Posts by BlartVersenwaldIII

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

Re: Smart?

It's not a word, it's an acronym.

Supposedly Modern, Actually Retrospectively Terrible.

Ubuntu says i386 to be 86'd with Eoan 19.10 release: Ageing 32-bit x86 support will be ex-86

Re: only reason I can see to run a 32 bit os

Running closed-source 32bit games (of which there are many) often requires the use of 32bit libraries. For instance, steam for linux is currently 32bit only and brings in a lot of 32bit dependencies needed by both the client and the games. Ditto many of the linux games from GOG also need 32bit libs to run.

Presumably ubuntu are happy with this but it sounds like a big two fingers up at the people who game on linux... ditto anyone else who's using a 32bit program with no hope of a 64bit version - no more SMAC under wine for instance, unless you follow ubuntu's so-called "solution" of maintaining your own 32bit libraries and re-packaging all of your old games and applications as a snap build.

Micron's new 9300 SSDs are bigger, faster and simpler... which is nice

If you could live with the appallingly stone-aged SATA, the 5200 ECO has been at ~£700 a couple of weeks ago for the 3.84TB model (although it's risen again recently).

As you say, pricing is everything and I'm worried that the demise of the ECO line will mean there's no longer a dirt cheap 1 DWPD drive for use as fast bulk storage - the PRO line tended to be substantially more expensive than the ECO line. To continue the SATA example, the 5200 ECO 3.8TB is currently selling for about £780, the 5200 PRO 3.8TB for £1100.

UK pr0n viewers plan to circumvent smut-block measures – survey

Re: There is a reason the UK government prefer rope for hanging themselves

The crucifix will have been shoddily erected by a lowest-bidder contractor. On bearing the extra load of an MP, it will inevitably unbalance and fall forward flat onto the ground, therefore providing enough force to hammer in the last nail.

Brit Parliament online orifice overwhelmed by Brexit bashers

> But, what Guido happily ignores is that British Citizens live across the world, or may be out of country on business.

But therefore they're not true British Citizens!

Croydon school rolling in toilet roll after Brexit gift deemed unfit for the Queen's Anus Horribilis

> ...capital punishment almost for paedophilic criminality, whereas you can turn to page 12 to see the latest exclusive pictures of a 15-year old Z-list celebrity topless...

'Twas ever thus I guess.

A classic juxtaposition occurred when the tabloids were lashing out at Brass Eye's* "Paedogeddon"** episode, loudly declaiming it as sick filth that was trivialising/glamourising paedophilia opposite an article about how the breasts of 15yr-old Charlotte Church were coming along nicely.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010806141503if_/http://chilled.cream.org:80/graphics/charlotte.jpg

* For non-brits or those who might not be aware of it, this was a short-lived but scathing and iconic satire series taking a swipe at sensationalist news with lashings of ridiculous black comedy delivered with a deadly straight face

** Words can't adequately describe the episode in a mere footnote, but I'd go with "tasteless", "hilarious" and "hilariously tasteless" as a starter for ten

That's Numberwang! Google Cloud staffer breaks record for most accurate Pi calculation

Re: Pi day

Some of us like the nice ISO date format... yyyy-MM-dd; it has the advantages of both sorting lexically and being unambiguous to people used to either MM/dd/yy or dd/MM/yy. After dealing with Hilarious Misunderstandings thanks to left/rightpondian misinterpretations I put on my benevolent dictator hat and got all us techies to standardise on ISO format instead on pain of death (or at least making the tea for a week).

As a bonus for those of us who prefer it and use linux, ls has inbuilt support for using it via the --time-style=long-iso option, add it to your alias file today!

What happens when security devices are insecure? Choose the nuclear option

Re: Too depressing?

5. Miraculously find a shelter strong enough to withstand the fallout without poisoning you, and die inside for lack of provisions, extreme heat, etc.

