Posts by Oh Homer

The Psion returns! Meet Gemini, the 21st century pocket computer

I still have my Psion netBook

As in the original netBook, before the advent of generic "netbooks".

Still works too, although it's hideously dated.

Rarer than hen's teeth, apparently.

Toxic Uber sued after driver allegedly tried to rape passenger in car

Re: "I wouldn't work in their data center for $300/hr"

Most people can't afford the luxury of being that snobby.

Re: "you flunked logic"

"records of assaults in taxis are sometimes available" ≠ "no assaults ever occur in taxis" or even "assaults occur more frequently in Uber cars"

FTFY.

Like I said, not an Uber fan, but my beef with them is how they stiff their drivers. That doesn't somehow justify unsubstantiated allegations of assault based on personal bias.

Not an Uber fan, but

This seems unlikely to be a problem unique to Uber.

"records of assaults in taxis are not generally available"

'Nuff said.

Finally proof that Apple copies Samsung: iPhone 7 Plus halts, catches fire like a Galaxy Note 7

Re: "Do you think Picasso's work is found upon plagiarism?"

The difference is Picasso didn't fraudulently claim exclusive rights to other people's work, then hypocritically sue people for doing the same copying that he did, especially when the thing being copied was as trivial as "rounded rectangles".

Re: "Originality 1/10"

Actually I was just going for "Truth 10/10". The rest is irrelevant.

Finally?

I realise the author was being tongue-in-cheek, but Apple's entire business model is founded upon plagiarism, indeed Messiah Jobs regularly boasted about it.

Sysadmin's sole client was his wife – and she queried his bill

Even harder when it's not work

At least this guy had a formal working relationship with someone who also just happened to be his wife. Most tech. support isn't that formal, it's just friends and family assuming "the guy who's good with computers" will help them for free. That's a dilemma, because nobody likes refusing to help their own family, especially when their ego is being fed with praise, but on the other hand it can quickly become an unpaid, full-time job, and that's a problem.

There's a website out there (I forget where) that calculates the value of open source software based on how long it would take a commercial developer to produce it. If you added up all the "free" tech. support that "the guys who are good with computers" provide their friends and family, I bet it would be worth billions to the economy.

Oh, irony of ironies: Gov.UK's transparency report reveals... nothing

Our transparency report is as follows...

We hereby transparently report that it's against our interests to be transparent.

Here's a picture of cheese instead.

End of report.

Amazon goes to court to stop US murder cops turning Echoes into Big Brother house spies

Re: It's all about legal precedent.

The idea of requiring a warrant is explicitly about not setting precedents, otherwise there would be no point in having warrants in the first place.

On the other hand, I agree that the principle does not always align with reality, sadly, especially in post-911 America, where even the most banal trivia is often magically reclassified as "a matter of national security". The US justice system seems to have been rewritten in Java, where the new motto is "Read once, read anywhere".

Warrantless mass surveillance is one thing...

But this is something else entirely.

First, it's not warrantless. Second, it's not speculative - an actual crime was committed, and a proper one at that, not merely something that offends the government's misguided sense of entitlement. Third, honouring a warrant to assist with a murder investigation will not magically set a precedent whereby everyone's privacy can be legally violated ... other than by Amazon who were doing so in the first place, of course.

Given the circumstances, Amazon's response is frankly bizarre.

Ad men hope blocking has stalled as sites guilt users into switching off

Re: 'a setting that says: "I'm not bloody shopping"'

You assume that marketeers care what you want. They don't. In fact they literally consider it their job to tell you what to want, then manipulate you into paying for it. That's sort of the whole point of marketing. The idea that you, the mark "consumer" should get the freedom to decide not to play this little game, is something that marketeers find both amusing and horrifying.

This might be a good time to remind everyone that Google's sole business is advertising. Nearly all of Mozilla's funding also comes from advertising. Microsoft is also only after your money, and is increasingly depending on Google's data-harvesting model for revenue (just look at Win10, the most pervasive, intrusive spyware ever created). That's nearly 100% of the browser market. Expecting these companies, or frankly any commercial entity, to genuinely care about your privacy, is more than a little naive.

It's not so much the ads

What annoys me most is not really the ads themselves, but the mentality that we are somehow morally obligated to look at them in exchange for the dubious privilege of visiting the site, and that failing to do so amounts to "theft".

Well sorry, but no. If you want to charge for access then use a paywall. If not then your "business" model is purely opportunistic, with no more obligation than a window shopper has to come into your shop and buy something. Unfortunately you'd then have to be selling something good enough for people to want to actually pay for it, which for 99% of the "content" out there simply isn't the case.

