Posts by Thicko

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

Re: Who are their lawyers?

"I don't like Brexit but it is not correct to lay the blame on those who voted leave.". I dont like to split hairs but logically you do have to blame those who voted to leave for us actually leaving! However I agree that Remain ran a remarkably sloppy ship. They were fat, dumb and happy because they had so many of the economic facts stacked in their favour. They simply could not see that feelings and fears would dominate the referendum until it was all over. If I was of the Red Wall or a fisherman I could well understand why Leave won on the day. They heard and loved the Leave messages about the left behind, sunny uplands, big new deals with US etc. but forgot to look at who was feeding it to them. If they had they might have reflected on just how well the Tory Party had ever looked after the poor and the North and thought twice!

The outcome was not 'fair' given the remarkable width and breadth of untruths told by both leave organizations as well as their significant financial overspend. Don't forget the iffy mysteriously funded FB scare campaigns that supported Leave either. Come to think of it the Russia report still hasn't been published in full either!

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

Re: If only there were some sort of handy backup.

Solar navigation doesn't work well at night! Once I got lost on the routes around Liege late one night and only really knew how badly when I recognised the tunnel I was driving through as the one I'd been through half an hour earlier. Even today Google reliably directs me off the A5 motorway between Karlsruhe and Stuttgart to give me a grand tour of Pforzheim before directing me back to the motorway at the next junction if I let it!

Motorola loses appeal to kill price cap on UK Airwave emergency services contract

Last year, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) published a highly critical report claiming there had "never been a realistic plan for ESN" and there was no evidence it would work as well as the current system. Blow me sideways, the PAC is completely correct! ESN is still vaporware. It's made a cruise liner full of consultants very happy indeed though. Huawei said a decade ago (its in The Reg somewhere) that trying to jam an ESN network onto 4G was like knocking a square peg in a round hole and so far they have not been proved wrong. I bet this saga is going on in 5 more years.

No more Mr Nice DoJ: Tesla gets subpoenas over self-driving software claims

Re: At any normal company

"....but I'm fairly sure I could comport myself in a more civil and beneficial manner.". I'm sure nobody doubts that!

TETRA radio comms used by emergency heroes easily cracked, say experts

Re: ESN to the rescue!

It rescued a lot of Home Office contractors from poverty that's for sure!

Look who's fallen foul of Europe's data retention rules. France and Germany

Re: .....and let's not forget FB......

Fascinating article. Thanks!

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

Re: Copyright law

Its the 10% I'd be most worried about!

BT strikes to start this month, 40,000 workers to down tools

The problem of course is that the Tories face both ways in public at least when it comes to wages. They give the spiel about the high wage, high skill economy to the faithful but killed decent training and introduced more restrictive laws on striking. The reality is that they do the employers (and donors) bidding. Pay rises have been at or below inflation since Osbourne a decade ago. This little economic downturn seems to be yet another good reason for the government to permit further squeezing of wages. Where do all those saved wages and pension contributions go? Shareholders of course with a bit to the senior management to ensure the plebs are kept to the wheel. Factor in runaway house prices also engineered by government policies and its obvious that the divide between them with and them without will soon be wider than the Amazon. And just as uncrossable. Back to the good old days you might say, if you are one of the owner classes.

UK science stuck in 'holding pattern' on EU funding by Brexit, says minister

Re: Equality

You get on with it then, best of British mate!

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the BBC stage a very British coup to rescue our data from Facebook and friends

Re: BBC

I know what you mean. Thank God for honest rags like the Sun and the Mail eh?

Competition watchdog? We've heard of it. But emergency comms firm still on track to Airwave hello to £1.2bn

ESN is the Brexit fantasy of the telecoms world. Everybody who wants it keep saying its just one more small hill away whilst almost everybody else wonders if they will live long enough to see it. And finally there are those who just keep taking the coin wherever and however they can. What an utterly British mess.

UK Test and Trace chief Dido Harding tries to convince MPs that £14m for canned mobile app was money well spent

Re: [Apple & Google] have been on the record as saying that the UK app … is a world first

I guess they are crowing about the addition of the QR code combined with contact tracing as a "world first". Every time I hear that phrase from this government I get the distinct uneasy feeling soft soaped into swallowing yet another half or three quarter lie.

