Posts by Ian Mason

Signal chat app clone used by Signalgate's Waltz was apparently an insecure mess

No, I did too. I find the similarity a little "something", quite what that "something" is I'm not quite sure

Three Brits charged over 'active shooter threats' swattings in US, Canada

Re: sentenced to 20 months in prison, suspended for 18 months, in April 2024.

They couldn't be extradited. Our extradition treaties with other nations require that the offence being extradited for would also be an offence in the UK. As the article points out, there isn't a specific "swatting" offence in the UK. The reason that our treaties are like that is so we don't have to extradite people for offences are incompatible with our idea of the rule of law, like apostasy or lèse-majesté which are criminal offences in some countries.

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

Re: Patent law has been abused for decades.

You're wrong about patent law being created to reward creators, it was created so that creators could share their methods for the general good while still enjoying exclusivity on benefiting from their methods for a limited period. The deal was that rather than protect their ideas for their own exclusive use by keeping their methods secret that they would be given exclusive rights for a limited time if and only if they openly published them in a patent application. Patents were originally about promoting openness.

Re: Copyright is not IP

You are going to have to spend a long time living down the manifestly stupid claim that copyright law and intellectual property law have nothing to do with each other. Your claim is on the close order to claiming that red paint and paint have nothing to do with each other.

GCC 15 is close: COBOL and Itanium are in, but ALGOL is out

The characterisation is unfair

The characterisation of algol 68 as "over-complex" is both unfair and untrue. Any competent programmer could pick up Woodward & Bond's 99 page "ALGOL 68-R User's Guide" and learn and use 99% of the language in a single day. In fact it's gloriously simple and regular, or "orthogonal" as the algol 68 designers liked to describe it.

I challenge anybody to learn 99% of C++, Swift, Go, or Python in the same timescale.

Unloved, probably true, but that just demonstrates how rare good taste is.

Re: ALGOL-68 is out

Boroughs algol was always a direct algol 60 descendent. Not a hint of '68 to it.

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

Re: Unless a finger smear or a slice of cheese is enough to damage the Cybertruck

They got the very last of the brains, just after the ginger cats.

There is a theory that there is only one labrador braincell and that they all have to share it in a fashion similar to the single electron shared by the whole universe as mooted by Pauli (Man, I want some of what Pauli was smoking that day).

Nvidia shovels $500M into Israeli boffinry supercomputer

Clipy

Looks like you're trying to build a supercomputer to test atomic bomb designs. Do you need help with that?

UK government tech procurement lacks understanding, says watchdog

Rinse, repeat.

Every few years the NAO goes through this exercise, every few years they come to the same conclusion. It's like a perennial driving test failer going for their 16th test and failing yet again. Perhaps it's time hire a chauffeur and be done with it.

Tongue-zapping spoons, tea-cooling catbots, lazy vacuums and more from CES

Re: Fire, retrain, redeploy

Hey Treez, is that you? Got fired again?

A vision of the robot vacuum cleaner rushing into the living room when mum or the vicar is visiting, proudly holding aloft some sex toy left abandoned on the bedroom floor, immediate comes to mind.

Tesla, Musk double down on $56B payday appeal

Re: Doesn't make sense

In a word, yes. Track what institutional investors are doing with Tesla shares - quietly dumping them to minimise their exposure to risk.

Re: Doesn't make sense

I would dispute that panel and styling changes are unusual for a mid-life refresh. Instead I would say that panel and styling changes are the principal changes wrought in most auto maker's mid-life model refreshes.

The latest language in the GNU Compiler Collection: Algol-68

The stated reason for the RS compiler and language variant was to support modular programming as the ALGOL 68 view of the world was all monolithic programs. The RS extensions introduced ways of compiling chunks of ALGOL 68 as modules and then compositing them into a complete program, it wasn't pretty. The modular extensions aside, the RS compiler was a pleasant enough implementation to use. There was, of all things, a Multics port of it which I got to use.

Re: Lead to a bunch of stuff at what was RSRE Malvern

Wirth's moans were just because his proposal for ALGOL X was rejected. He later went on to release it anyway as ALGOL W, which sank without trace.

Fear of Foxconn reportedly driving possible Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi merger

Re: Foxconn's iPhone experience isn't relevant here

Yeah, that struck me as a pretty facile statement too. Smacks a bit of "Only 1000 words to Christmas, who cares if what i write makes no sense."

Judge hands WP Engine a win in legal fight with Automattic

Re: Shitstorm

Well, you've just answered your own question - it's unlawful anticompetitive behaviour.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Re: Stop with the useless A better than B crap

As any engineer will tell any manager "Products can be had good, cheaply, safe, or soon. Now pick which two out of those four that you want because it is not possible to have all four."

