Posts by Doctor Syntax

FreeBSD gains eMMC support so … errr … watch out, Android

I'd like to think that anyone who has the - shall we say good taste? - to use BSD in an IoT thing will also be inclined to do better than to let the user operate it with a default password.

Oath-my-God: THREE! BILLION! Yahoo! accounts! hacked! in! 2013! – not! 'just!' 1bn!

"The thing with the exclamation marks was never funny."

Funny, no; scornful, yes.

Re: Marissa Meyer laughed all the way to the bank

"Hewlett Packard Enterprises"

Fails on "in right mind".

Life began after meteorites splashed into warm ponds of water, say astronomers

" I'm satisfied that we're here based on an incredible string of random chances over an insanely long period of time."

No we're just a simulation - sorry, wrong thread.

" We have provided plausible physical and chemical information about the conditions under which life could have originated. Now it’s the experimentalists turn to find out how life could indeed have emerged under these very specific early conditions.”

Translation: We've done the easy bit. Can someone put it together?

In reality we don't have separate DNA, protein and energy handling chemistries. They form an interactive whole. Once the thing is up and working it's easy to see how advantageous chance changes can be preserved. Discovering how a sufficient collection of apparently unlikely changes came together it assemble a self-reproducing system is a different matter.

Re: Why highlight meteorites?

"The meteorites and large asteroids of the early solar system were probably important for delivering water to ancient earth"

Why suppose that meteorites and large asteroids would have had water and the early Earth wouldn't? They might have added water but if was around in the early solar system for them to incorporate it was also available for the early Earth.

Home Sec Amber Rudd: Yeah, I don't understand encryption. So what?

Re: But this isn't a new area for legislation

"I don't need to understand how encryption works to understand how it's helping – end-to-end encryption – the criminals."

What needs to be fed back against this is that it's simply a tool and like any other tool, has its good and bad uses. In this case its good use is the securing of everyday commercial transactions. In trying to destroy it you are helping criminals Home Secretary.

"Theresa May, who excelled at these two things as Home Secretary, to the point hat no-one noticed that she has literally no other recognizable skills whatsoever."

Wrong. Lots of us noticed.

Re: Fashionanle Ignorance

"Westminster House of Commons still has a formal separation between the benches of the opposing parties that inhibits sword fights."

The pegs in the cloakrooms also have loops for hanging up members' swords.

Re: Fashionanle Ignorance

"Another key to success is building mutual respect with the technical experts so they give you good advice and information."

That's only half of it. The other half is that management should heed that advice and information. Not just listen to it, heed it.

Re: From the BBC article

"I am not suggesting you give us the code,"

Which only adds to her display of ignorance. Some encryption code is readily available if you want it and even for proprietary code either it will use publicly available algorithms or the TLAs will be with home-grown alternatives. It's the keys that matter and for real end-to-end not even the vendor will have those. But the thing that matters most of all is the extent to which encryption is essential to the security of everyday commercial life and that the damage she can wreak there vastly exceeds what terrorists are attempting to do. It is she that is trying to help the criminals and everyone else who is trying to stop her.

"Otherwise, you end up in the Canute-like position of trying to repeal maths by force of law, which doesn't work."

Sorry to go all Bob but JUST GO AND READ UP ABOUT CANUTE.

Re: Rudd

"She's just banned the sale of acid to under 18s."

Presumably bleach is still OK.

Re: Rudd

"Has she remembered hydroxic acid? That should definitely be banned too."

Ooh, look! You've got exactly its pH in upvotes.

Re: Techies will continue to sneer. I think I get her. She simply does not care

"She simply does not care."

The odd thing is she seems to care that she's sneered at - and still doesn't try to work out why.

Re: Fashionanle Ignorance

"At what point in our society did it become acceptable to declare your own ignorance and be proud not to know something so fundamental."

A very long time ago. In fact, I'm not sure there ever was a time this side of the middle ages where knowledge other than legal knowledge was essential. In the middle ages a talent for violence was also handy.

Re: The Home Office

Has she not asked anyone to explain to her how "it works"? Is there nobody there that understands it?

I've explained this before.

There are people at the HO who do understand it. They need someone who doesn't to front things for them because such a person will be able to spout the bollocks they tell her with complete sincerity as she doesn't know any better.

ISIS and Jack Daniel's: One of these things is not like the other

Re: Ignorance knows no borders

"It is frequently mixed with Coca-Cola, many times with Diet Coke!"