Under that pile of spare keys and obsolete cables is an IoT device: Samsung pushes useful retirement project for older phones

Re: S8 and S9 old?

lineageos on an S5 is surprisingly nippy. I set one up for my mum and she is very happy with it pottering about the BBC food pages. She has now even mastered the art of accidentally calling me on Whatsapp (yes I know, I should change it to Signal!).

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

Re: ....and the beat goes on.............

maybe they are the 2 fabled fishermen who may actually benefit from the pantomime.

Re: ....and the beat goes on.............

merely educating you.

Hundreds of Facebook moderators complain: AI content moderation isn't working and we're paying for it

I guess they will only be needed until the algorithms can replace them so why invest in them, they are just expendable meat bags from the FB investor point of view.

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

Re: How

Assuming you are not rooted you could try Netguard

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.faircode.netguard&hl=en&gl=US

You can block individual programs and system programs access to the web through either wifi or mobile data or limit them whilst roaming.

it does require a little setup to get it right but it works for me. i use the pay version downloaded from Github to add a hosts file to block lots of iffy web addresses when surfing.

With less than two months left, let's check in on Brexit: All IT systems are up and running and ready to go, says no one

Re: QR

I get the feeling that deep down this brexit mad for it government thinks those Jonny Foreigners (not one of them went to Eaton you know!) will be as disorganized as they are. Those Dutch started training additional customs officers 3 years ago. I get the feeling Britain is going to get a nasty lesson in January.

Brit accused of spying on 772 people via webcam CCTV software tells court he'd end his life if extradited to US

Re: Team America: World Police

As I understand it the US has not ratified its half of the UK-US extradition agreement. Until this is sorted out we should not stick to the letter of the agreement as the US is having its cake on this.

Trump's official campaign website vandalized by hackers who 'had enough of the President's fake news'

Re: A sign of the times

I would never vote Trump precisely because I know what we got last time!

Thought the FBI were the only ones able to unlock encrypted phones? Pretty much every US cop can get the job done

Re: I'm not stopping you...

If you happen to have run into a cop having a bad day, it will do wonders to diffuse the situation. If you have done something wrong 'man up', then 'shut up', and call a lawyer, before you say *anything*, other than, 'I think I should speak to an attorney before i talk with you.'

I expect this could work if you are white. I would be a bit more nervous if I wasn't.

Re: Shot while fleeing?

Do keep up. Trump rescinded that stupid regulation first week in office!

We know there are a lot of, er, distractions right now but NASA's got some sweet video of its asteroid rubble raiser

Welcome to Hollywood science 2020!

Life with Amazon's fitness band: Upload your half-naked pics to see how fat you'll look without exercise. You now sound stressed – relax!

Re: Good one

and maybe some liposuction vouchers.

Road trip on Mars: Thrill as Curiosity rover races up to 0.06 miles per hour. Marvel as it takes a mile-long detour

Re: Flat Mars-ers

The Red Dwarf episode "The Last Day" should be more than enough to give any God based conspiracy nut plenty of cause to fret. Does Heaven really exist?

Sorry to drone on and on but have you heard of Ingenuity? NASA's camera-copter is ready to head off to Mars

If they get the camera, the background view and the light just right, the first flight video could become as iconic as the liftoff from the moon.

All-electric plane makes first flight – while lugging 2 tons of batteries aloft

Re: Could someone check the numbers?

And the silence on descen in a rear engine plane t can be a little startling too if you are sitting at the front where you can loose the throttled back engine noise completely under the wind noise.

Ex-Imagination Technologies boss tells UK Foreign Affairs Committee: Britain needs to stop overseas asset stripping

Re: And who will pay ?

The use of the" friend of a cabinet minister" is a straw man. There are very good reasons why other countries protect their valuable assets. Our usual laissez faire attitude to almost everything in business is no way to protect a national asset.

I dont know exactly what the government would say. Do you? What do other countries tell their security sensitive companies about who they can be sold to? Whatever it is, we should say it too rather than nothing at all. Or even worse, just mumble some flubbery about profit and freedom.

Capita to place bit less sauce in outsourcing execs' share awards packets

Re: He was supposed to get 5,900,000 shares ?