'First ever' SHA-1 hash collision calculated. All it took were five clever brains... and 6,610 years of processor time

Re: "unable to implement an automatic update for Android"

Not defending Google, in fact I agree with the sentiment at least, but the fact is there is no such thing as one "Android OS" that Google can deploy to millions of handsets. Instead there are countless proprietary smartphone operating systems based on Android, deployed by various manufacturers to devices that Google has no access rights to, at least not for the purpose of updating the OS.

And if Google could somehow update the OS remotely, it simply wouldn't be the same custom OS as provided by the vendor, it'd be vanilla Android, missing all the proprietary bits necessary to keep the vendor's proprietary UI and shovelware running, missing the vendor's proprietary drivers necessary to keep the hardware working, and would thus also invalidate your warranty, which is with the vendor, not Google.

This is the problem with OEM arrangements in general, not just with Android in particular, and is a problem that Apple avoids by being both the OS developer and the hardware vendor.

Of course another way to avoid this problem would be to abolish all the proprietary junk in both the hardware and OS, and have an open hardware, open specification, open source solution where everyone could apply daily, incremental updates to every part of the system, including apps and core OS components, but then companies like Samsung would whine about losing their "competitive advantage", as we'd all be able to construct our own smartphones from kits in Maplin.

Actually an even more fundamental reason for all that proprietary junk in smartphones is that the FCC/CEPT/Ofcom mandate that a lot of it must be a black box, incapable of being fiddled with by consumers, but that's another story.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing

Given enough time and resources, all security will be breached. The point of security is not to stop the inevitable, but merely to slow it down long enough for the breach to no longer matter.

Calculating just a single collision in 6,500 years of CPU time is not exactly what I'd call the death blow for SHA1. That's still significant enough that manufacturing collisions for low-grade material just won't be worth the effort, and even military stuff will be old news by the time you've compromised it.

Maybe if you could spoof target coordinates in under 60 seconds using a smartphone you might have a problem, or if you'd be inclined to waste 100k+ on the equipment necessary to fiddle with the terms of somebody's 50k contract, but as it stands none of that is likely any time soon, which means the security is doing its job as designed.

That will not always be the case for SHA1, but it's far too soon to hit the panic button, unless your primary interest is hype not security.

I was authorized to trash my employer's network, sysadmin tells court

"I wish for world peace"

Everyone in the world disappears.

The next wish is a 4000 page definition of what exactly "world peace" should entail.

If this guy wins, expect your next contract to be like something written by Tolstoy.

Pack your bags! NASA spots SEVEN nearby Earth-sized alien worlds

Trappist?

Does that mean it has beer?

Woohoo!

Cancel your cloud panic: At $122bn it's just 5% of all IT spend

BaaS

Bollocks as a Service.

Well OK, not all of it is total bollocks. Datto seems to have it mostly right.

Otherwise I'd stick to private Cloud solutions, at least for SMBs.

Drop the F-bomb, get your coding typos auto-corrected

Re: Do What I Mean

tat cvzf /mnt/backup/my_only_backup.tar.gz /home/me

# tat: command not found

# running best guess instead

rm -fr /mnt/backup/my_only_backup.gz /home/me

# was that OK? (yes/no/fuck) >

Apple to Europe: It's our job to design Ireland's tax system, not yours

"profit-generating work happens elsewhere"

Yes Apple, that's exactly the point. You do all the work elsewhere, then funnel all the profits into a tax haven.

So Apple's defence is, essentially, "But your Honour, how exactly are we supposed to rob the bank without a shotgun?" - seemingly oblivious to the fact that the shotgun part is actually inconsequential, because more fundamentally they shouldn't be robbing the bank at all, with or without a shotgun.

No really, I get it. Apparently Apple doesn't, however.

Google agrees to break pirates' domination over music searches

OK then, just "demote" Google

Why use Google to search for content anyway, when the best search results for such things are always going to be directly on the torrent/streaming sites themselves, increasingly not even using a web browser, but using the likes of Kodi plugins?

As for those determined to punch a hole through the Great British firewall, by doggedly relying on mainstream services that our technophobic politicians misguidedly believe are the sole gateway to everything: unless the government plans on switching off the entire Internet, or at least the UK's access to it, their silly game of whack-a-mole will never be anything more than a circumventable obstacle course.

For as long as it's still possible to gain access to any VPN/SSH/CGI proxy server located outside the grasping influence of the MAFIAA® and its political lackeys, and there exists any means of searching for content beyond the increasingly sterile offerings from the government's pet monkeys, training those monkeys to censor everything is utterly futile and actually quite funny.

