Posts by gnasher729

Blinking cursor devours CPU cycles in Visual Studio Code editor

Here's a possibility: At some point the screen was updated twice a second (or when you typed), so that used 0.4% CPU time, and nobody cared how efficient or inefficient the actual drawing was. It was inefficient, but who cares if it's 0.4% CPU time inefficient?

Then someone was careless and introduced 60 updates per second. Now the inefficiency hurts. (Of course nobody will work to make the screen updates twice as fast, if you can just set the updates back to twice a second and save a lot more CPU time).

Most likely it's not rendering just the cursor but the whole screen.

'Sorry, I've forgotten my decryption password' is contempt of court, pal – US appeal judges

Re: Morton's Fork

What you have is a different situation. You have some random old files on your disk. And quite a few of them. So your claim that you have forgotten the password is quite reasonable. Forensics can check when these files were last opened. If I have an encrypted hard drive _attached to my computer_, then a claim that I forgot the password is much less believable. Since I don't throw away things often enough, there is a chance that there is an old hard drive somewhere in my garage that is encrypted and I don't know the password. That old hard drive would turn up when my garage is searched, it wouldn't be attached to my computer. It would be covered in dust. It would be years old. It's a different situation.

Saying that you forgot a password isn't contempt of court. Saying that you forgot a password when it is quite clear that this is a lame excuse, that is contempt of court.

Re: Actual case aside

"You, too, are applying circular reasoning here, basing your conclusion on things you'd have to prove first to be considered facts. "

There's no circular reasoning at all. Police and court have the legal right to access the disk drive. There's a search warrant. You need a strong suspicion for a search warrant, not evidence that something will be found - if you had that evidence, you wouldn't need to search. And the accused was ordered to provide the password. As far as "contempt of court" is concerned, it doesn't matter what's on the drive. If he is totally innocent and refuses to hand over the password when ordered, it's still contempt of court.

Just like opening your front door to police with a search warrant, handing over your password is not (in this case) incriminating yourself. It's the evidence on the drive that would incriminate you, not the fact that you have the password - which is already known, otherwise there would be no contempt of court. And you have no right to hide that evidence.

A situation where you wouldn't have to reveal the password because the act would be incriminating: If you live with a roommate, and if there was an encrypted disk, likely containing child porn, but just pictures with no evidence of the owner on the disk, and if it was known beyond reasonable doubt to be either your disk or your roommates disk, then providing the password would be proof that it is yours and not your roommate's. That would be self incriminating and you wouldn't have to provide the password.

Re: Already incriminated by a witness.

"If they've got the sister's sworn testimony, why do they need the files? "

She claims she has seen hundreds of photos. That doesn't mean "hundreds of photos" is proven. Just like when the cops measure you drove 56 mph in 50 zone, only maybe 53 mph will be considered "proven". Or he could have shown her the same 50 photos six times.

On the other hand, they don't care how many pictures he showed to his sister, but how many are on his drive. Even if it was considered proven that there are pictures on the drive, for _correct_ sentencing you would need to know how many exactly. And these photos come from somewhere, so they might help the police catching the distributor. Plenty of reasons to want to see what's on the files.

Re: Court fail

About 30 years ago I met a retired postman (in his 60s) who bought himself an Apple II computer, learnt 6502 assembly language, and did some things with it that impressed all the kids in their 20's.

Re: Actual case aside

"Also, somehow wanting to force the accused person to reveal his password goes against all established principles of due process, like the accused not having to incriminate himself, or the right to remain silent."

That's where you are absolutely wrong. Evidence on an encrypted drive is the same as evidence in a safe - you have no right at all to keep that evidence unknown to the police if they have a search warrant, and no right to keep it secret from the court.

You would only incriminate yourself if the fact that you know the password is incriminating. If you live with your room mate, and the police knows beyond reasonable doubt that _one of you_ has the password to a hard drive full of child porn, but they don't know which one, then the fact that _you_ know the password would incriminate you. But in this case, no. The fact that he knows the password is not incriminating evidence, so he has to reveal it.

