Posts by AbeSapian

Cop warrant orders Ring to cough up footage from inside this guy's home

Time to Revise Their Corporate Structure

It looks like most of Ring's corporate structure can now be replaced by a bunch of tech savvy lawyers. I suspect all they'll be doing from now on is processing search warrants.

Ransomware crooks steal 3m+ patients' medical records, personal info

Equifax

Equifax donated my entire credit information and history to the dark web years ago (why are they still in business). I froze my credit then. Lately Experion decided to make their contribution to identity theft. Between the two of these monsters, what can a measly hospital do? It's to the point where it's hardly worth mentioning any more.

Scottish space upstart's rocket crashes into the drink

Points of Order

1) Maybe this was really planned as payback for all those Viking raids.

2) I thought most rocket launches took place near the equator to take advantage of gravity and the Earth's rotation. And ...

3) Using their glossy sales video when talking about their unplanned flight path was cold Reg - real cold.

Re: No such thing as failure

It's just a learning experience.

Weird robot breaks down in middle of House of Lords hearing on AI art

Ai-Da Will Not Pass The Turing Test

While Ai-Da will not pass the Turing Test, I found this presentation fascinating. Ai-Da is a crude tool. I say that not to denigrate the thousands of man-hours that went into her creation but because all tools start out that way.

What I found most interesting was the analogy of the camera that cropped up midway through the video. Some artists tried to throw their sabot at the camera to prove that it could never be used to create "ART". Others adopted the camera wholeheartedly to demonstrate that the new medium could be used to capture great drama and beauty in light and shadow. They were the ones that made photography into an art form of its own and proved the saboteurs wrong.

Ai-Da is a very early stage of AI. There are other forms of machine learning out there that are more sophisticated in their use of data analysis. However, they've also graphically demonstrated the age old computer science adage; Garbage In - Garbage Out. The question of "what is art" has been challenged again. I didn't see examples of Ai-Da's art. But I suspect most of the oxygen will be taken up with whether it's original or derivative.

Australian wasps threaten another passenger plane, with help from COVID-19

Clues

Have they considered the red flags that the Navy uses on jets for the arming pins that have to be removed before flight?

Paper batteries on the cards to power IoT and smart labels

Not to Rain on Their Parade

Didn't Alessandro Volta pretty much do the same thing in 1792?

Govt suggests Brits should hand passports to social media companies

Are They High?

Do they not read the news?

Beware the techie who takes things literally

Bad, Bad, Very Bad, Not Good

I'm not sure how it works in the UK but Frank would be in the Bog of Eternal Stench in the US. Retribution and restitution would be the order of the day. If I got the story right, Frank deleted everything. But the parts that Frank wrote belonged to the company. Frank might have been right to delete the shareware portion since the company didn't own that. But the portion that Frank wrote belonged to the company. Deleting that portion was a crime punishable both civilly and criminally.

Frank overstepped his authority.

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Master / Slave

So instead of Master / Slave, we should use something like Leader / Prisoners With Jobs?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prz4jfSX_Qg

We have some sad news about Facebook. It has returned to the internet after six-hour mega outage

I love the Register

I love reading The Register because I always learn something - even if it's something I'll never use.

On a personal note: I was not even aware of the Facebook outage until I read this article. What does that tell you?

What can the 1944 OSS manual teach us before we all return to sabotage the office?

You Scared the CIA

Apparently your article scared the CIA because they pulled down the link to the PDF. I had to find it on another site with a google search.

After searching the CIA site a couple of times, I wonder who will be knocking on my door next.

They were not the cloud you were looking for, insists Amazon Web Services in unsealed JEDI protest

Garden of Earthly Delights

As a long time Microshaft user, I suspect the DoD will find that the demo (see Garden of Earthly Delights) will not match the delivered product (see Dante's Inferno). MS has a long history of ignoring product bugs that affect usability or performance.

One does not simply shove elephants on a ballet shoe point and call it an acceptable measure of pressure

Knickers

Well! Somebody has their knickers in a knot. Is there a Reg Standard Unit for that?

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

To The Editor

The name of the party is The Democratic Party. When referring to the party's nominee, the correct phrase is Democratic contender. Calling the nominee the Democrat contender is a right wing trope to denigrate the Democratic party.

