & sexual diversity - check

No actual information - check

They do seem to have found a way to make advertising even more patronising than when a man in a suit simply announced that 8 out of 10 women preferred it.

Theranos bins two years of test results

Re: How to get in on these scams

He must be really, really desperate in his final years

Perhaps his test results suggested he was going to need a lot of expensive treatment...

A UK digital driving licence: What could possibly go wrong?

Re: My guru lives uptown...

Unfortunately, if you Google "Yoti" and click on the About Yoti link that Google returns, it would seem that the guru believes in security through obscurity [also cached in dropbox].

Edit: given the current political climate, is it really wise for them to claim:

We use the best facial recognition technology avaliable - the same used by European border control.

Being an IT trainer is like performing the bullet-catching trick

Re: "Captain Haddock cosplay contest at a Geography teachers’ convention"

Frolicking folicles!

Goracle latest: Page testifies, jury goes home

Re: The lessons of not doing due diligence in acquisitions

The only company / organisation / IT Guru who thinks interfaces are copyrightable is Oracle

Unfortunately, the courts agree with them, which is why this is rumbling on.