Re: Future Justice

"Why not cut to the chase; introduce a law which says "if we believe you to be guilty then you are. No evidence needed"."

But there is evidence. There was a Mac Pro whose contents got decrypted and which showed evidence of child porn downloads. And there were encrypted hard drives connected to that Mac. If I had an encrypted drive and forgot the password, I would try any password I can think of until I get the right one or give up, and when given up it would be reformatted.

'Clearance sale' shows Apple's iPad is over. It's done

Apple can increase prices, then everyone complains that they are going mad increasing prices and will go bankrupt. Apple can keep prices the same, then everyone complains that they are too expensive and need to drop prices to compete. And Apple can reduce prices, then everyone complains that it is a "clearance sale" and the iPad is over. Since _anything_ they could possibly do will lead to harsh criticism, we can discard that criticism.

In reality, Apple is selling two kinds of iPads (expensive Pro and not so expensive non-Pro). The expensive ones are not affected by this. Apple will never do anything about the £80 devices. But this move will have significant impact on the £200 - £300 devices and should increase iPad sales that way. Or force the competitors to reduce prices and lose any tiny bit of profit they are making now. It is a lot easier to convince someone to get an iPad for £339 instead of a £250 Android device than to convince them to pay £379 instead of £250.

Re: Chrome in US

"They dominate 2 markets, but small player elsewhere."

They take almost all profits in the phone market, almost all profits in the tablet market, over half the profits in the personal computer market, and almost all profits in the smart watch market.

I wonder what percentage of the portable music player market they hold - if that market still exists :-(

Re: As I have said a million times

"iMac, MacBooks, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch all followed proven established market entrants."

What alternative universe are you living in?

New iPad revealed. Big price cut is main feature

Re: Red and Pink and tired all over

"Painting something CharityRed" gives you a product where buyers automatically donate to a charity, and get a product that clearly shows that they donated to that charity. And the Product Red color is actually quite nice. It's would you buy to get noticed.

So "desperate need of a gimmick to make clueless people buy it" is rather stupid, and insulting to the cause of the charity.

Re: Re Slave Labour Camp

You claimed "Slave labour camp". No evidence of that.

It seems you just picked some websites who reproduce the same old stuff again. For example the child labour at Foxconn, which turned out to be a completely made up story by some journalist / performer.

Foxconn has about 1.2 million workers. With the average US suicide rate that would be about 40 suicides every year. It seems that Foxconn workers are considerably more happy than the average American.

Re: New iPad

"Did anyone else notice that both the new iPad and the new iPhone still come with regular USB cables, rather than USB‑C cables, so if you've bought last year's MacBook, you're still having to shell out for dongles."

If you compare the number of people who bought last year's MacBook with the number of people using any other Macs, plus the number of people using a Windows PC, I'd say this is a benefit for maybe 96% of all iPad customers.

I always find the use of words interesting. I have not once in my life used the words "shell out", it sounds too much like someone being a pretentious idiot who thinks he is writing for some publication. Same for "dongles" instead of "adapters". It's a bloody adapter that you would need, not a dongle. And there is no reason actually to plug that iPad into your MacBook. The only people having a need for that are developers, and they usually have some seven port hub connected to their MacBook.

Gift cards or the iPhone gets it: Hackers threaten Apple with millions of remote wipes

Re: Quite ironic

You certainly don't go to the same store that I use. I twice had problems with a device that I wasn't willing to solve myself, and in both case the "Genius" solved it for me, with no problems.

That said, obviously you should have your phone backed up, so "wipe it and reinstall" is indeed a painless way to solve some problems without any loss of data.

Now UK bans carry-on lappies, phones, slabs on flights from six nations amid bomb fears

Re: Denial of Service Attack

"So, you get some friends together and start chatting about a theoretical bomb-cum-laptop that doesn't actually exist. This gets the "intelligence" community all up-tight and nervous, and they put stupid restrictions like this in place."

I'll start spreading rumours that you can use a hairpiece to hide bombs. No air travel from Trump anymore!

