Posts by I am the liquor

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

Re: Dead Cat

It's a law of the internet. Any post criticising the grammar or spelling in another post will itself contain a spelling or grammar mistake. And thats definately true.

Privacy Shield: EU citizens might get right to challenge US access to their data

Enhanced privacy shield

Great idea. Wait for your data sharing agreement to be struck down by the courts, then just repackage the same old shit, with a few ineffectual changes and a different name, and you have another 2 years of business-as-usual while Max Schrems chips away at that one. Seems like that could work indefinitely, or until Max is worn out, whichever is the sooner.

Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis

Re: One doesn't imply the other

Home in.

Re: Watson

What colour tray would you like your dinner served on, dear? And shall I turn on the TV?

£42k for a top-class software engineer? It's no wonder uni research teams can't recruit

Re: How many people do you manage? None? In that case, it's £42k a year'

Pretty much every software business error that Fred Brooks wrote about in the 1970s is still being made more often than not. Including the one in the title of the book. Most project managers I've mentioned it to over the years had never heard of The Mythical Man Month.

We're in a business that likes to think of itself as fast-moving and forward-looking. I suppose it's inevitable to have an element of being doomed to repeat the mistakes of history.

Leaked footage shows British F-35B falling off HMS Queen Elizabeth and pilot's death-defying ejection

Re: Ooops!

An old friend used to recount a story about accidentally driving his armoured vehicle over his rifle, rendering it suitable only for shooting round corners. Fortunately he was in enemy territory during a hot war (Iraq, the early 90s one), and got issued a new one with no questions asked. Apparently there'd have been hell to pay if he'd done the same on Salisbury Plain.

China plans to swipe a bunch of data soon so quantum computers can decrypt it later

ln -s /dev/urandom MySecretz.zip

Happy with your existing Windows 10 setup? Good, because Windows 11 could turn its nose up at your CPU

It's not CAD you need processor power for these days, it's running all the shitty javascript on sloppily designed web sites.

UK watchdog fines two firms £270k for cold-calling 531,000 people who had opted out

Re: Reporting calls

The terminating telco doesn't need to immediately block the route; they pass the info upstream and wait for the originating telco to cut off the subscriber. If the originating telco doesn't do so, then whoever's downstream of them has to cut them off. And ultimately, yes the terminating telco in the UK would have to cut off the inbound route, if the intermediate telco on that route has not dealt with nuisance calls upstream of them.

Clearly none of them are going to do this voluntarily, especially when they're all taking their cut from all these calls. International treaties and legislation will be required. Or at least the threat of legislation, if the telcos can't collectively get their house in order.

If it's ITU rules that are preventing anyone addressing this problem, then maybe the ITU is the organisation that should be tasked with solving it.

How many low-code products does an enterprise software biz need? Ask SAP, it's just swallowed another one

Re: Almighty mess

Frankly, it started going downhill with COBOL.

Machine-learning model creates creepiest Doctor Who images yet – by scanning the brain of a super fan

Re: Someone with access to an MRI machine has misunderstood machine learning again...

You see that Eddie The Eagle Edwards? That's you that is.

ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 1: Workhorse that does the business – and dares you to push that red button

Re: Terrible keyboard positioning

Back in the days when carpal tunnel syndrome seemed like a major health crisis, having your wrists higher than the keyboard was reckoned to be the safe way to type. You could get a squidgy wrist rest to put in front of your keyboard to raise your wrists to the correct angle.

Now everyone uses laptop keyboards, with this built-in wrist-rest design, and you hardly hear about carpal tunnel syndrome any more. Coincidence?

Re: Personal hobby horse warning

It makes one nostalgic for times when one could use "one" as a pronoun, without one having to be a member of the royal family.

Re: Vile

It's not for looking at, it's for working on.

If you want something to work on, by all means use a Thinkpad.

If you want something to look at, I recommend a tree or some clouds.

Re: It is why I buy Thinkpads

I think when Matthew said "it’s not something you instinctively want to use," he really meant to say "it’s not something I instinctively want to use."

Clearly the reason they still have it is that there are enough customers who will never buy anything other than a Thinkpad because of it.

UK network Three hikes pay-as-you-go rates by 400% to push punters to buy 'bundles'

Re: PAYG is no longer PAYG

They're probably just realigning themselves with the market. Their new price is in line with the likes of Tesco and Asda at 8-10p a minute. Vodafone/EE/O2 PAYG tariffs are 30-35p a minute! They really don't want PAYG customers.