In reference to the party one is the Democratic contender or Democratic nominee.

An individual may be referred to as a Democrat.

But if you wish, the Republicans may be referred to as:

republicans,

Repugnants,

Repubs,

Repugs,

or a$$ hats.

Feeling saucy? Microsoft would like you to use .NET 5.0 'go live' release in production to track down 'critical bugs'

Yet Another .Net

Is this yet another incompatible release of the .Net framework? MS doesn't seem to understand the concept of upward compatibility. How many tons of this crap do I have to carry around with me?

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

What's in a Name

My preferred handle is Microshaft.

"He Who Must Not Be Named" was taken. Besides, it's too wordy.

Land Where Ideas Go To Die

Not A Bug It's A Feature.

Smithfield for Software

There's a black hole lurking within 1,000 light years of Earth – and you can see stars circling it with the naked eye

No Planetary Nebula

I'm not an astronomer, but I think the lack of a planetary nebula suggests the black hole is very old. It's either been swallowed by the black hole, or the companion stars leaving nothing visible.

Re: Starman on his way...?

Now we know why Elon launched that Tesla. So Tom Cruise could have a cool car to save us from the black hole in.

Get in the lake, Sparky: Databricks touts new ingestion file sources

They Missed a Bet

Instead of data lakes, they should have called it Pensieve.

Good news, everyone: The US military says it will be ethically minded about how it develops AI

Success Stories Every One

Colossus: The Forbin Project

HAL 9000

Sky Net

I feel safer already. What could possibly go wrong?

Come on baby light me on fire: McDonald's to sell 'Quarter Pounder' scented candles

Which Is Worse

Which is worse, Goop Lab's vagina scented candle or a McDonald's Quarter Pounder scented candle.

We report, you decide.

Fed-up air safety bods ban A350 pilots from enjoying cockpit coffees

Fate is the Hunter

Apparently they've never seen the movie Fate is the Hunter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_Is_the_Hunter_(film)

Is everything OK over there, Britain? Have you tried turning the UK off and on again? ISPs, financial orgs fall over in Freaky Friday of outages

Is Brexit BrokesIt?

It's all in the title. Of course, being in Ameirka, I can't talk too much. We're still Trumped.

Head of Apple's insider trading program charged with… you guessed it... insider trading

Irony?

I would say this is dripping with irony were it not for the fact that this is just another day in the life.

Fraudster convicted of online banking thefts using… whatever the hell this thing is

A Good Christian

I like the fact that his thievery device came complete with a picture of the holy family. It shows the right attitude towards his faith.

US govt confirms FCC's broadband speeds and feeds stats are garbage

Telecommunications Ghetto

If you live in rural America you are forgotten. Only the lowest level of service from AT&T that can still be called DSL (speeds less than 1M) is available to me. My alleged other provider is Charter Communications, a cable company that can't be bothered to string a wire to my house. And a complaint to the FCC yielded a raft of phone calls and excuses and not results. And that was before Ajit (pronounced idiot) Pai made things worse.

4G found on Moon

Telecommunication Ghettos

How about bringing some high speed service to the telecommunication ghettos, like where I live.

Survey: Tech workers are terrified they will be sacked for being too old

Inexorable

What Zuk et. al. fail to realize is that they too are inexorably heading towards old stale fartdom themselves.

Cancel the farewell party. Get back to work. That asteroid isn't going to hit Earth in October

Damn!

I was so looking forward to watching Mar-a-Lago go sput.

Blocking peeps on social media? That's a paddlin' for governors, senators, house reps

Re: The more i read about America...

We fought a war on that topic.

Re: Meh!

The point being that this use of social media constitutes official communication from an elected official. Every one of their constituents has the right to access that information. And if comments are allowed, every one of their constituents has the right to weigh in whether they agree or not, whether they like the official or not.

Microsoft dumps mobility from its Vision

Oooh - So Close and Yet So Far

I guess this means that we can look forward to a Windows 11 that fails to grasp basic computing requirements at a higher level.

Microsoft! I didn't need a bigger tablet. And I don't need a walky-talky that doesn't understand what I need.

Fake Newspaper steals Reg design to spruik storage upstart

Imitation?