Re: Cameras

"(apologies for Trumpbush Frankenaccent)"

That's a totally unacceptable insult to Bush, Dr. Frankenstein, and his monster.

Re: non-public?

"Can anyone confirm that thing about the scanning for density or that the battery contents are similar in specific density to explosives?"

You can sometimes have a look at what the person at the scanner sees. Yes, it is a picture showing the density of the material. I think they want to scan your laptop separately for two reasons: One, it hides other stuff in your luggage - they might not be able to see the bomb behind your laptop. Two, they can ask you to turn your laptop on. Laptops with battery replaced with explosives don't work anymore.

And yes, you can have explosives designed to have the same specific density as laptop batteries.

Re: Checked in luggage

"My guess is the hold can be strengthened against an explosion"

My guess is someone felt an urgent urge to kiss Trump's arse. So don't expect Germany to copy this (video of Merkel looking at Trump was priceless - a picture speaking a thousand words).

Judge issues search warrant for anyone who Googled a victim's name

"The obvious target for a search warrant is not Google, but the Bank of America, which allegedly received the fraudulent transfer. "

If you read the article, the fraudster sent a message to the bank with a photocopy of the victim's passport - which was faked, with a photo that was not the victim but looked quite similar, and which turned up when you googled for the victim's name.

So it is most likely that the criminal got the wrong photo by googling for the victim's name. And if the victim is some unimportant person, then most likely very few people did that search. A very good way to find the identity of the perpetrator.

Re: A bit of an overreach here but.....

I don't think the cops have an idea who did it, but I would expect that very few people do a google search for my name (once you exclude me being curious what google will return in such a search), or for any other not very important person. So this search should only affect very few people.

Bloke cuffed after 'You deserve a seizure' GIF tweet gave epileptic a fit

Re: Migraine

"I did wonder if manufacturers like Samsung, Sony etc should add anti-strobe algorithms to their phones to help guard against malicious code."

That shouldn't actually be very difficult, if you accept slightly lower graphics performance and slightly delayed playback: All you need to do is find out _exactly_ what an epileptic reacts to badly, then compare every frame that is displayed with the previous one. I think you could do that with videos, gifs etc. if you accept a slightl delay of every frame, which would be unnoticable if you delay sound as well.

My estimate that out of any group that you choose, about half a percent are complete and utter idiots. And obviously the idiots are those who are getting caught, so among people who get caught doing malicious things the percentage of idiots is higher than half a percent.

Re: What an asshole

"I suspect a court would hold it in the same regard as shouting "fire!" in a crowded cinema and claiming that was free speech too."

I think a court would hold that in the same regard as shouting "fire" in a microphone, with your victim tied up two inches from a 1,000 watt speaker.

GCHQ dismisses Trump wiretap rumours as tosh

Time zones. GCHQ can easily respond at 11am BST to a press release at 3pm in Washington.

User jams up PC. Literally. No, we don't know which flavour

Not quite the same... But I had a Mac where the floppy disk drive broke. I took it out hoping to get a new one, but that was at a time when floppy disks were on their way out, so I never got a new drive and forgot all about it.

About a year later I was handed a floppy disk that I needed to read. Put it where the floppy disk used to be. Plop! It was gone... Opened the Mac, took the floppy disk out, found someone who could read it and got the contents over the network.

US Marine Corps chiefs declare WAR on stolen sex snap sharing scum

Re: Digital is forever

In this case, much more than just giving them the sack. They will be sacked, lose all privileges that they would have as ex-military, lose pensions, and possibly go to jail.

Re: War on ${HotTopic}

Do you mean our foreign minister? He's an incompetent and a liar, but not a Nazi. Or do you mean the orange one? He was on 40% in the polls and more in the elections. And he's not a Nazi either, he is mad in his own distinctive way.

Apple urged to legalize code injection: Let apps do JavaScript hot-fixes

Re: Not Necessarily

"I have no sympathy for such careless devs. If a 4-7 day delay for review means they have to think about what their doing and maybe test stuff a bit before releases, I think that's a good thing."