6. Miraculously find a shelter strong enough to withstand the fallout without poisoning you, but open it too soon and die of fallout anyway

7. Miraculously find a shelter strong enough to withstand the fallout without poisoning you, and have a load of fun finding a safe place to go when you eventually come out

This passage reminded me of a guided tour I took of a nuclear bunker in central Berlin (west IIRC); ingress air-lock with gunports and a "strip naked here" decontamination shower for the cognoscenti lucky enough to know about it, be allowed access and to get there in time; tiny chicken-wire bunk beds stacked floor to ceiling; no doors on the toilets/showers so there'd be nowhere private where people might be tempted to commit suicide; an expectation that people would sleep >20 hours a day because air quality would be so bad that people would be barely capable of functioning; two weeks' worth of food and water for the "lucky" people inside.

(I can't remember the name of the museum the tour was attached to nor the name of the bunker but if any of you are in Berlin I can't recommend it highly enough)

Re: Too depressing?

The (atomic, not thermonuclear) bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were mere party poppers compared to a cold war MIRV.

Little Boy: 15kt blast yield

Fat Man: 21kt blast yield

A modern Trident 2 SLBM (and thus by no means as big as a cold war era ICBM or one of the huge >5Mt bombs) payload might be 8x475kt MIRV warheads

Some chap thoughtfully put together a map which'll give you a nice informative overlay of what you could have expected if the cold war were to become hot or if you'd like to plan your own apocalypse

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear explosion, t'was a steam explosion that ruptured the reactor (no containment vessel), spreading the insides of the reactor far and wide (mostly through fire) so there was no real "blast" but plenty of poisonous crap thrown over the surrounding area (and of a different class of stuff compared to warhead fallout).

You. Shall. Not. Pass... word: Soon, you may be logging into websites using just your phone, face, fingerprint or token

DNA called it. Coming down from the trees was such a stupid idea...

It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant - a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.

Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all- purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

Mostly Harmless, Douglas Adams

Cover your NASes: QNAP acknowledges mystery malware but there's no patch yet

Re: New year?

I was wondering if anyone knew of the attack vector; I didn't see any mention of it in any of these pages nor (most worryingly) QNAPs advisory.

I'd be willing to bet money on this being due to an exploit in a net-facing service that UPnP helpfully allowed through.

Disclaimer: I've not used a QNAP at home for 6yrs or so (went back to building my own) but the seeming idea of automatically trying to punch holes in the firewall to allow external access was one that struck me as stupid; not long afterwards, a bunch of synology systems were exploited by a bug in apache that resulted in lots of systems being remotely pwned; including that of my mate - on closer inspection, apache was configured to run as root (!) which reinforced my decision to stick to BYO+tinfoil hat in the future. Hopefully they've improved matters since but IME security is frequently way down on the agenda.

As netizens, devs scream bloody murder over Chrome ad-block block, Googlers insist: It's not set in stone (yet)

Re: welp....

Bear in mind that something else google (and others) want to do For Our Protection is bypass system DNS and have chrome talk to DNS servers directly over HTTPS:

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/dns-over-https

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS

There are legitimate reasons for wanting to pass DNS queries in encrypted form, but this will also have the effect of neutering DNS-based ad blocking solutions external to the browser such as pi-hole or pfBlockNG - your browser will only talk to the DNS servers it's configured to talk to. It will also make it much harder to see what DNS traffic is occurring - you would essentially need a browser API to do be able to do that directly, as I suspect any implementation would fail if it detected any attempts to MitM the SSL (so you couldn't intercept the DNS by spoofing an 8.8.8.8 on your local network for example since it wouldn't have the requisite google cert).

French data watchdog dishes out largest GDPR fine yet: Google ordered to hand over €50m

Re: Wishful thinking

Aren't all of google's datacentres in the cloud?

