Posts by Doctor Syntax

Neuralink's looking for participants willing to be part of human trials

If self-experimentation was good enough for Neil Noakes it should be good enough for Elon Musk.

Robocall scammers sentenced in US after netting $1.2M via India-based call centers

"managed to convince her to give them her O2 account details"

Always ask them to prove who they are by telling you prt of the account details.

UK Online Safety Bill to become law – and encryption busting clause is still there

Coming next: a law to make pi equal to 3.

Re: Don't Understand......

And it's the recipient's key that's needed to decrypt PGP. That assumes the recipient has a key. Perhaps I'll create a key pair, thow away the private key and use the public one to encrypt a message for my MP.

Re: The biggest surprise...

But they didn't hide it.

"But the penny is still falling it seems."

Not isn't. It's been snapped up by an airborne pig.

Re: Blighty seems determined to cut itself off from the rest of the world

Given that MPs and ministers are quite apt to blab about Whatsapp or whatever messages they probably think that security is just a myth.

Re: Why?

"Such a notice could be served on Apple, who demonstrated such technology two years ago, and by extension can be served on everyone else, because Apple have proved it is technically feasible."

Have they? Having a piece of software that reads files and gives some answers falls short of technical feasibility. How many of those answers are false positives and how many are false negatives? What are the allowable percentages? If the allowable percentages of false positives is greater than zero what redress has an innocent user who is hit with a false positive and against whom, the service provider or OFCOM?

As TikTok surveils staff's office hours, research indicates WFH is good for planet

"renewables penetration for office buildings"

Does this mean defenestrated managers are renewables?

GitHub Copilot, Amazon Code Whisperer sometimes emit other people's API keys

It's just pure chance. Nothing at all to be worried about.

Unity talks of price cap and fees for only largest games developers

"Riccitiello said Unity could have handled the communication better"

Blaming the messanging, not the message.

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

Re: But... he's right

"worst case is twitter fails"

You should choose your words more carefully.

"a subscription model makes sense"

It does if you've got a monopoly and something worth paying for - ar at least user lock-in.

"So much for rational markets."

Rational markets need rational participants.

Venture capital firm makes 'unsolicited' bid for MariaDB buyout

Is this going to mean another fork?

If anyone finds an $80M F-35 stealth fighter, please call the Pentagon

"people could have spotted an errant F-35 in their neighbourhood but not thought to mention it until asked."

If you live in an area where military send low-level training flights you wouldn't realise it was errant until asked.

Britcoin or Britcon? Bank of England grilled on Digital Pound privacy concerns

This Danny Kruger shows dangerous signs of thinking. If he doesn't respond to a meeting with the Chief Whip somebody might be having a word with his constituency party about replacing him at the next election.

Having read the room, Unity goes back to drawing board on runtime fee policy

So with hindsight he knows what he did wrong. Hindsight is what you rely on when you don't use foresight.

Re: Too little, too late

"many devs impacted by this would be unable to fork it and just carry on"

It would only take a few.

37 Signals says cloud repatriation plan has already saved it $1 million

Re: Ops Team

"We don't have an Ops team."

You do. It's your provider's Ops team. And when it goes pear-shaped their priorities are not necessarily yours.

Re: Is it comparable?

"But just because cloud providers have geographically diverse redundant servers doesn't necessarily mean that, if one falls over, your workload will smoothly transition to another server in another location"

All the extra networking involves adds an extra layer of failure points.

Re: Is it comparable?

it's up to you to apply and pay for whatever backup rules you decide are necessary.

Re: The 90 day payback conundrum

Perhaps there needs to be legislation to limit financial statements to annually or whatever interval dividends are paid apart, possibly, from regular statements as to whether the company is still solvent. The fact that that might throw many financial analysts from Wall St & elsewhere out of work is an added bonus.

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

Re: Should this be so easy?

"Maybe the world should have adopted different connectors for the two different voltages."

A lot of equipment these days is multi-voltage. That's a much better solution than adding yet another variety to the world's leads.

Re: It doesn't always smoke though

"definitive"

Good use for the word. Must remember it.

Salesforce flipflops from 'you're fired' to 'you're hired' in six short months

Re: A board with no insight

It should also be a warning to prospective customers. And existing ones, come to that.

"Salesforce announced a slew of new technical features"

Maybe they've suddenly realised they need somebody to create what they announced.

There's nothing like looking as if you know what you're doing and ...

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Re: Own goal after own goal

"The employees aren't stupid, they can see exactly what the medium term effect will be, and they'll be the ones paying the price."

Don't get angry, get out.

Irish watchdog fines TikTok €345M for mishandling kids' data

Re: Shakedown? Extortion?