Re: PAYG is no longer PAYG

You can still do normal PAYG, you don't have to buy the 1-month bundles/add-ons. Your cost per minute will be higher now if you're on 3, but you can still choose to pay just for what you use, subject to a minimum usage level of one chargeable event per 180 days to keep it alive.

That's it. It's over. It's really over. From today, Adobe Flash Player no longer works. We're free. We can just leave

Where can you see lions?

Leave.EU takes back control – and shifts its domain name to be inside the European Union

Re: My irony metre --------------------->

I think you'll find it's now an irony yard.

We take a look at proposed Big Tech regulations in the UK: Heavy on possible fines, light on enforcement

Re: Maximum fine £18 million

To be pedantic, the minimum maximum fine is £18m.

Microsoft adds Breakout functionality to Teams that Zoom has had for ages – and people still don't like it

Visual Studio Code 1.52

I haven't been following Visual Studio Code version numbers... is 1.52 just a natural increment, or is it a knowing nod to the classic Visual C++ version that some of us grey-beards remember from the Windows 3.1 days?

Re: Breakout rooms?

Or slightly less boring, a virtual pub quiz where everyone listens to the questions, then breaks out into their teams to discuss the answers.

Tim Cook 'killed' TV project about the one website Apple hates more than The Register

Re: Well, of course

24 was like a 60-minute IT kit ad break wasn't it. If the camera wasn't lovingly lingering on the blinkenlights of the Dell PowerEdges, then you were probably either looking at a Cisco logo on a TelePresence screen or listening to the characteristic ringtone of one of their IP phones.

Not one, not two, but a trio of hinges to potentially break in OPPO's bendy concept phone

Laptop with fold-out display

Ooh! Pair that with a Thinkpad 701 butterfly keyboard and you'd really have something. Suit you sir!

What does my neighbour's Tesla have in common with a stairlift?

Re: EVs = bad for planet, bad for poor people, bad for practicality

Even small cars are much wider than their predecessors; the latest Ford Focus is nearly a foot wider than a mark I Escort. Partly thanks to side impact protection.

Reading El Reg while working from home? Here's a pleasant thought: Kaspersky says 1 in 10 of you are naked right now

Re: shock to the system when the day comes I have to go back into the office

I was reading the other day that the feared rise in suicides under lockdown hadn't materialised.

Just wait until everyone has to cram themselves onto the 7:45 to Waterloo again, I thought.

Re: Naked coding? Sounds Agile...

Things could get sticky in the daily scrum though.

Google Chrome's crackdown on ad blockers and browser extensions, Manifest v3, is now available in beta

Re: If the goal is increased performance

Full-page reloads were certainly a pain over a 56k modem.

Marine archaeologists catch a break on the bottom of the Baltic Sea: A 75-year-old Enigma Machine

Re: WTF? WWF

You last checked in the mid 1980s?

Re: Old typewriter

Despite the downvotes, I think your first sentence at least is accurate. The Enigma machine was made famous by the effort and ingenuity that the other side put in to breaking it.

The British equivalent was Typex. The Germans probably did not effectively break it, for a number of reasons, a major one being that they didn't put anywhere near the same resources into it. The machine was intrinsically somewhat more secure than Enigma. It was also less widely used, so there was less ciphertext to go at and less chance of getting a crib. Several times more Enigma machines were manufactured than Typex machines, and the Germans used them for everything, even mundane stuff like weather reports.

The American SIGSALY system that was used to secure top-level voice traffic between London and Washington is another interesting Allied cryptosystem.

A tale of two nations: See China blast off from the Moon as drone shows America's Arecibo telescope falling apart

Re: Amy Coney Barrett

My reading of the story was that in "this case" the thing falling over was a radio telescope. Are you sure you didn't mean to post all this on a different news item - perhaps one to which it is in some way relevant?

Re: Amy Coney Barrett

Huh? Politicisation of the Supreme Court is related to the Aricebo telescope how? Has radio astronomy been ruled unconstitutional or something?

Or is it that if any random thing falls over in America, Republicans did it?

Intel Labs unleashes its boffins with tales of quantum computing, secure databases and the end of debugging

Re: "once a human expresses his or her intention to the machine"

Yes quite. If the specification exactly defines everything the program must do in every circumstance, it'll contain the same amount of complexity as the program.

If an AI's going to create a program from a real-world specification - which is to say, an incomplete one - the AI needs to identify the omissions and work out what questions to ask the user in order to fill them. It feels like we're a way off that yet.