Re: Switch to duckduckgo.com

I run it mostly without JS myself - most of the customisations I want to do that are JS-only GUI-wise can also be invoked via URL parameters or special search syntax as per my other post here:

https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/all/2019/01/21/google_50m_cnil_gdpr/#c_3699701

Re: Switch to duckduckgo.com

Fellow DDG users wishing to invoke a google search directly from DDG itself using !g as a search prefix:

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html (non-JS)

https://duck.co/help/results/syntax

https://duckduckgo.com/params (general URL parameters)

Western Digital deploys heatsink on remodelled M.2 to tempt gamers

Give that heatsink some RGB LEDs and maybe we'll finally see a speed improvement worthy of gaming!

Snark aside of course, gaming is very rarely IO-limited and there's a sizeable market amongst the gaming crowd for functional/utilitarian designs with little in the way of bling. The heatsink is supposedly marginally useful, in that some NVMe devices throttle at high enough temperatures, but without TIM and the rest of it I think it's still of dubious utility. Thankfully it's available in a "naked" version for going in laptops or mobos where it won't fit (indeed, some mobos are coming with their own M2 heatsinks these days as well - but again that mostly seems to fall under the "heatsink ALL the things!" aesthetic).

The SN720 was seemingly a decent enough drive although apparently WD don't test it under linux and a couple of workarounds needed to be made in order to get it to boot IIRC;

https://community.wd.com/t/linux-support-for-wd-black-nvme-2018/225446

As someone who's using linux more and more I'm avoiding vendors without explicit Tux-friendliness; lots of SSD vendors seemingly only provide firmware updates via windows utils.

Amazon Mime: We train (badly) an AI love bot using divorce bombshell Bezos' alleged sexts to his new girlfriend

Those of you in a friday mood and looking to be educated in that AI definitely definitely isn't just throwing random words together might enjoy the AI Weirdness blog;

http://aiweirdness.com

As an example of the delights therein, here's some ice cream flavours:

Bloodie Chunk

Goat Cookie

Rawe Blueberry Fist

Candied Nose

Creme die

Apple Pistachio mouth

Chocolate Moose Mange

Bubblegum Chocolate Basil Aspresso

Lime Pig

Elterfhawe Monkey But

Kaharon Chocolate Mouse Gun

Gu Creamie Turd

Mocoa Pistachoopie

Cookies nutur Coconut Chocolate Fish

Peanut Butter Cookies nut Butter Brece Toasterbrain Blueberry Rose

Oh, I wish it could be Black Friday every day-aayyy, when the wallets start jingling but it's still a week till we're paiii-iid

Re: Interesting...

There are several black british cheeses incorporating charcoal, not just ash-coated cheeses. One example they stock at my local deli is this one from oop norf;

http://www.thegreatbritishcharcuterie.co.uk/charcoal-cheddar-2

I'm not much of a cheddar person, but this one definitely sits in my "cheddars that are actually very nice" pile.

Boffins want to stop Network Time Protocol's time-travelling exploits

Re: Simply fit all computers with sundials.

> We can use the Water Clock for processor cooling as well as a time signal.

You're over-under-thinking it! If you did that, different loads will heat the water up to different amounts, resulting in changes in water density and thus changes in the temporal dampenflux. You're better off using the heat from the processor to boil the water so that it can power a steam turbine to generate electricity to wind the pendulum.

Re: It's not an actual problem

> Clients typically don't care about NTP at all and only implement it's braindead cousin SNTP which gives you a very rough approximation of the actual time and date.

I guess it depends on the type and size of clients but it's quiet common even in small windows shops to have:

a) some of the edge networking kit go out to the various internet NTP servers to query time

b) present that time internally via an internal NTP server on the same networking kit (usually a requirement of other bits of networked kit e.g. telephone PBX)

c) one or two windows domain controllers configured to grab their time over NTP (not SNTP) straight from this network kit

d) all domain controllers sending SNTP to the windows clients

So whilst clients may not care about NTP and are content to sleep with the braindead cousin, they're frequently indirectly dependant on it by virtue of getting the domain controllers to know what year it is.