You should have seen what the previous heffalump snuffled away!

Capita cuts projects, furloughs workers due to 'unpredictable level of disruption' from COVID-19

Re: I've got the feeling that I should invest in Capita shares

You simply dont have the Capita Connections old chap!

Fancy that: Hacking airliner systems doesn't make them magically fall out of the sky

Re: Natural vs. artificial intelligence

Its not really intelligence, more being able to read and interpret lots of different real time data streams from remote sensors.

If you're wondering how Brit cops' live suspect-hunting facial-recog is going, it's cruising at 88% false positives

How does Metplod tech accuracy compare with China's implementation? I'm not saying plod tech is always bad but form long experience I know the Met like to pay over the odds for second best as many former colleagues will testify! Can anybody comment? I've walked around Oxford Circus occasionally and that square at Stratford many a time and its always very, very busy so it seems to me that they only ran their cameras at each location for an hour or so.

If I was the first person bagged on plodcam in the UK Id want to get into the Guinness Book of Records!

That one person was bagged in just a couple of camera hours with such a small database of faces means they probably loaded the mugs of know local wanteds into the system or they just got very lucky.

Forget looking for fugitives, how long before Border Force have the system up and running at every airport making it impossible to go on hols before settling your tax bills or outstanding tv licence?

Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya super-pwnage

"Having control of employment rights in the UK parliament is not the same as running them down..." Technically you are correct but you would have to be pretty deaf to Priti Patel and co and their clear and oft stated intentions. That you added "completely" to your comment as in "completely biased against..." lends weight to the idea that you are so heavily biased in favour of brexit that any inconvenient fact is just false news to you.

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

Re: WTF?

Protecting The President probably. He has a few scrapes already!

Ad network ransomware crook to flog £5k Rolex after court confiscates £270k in ill-gotten gains

Re: Happy crooks

8 years so with good behavious, out in three or four. Less if you consider the time on remand. At least the stay at Goodayes hospital might put him off a life of crime!

Controversies aren't Boeing away for aircraft maker amid claims of faulty oxygen systems and wobbling wings

"Boeing South Carolina is strictly driven by schedule and cost," he told the Beeb. Boeing denies his claims, let me cogitate. Whistleblower risks all to inform world.... And Boeing denies all. Who should I believe. Well I'm not a daft as a brush Brexiter so I go with the whistleblower I suppose, unless Mr Gove can persuade me otherwise!

HMRC chief digital wonk Jacky Wright takes flight back to Microsoft's light

2 years! Wow. So 2 months to find the executive loo. 6 months to negotiate return to mother ship, 12 weeks of hols and another month in total for 2 Xmas wind downs. I'd quite like to be a seagull myself!

HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some

Re: Trustworthy?

You write it and I will run it!

Google takes a little more responsibility for its Android world, will cough up bounties for mega-popular app bugs

75k in bounties in the last few months alone, spread across 1 million+ apps. Wow that's lucrative init!

How do you sing 'We're jamming and we hope you like jamming, too' in Russian? Kremlin's sat-nav spoofing revealed

Would it be possible to use electronically steerable antennas that can check that satellites are in the approximate direction that they say they are in? That way you might detect whether one or two sources are in disagreement with the others? I'm guessing it will be harder to accurately spoof signals from several different directions.

UK networks have 'no plans' to bring roaming fees back after Brexit

Re: If only roaming worked at all

Ican only agree with u regarding Croatia after my first visit last year. 3UK roaming was quite acceptable for me there. I used up several GB of allowance in a week there.

Its only a non story if you nexer stray beyond the safety of Dover I suppose or are you so well heeled you just dont care?

UK Home Office's £885m crim records digi effort: A 'masterclass in incompetence'

Re: This is nothing compared to..

Those turkeys are hardly likely to vote for Christmas!

BBC extends Capita Audience Services contract to 25 years

If you think the BBC is biased just watch a bit of Fox Be!

Two's company, Three's unbowed: You Brits will pay more for MMS snaps

Re: Crazy Prices

They cant gouge you for EU roaming at the moment but gougers being gougers I don't fancy it remaining free for long after next March!

Air Canada's network soars back up after Monday morning death dive

Ahhh. Fly Air Canada to a world of possibilities!