Posts by EngineerAl

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

Ccea blocks me, why?

When I try to see anything on ccea.org.uk I am blocked. I live in Canada. What is ccea hiding?

Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed

Not that new?

I recall having a copy of a program on my Apple ][ called Racter that acted similarly when seeded with a bunch of text. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter. It just typed back words based on the frequency of those words in the seed text. This ChatGPT looks like a more sophisticated Racter.

Troll jailed for 5 years after swatting of Twitter handle owner ends in death

Re: You have gotta be SWATting me.

Gender re-assignment surgery is only given to adults. Younger people may change their gender expression (totally reversable) or when old enough to need it, take puberty-blocking medications (again totally reversable) until they reach adult age and then can have surgery if they still want. (Going through puberty in the usual way is not reversable. )

Redcentric CFO quits after botched accounts discovered

How long can this sort of thing continue?

If I have a small business, and my accounts are goofed up by showing more profit than actually occurred, wouldn't the problems show up pretty quickly in my bank account (or equivalent)? How can large enterprises kite things for years without some one external noticing?

Four Boys' Own style World War Two heroes to fire your imagination

Long before WWI - but noteworthy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cochrane,_10th_Earl_of_Dundonald

One of the models for Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey, but possibly more unlikely than them.

Ice volcanoes just part of Plutonic pandemonium

Escaped Moon of Neptune?

There is some thought Pluto may be a moon escaped from Neptune. When it was a Neptunian moon, would tidal forces at that time have generated enough heat to cause ice volcanoes?

BOFH: An architect and his own entirely avoidable downfall

Pet peeve 487 - meeting rooms in engineers' offices with paint that won't tolerate tape holding up plans. What do they figure we use the d--m meeting rooms for if not to look at plans?

Bluetooth privacy is mostly ignored, so you're beaming yourself to the world

I operate several bluetooth devices used for analysis of motor vehicle travel speeds and distribution. All I get out of the gadget is the MAC address. I can't connect the MAC address to any particular person unless I know the match from some other means. What else are the phones (and the cars' electronics) transmitting?

BTW the maker of our gadgets allows hashing the MAC addresses before storage so that's what we do.

Looking for laxatives, miss? Shoppers stalked via smartphone Wi-Fi

MAC addresses - so what?

OK, so MAC addresses can be picked up and tracked around the store, or in front of the store. I don't think there is any list anywhere of what person has what MAC address, so the address itself is anonymous. If I worked for the company or maybe the store I could maybe work out what the hashed value of my own MAC address is, but without getting a match between randomly observed addresses and real people, so what?

Ex-cop: Holborn fireball comms outage cover for £200m bling heist gang

Re: Copper thieves

No ground or neutral at the location the thieves are working, but other nearby(ish) neutrals and grounds serve the purpose?

Qualcomm fires DMCA shotgun at alleged code thieves on GitHub – including itself

Trade Secret?

How can someone claim infringement of a trade secret? Isn't a "trade secret" some piece of intellectual property someone decided *not* to copyright or patent so the "secret" can remain unknown outside the organization?