Re: Simply fit all computers with sundials.

...until you forget to unplug the sundial, some bright spark installs a Sun server in your data centre, then all of a sudden the sunlight changes completely and your time goes completely out of whack! Unless you move the Sun around the room in the proper way, your sundial will always read the same time.

Schneier warns of 'perfect storm': Tech is becoming autonomous, and security is garbage

Re: ahum, dumb fucks ?

I believe GP is referring to the facebook-using masses who have no care or understanding of privacy or security, rather than actuall calling people dumb fucks themselves.

In case you weren't aware, Zuckerberg famously did a Ratner and called facebook users "dumb fucks";

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks

High-end router flinger DrayTek admits to zero day in bunch of Vigor kit

Re: Draytek

I've also been a Draytek user since the 2200 + mint green stingray days. Not affiliated but a happy long-term customer. IME they make the most reliable kit of practically anything else I've ever used.

I've still got a positively stone-aged 2820 in service... bought in early 2008, still ticking along just fine in its branch office, latest firmware update is two months old.

Press F to pay respects to the Windows 10 April Update casualties

Re: "Upgrading users should be able to ignore the viewer as before."

> Most people have mobile Internet on their phone for when the PC is broken

"Siri, I can't get online so the help key on my windows machine doesn't show me the help page I need. What would it have shown me if it did have an internet connection?"

Clearly a superior solution to wasting dozens, I say DOZENS of megabytes of offline documentation!

Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte creating app to register 3m EU nationals living in Brexit Britain

Re: A focus on security I hope

> Making this run on a mobile phone might be trendy, but is it secure ?

> I'm unsure if a mobile platform would be the absolute best interface for such an involved process.

How else would you propose getting easy access to their contact lists and GPS location, and the right time to alert them with directions to the nearest patriotism re-education camp?

(I pondered using "joke alert" but I think devil's advocate is probably more applicable these days)

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

Re: Fuck translates to Fick, Bolle, and what more

> Clean language will become offensive, again.

Nothing new under the sun it seems, as MS were supposedly tackling this back in 2009.

Oblig. Penny Arcade

The attached blurb includes the following nugget:

"A year ago, we saw a quiz thing that asked you to determine which of four odd phrases were euphemisms for sexual acts. By the time we had discovered this question, every item on the list had developed a carnal reputation. That is to say, every item. We are fast approaching a point where ordering a sandwich at a deli will land you in prison."

At Christmas, do you give peas a chance? Go cold turkey? What is the perfect festive feast?

Re: Goose

Turkey's a bit of a tricky double whammy for dryness because it tends to not be as fatty as a chicken, and being much bigger it requires cooking for considerably longer. Hence it needs probably more fat added to the bird than perhaps most people are used to (esp. if you treat it like a chicken) - when doing turkey we'd generally slather the bird in butter and then lay about 12 rashers of streaky over it. It's also important to have a fat-heavy stuffing (e.g. more sausagemeat than usual).

When cooking it we'd cook it for half an hour at gas mark 8 to cook the outside and get the fat melted as quickly as possible, and then put the bird in a tinfoil hat at gas 5 for the rest of the cooking time, and thus you end up with a nice succulent turkey.

For what it's worth, most of our stuffing usually gets done outside of the birds as well, but only because stuffing is hugely popular in our household (to the extent that we'll have cold stuffing sarnies in the following days) so we always make twice as much as normal.

I've never had a "wild" turkey, but a family member keeps chickens and I've had the immense pleasure of eating a genuinely free-range chicken from their back garden. Vastly different in taste and texture (gamier and much more "meaty" in the mouth) from the sort of chicken you'd buy in a shop and stonkingly delicious.

I come from a small family so we've never had more than a meal for 6 but I think I'd need two ovens to deal with 8 or more people.

