Posts by rajivdx

India's demand to identify people on chat apps will 'break end-to-end encryption', say digital rights warriors

Just do a hash of the message text and it works if you cut and paste it too. It will break if you modify it but at least they can track it back to you, identify the source of your message and then track it on.

For this system to work they will need access to 1 message in the chain - usually someone who infiltered the group or someone who was offended by the message and reported it. Once you have that you can track the chain to its source and get a warrant for that person and then repeat the process after examining their phone to track their source.

It seems like a workable solution that does not break encryption - not that I support it.

Microsoft backs Australia’s pay-for-news plan, risks massive blowback over a lousy $3bn and change

Re: short termist

Oh yes, we will!

I have DuckDuckGo and Bing as my search engines. Have an iPhone with no Google apps. The iPhone is crap compared to Windows Phone (RIP) and Android, but it does not track me as intrusively as Google does. I would love to get off GMail as well, but for now have to make do with fetching my Gmail on Outlook.

I appreciate that companies need advertising to make money for content they offer for free. I appreciate that some profiling is needed to offer targeted ads. I appreciate the need to track my location for features like FindMyPhone. But why does Google need to track my location even when I put my phone in 'Flight Mode'? Why do they need to interpret my location data like 'walking', 'running', 'entering a vehicle', 'exiting a vehicle', etc? This is extremely intrusive.

20+ years ago when I started using Google, I never thought they will become the evil they are today.

Re: I am confused ...

I agree, previews should be paid form.

Hyperlinks that look the same as other search results should not be paid for - this is how Google was 15 years ago. Search brought up news articles just as regular search results.

I recon anything that appears on Google News should be paid for. Google scrapes so much information that you don't need to click through to get a summary of what's happening in the world today. I think that is a problem for most news sites.

That said, instead of having a dialog with government and news sites to debate what should be payable and what not, Google has decided to use their clout to throw intrusive ads at people who land on their search page and arm twisting us with threats to leave the country. You know what? Pack up and go Google - we've had enough.

I've been using DuckDuckGo for a while - its very good on privacy but has usability issues - most annoyingly not being able to navigate back from a link. i am using Bing now, and its really good, a very usable alternative to Google, particularly for news.

Re: now openly admitted

Who initiated this legislation?

Rupert Murdoch.

India shows off new home-grown CPU – but at 100MHz, 32-bit and 180nm, it’s a bit of a clunker

Nothing to see here...

This is a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. The Indian government might be beating its drum about a 'new' CPU they have developed - but this is certainly not the first time a new CPU has been developed in India or by an Indian. The Intel Pentium processor was developed by an Indian. I myself designed a 32 bit processor and implemented a scaled down 16bit version for my University project 24 years ago. It was implemented with off the shelf 74LS series TTL chips only on stacks of 5 vero boards (didn't have access to technology to make my own boards then) and ran at a blistering 1MHz. Even did an IDE for developing and debugging assembly code in Turbo Pascal - complete with single stepping, breakpoints and watchpoints. I had a friend who developed his own CPU cores in VHDL.

So, in short it is an absolute embarrassment when the Indian government toots its own horn about this 'achievement'.

Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool

Re: I look just like Buddy Holly, and you're Mary Tyler Moore…

You could run 3Dfx Voodoo with OpenGL drivers on NT4 and then run OpenGL games like Quake on top. This was at a time when DirectX hadn't caught on and OpenGL was the only serious API around. Graphics card vendors like 3Dfx shipped OpenGL drivers with their cards as that was the only way to make them work. This was at the time when Graphics cards were strictly 3D and graphics acceleration just meant hardware 2D blitting.

Re: W95 was a pineapple

Ummm… NT *did* run dos software, it just didn't run badly written ones that liked to do direct IO to all peripherals. In fact NTVDM even captured some of these direct IO's (Like printer and VGA) and redirected them to the correct device driver via emulation.

Re: it's infamous need to be rebuilt literally every couple of months

Agreed. I used Windows NT4.0 instead of 95 using dual boot (NT had a boot selector) to run 95 only for games. NT ran everything else for months on end without needing a restart and was rock solid. There were even a few games that ran on NT (WinDoom/GLDoom, Quake, MS Monster Truck, etc). To Me Win 9x was only a wrapper to run Win32 apps over DOS, now NT was a proper OS.