In colossal shock, Uber alleged to be wretched hive of sexism, craven managerial ass-covering

Re: "goes both ways"

Before the anti-feminist brigade pervert this into a crusade against "whining women", I suggest they read the full blog post, which recounts in detail how Uber's workplace culture is like "a game-of-thrones political war", filled with gleefully hostile back-stabbers, who are given complete impunity by a morally bankrupt HR, which is apparently manned by the three wise monkeys.

Ditching your call centre for an app? Be careful not to get SAP-slapped

"customers must pay it"

Or choose to no longer be customers, I suppose, which is a consequence that SAP has apparently failed to consider.

On the other hand, with operating profits fast approaching 3 billion quid, an aspiring monopolist like Diageo doesn't exactly engender much sympathy, and clearly doesn't need it either.

Oh happy day! Linus Torvalds has given the world Linux 4.10

"Oh happy day!"?

Seriously?

A kernel is like an insurance policy: we all need one, but it's not exactly the sort of thing that should induce euphoria.

Déjà vu: Euro Patent Office prez ignores yet another formal rebuke

A corporate dictatorship with diplomatic immunity?

I find it deeply disturbing that a commercial organisation can attain a status comparable to a sovereign nation, operate as a dictatorship, then be essentially immune to any government intervention, merely because it's "international".

So is Google, Microsoft and Apple, but that doesn't make them immune to government intervention.

Frankly I think the EPO is an abomination that should be exterminated and replaced with something that is fully accountable in every jurisdiction in which it operates, starting with its present Gangster-in-Chief.

FAKE BREWS: America rocked by 'craft beer' scandal allegations

Re: "IPA is a style of beer"

Walmart could make the same argument about their "craft" beer. The inaccuracy of any description can therefore be justified by pretending it's just a "style". Like a Melton Mowbray pork pie is just a particular "style" of pork pie.

Oh wait...

Re: "India Pale Ale went *to* India"

Then what's the basis for calling it "IPA" when it's not actually destined for India?

I mean, if they can't even be honest about something as basic as that, how can we expect them to honestly differentiate between industrial and artisan beer?

Have things really degenerated to the point where there is now an acceptable level of deception?

May contain nuts

Truth in advertising?

It's bollocks, innit.

I mean, this is the same deceptive mentality that thinks its OK to plaster "57 Varieties" on tins of baked beans, then quietly concede that this statement is essentially meaningless.

Come to think of it, what part of India does India Pale Ale come from, exactly?

Merchants stretching the truth about their wares is not exactly a new phenomenon, but at least in Ye Olden times you had the opportunity to challenge them face to face. It's only since industrialisation that an entire industry has emerged that's devoted entirely to the business of lying for profit. This is just one of many reasons why things would be better if we went back to localism. At least then everyone in the village would know to avoid the liar.

Don’t panic over cyber-terrorism: Daesh-bags still at script kiddie level

Re: "Pot calling the kettle black"

You assume that I'm defending the pot.

Frankly, both the pot and kettle need to be melted down for scrap.

"we are very resilient as a country"

Yeah well, apart from being $20 trillion in debt, having entire cities go bankrupt and collapse into a pile of rubble, and having the highest incarceration rate in the world, not to mention the highest incidence of mass shootings and cybercrime.

On the other hand, they're great at bombing the shit out of other countries, hence all of the above. Maybe that's what he meant by "resilient".

Why I had to sue the FCC – VoIP granddaddy Dan Berninger

Re: "also comparable"

Yes, road tax, council tax and TV licensing are three more scams that need to be abolished.

"We should be turning off the POTS telephone network"

Amen.

Maybe then we could also abolish that scam called "line rental".

Do you pay "rental" for the electrical supply cable coming into your home, or for the pipes connecting you to the water supply, or for the cable connecting you to the cable TV service?

While we're at it, let's also abolish those bogus "administration charges" for the privilege of paying by any method other than Direct Debit, and the equally bogus charges for caller identification (or what BT calls "caller display"), as if BT magically incurs costs just for telling you what it must already know in order to establish the call in the first place.

Goodbye POTS, and good riddance.

You know IoT security is bad when libertarians call for strict regulation

Re: "missing the point"

Not so much "missing the point" as completely misinterpreting the meaning of "libertarian".

The entire ethos behind libertarianism is proprietary rights, which is exactly why libertarians want a government they can "drown in the bathtub" every time it so much as looks at their money.

Libertarians don't especially want information, your ebook or anything else to be free. The only "liberty" they're interested in is their own freedom to exploit and hoard with a flagrant contempt for any social responsibility. It's "freedom" in the Al Capone sense, not in the hippie sense.