From experience, if a developer finds out that their app in the app store has some critical problem that needs to be fixed asap then they _can_ contact Apple and a review _can_ be made quicker. Apple will want a really good reason. Do it more than once and you burn a lot of goodwill, obviously.

Can you ethically suggest a woman pursue a career in tech?

Well, I'm an equal opportunity guy. So should she try that with me, do you think I should press charges for assault, or flatten her?

Favored Swift hits the charts: Now in top 10 programming languages

Re: iOS Only

That's interesting. I had the impression that Swift runs just fine on MacOS X. At least my Swift code does.

Re: methodology?

"while (true){BAH!++;}"

The ++ and -- operators have been removed from Swift, with the argument "we would have never added it in the first place hadn't it been available in C, C++ and Java, and being available in other languages is not a good reason to have a feature".

Two-thirds of TV Licensing prosecutions at one London court targeted women

Re: Keep you mouth shut

You are not told by your insurer to not admit liability, you are told by everyone else. Because when you admit liability the insurer will say "you admitted liability, so we can't go to court and say it wasn't your fault but have to pay, so we want the money back from you". You do your insurer a _big_ favour if you admit liability. DON"T DO IT.

Here's my question: Is there any step before going to court? That maybe women ignore more often than men in the hope the problem goes away?

Re: the Campaign to end the BBC Licence Fee

That's why we have Freeview in the UK. You record it, and when you watch it you skip over the adverts. Just a pain when you watch a program live (that is when it is transmitted).

Tech contractors begin mass UK.gov exodus in wake of HMRC's IR35 income tax clampdown

Re: Stupid Questions

"So all these contractors are dumping their existing contracts early. Is there such a shortage of contractors in the private sector that they are all going to get work?"

There will be such a shortage of contractors in the public sector that they are all going to get work at higher rates, compensating for the tax disadvantages. Said before, contractors don't care about their daily rates, they care about what's left in their pocket. If there are more taxes to be paid, the daily rate must go up.

The supposed savings of £440,000,000 are coming out of someone's pocket - the contractor's pocket.

Contractors don't care how much they are paid, they care how much is left in their pockets. If you change regulations so that there is £440,000,000 less in their pockets, what does the government think they will be doing? They will quit, and the government can then re-hire them for money so that they have the same amount left in their pockets.

Post-Brexit five-year UK work visas planned – report

If there are no benefits paid, does that mean employers and employees won't have to pay national insurance contributions?

And if benefits were based on how long you have worked in the UK, would that only apply to foreigners, or to the huge number lazy Brits who have successfully avoided any work for years as well?

Finally proof that Apple copies Samsung: iPhone 7 Plus halts, catches fire like a Galaxy Note 7

Re: "Do you think Picasso's work is found upon plagiarism?"

Here we go again. "Rounded rectangles" = clueless twat indicator.

Apple had design patents on the iPhone 3GS with a long list of design features, of which one was "rounded rectangles" (actually a rectangular shape with rounded corners). Samsung copied _the complete list_. That's what made it infringing, copying the complete design, not just parts of it. Everyone is free to create phones with rounded corners, and I think the majority do, and they don't get sued.

Samsung has plenty of design patents for phones themselves, and guess what: These design patents contain "rounded corners" as one part of the design. Samsung actually had design patents for phones with rounded corners at the time they copied the iPhone 3GS. They could have just used the designs from their own design patents (including "rounded rectangles") and they would have been safe. Of course their phones wouldn't have looked like an iPhone 3GS.

Re: Finally?

I realise the poster isn't the brightest person around... Do you think Picasso's work is found upon plagiarism? Because that's where the quote "bad artists copy, great artists steal" comes from. Great artists find inspiration everywhere. But they don't copy, they make it their own.

Re: Statistically speaking

7 phones out of two million within two weeks is not the same as 7 phones out of 100 million over six months. At Samsung's Note burn rate there would have been 4,500 burning iPhones by now.

Re: Statistically speaking

Before you test chargers, I know that Apple chargers have some intelligence built in to detect which Apple device they are charging, and I suspect Samsung chargers would do the same for Samsung devices. The result is that they will provide more power than the USB standard says if they know the device being charged can handle it.