Seems reasonably. If they didn't do that they might mix one or other of them with something that could be harmed by such treatment.

BBC Telly Tax petition given new Parliament debate date

Don't call it a tax

You'll only give the Treasury ideas. They'll call it a hypothecated tax. Who would want such a tax with such a nasty name? So much nicer to just take it into general taxation and then HMG can fund the Beeb directly....

The licence may not be an ideal way of funding the Beeb, especially when operated by Crapita, but the alternatives - ads or direct government control - are much, much worse.

MH370 final report: Aussies still don’t know where it crashed or why

Re: If you found the plane it wouldn't bring the people back.

"So, what doubt are you trying to resolve?"

The doubt as to the cause and, not knowing that, we thus don't know if it was something which could be corrected on other aircraft to make them a little safer.

Re: planet is surrounded by spy satellites

"OT: Oi, El Reg! The wavy red line of disapproval appears beneath the word when I write kilometer, but disappears if I swap the last two letters. Please load a proper English dictionary! (Or in this particular case, a French one, I guess)."

Assuming you're not actually joking:

(a) The dictionary is supplied by you via your browser. In my case, using Seamonkey which is the same program for both browser and mail, I get exactly the same underlining in both the browser and the mail composing windows.

(b) Kilometre is the original French spelling and hence is correct unless you live in a country that also thinks that colour and theatre are also incorrect.

If you wish to persist in using the spellings currently in vogue in the colonies load the en_us dictionary or right-click on the word and add your misspelling to your dictionary.

"despite us being able to view a pimple on the nose of anyone on the planet via satellites"

Once your initial assumption is wrong even the most impeccable logic won't help you.

Forget the 'simulated universe', say boffins, no simulator could hit the required scale

Re: But when no one's watching...

"the observers"

In the plural? Do you have a proof there's more than one?

Re: The whole point of simulating a universe

"There's observer effect and faster than speed of light communication between entangled particles, how much more obvious easter egg you need ?"

Not Easter eggs. The whole of quantum physics and relativity are just bugs that haven't been sorted out yet. Newtonian mechanics was all that was intended.

s/some of the sims/the sim

What makes you think there's more than you?

Re: What if it isn't a simulation but reality?

"It would basically refer to the fact that ... our universe is part of something much bigger, something not easily comprehensible."

I don't know about you but I find the universe itself not easily comprehensible let alone anything bigger.

Re: "To model just a few hundred electrons needs a computer bigger than the universe"

e) If I (and this has to be expressed in 1st person terms) exist in a simulation then none of you, el Reg or anyone else exist except as inputs presented to me. That includes the papers you write which I'd have no way of verifying as I have no access to the observatories that don't exist. So if one were to consider oneself as living in a simulation one doesn't have to believe that everything an entire universe is being simulated all the time because nothing outside one's immediate experience needs to be simulated all the time; it can just be instantiated as needed.

Smart burglar alarms: Look who just tossed their hat into the ring ... It's, er, Ring

Re: 'it's hard to know'

And if el Reg stopped reporting stuff then in 2 year times there wouldn't have been shocking revelations in the last 2 years. We might all think things had been cleaned up.

Mainframes are hip now! Compuware fires its dev environment into cloud

Re: Solution is simple

Yup. There's nothing like offering serious money and this is nothing like offering serious money.

Ancient fat black holes created by belching Big Bang's dark matter

Re: So...

"the hypothesis we're talking about depends so strongly upon something we can't prove to be true"

Or prove to be false?

It used to be the case that science proceeded by making empirically testable hypotheses and testing them, discarding the duds and retaining the not-yet-proven-to-be-duds. Now we seem to be proceeding by only hypothetically testing hypotheses.

It's the white one with a big ferric chloride stain.

Telco forgot to renew its web domain, broke deaf folks' video calls – now gets a $3m paddlin'

Re: Here in the UK... off topic

"it is too difficult for police to solve most simple theft in modern cities."

Simple theft is apt to leave few clues. You stand more chance of getting the culprits when they do something stupid. That doesn't, however, mean that there shouldn't be a preliminary investigation otherwise the opportunities will be missed.

Tarmac for America's self-driving car future is being laid right now

Re: Driving at less than the speed limit

"Not everyone needs to get from A to B in as short a time as possible ALL OF THE TIME."