Re: Goose

Sadly I've only got the one oven (and it's a well rehearsed juggling act getting everything for the main course ready at the same time) so this is usually just a meal for me, the good lady and any friends nearby who would otherwise be on their own

Indeed, the extended holiday is a perfect opportunity to stick a pin in to some of those recipe books on the shelf and say "yup, why not?", hence why my take on christmas dinner is substantially different from that of my family.

I don't even think feasts like this are even that expensive, at least in terms of money; pound for pound our butcher provides significantly better quality meat than the supermarket for less money, but sadly butchers of this sort are few and far between and I realise that many people out there only have the supermarkets to choose from these days - personally I was over the moon when I found out my new digs had a butcher 10mins bike ride away, and that's when we started buying new and different stuff for christmas dinner.

Mostly I think the expense is time and cooking ability (my mum had me cooking from an early age as part of the "you're out the house at 18 whether you like it or not and I don't want you starving to death/eating nothing but kebabs" plan), and for most big families with kids and that, meals as complicated as this might be punching above your weight, but I certainly feel it's worth the effort if you do have the time. Certainly I'd rather spend 6 hours on christmas day making a delicious meal with the missus rather than five hours in front of the telly and one hour doing a pre-prepared bland turkey* meal.

I forgot to mention sprouts and stuffing properly. I don't like boiled sprouts much at all, even when they're cooked well, but when they're raw and shredded and cooked in the bubble and squeak** they're very tasty indeed. Same with spinach, turns to horrible mush IMHO when boiled, steamed or wilted but is rather tasty raw.

Stuffing tends to be based off of out butcher's sausage meat (although we will make venison stuffing when cooking something very strongly flavoured like grouse - this was a recommendation from the butcher himself and he was not wrong!) often with roast chestnuts and dried apricots plus whatever herbs we feel will go well, along with goodly portions of fresh breadcrumbs, lemon juice and finely diced onions (sometimes caremelised in sugar and vermouth depending on the meat).

Needless to say I always look forward to celebrating the yuletide feast :)

* not that turkey has to be bland, but personally I think it takes too much effort to make turkey interesting, and it's too big and unwieldy for small gatherings of 4-5 people. Cooking with small birds takes up less space in the oven, takes less time to cook and is simpler to cook to boot.

** that reminds me - found some guanciale at the deli last weekend, used it in place of the usual bacon/pancetta for making some spaghetti carbonara. Utterly delicious stuff - it's like cooking with ready-smoked fat. This year's bubble and squeak will likely contain guanciale.

Re: Goose

Yorkshire puds a yes from me. Never had them with christmas dinner growing up, but as far as I'm concerned no roast dinner is complete without them. One of the things my (non-british) missus loves most about the UK is roast dinners (and one's we've rustled up for her folks go like a house on fire) so christmas is a great excuse to spend half the day in a kitchen pushing out the gravy boat (assuming you like cooking of course).

Starter tends to be about three hours before the main meal and is mostly just something light to stop you getting hammered from the first round of wine. Smoked salmon on toast, some pastry tartlets, smoked mackerel paté on crackers, mushroom arancini went down very well last year, that sort of thing. Couple of glasses of champagne or prosecco to line the stomach and protect from the rest of the wine that's consumed whilst finishing off the main course.

Goose is a great choice, although in my household we tend to alternate with different meat or game over the years (never been much of a fan of turkey). We're lucky enough to have an excellent butcher so this year we're having partridges, last year we had a brace of pheasants, the year before that we had grouse. Then a good few litres of a homemade gravy suited to the meat (white wine or madeira with chicken stock for most poultry, red wine with juice from the meat for most game, often with redcurrant jelly and crushed juniper). Cover it in bacon, pack the roasting tin with quartered onions, chipolatas, bacon/stuffing rolls, pigs in blankets as per preference. When the meat is done and out of the oven, the roasting tin is de-glazed and then added to the gravy, then the batter for the yorkshire (usually with a generous spoonful of bicarb to help fluff it up and get the top/edges nice and crispy) is poured into the roasting tin and cooked in the 15-20mins whilst the meat sits. Some extra fat will be added if the meat didn't leave much in the way of juices.