Issuing regulations - and it's GDPR which is the relevant set of regulations here - like all legislation needs to tread a fine line. If it's too specific it's full of loopholes and/or fails completely to deal with innovation. The best legislation sets out principles and lets some tribunal - a regulator or a court - handle the case-by-case specifics. On the one hand that builds up case law so there is a set of decisions which can be followed when circumstances are repeated, detailed reasoning on how to apply those decisions in future and flexibility to cope when something completely new comes along.

As such GDPR is pretty good as far as it goes. It's arguable that it could have enabled or even required the regulators to be more pro-active instead of sitting waiting for complaints to come in. I suspect the EU, with its ideas about gatekeepers, may work round to that.

Re: Data is just like breathing

No, no, you don't understand. US company, good; Chinese company, bad.

Probe reveals previously secret Israeli spyware that infects targets via ads

Re: How to pay

You didn't mention a subscription-based search engine. If there was an ad-free, reliable search engine that respected a few operators such as +, -, and, not, or, etc would people subscribe? It's probably a moot point because if someone tried to set one up the usual suspects would improve their game for a year or so and roll over it.

Re: How to pay

"Search ads will be as relevant as before - that is when a user wants it."

For some value of "relevant". It's unbelievable just how determinedly Amazon's search engine can be despite the whole purpose is for them to sell you stuff.

Re: Insanet only selling to Western nations?

Quality is expensive, doesn't adversely affects the bottom line

FTFY

Re: Insanet only selling to Western nations?

There's no separation between "program" and "data"

Well, that's von Neumann architecture for you.

And this, boys and girls, is why you never brows the web without an ad-blocker.

Scattered Spider traps 100+ victims in its web as it moves into ransomware

Re: The race is ON!

Just leave the bodies lying around in the street as a warning to others.

Activist investor to GoDaddy: Cut costs, improve sales, or sell

Re: "activist" investor

They could double down - buy it and put Musk in to run it.

Re: Sorry guys...

Just wondering - does anyone here have clients on GoDaddy?

Re: "activist" investor

"At least they did not yet buy GoDaddy with its own money, did they?"

If an "activist" investor thinks it can run the business it should take it over completely and prove it.

Google promises eternity of updates for Chromebooks – that's a decade for everyone else

"after those updates stopped, expired Chromebooks ended up as e-waste"

I'd have thought they just ended up as Chromebooks no longer getting updates. Did they really stop working?

Re: "at the end of their usefulness"

I thought that, as with any S/W, the life starts at release date so for something with embedded S/W like a Chromebook, that would be at product launch.

Meet Honda's latest electric vehicle: A rideable suitcase

Re: Remember the Honda 50?

"But could be driven on a car licence. A Honda 90 needed a motorcycle licence."

You say that as if the M/C licence is a bad thing. But a rider on a provisional licence doesn't need a qualified rider as company, unlike a provisional driver. It was a cheaper alternative for those of limited means. The whole point of the three-wheelers like the Reliant Robin was that they could be driven on a M/C licence (legally indistinguishable from a M/C & sidecar!) so there was no need to obtain a full car licence.

Arm IPO kicks off today with CPU slinger valued at $54.5B

Re: All a mess

AFAICS it was you who sold off your shares. There are many things for which to blame HMG but is selling Arm one of them?

Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

Re: Connection

"So odd that Tesla is not on that list."

Not at all. Musk won't want to cannibalise his Powerwall market. It pains me to say it but that's the more sensible way to go. The requirements of EV charging and grid backup are not the same and not likely to be fully compatible for many if not most use cases.

Re: "because if you unplug your car, your house goes dark"

"you’re already paying for it" as a car, not as storage for the grid

"and like most cars it spends over half its working life parked at your house." to be used as a car when needed, not to keep the tarmac dry because it's been drained. Realistically, any Pennine village I drive through has cars parked on the road because rows and rows of industrial revolution period houses were built with little or no space between front door and footpath (footpath? luxury!). Such cars can't be connected to the house and I can't see the necessary public 2-way infrastructure being built by 3rd parties any time soon. there's enough problems getting enough public 1-way infrastructure built.

Re: Not sure I'd do this

"on days you’re not travelling"

I suspect you meant was "days when you're not planning to travel". If you have an emergency and need, for example, to go to A & E the electricity company isn't going to reply that loan quickly enough.

Re: Voila!

You just need a big fleet of EVs to store all that energy you get during the summer. That should tide you over until spring.

Re: Voila!

"Solar + storage"

For a flat-dweller there's going to be no solar to store. Even a south-facing flat with permission to hang panels on the exterior wall (and there won't be many of those) it's not going to amount to much.

Capita class action: 2,000 folks affected by data theft sign up

Re: C(r)apita....there I've fixed that for you.

Fly by nights? No such luck, they're always there.