But some of the people you're holding up need to get from A to Z and the accumulation of time spent behind those who don't means that they end up driving the latter part of their journey much more tired than they need to be.

Re: Insurance-Lobbyists:

"no matter what data protection laws say"

Data protection? In the US?

IKEA flat-packs TaskRabbit to crack assembly code

"I've assembled plenty of IKEA and random brand flatpack stuff, I've NEVER experienced missing holes."

It had all the right holes but not necessarily in the right order.

"Are you positive it - or possibly the piece it joined up with - wasn't the wrong way up?"

No. Holes drilled in edges to take bolts. "Matching" holes to take cams drilled adjacent to opposite edge at other end of piece. Either the process missed out a 180° rotation or put an extra one in.

No matter how many Taskers they have it wouldn't have made it any easier assembling the grand-kids desk. A component had half the holes drilled with the the component 180° out of alignment.

Re: @ Prst. V.Jeltz

"Also missed a couple of full stops and Cap letters."

And an apostrophe.

"If you ask me everyone should assemble their own furniture by law ... Same for other areas , like cooking , reading writing"

It would make eating out interesting. Presumably TV would just show the scripts - can't have actors and newsreaders doing the job for you. And book-buying....

Vibrating walls shafted servers at a time the SUN couldn't shine

Re: Dockyard

"It took a heck of a lot to kill those DEC terminals."

And maybe other DEC kit. Back in the '80s of Big Bang London there was the story of DEC being asked by a non-customer if they could supply a copy of the OS. They asked what it was for. Someone had found a presumably surplus Micro-VAX tossed into a skip.

"Oracle may have hosed out its hardware teams but still has this whopping PDF Reference Manual for the machines. What bruisers they were! Each needed a full rack all to itself"

That's what I call a reference manual.

Internet-wide security update put on hold over fears 60 million people would be kicked offline

Re: The problem?

"I say just do it.

Then all the companies running DNS servers and not maintaining them will get an in-flood of angry customers some will leave and the company will learn it's lesson to not leave stale infrastructure out there."

Maybe a half-way house. Roll it out for a short period then roll back (they did have a roll back facility in their plans, didn't they? Then announce "Did you have a problem? If so you've got a month to fix it, then it's permanent."

At last, someone's taking Apple to task for, uh, not turning on iPhone FM radio chips

"When wireless networks go down during a natural disaster, smartphones with activated FM chips can allow Americans to get vital access to life-saving information,"

So any other nationalities caught in the danger area don't get warnings?

Really, is it so hard to say "people"?

NatWest customer services: We're aware of security glitch

Re: password specifications..

"the servers handling authentication are much less likely to have been compromised with malware"

OTOH if your device is compromised you lose control over your own passwords and, frankly, the bank isn't going to care about that. If the authentication server is compromised they lose control over everyone's passwords and. of course, the bank ... Yes, you can see why they're choosing such an insecure option.

Seriously, there are two aspects to risk. One is the probability that something will go wrong, the other is the scale of going wrong.

Re: password specifications..

"Isn't it time there was a standard for this stuff?"

A standard? There are lots of standards. Just pick one.

Re: Next time, screenshot it and post it on Twitter with a link to the story

"We can't be arsed to do our job properly unless you hang out your dirty laundry in public on Twitter" approach to customer service

AFAICS customer service was doing its job - it even escalated the problem, a step which seems to be unknown to many these days. The tech side -trying without success.. It's PR that needs to be hung out to dry.

“in order to more thoroughly investigate"

OK, a split infinitive isn't actually reckoned to be ungramatical. Throwing in an adjective as well is just plain ugly.

OTOH I take it that "exceeding authority" is PR-speak for telling the truth.

Alleged dark web drug baron cuffed – after he flew to US for World Beard Championships

"Interesting they didn't try and get the gendarmes to do this with a bit of help from Interpol?"

No promotions available for that although, to be fair, they might not have expected him to tote all the evidence around on a laptop for the gendarmes to find.

Re: I believe the word we are all struggling to vocalise is ...

"surrender encryption keys at the *French* border on the way in"

He should have surrendered his on the way out.

Microsoft gives all staff a marked-up 'Employee Edition' of Satya Nadella's new book

Re: I can reveal the chapter headings...

Surely all the chapters after 8 are numbered 10.

El Reg is hiring an intern. Apply now before it closes

Re: Want a remote one?

"Can you operate a Teasmaid?"

WHy are you teasing maids?