We'll generally do a roast beef joint in the preceding week to get fresh beef dripping for the roast veg (unless of course we're cooking goose or duck).

About five hours later we manage to have some christmas pud (the fruit for which has usually been macerating in rum and spices for the past four months).

Any leftovers veg are turned into boxing day bubble'n'squeak, leftover meat is typically recycled into a meat/game pie (we make a sort of hybrid shortcrust/suet crust pastry for this) with any leftover gravy.

In a word: yum.

Black Horse Down, we repeat... yes, Lloyds Bank, again

Re: TITSUP

Trashy IT System Unfit for Purpose

Totally Inebriated. Trolleyed! System Update Pending...

Think I'm TUPE'd, Server Un-Plugged!

The Quantum of Firefox: Why is this one unlike any other Firefox?

Re: Speed isn't as important as Addons

Don't know if it's applicable to FF any more (I've been a Pale Moon user for about three years now) but the Old Location Bar extension is invaluable for doing this.

I change the settings to location matching behaviour as "use word boundaries first, then try matching everywhere", pulling in results only from history. Works for me as it'll match whole or partial URLs and page titles (seemingly weighted to page titles) although I'm not sure if it can be configured to match URLs only (as the only other matching behaviour is "match only the beginning of URLs and titles") but think it might be worth your while checking how it behaves for you.

Nokia updates classic comeback mobe 3310

Re: My new Nokia

I'm still using the E6 I bought back in 2011 (charge still lasts a week on regular use) and recently bought another one as backup just in case. Hands down the best phone I've ever used for my needs (which amounts to reading and writing text and emails, plus phone calls*). Nokia/OVI maps still brilliant (although maps slowly being outdated of course, but great to have the entirety of europe's roads on the SD card).

Nothing I've ever used since has remotely come close. For all of you who may have thought the QWERTY keyboard on the blackberries were sadly missed, the keyboard on the E6 is a thing of utter beauty. Touch-typing on a keyboard that's barely more than 2" wide shouldn't be possible but the E6 made it dead easy. Typing on a touchscreen twice the size I find next to impossible at any reasonable speed.

Might pick up one of the nu-3310's out of curiosity as a not-too-bad-if-I-lose-it phone as I like the cut of HMDs jib, and I'm hoping for custom ROMs/AOSP on an HMD handset for the missus' new phone...

* Count me as one of those weird users who never really saw the draw of "apps" nor have any interest in social media. The only social network I'm a part of has several beer pumps, and to quote TDM "It’s an amazing platform for trumpeting my half-baked politics and making vague statements about being unhappy so my friends feel obliged to pay me some attention".

Dell's flagship XPS13 – a 2-in-1 that may fatally frustrate your fingers

Re: Two things ...

> 2) I'm all for verbing adjectives, at least for the most part. But footling? Maybe not so much.

"Footle" is the verb ("to footle about"), "footling" ("footling about") is the adjective. Means to engage in or muck around with a generally fruitless activity or doing something useless or trivial, making it a close analogue to "frobnicate".

Bonkers call to boycott Raspberry Pi Foundation over 'gay agenda'

Re: Rainbow

Does this mean that when a beautiful rainbow appears in the sky after a rainstorm that God himself is literally condoning Gayroller massacres?

Opposable thumbs make tablets more useful says Microsoft Research

Re: Next up

Only six years too late!

From the same guy that brought us all microtransactions for pelican crossings.

Why do GUIs jump around like a demented terrier while starting up? Am I on my own?