Free and open access to information is not and never has been a libertarian aspiration, or much to do with politics of any kind, it's an academic principle, for reasons that should be obvious.

Schneier is not trying to steal your ebook, he's calling for you to not publish it in the first place, whereas previously he would have said "publish and be damned".

So, as I said, it looks like he finally grew up and realised that social responsibility trumps irresponsible Freedumb®.

Former libertarian

Or what we adults call "growing up".

Google yanks workers from ISP outfit, it's THE FIBER COUNTDOWN

Fibre, WiFi, whatever

Anything would be better than my existing rural internet service. It's like living in the Third World, if Third World ISPs charged fifty quid a month for 1980s download speeds. Seriously, the sheep at the back of my house move faster. Then again, maybe that's just because they see me with my wellies on.

Talk of tech innovation is bullsh*t. Shut up and get the work done – says Linus Torvalds

"Innovation"

A word that marketeers use to describe something that isn't really an invention.

Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies

Re: "unique US government threat to liberty"

Yes, it's called Trump.

Certainly the hysterical paranoia over "terrorism" (that thing that's 17,600 times less likely to kill you than heart disease) is not unique to America. Uniquely belligerent, yes, but not entirely unique.

And the US government is also not unique in its violation of civil liberties, but (again) its violations are far more pervasive (basically the entire planet), largely due to being better funded (trillions of taxpayers' dollars).

Basically, the US is a uniquely belligerent warmonger, that has declared everything even remotely not American to be "the enemy", then for good measure included everything that is American anyway (i.e. the entire population of the US), just in case, by militarising the police, having the highest slavery "incarceration" rate in the world, then spying on everyone for good measure. It isn't the only violator, but it is easily the worst, quantitatively speaking.

Is this the inevitable consequence of government - any government - in principle?

No, not really.

When was the last time Denmark bombed, invaded and occupied anywhere, for example? When did Sweden blatantly lie about WMDs, then use that lie as a pretext to commit genocide on millions of innocent civilians? When did Iceland bail out the criminal bankers that brought us this grim era of "austerity", then declare war on the poor ("If you feed them, you breed them")? When did Norway commit collateral murder on children using killer drones? How many "regime change" operations has New Zealand conducted recently? How many "black sites" does Belgium currently use for kidnapping "extraordinary rendition" and torture "enhanced interrogation", on average? How many nuclear weapons has Finland dropped on civilian populations recently? How many Cold Wars have been created by the Netherlands, then used as a template for neoliberal policy to infest the rest of the world through "special relationships" and "trade deals"? How much illegal surveillance does Switzerland conduct on US (or any other) citizens, approximately?

The principle of government is not the problem, it's just one government in particular, one that lacks any accountability, because it isn't even remotely democratic, it's mostly controlled by corporate lobbyists.

Re: "Not in Trump's world"

In fairness, the "world" in question predates Trump's reign by several decades. Indeed I don't see much evidence that it has ever been any other way. The only difference is now the slaves sew mailbags instead of picking cotton.

Re: Value!

Yes, the entire concept of "creating value" is a farce. In reality, it means spending a (ideally) small amount of your own money to take a (again, ideally) larger amount of somebody else's money. The total "value" in the system doesn't actually change, it just gets moved around, except in the sense that the stuff this "value" comprises is increasingly trivial junk (First World solutions to First World problems), and therefore it's probably more accurate to say that, overall, the practical value of everything is actually being diminished, not improved.

Re: Well, maybe we should not put software in everything

Or maybe we should just code everything outside the grasping jurisdiction of the US.

Google to cough up $20m after Chrome rips off anti-malware patents

Defending Microsoft et al

Personally the only thing I have any interest in defending in this scenario is sanity, or conversely condemning the insanity of the "IP" racket.

Yes, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and pretty much everyone else with even a peripheral involvement in this racket is equally guilty, but the most fundamentally guilty party of all is the government for even allowing this racket in the first place, then adding insult to injury by defending it so prejudicially, when what they should do is outlaw it, like any other anti-competitive racket.

What the Hell is it with Texas and junk patents?

If there's something out there that should be laughed out of any sane patent office, a Texas court will defend it.

Is there something in the Bible about patents, or something?

Seriously, Texas is like some kind of Mecca for "IP" quackery.

Unlucky WD Ultrastar drives are knackered, need replacing ASAP

The IBM "Deathstar" curse lives on

IBM -> Hitachi -> Western Digital.

Companies should just stop putting "star" in their product names, clearly.