Re: Which language do you think is used to implement all those memory-safe languages?

C was bootstrapped using its predecessor B, which itself was bootstraped via TMG (TransMoGrifiers - a compiler generator). C was not bootstrapped in machine code, or even assembler.

Re: No, of course I've no idea if this remotely resembles the actual syntax used...

It might just be a bit easier to:

#pragma pretend-to-be-rust=on

int main ()

....

return 0;

#pragma pretend-to-be-rust=off

That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled

Re: USA

Illegal under the Fraud Act 2006 section 2. No doubt about it.

Definitely illegal in the UK.

This falls squarely under Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006. "... dishonestly makes a false representation ... cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss [i.e to an applicant]".

If anyone from HR or an employment agency is watching, that's worth up to 10 years in prison plus a fine.

Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

Re: Approach? What approach?

I doubt they are. Typically it is only selected institutions and people that are sanctioned. It's unlikely, but not impossible, that the individual contributors are on the sanctions list. This smacks more of ignorance or laziness in understanding the sanctions regime and regulations.

I note that in insulting people's lack of historical memory he doesn't also educate them that Finland was on the wrong side in WWII.

Missing scissors cause 36 flight cancellations in Japan

Re: Meanwhile in Zürich...

CS spray? A section five prohibited weapon (Firearms Act 1968), unlawful possession of which carries a mandatory 5 year prison sentence. Not a good mistake to make.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Moaners

I'll have a bet that all the people moaning about this think they are better than average drivers. So too do most drivers, and I hope I don't have to explain to reg readers that "Averages don't work like that".

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

The vague "Vodafone Platform"

Hmm. Vodafone don't do IT, just connectivity, so I wonder if 'interacting with the Vodafone Platform' just really means "our data sims have stopped working".

Vodafone are phasing out some of their data only sim plans; I got an email telling me that a Vodafone data only service I use is ceasing soon (1st August in case of the particular service that I use). What are the chances that someone at BA got a similar email, failed to act on it and the deadline to find an alternative to a Vodafone data only mobile service just came and went? Is this just a variant on the "forgot to renew a certificate" classic fail?

Microsoft bigwig says the Feds catching Chinese spies in Exchange Online is the cloud working as intended

You trusted the email accounts of high value targets to Microsoft's Exchange Online? There's your mistake, all the rest is a consequence of that decision.

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Re: GOOD

Don't worry, in six months the self same authors will be penning a paper on how noise pollution kills. Obviously in between writing articles for the Daily Fail on what new thing it is that cause cancer this month.

Texan construction workers put a rocket up Team SpaceX over 'unpaid bills'

Re: I predict a major scramble by creditors soon

My advice is to buy popcorn futures.

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Re: 0/10 for current affairs

Intelligent creatures learn from experience and adapt, LLMs don't. Ergo intelligence is qualitatively different.

If you correct an LLM it doesn't incorporate that into its world model. Playing with the llama2 model (prompted by this article) it conflated race and ethnicity. I pointed this out, it apologised and issued a 'correction' without the mistake, except that all it did was substitute the word "ethnicity" for "race" in its first appearance and then continued to say "race" for the rest of the paragraph.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

The late?

Given it's about auditing I'd have gone with the late Arthur Anderson.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

Re: Depends on your definition of growler I guess.

> I never drank it myself, but watching the effect on others was very amusing, until I had to take them to A&E!

Why A&E? Oh lordy, they weren't stupid enough to spill any in their laps were they?

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

Anyone who needs to ask the question "is Microsoft Windows a trustworthy operating system?" clearly hasn't been paying attention. That question was answered in the negative a long time ago.

X hiring 100 content cops in bid to tame Wild West of online safety

Re: X

Stop mentioning gammon, you're making me hungry.

The Post Office systems scandal demands a critical response

"the Post Office, had the very unusual power to bring private criminal prosecutions."

No, there's nothing unusual to it. Everybody has the power to bring a private criminal prosecution.

You used to just have to pop into the nearest magistrates court and 'swear out an information' but nowadays you just toddle along to gov.uk, grab a copy of the form "Application for summons or warrant for arrest for alleged offence under Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980 section 1, CrimPR 7.2(6)", fill it out and submit it to the court. There's a lot more detail to actually conducting a prosecution, but the essential thing is that anyone has the power to bring a private criminal prosecution, perhaps not the expertise to, but certainly the power to.

GNOME Foundation's new executive director sparks witch hunt

Re: It's not a witch hunt.

Luxury? You 'ad it easy.

When I were a lad we had to program t' computer by hardwiring the program into it, in actual wire on plugboard. And we had to make the wire ourselves, after getting up two hours before we went to bed to mine the ore for the metal for the wire ourselves.

Re: Probably off-topic, but ...