What's the Arm? First Apple laptop to ditch Intel will be 13.3" MacBook Pro, proclaims reliable soothsayer

'as Mac owners will no longer be able to dual-boot Windows 10 via Bootcamp'

...ummm, Windows 10 runs of ARM64 as well.

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

Re: Pascal has always been great

A lot of the issues raised by Brian Kerningham apply only to the old or original version of pascal - such as the fixed array lengths, string types and inability to pass arbitrary arrays to functions.

Some of the issues he raised are actually good features of Pascal - which are implemented as kludges in K&R's shitty C. For example the approach of defining a function/procedure in Pascal before using it is actually a favorite feature of mine - it meant that if I am looking for the definition of a function I just need to look above and not everywhere as I have to in C. It also means that the compiler is super fast as it already knows about the function by the time it is called. In C, the put a function anywhere concept means that you need to declare them in header files and use include them everywhere and then deal with the possibility of recursive #includes with the nasty #ifdef _MYHEADER_H_ .. #endif kludge.

I've had huge programs with several thousand lines of code compile (Clean build) in under 1 second on a 4.77MHz PC - try beating that in C. Pascal compilers compiled in 1 pass while C compilers preprocessed, compiled (multiple passes) and linked.

Jeff Bezos: I will depose King Trump

Am I missing something here? Azure seems to support Custom domain HTTPS, even for file storage:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cdn/cdn-custom-ssl?tabs=option-1-default-enable-https-with-a-cdn-managed-certificate

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cdn/cdn-storage-custom-domain-https

Less fake news, more facts please.

Time to patch your lightbulb? Researchers demonstrate Philips Hue exploit

Re: "an update that reduces infection range to 1m or less"

It just means that while drones are not feasible for scanning whole cities for Philips Hue bulbs, you can still take over targeted homes with a highly directional antenna.

Hell, you may not even need that - many homes use Hue lamps on the outside for the outdoor lights to turn on automatically when a visitor arrives. Just walk up to the bulb and infect it. Also from what I am reading, the bulb does not need to belong to the homes Hue network as it requires the owner to re-add the infected bulb. So, just walk around the neighbourhood and swap out all outdoor Hue bulbs with infected ones from your backpack.

Reusing software 'interfaces' is fine, Google tells Supreme Court, pleads: Think of the devs

Re: @jilocasin There is *no* IP to take advantage of.

Correct, I remember there was some source code that was copied verbatim, with comments and all. Copyright applies to source code, written work etc. Patents apply to methods, processes, etc and *may* cover API's.

I clearly remember Google had lifted not just the API's (Which would not be covered by Copyright) but also the source code (which is covered by Copyright).

Now it's Terrance Dicks' turn to regenerate: Golden-age Doctor Who mainstay dies aged 84

RIP Terrance Dicks

I read the Target novelisations (mostly Terrance Dicks) for 15 years before I even saw my first Dr Who episode on TV. Thankfully I jumped straight to the new series because when I did go back and watch the old series I realised that the books and my imagination were much better. I still ploughed through all the Third and Fourth doctor episodes because despite all the poor sets and budget special effects the stories and acting by those doctors were top notch. I can only imagine how much better those stories would have been with the budget of todays episodes and more concise formats that did not force them to use so many fillers staring at blank corridors.

Microsoft Chrom... Edge hits beta as new browser prepped for biz testing

The problem for Edge is Microsoft itself!

I have been using Edge exclusively for 4 years now and have not come across a single website that didn't work with edge. The problems with Edge that I experienced were:

1. Poor integration with Windows - Cut & Paste were dodgy and so were other keyboard shortcuts and integration with the on screen keyboard.

2. Idiotic Google nagware encouraging me to 'upgrade' to a 'better browser'.

3. Websites that didn't know which browser I was using and just throwing up an 'Incompatible browser' message - these websites worked flawlessly when I dismissed the annoying popul.