UK prof claims to have first practical blueprint of a quantum computer

Quantum Physics is not hard to understand

I watched it twice on Netflix, and it's basically just about James Bond getting revenge.

Pfft.

Bloke, 27, arrested, tech gear seized by cops over UK Sports Direct hack

"urge workers to change passwords"

From "password" to "password1".

IME.

High tides: Boffins spy on dolphins baked on poisonous piscines

Could be worse

Could be Tesco Everyday Value Lager (i.e. "water that is yellow in colour and tastes a little of barley").

[shudder]

Junkie dolphins?

What next, drunk parrots?

Oracle refuses to let Java copyright battle die – another appeal filed in war against Google

Re: "fiduciary obligation to maximise profit"

It may well be a misconception, but sadly it has nonetheless become enshrined in corporate culture, to the extent that it has subsequently become supported by case law (re: eBay Domestic Holdings Inc. v. Newmark^[1] and, even more damningly, the establishment of so-called "B Corps"^[2] to distinguish corporations that are (assumed to be) legally compelled to maximise profits from those that are free to pursue other goals).

The fact that corporations may or may not (depending upon one's subjective interpretation of such vague legal definitions as "best interests") have been explicitly obligated under the law to maximize profits is moot, if all those involved in such undertakings nonetheless believe that this legal obligation is real, and moreover would gleefully pursue that single-minded objective anyway, even in the absence of any such legal obligation, particularly given the dire extralegal consequences of not doing so.

[1]The corporate form in which craigslist operates, however, is not an appropriate vehicle for purely philanthropic ends, at least not when there are other stockholders interested in realizing a return on their investment. Jim and Craig opted to form craigslist, Inc. as a for-profit Delaware corporation and voluntarily accepted millions of dollars from eBay as part of a transaction whereby eBay became a stockholder. Having chosen a for-profit corporate form, the craigslist directors are bound by the fiduciary duties and standards that accompany that form. Those standards include acting to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders. The "Inc." after the company name has to mean at least that. Thus, I cannot accept as valid for the purposes of implementing the Rights Plan a corporate policy that specifically, clearly, and admittedly seeks not to maximize the economic value of a for-profit Delaware corporation for the benefit of its stockholders

[2]Gilbert and his colleagues argue that conventional companies are constricted by corporate law. "At the end of the day," he told me, "the only legitimate purpose of a [conventional] Delaware corporation is to maximise shareholder interest. That has a chilling effect on corporate behaviour." Managers and directors of conventional companies who fail to maximise profits risk being sued by shareholders, he said. "What B Corps does is open up a whole new avenue of possibilities," he went on "It makes it clear that we as entrepreneurs and investors are free to build businesses with a higher purposes."

[2]99% of US businesses today are conventional C Corps, and most are likely to remain so.

That means 99% of US businesses will continue to aggressively pursue an agenda of maximising profits, whether or not they are truly legally obligated to do so, indeed they'll do so by any means possible, ethical, legal or otherwise, as regular El Reg readers are only too painfully aware.

Crack in black: Matte iPhones losing paint at alarming rate, gripe fans

Re: "given up asking"

I seem to remember El Reg mentioning in the past that their PR relationship with Apple is a bit, erm, cold. But then from what I've read about Apple, that's probably true of everyone, unless your name is Walt Mossberg.

Want to come to the US? Be prepared to hand over your passwords if you're on Trump's hit list

Breeding anti-American sentiment

I'm fairly ranty about America's less attractive qualities (and equally my own country), but I keep reminding myself that there is good and bad everywhere (I've seen more than my fair share outside of America), and ultimately there are a lot of good people in America, even in the dreaded Red States. I've met a few Texans who made my heart swell with their compassion and generosity, and there are aspects to Texan culture that are both homely and romantic, but equally there's a monstrous dark side, mainly borne out of fear of losing those values.

I'm not American, or Christian (or even theist), and I utterly despise guns, "patriotism" and neoliberal politics, but I refuse to hate good people based on the prevailing culture they were born into, even if they parrot those ideals unconsciously. People are individuals, not political agendas. My own father was one of the kindest men you could have hoped to meet, but he was also swept up by the tide of racism prevalent in the 70s, courtesy of extremists like Enoch Powell. I know first hand what it means when good people are corrupted by extremist propaganda.

Trump's hysterical polemics do not help the America people. He is not a worthy ambassador to his country, and he is certainly no statesman, much less a gentleman. At a time when America needs to show the world its best qualities, we have another Enoch Powell breeding fear and loathing, and as much as I cannot resist reacting negatively to that malice, I have to remind myself that not every ordinary, decent, hard-working American is the bogeyman.