It's necessary to point out that Dublin is in Ireland because Americans may read this, and they get very confused when a placename, that they have reused umpteen times to name somewhere in the US of A, is used to refer to the original and not the Dublin in Ohio, California, Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas, or Michigan (and I've probably missed some).

If only the early settlers had possessed just a little more imagination, the USA would not have 21 Glasgows, 7 Edinburghs, 10 Londons, 7 Cardiffs, 16 Birminghams, and 27 Brightons - that last one clearly suggests a lot of people wishing for somewhere to go to for a dirty weekend.

China uses Alibaba's Euro logistic hub to spy on stuff, Belgian intelligence fears

50 hackers?

Meanwhile, FBI Director Christopher Wray has repeatedly warned that China has 50 hackers for every one of the bureau's infosec operatives.

Do they also work in the State Department?

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: IBM did this for years

Burroughs too, exact same thing except they changed a couple of wire wrap connections to do the upgrade.

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

Incompetence, as usual.

Breeden responded: "We haven't got to the point yet where those [privacy] issues have been raised; we're at the technical design point. ..."

Then the people involved aren't competent to be involved. Privacy issues in a digital currency have to be at the core of the technical design if it is to have a possibility of meeting any privacy constraints placed upon it. Anybody who doesn't realise this has no business being anywhere within a thousand miles of any digital currency design.

By the sounds of it they expect to bake privacy in by saying, legislatively, thou shalt not breach privacy instead of ensuring technically that it is not possible for you to breach privacy.

This kind of idiocy is not surprising to those who have watched various government types keep insisting that there must be a way you can break encryption but only for the "good guys".

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

> "As levels of stupidity go, this is breathtakingly advanced Grandmaster stuff. Even the British government would struggle to surpass it!"

Jacob Rees-Mogg: Hold my claret!

Re: The big ones will leave rapidly too

C'mon, you can't say "the hoi polloi" in the reg comments section and not expect to get pulled up on it!

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

ARM: pay attention

People don't like bullies. If you want to see yourself lose market share to RISC V, just carry on the thuggish behaviour.

People don't forget, and perhaps even now there are embedded engineers the world around going "You know, I've been meaning to have a play with RISC V and if ARM are going to run around being arseholes perhaps now's the time to do it. If they can be this stupid in how they treat people who are trying to help them by educating about their architecture, what other boneheaded mistakes are they going to make once the IPO really goes to their heads?".

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Re: So Musk has blood on his hands

Yeah, they'll make a complete mess of it like the Afghanis did against Russia. Oh, wait, the Afghanis won!

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Re: Jeepers.

The SOS phone on my car just reads out the GPS coordinates to the emergency operator via speech synthesis before connecting you personally (via hands free) to the operator.

Amateurish, at best.

Many, many years ago in 1985 I wrote a password generating algorithm for the company where I then worked. It took a 30 bit pseudorandom number, split that into three 10 bit fields and then spat out a three word password, with each word of the password taken from a list of 1024 words, all nouns, that had been carefully crosschecked for possible confusion by feeding them all through the "soundex" algorithm. Soundex is normally used to find words that sound alike, even if the writer uses the conventions of another language (e.g. "mare-duh" instead of "merde"). It was developed to help match people's names under variant spelling.

If as a fresh faced junior programmer I could manage to spot, and mitigate, the risk of homophones, what does that say about the quality of the thinking that went into What Three Words?

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

Re: Narrow but uncertain applicability?

Hey, at least they stated their assumptions.

I recently read a paper on how exercise modes affect blood pressure that was reported in the the press akin to "These two exercises could reduce your dangerously high blood pressure" where they made the assumption that the control groups in the papers they were doing a meta analysis of were sufficiently similar to allow all the studies to be linked. Of course they (1) didn't actually state the implicit assumption or (2) provide any evidence that the assumption held thus rendering the paper little more than prettily worded bunkum and the conclusions worthless.

Unlike this paper, which at most is going to be used to justify a bit of Friday afternoon bunking off, that paper is going to possibly genuinely and seriously affect the health of people who get an exercise prescription from a medic who (a) didn't read more that the conclusions or a report of them, (b) isn't smart enough to spot the terrible methodological mistake.

Twitter sues Brit non-profit, claims hate-speech reports scared off advertisers

Re: Hate-speech reports scared off advertisers

Since 1979. TFTFY.

OK, that got a genuine "Laugh out loud".

Re: Arrogant Muskrat

Given that the word's roots are Latin, via Italian, the Italian Partito Nazionale Fascista, the Italian Fasci Italiani di Combattimento the Italian Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria, and the Italian Fascio Rivoluzionario d'Azione Internazionalista I think claiming a French origin might be a bit off the mark.