Bristol's bus stops can run Chrome and Internet Explorer, but no, Windows and public transport do not mix well

But if you just used a simple microcontroller and a text-mode display to show actual information, how would the colouring-in department be able to express their brand values by changing the fonts and colours every 6 months?

‘Father of the Indian IT industry’, Tata Consulting Services founder F. C. Kohli passes, aged 96

Simon doesn't say Kohli passed, he says Kohli passed away. Which seems a perfectly valid turn of phrase whether you're a British news outlet, an Australian journalist or an Indian tech tycoon.

Although according to the Guardian and Observer style guide, "Die is what people do in the Guardian." The Health and Safety Executive should probably look into that.

If I pedal faster and feed it spinach, my robot barman might pull more pints

Re: Age related adverts

Or late 30s in hex.

Re: Intense raspberry confiture

Everything sounds twice as dirty in French.

For every disastrous rebrand, there is an IT person trying to steer away from the precipice

Anyone watching the re-runs of Buffy The Vampire Slayer on E4 recently will no doubt have noticed they had both a Wanker and a Wankum in the credits.

Retired engineer confesses to role in sliding Microsoft Bob onto millions of XP install CDs

Re: No good reason then

If you read Raymond Chen's article that's linked to in the Reg story, the main purpose was to raise the workload for pirates copying ISOs over the internet. Dial-up was still more common than broadband at the time.

AMD performance plummets when relying on battery power, says Intel. Let's take a closer look at those stats

Re: Poor intel

It's a good demonstration from Intel of how making a bad argument undermines your case worse than making no argument at all.

Bloated middle age beckons: Windows 1.0 turns 35 and is dealing with its mid-life crisis, just about

Oh yes, there are some truly hideous javascript drop-down menu implementations. A common fault is to have child menus pop up as you mouse-over the parent menu items - and then to get to the child menu, you have to very carefully move the mouse perfectly horizontally across, because if you move it up or down, a different child menu opens. That gets especially challenging when they haven't properly handled display scaling or font substitutions or something, so the child menu doesn't open alongside the parent menu, leaving you no route from one to the other.

Ah, those were the days... when Excel and Word had menus...

NCSC's London HQ was chosen because GCHQ spies panicked at the prospect of grubby Shoreditch offices

Re: London?

Or Cheltenham even.

I suppose the risk would be that the NCSC bods might get too good at their jobs if they could hob-nob with the opposition in the canteen.

The GIMP turns 25 and promises to carry on being the FOSS not-Photoshop

Re: full-fat PS just as confusing

I've never used full-fat Photoshop, but I'd bet "File/Save As..." in Photoshop will let you save your picture as a JPEG. Like it does in every other image editing application apart from one.

Compsci guru wants 'right to be forgotten' for old email, urges Google and friends to expire, reveal crypto-keys

Re: you are just an old git

At least we don't have to worry about said-bookism any more.

Re: He wants to stop "incentivising crime"

Yes I think he's the one who's got the cost-benefit balance wrong here, not the designers of DKIM. His proposal creates a margin of deniability that could allow wrong-doers to escape accountability, but will be of little benefit to victims of blackmail. I'd imagine blackmail victims generally care about their secrets being revealed at all, not whether they can be cryptographically authenticated.

I do have to applaud Prof. Green for verbing the word "crime" though.

Trump fires cybersecurity boss Chris Krebs for doing his job: Securing the election and telling the truth about it

Re: The Truth?

It wouldn't surprise me if Trump's last act in office was to press the big red button.

Fortunately we have nothing to worry about because the CIA gave him a fake nuclear button, which he already pressed a dozen times in his first month in the White House. That's definitely true according to unimpeachable news sources.

Not on your Zoom, not on Teams, not Google Meet, not BlueJeans. WebEx, Skype and Houseparty make us itch. No, not FaceTime, not even Twitch

Re: You wot mate!

Opinions are like noses: everyone's got one, but given the choice you'll always pick your own

Swiss spies knew about Crypto AG compromise – and kept it from govt overseers for nearly 30 years

Re: Many years ago ...

So on that basis, is "HTTPS everywhere" a bad idea?

Brit Conservative Party used 10 million people's names to derive their country of origin, ethnicity and religion according to ICO report

If it's personal data, it's covered by GDPR. It doesn't have to be private.

It definitely is personal. But given that it's the output of more-or-less-random guesswork, maybe there's an argument that it's not actually data.