I have found Edge to be a lot more secure, faster and lean on resources than Chrome. Chrome is a massive resource hog (don't know how it is these days) hogging both memory and CPU for tabs that are in the background. A common problem with Chrome was my laptop overheating when I opened too many tabs - haven't had that problem in a while now that I'm using Edge.

The biggest problem with Edge is Microsoft itself who have no faith in their own products!

Autopilot engineer drove off to Chinese rival with our top-secret blueprints in the glovebox, Tesla claims in sueball

Because you can't steal IP in production. You only have access to finished modules/parts with encrypted software that cannot be copied.

Holy moley! The amp, kelvin and kilogram will never be the same again

Re: "...using methods that can be replicated anywhere on the planet."

Not true. The speed of light is fixed for all observers. This means that time dilation effects are not detectable to you if you are in the same frame of reference. This means that you will still measure 1 second correctly for your frame of reference using a Cesium clock whether you are in total void or on the surface or the earth or on the event horizon of a black hole.

Windows 10 Pro goes Home as Microsoft fires up downgrade server

This happened to me, but cant see what all the fuss is about....

I came in to work this morning and got a message saying 'Windows needs to be activated' - no the computer didn't blow up, no the sky didn't fall on my head, no I didn't lose any functionality it still behaved like Windows 10 Pro - just a watermark saying I needed to activate Windows. I hit 'Troubleshoot' and the watermark was gone and a message saying Windows was activated. Hardly a reason to throw out Windows and spend the next 2 weeks installing Linux, tweaking the packages, services, window managers and hunting for equivalent apps that barely cover half the functionality of what I need to get work done in Windows.

Qualcomm, Microsoft drag apps for Win-10-on-Arm into 64-bit world

Re: Why didn't they require ARM64 from day one?

Oh, when Windows was released on ARM (Windows RT), there were no mainstream ARM64 chips. (Yes, there were ARM64 chips then, just not so prevalent).

That's why Windows was released on ARM32 first.

Re: Why didn't they require ARM64 from day one?

The Emulation is for x86 WIN32 Apps, not UWP apps which are mostly architecture independent.

x86 Win32 Apps are emulated on ARM64. This article simply states that you can now build Native ARM64 apps using Visual Studio - which I assume are 'WIN32' but could also be UWP. ARM64 has always been supported by Windows 10 on ARM from Day 1 - its just that Visual Studio is being released with support to build native ARM64 apps now.

That's what I read from this article.

Twenty years ago today: Windows 98 crashed live on stage with Bill Gates. Let's watch it again...

Re: Few Knew

The Blue screen you are referring to is the Windows 9X 'Please re enter the disc in drive X' prompt. Being Windows 9X such low level prompts were displayed in a text 'DOS' screen and not using the Windows GUI. This wasn't a BSOD as simply choosing 'Abort, Retry or Ignore' (Anybody remember that??) would make the screen go away.

Re: My first laptop ran WIn98

NT didn't die - it lives on in Windows 2K, XP, Vista, 7, 10 & Windows Phone. Its Windows 9X that died, and rightly so...

NT4 was probably the most stable OS I had ever seen...

Re: Bill Gates

If you didn't think your own product was worth much and you sold off all rights for $100 to someone who thought it was worth a lot more - I wouldn't blame Bill Gates for that. The neighbour who sold the QDOS to Gates is obviously having a case of sour grapes...

Re: Bill Gates

Interesting story and I'm not surprised - Bill Gates was ruthless in business. But he wouldn't fire anyone for something that wasn't totally in their control - Jobs would.

About the pledge - I think he will be remembered for his philanthropy a lot longer than his role at Microsoft, even Jobs will be forgotten by then. Its no use hoarding your money if nobody else benefits from it - once you go past a billion it makes absolutely no difference, all those extra billions are just wealth you are keeping from everyone else. Get the hint Mr Bezos?

Re: " Still funny, even after all these years"

Mine only BSOD'd when I used the dodgy fake-FTDI peripherals and the FTDI driver would deliberately BSOD when it detected a counterfeit peripheral...

Re: "That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet," quipped Gates.

You mean:

s/Elon Musk/Steve Jobs/

I wonder how many people would have got fired then and then the audience told the BSOD was a feature and that they were plugging in the scanner wrong...

Windows 10 Spring Creators Update team explains the hold-up: You little BSOD!