New UK laws address driverless cars insurance and liability

Re: Customer can't win

Cynical shopper, there's more than one car insurance company. They have very good reason to keep the premiums as low as possible because otherwise the customers move to another insurance company.

Q very simple and sensible rule - if a car is on the road and driving, whether with or without a driver, it must have third party liability insurance. What I don't like is that the insurance company can get out of paying if the owner misbehaves. What should happen is that they have to pay the victim, and then of course the insurance should be able to recover the money from anyone who was responsible. Plus the possibility to take legal action _before_ an accident happens.

I would think that like with cars with a driver, the insurance cost would depend on the number and cost of accidents that the insurance has to pay for.

Git fscked by SHA-1 collision? Not so fast, says Linus Torvalds

What can actually happen? Let's say there is a file in a repo with hash X. And I can manage to create a different file with the same hash X. The first problem is that I cannot put that file into the repository - git will tell me that it's the same hash, so the file "is already there" - it doesn't let me replace a file with an identical file because that is inefficient and pointless, and it doesn't let me replace a file with a different one with the same hash because it thinks it's the same one. You just can't have two different files with the same hash in the same repository.

The only attack vector is to replace a file on some developer's hard drive with a different one, and git won't notice. So you would need to access that developer's computer and replace a file.

Re: That's not how hashes work

Electron, what you post is nonsense. A 160 bit hash _does_ in practice produce a unique result for any given input (unless you spend 6,600 years of CPU time to search for two given inputs with the same result).

Someone did a calculation for backup systems that calculate hash codes to see if an identical file is already stored. It is _possible_ that you have a different file with the same hash as one that is already stored, and your file isn't going to be backed up. It is also possible that 5 seconds after the backup, a small meteorite crashes into your office and destroys your computer, and a bigger one destroys the data centre where your backup is held. The latter scenario has higher probability.

Engineer who blew lid on Uber's toxic sexist culture now menaced by creepy 'smear campaign'

Re: Why does Uber even exist and Too Big To Fail

To be honest. Uber hasn't skimmed billions yet. Quite the opposite. The two reasons why they can be cheaper than a normal taxi service: They circumvent any regulations, and they subsidize the rides.

We want Waymo money from you! Uber sued for 'stealing self-driving car' blueprints from Alphabet

Re: Baffling

1. Google owns a small percentage of Uber. It seems we are talking about 500 million. If Google wins 500 million why would they care if 20 million come out of your own pocket?

2. Nobody is talking about patents except you. Patents usually have prior art. "Patents are too general, they should not have been issued" is something that you pulled right out of your backside.

This is about stealing trade secrets most of all.

I was authorized to trash my employer's network, sysadmin tells court

There are two different things here: Computer hacking, and causing criminal damage.

There was a case a few months ago, where a store employee handled a computer to sell lottery tickets: Customer hands over cash, she tells the computer how many tickets to print, takes the cash, hands over the tickets. This employee was caught printing about 1,000 lottery tickets a week for herself and not paying. A judge said that she was authorized to use that computer, so there was no computer hacking involved. But of course it was theft of the tickets.

Something similar will be the case here. That admin was indeed authorized to delete backups etc., so no computer hacking. But he caused a huge amount of damage by his authorized computer access, and will be responsible for that. Just the same as if he had taken a sledge hammer and destroyed the servers and physically destroyed the backup drives. Tons of damage, but no computer hacking.

(Obviously only true before he resigned. At the moment he resigned the authorization would have been gone).

Apple to Europe: It's our job to design Ireland's tax system, not yours

Re: What happens if they refuse?

"But considering that they let them get away with not using a Standard USB socket on the Iphone for charging (directly violating EU law)..."

You should know that is nonsense. The charger is absolutely standard. The cable must have USB at one end and whatever you need at the other end, and that's what an iPhone charger has. You can easily charge a Samsung phone by swapping the cable for a Samsung cable. Or you can easily charge an iPhone using a Samsung charger. These Apple chargers are absolutely fine and conforming with EU law.