Re: Microsoft time

I don't have a screenshot (t'was lost in the mists of time), but back in about 2004 we were copying a bunch of files from a 250GB external hard drive - t'was a forensics dump of several million email messages all in single small files, typically 1-4kB in size (and over the brand-spanking-new USB2) - and from the number on screen the estimated completion time to begin with was longer than the current estimated age of the universe.

This is the closest equivalent I could find with some google-fu, a scant 9 years.

Uber's self-driving cars can't handle bike lanes, forcing drivers to kill autonomous mode

Re: Dangerous? No, guv, no.

When Uber finally kills someone with this, their disruptive approach will mean they'll ignore the corporate manslaughter charge and instead prosecute the family of the victim for wilful obstruction of a personal conveyance and wanton vandalism of the bumper, paintwork and tyres, not to mention the cleanup costs of the road itself and the inordinately expensive cost of emotional counselling for the AI in charge of the vehicle.

Perhaps Uber should pre-emptively get Massingbird on the line?

"I remember Massingbird's most famous case — the Case of the Bloody Knife. A man was found next to a murdered body. He had the knife in his hand, thirteen witnesses had seen him stab the victim and when the police picked him up he said to them, 'I'm glad I killed the bastard'. Massingbird not only got him acquitted, he got him knighted in the New Year's Honour's list and the relatives of the victim had to pay to have the blood washed out of his jacket."

Not sure if I should be adding the "joke alert" or not.

Going underground: The Royal Mail's great London train squeeze

Lucky you getting the Down Street - managed to miss out on the tickets for that this year so congrats. Had to make do with the consolation prize of the old Euston tunnels but was still well worth the £35. It also came with a discount voucher for the london transport museum.

At the risk of doing myself out of tickets again next year, I'd recommend all commentards in london and the south east interested in this sort of thing to bookmark the Hidden London site and watch it like a hawk for when new tours make an appearance:

http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whats-on/hidden-london

Jeremy Hunt: Telcos must block teens from sexting each other

> more a case of "can't"

Oh so close...

Microsoft still working to fix Outlook sync issues

> Cloud service provider.

>

> Say no more.

I prefer:

Cloud service provider. Pick any two.

Facebook chokes off car insurance slurp because – get this – it has privacy concerns

Re: Well thought out idea.

> The self-discipline required to maintain a facade like that would, itself, be a pretty good indicator.

It probably already exists, but I'm quite surprised there isn't more of a market for services which will "curate" fictitiously perfect social media profiles for people to give them a better shot at jobs/dating/insurance and other casual observers that are pissed off that the telescreen isn't reality yet. If using social media profiles for insurance becomes commonplace, expect that sort of thing to become mainstream very quickly and there'll be no need for self-discipline any more, not when you can just buy "legitimacy".

(Are we living in a sci-fi dystopia yet?)

In its current state, Ubiquiti's EdgeSwitch won't have much of an edge on anyone

Re: FAIL?

I don't think it's fair to call this a personal vendetta; I'm someone else who was all primed to buy this switch but was put off by a raft of poor reviews over quality control and SFP compatibility over at StH:

Original thread

Review from the site owner

SFP compatibility

Consensus from many of the forum members seemed to be "wait for hardware v2.0 when buying UBNT kit".

NHS patients must be taught to share their data, says EU lobby group

Re: While the data might be limited to Pharma

Even better, have the horse become a trained bolt-fitter and an agoraphobic so it never leaves the stable; extensions like Self Destructing Cookies will delete those cookies as soon as you close the tab.

Re: While the data might be limited to Pharma

Don't mean to sound like an alarmist doom'n'gloom monger, but relying on posting AC is of dubious utility unless you've taken extra precautions.

Assuming you're not using a blockerator of some sort (and I pray to FSM that you are), the google-analyrics.com JS is active on the El Reg "reply to post" form so if they were so inclined, google would be able to see a user with the cookie jNnQ0MWllwa9yHPGVIqOu9Tjpg1lvXrg accessing the "write post" page, and eight minutes later posted a post, which coincided at the exact same time as a post titled "While the data might be limited to Pharma".