Re: pretty much every single alpha/beta test

Umm... 64bit Windows uses the WoW (Windows on Windows) subsystem to run 32bit and 16bit apps via emulation. This is why Microsoft is able to run x86 apps on ARM64 Windows simply by updating WoW to run on ARM64.

Now before someone jumps on me - on x86, 32bit apps are run with some amount of emulation (API's) and some amount of native 32bit instruction set. I believe 16bit is fully emulated. On ARM64, everything has to be fully emulated.

'Housemate from hell' catches 24 new charges after alleged nightmare cyberstalking spree

Re: Running away.

First she made no mistakes. You meet people daily and you choose not to associate with them the way they want to - if they continue to harass you, its no fault of yours. Second, they are in 2 separate countries that are literally on opposite ends of the earth - how much further can she run (no she did not run, and should not have to either).

Don't get me wrong, she has tried the suggestions you have put forward - closed all her accounts, got new phone numbers, etc. But he still tracks her down, and that is scary. Tracks her friends & family - that is scarier.

The only solution seems to be to go back to the US, to the state that he is in and lodge a police complain & get a restraining order. Would you go that close to a creep like this who would probably know you are coming and be waiting for you?

Thanks

Thanks all for the suggestions. It does look like not much can be done besides reporting to local police. The best that can be done is apply for a restraining order when back in the US - but this requires one to travel back to the US.

For those implying she invited it - no she did not.

Need help with a cyberstalker

My friend is being stalked in exactly the same way by a creep living and operating from the US. Is there any way to nail this creep from Australia (where she lives) such that he gets his 3 to 5 years behind bars?

Please help if you know how.

Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018

Chris, the times are a changing for embedded devices too - they now sport 1GB of RAM, 8GB of Flash, run Linux, take 2 minutes to boot, poorly programmed by amateurs and do things as mundane as turning a light ON or OFF.

Germany says NEIN to purchase incentive for Tesla Model S

Not so...

> All electric vehicles are a con...

If you understand how electric vehicles work you will know that is not true. For example your petrol/diesel vehicle does not generate fuel when you brake, but an electric vehicle does allowing you to recover most of the energy you expended when you put your foot down when the lights turned green. You also have the option of sourcing the energy to charge your car from greener sources such as solar - you do not with fossil fuels. (Yeah-yeah to bio-fuels, but I'd rather feed the hungry in Africa with all that corn than turn it to fuel for your car)

Your chance to win the world's only handheld ZX Spectrum

Why destroy a pristine ZX Spectrum? The Z80 is still available today!

The Z80 is still available today in tiny QFP package:

http://au.element14.com/zilog/ez80l92az020sg/mcu-8bit-ez80-20mhz-lqfp-100/dp/2113949

Use that, some external RAM, some CPLD for the video controller and flash the EEPROM into the internal ROM of the Z80 and you are done!

Heavy VPN users are probably pirates, says BBC

Why? Why pirate Dr Who when the ABC gives it away in every way possible??

Why should we ever need to pirate Doctor Who?? Its simulcast in Australia at 4:20AM - same time as when its being shown in the UK. How can it be possible to pirate it even earlier?? For those of us who cannot make the effort to wake up at that ungodly hour to watch Dr Who the ABC puts it up on iView for all to watch shortly after the simulcast - and then there are PVR's.

If any d*ckhead still pirates it after all these efforts the ABC makes to hand it on a plate to us - then he deserves a stout whack on the side of the head.

How Microsoft can keep Win XP alive – and WHY: A real-world example

I agree with the author. Not all Windows installations are on 'PC's and not all can be upgraded. We for instance have an advanced DVB broadcast analyser equipment that we purchased 15 years ago for $50,000 - and it runs Windows NT4.0, not even XP. We cannot upgrade it (believe me, we have tried to upgrade to Windows 2000 and failed - we could upgrade the hardware from Pentium III to Pentium 4, but no further as NT did not support it) as new drivers are not available and the manufacturer does not exist anymore. I am sure companies in similar situations like ours will be quite happy to pay Microsoft hundreds (maybe more??) of dollars a year to be able to continue using their expensive & often irreplaceable equipment.