While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, money is the sincerest form of apology.

President Donald Trump taken on by unlikely foe: Badass park rangers

In Another Interesting Turn of Events

Wednesday, the entire senior staff of the Department of State resigned. With Trump's incompetence and total failure to have his own people ready to step into these positions, the State Department is going to be stripped of it's institutional memory of how to conduct it's business. When Tillerson is confirmed (almost a certainty) he's going to be a party of one prowling empty, echoing halls trying to pick up the pieces.

That's going to slow his Putin ass kissing down for a while.

The Washington Post: The State Department’s entire senior administrative team just resigned

Re: Less than a week in the position...

Sadly, remember these are Republicans. The first commandment of being a Republican is "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican." These are also most of the same yahoos that tolerated Bush / Cheney for eight years. I'm not holding out much hope for any measure of actual patriotism.from the Republicans, and the Democrats don't have the votes.

So while impeachment or the 25th Amendment is a possibility, it's not a very likely one.

Boffins explain why it takes your Wi-Fi so long to connect

Great! So Maybe We Get A Faster Connection Time

But most of the time is spent in actual communications of actual useful data. How much will that really improve throughput?

We've found a ‘vaccine’ for fake news. Wait! No, we really are Cambridge researchers

Re: So, fight propaganda with propganda, then

Didn't George Orwell have something to say about this?

Make America, wait, what again? US Army may need foreign weapons to keep up

Re: Military-industrial 101

Military spending is the most wasteful spending there is. Built for destruction, once it is used all you have to show for it is a hole in the ground.

Our military budget is greater than the next 10 highest military budgets combined. Yet the sad fact is our performance is not ten times greater than any of those countries. The case might be made for some that we perform worse.

I know it will never happen, but we need a complete, top to bottom overhaul of our military budget. More importantly, we need a complete, top to bottom overhaul of our foreign policy, both political and economic.

I'm not holding my breath or giving up sex in the mean time.

Re: F-35 Su-35

With Trump as Putin's sock puppet, I don't think we'll be opposing Russia for at least the next four years.

Terry Pratchett's self-written documentary to be broadcast in 2017

Don't leave out "Where's My Cow".

Russia to convicted criminal hackers: 'Work with us or jail?'

Siberian President

I don't believe it is going to be the case that Russia will be kicked to the curb. For one thing Trump has too many assets in Russia and is subject to economic blackmail as he is in many countries.

No, Russia has very effectively installed a puppet in the White House. On January 20th, the U.S. will be demoted from superpower to Russian satellite state.

#nyetmypresident

Analysts apply Occam's razor to Tesco Bank breach

Hey, At Least Tesco Refunded The Money

U.S. banks would have simply hoisted the jolly roger to their customers. (c.f. Wells Fargo)

Experts to Congress: You must act on IoT security. Congress: Encourage industry to develop best practices, you say?

Starting with the fact ...

that the IoT is the solution to the problem nobody had. It was then followed by "Oops, we forgot to consider security." It's like bolting a birdcage onto a Chevy and then being surprised that budgie was a little strained on arrival.

Fake election news meltdown vortex sucks in Google

Re: Age-old propaganda trick ....

Karl Rove: Perception is reality. (I'm sure he didn't think that up, but he used it to terrible effect.)

Re: Google vs Wikipedia

So what's left? So called legitimate news sources don't fact check either. It's all one big echo chamber with news sources repeating the same garbage under the disclaimer, "It has been reported that...", which is newspeak for, "we didn't check this out but we like it so we're reporting it anyway."

Tech Trump: Silicon Valley steps into the valley of unhappiness

The Big Loser

As Silicon Valley begins the exodus to friendlier countries, the big loser will be all the towns that built all that infrastructure to support the soon to be empty homes and facilities of SV. SV will be a big shiny ghost town without even a Walmart to blame.

Never to Fear

Business will do what business has always done: Move to another country where they can get what they want at the price they want.

Top smut site stops Flashing, adopts HTML5

Butt, Butt, Butt ...

I thought the whole point of a porn site was to infect your computer.

Sex is bad for older men, and even worse when it's good

My Hope ...

was always to die in bed - shot by a jealous husband.