Oddly enough, from the same cookie ID jNnQ0MWllwa9yHPGVIqOu9Tjpg1lvXrg is also seen to regularly log into the gmail account of [e-mail] and the facebook page of HettyMacHetterson, which gets us names, addresses and phone numbers. A few more queries into jNnQ0MWllwa9yHPGVIqOu9Tjpg1lvXrg and we'll have a ballpark for your profession, your earnings and your dependants. And whaddaya know, this set of shakedown merchants valued clients will pay handsomely to target individuals suffering from serious life-threatening conditions.

Whether the ad slingers actually go to this level of detail or not I don't know (not enough tinfoil in my diet clearly), but I don't see why it's not technically possible. As someone else noted elsewhere, there's already been plenty of work done on de-anonymising large data sets like the Netflix subscriber catalogue... and things like diseases are even more identifiable I should think.

Other gubbins that attempted to load by the page I'm on now besides google:

http://s.dpmsrv.com/dpm_812ed4562d3211363a7b813aa9cd2cf042b63bb2.min.js

pool.admedo.com/pixel?id=4236&t=js

(By the way, "congrats" may be the wrong word, but long may your remission continue in peaceful anonymity with your friends and family)

Adventures in (re) naming your business: Fire up the 4-syllable random name generator

Re: agreed

Well alright mister wiseguy, if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be!

OK Google, Alexa, why can't I choose my own safe, er, wake word?

OK google, you got Shroedinger's cat in there or what?

Yes/No

Or What?

Go Away

Please Come Back Later

Fuck You, Asshole

Perfect B^I

Early indications show UK favouring 'hard Brexit', says expert

Re: "how we label our food"

> Why would we want to change this exactly, Mrs. May? EU food labeling law is probably the best in the world.

For one thing, we need to make sure we start calling them Freedom Fries!

Don't worry guys, when Article 50 is triggered and we somehow all fail to become millionaires, all us TRUE brits will know that it's entirely the fault of the immigrants and those who oldthink unbellyfeel IngSoc Brexit and we'll be able to have a referendum on starting The Reclamation.

Raspberry Pi adds PIXEL eye candy to desktop

You can get a pretty decent approximation of this using a USB-ethernet adapter, although routing performance isn't stellar and there won't be much additional headroom for IDS and suchlike.

Blog post on Pi as a router.

A Jetway SFF running pfsense is my preferred tool for this sort of thing; sadly no ARM support for pfsense on the cards yet.

Ars did a nice article on various flavours of homebrew routing recently which might be worth a read.

> The reason the Pi is cheap is that is is a repurposed mobile phone chip

[nitpick] I thought I read somewhere it was originally a repurposed chip originally intended for DVRs and other set-top-boxes* - hence the relatively weak CPU (especially in the original single-core incarnations) but pretty powerful GPU and video [en|de]coding capabilities. I think the I/O envisaged for this that wasn't video-related was solely interfacing with the controls (i.e. hardly any bandwidth requirements).

Personally I would give someone's right arm for a Pi with inbuilt PoE** rather than having to use a rather cumbersome HAT... PoE support seems somewhat thin on the ground in most SBC implementations sadly, and funky ones like the Ventana GW5100 are unobtanium (or very expensive).

* Cannae find a source sadly

** For my patented drbllr.io

US govt pleads: What's it gonna take to get you people using IPv6?

Re: If companies had not given out IP's like candy.....

> 'twas also the meeting where the CIO, after some time listening to the discussion, interjected "What's a class B address?" After a *very* long period of quiet, the nicest guy there answered succinctly and kindly. CIO didn't last another month, though.

Indeed, he seems like something of a dangerous intellectual in the CIO world.

A proper CIO would have demanded that the network be reconjiggered to operate only on Class A addresses and only over Layer 1, because we won't use anything but the best available under his watch!