Posts by FrogsAndChips

Bids for ISS demolition rights are now open, NASA declares

Re: Orbital inclination

I can suggest better options. "55° 45' 7.284" N 37° 37' 2.998" E" comes to mind.

Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024

Re: POP3. IMAP ?

You forgot the part about disposing of the secretaries in the shark tank after they have printed the emails. How do you want to keep them secure otherwise?

Mention AI in earnings calls ... and watch that share price leap

Re: BT for example?

Shibboleet!

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

Re: So let me recap...

That was at a time when downloading ringtones was still a thing, that largely predates smartphones.

Here's why cloud credentials are the hottest item on criminal marketplaces

Quote me one single cloud provider that pretended you could get rid of your IT Security department when migrating to the cloud. Securing IAM is and has always been the customer's responsibility.

And frankly, credentials security is not rocket science. Implement Federation authentication so that your users don't need another set of username/password. Use MFA. Use roles (i.e short-lived access rights) in your cloud infra instead of long term credentials. If you do need long-term credentials, rotate them regularly. Block all public access (now the default for most CSPs anyway). Monitor all accesses. The tools are there, just use them!

Freecycle gives users the gift of a security breach notice

Re: Gave up on all of them

Same here. I've had more issues with time wasters that never collect the items than with admins.

Most webmails will show you attachments as a link or an icon, so the download will only happen if you click on it.

I was notified 3 days ago. I'm not using my primary email address for Freecycle (not even a secondary one), so I wasn't aware until I came across this article. Have you checked the address you use for them?

Guild behind actors' strike fears video game workers also at risk from AI

The CGI in Ant-Man 3 is good, it's what they made of it which is a horror.

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

Actually, "the Anti-Social Network" is how Facebook/Meta has been nicknamed by El Reg journos for years now.

OpenAI pulls AI text detector due to it being a bit crap

Detecting human edits

The classifier didn't work very well on writing that had been AI-generated and edited by humans

Sure, but does it still classify as AI-text if it's been edited? Depends on the level of editing, I guess (with 80% accuracy).

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

It literally said "There's nothing for you here". (Who writes Microsoft's error messages?)

The people at the local shop in Royston Vasey?

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

- The kernel

- What?

- The kernel

- Oh. Yeah, yeah. He did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.

- And Git

- Oh, yeah, Git. Remember what version control used to be like?

Network died, hard, during company Christmas party, leaving lone techie to fix it

You mustn't have paid attention to the article title, then.

and well done to the Regomizer for coming up with 'Roy' instead of more obvious names like 'Bruce'.

ObXKCD

Sysadmin

Boris Johnson pleads ignorance, which just might work

Re: WhatsApp encryption key?

the secret key is only 64 bits

Source?

I thought it was a $5 wrench but we may be thinking of different comics.

If Whatsapp's E2E encryption works as advertised, only encrypted data goes through their servers and they'd have no way of decrypting it without the keys stored on the phones.

You're too dumb to use click-to-cancel, Big Biz says with straight face

Re: ever mindful of the limits of netizens' mental capacity

Still, you're basing your demonstration on a use case where the quantity you want to measure corresponds to 1 unit. In real life, that's rarely happening.

Re: ever mindful of the limits of netizens' mental capacity

Lever balances and, even worse, electronic balances have detached people from thinking about what underlies their accuracy, what the accuracy is or even if it exists. It's just numbers from a machine accepted uncritically in much the same way as so many social media users accept conspiracy theories.

Thanks for helping me realize that I was falling victim to conspiracy theories every time I use my calculator or my electronic balance. Of course I would blindly accept that 24x78=1.234E94, or would never suspect that I've messed up the tare if my 2 spoons of olive oil weigh 512 g.

I use these tools not out of detachment from reality, but because they're convenient, reliable and save me time. This is why people have been inventing things for millennia.

Re: ever mindful of the limits of netizens' mental capacity

Binary-based units are natural for weighing things

Only if you ever need to measure things in ratio of 2. What if you need 5/7 of a pound?

The benefits of metric/decimal system are not so much in the base unit (10 only has factors of 2 and 5, so it doesn't divide as easily as 12 or 60), but in its consistency: you always use the same ratio to move up or down from one unit or sub-unit to the other, whether you measure lengths, weights or volumes.

Fedora Project mulls 'privacy preserving' usage telemetry

Not necessarily, they could use some fingerprinting technique that uses hardware or software elements. AFAIK, browser fingerprinting doesn't use IP addresses.

Since we are only interested in opt-out metrics due to the low value of opt-in metrics, we must accordingly never collect any personally-identifiable data. We must also not collect any data that could become personally-identifiable if combined with other data, which notably means IP addresses must not be stored. We only want to collect anonymous data anyway, but we need to be especially mindful of the possibility that combining two "anonymous" data points could result in the data no longer being anonymous.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: Poor design in my opinion

It would play The Police's Message in a Bottle.

Brit broadband subscribers caught between crappy connections and price hikes

Re: Never had a problem...

I'm quite happy with mine that's located about 4/13 of the alphabet (good service, no mid-contract price hikes).

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Re: What about any non-GPL components?

s/little/bit

We just don't get enough time, contractor tasked with fact-checking Google Bard tells us

Re: Subverted use case??

Bard, Chat-GPT etc etc are also pre-trained, meaning they are immediately out of date

That's incorrect in the case of Bard, which can access the internet to search for information and isn't limited to its training data.

Oreo cookie maker says crooks gobbled up staff info

Oreo cookie maker says crooks gobbled up staff info

That takes the biscuit!

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

Re: as did his aide Walt Nauta

5. All of the above

Scientists think they may have cracked life support for Martian occupation

Re: May??

I'm sorry, but when you say "We know it has happened", it does sound like you do more than support the idea.

So far, I have not seen ANY support for a counter to that idea.

And I've not seen any support for the idea that there isn't a teapot orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars, therefore it must exist. After all, there is already a Tesla up there.

Re: May??

We would, and we know that's what happend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laschamp_event

If you want to convince us, don't quote an article that lays doubts on your claim:

"However, the lack of corroborating evidence of a causal link between the Laschamp event and population bottlenecks of many megafauna species, and the relatively moderate radio-isotopic changes during the event, have cast significant doubt on the real impact of the Laschamp event on global environmental changes."

There is actually no consensus on the correlation between a reversal of polarity and extinction events, except maybe in the Doctor Who-verse.

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Re: Banking apps

a bank will only accept it if it is being paid into an account where the holders name is some reasonable permutation of John Smith.

In practice, cheque cashing is automated and there are no checks (CHECKS, not CHEQUES! See?) on the intended beneficiary. Banks will only investigate if you contest where the funds have been transferred to and compare the name on the paper (or more probably the scanned copy) with the one on the account.

Scientists claim >99 percent identification rate of ChatGPT content

1. It is a game where you give 3 statements

2. 2 of them will be true

3. 2 of them will be lies

Re: Circular?

That would be circular if they were asking ChatGPT to detect ChatGPT-generated articles, but as I understand it they have trained their own model for the detection, and only used ChatGPT to produce the training material.

Google snubbed JPEG XL so of course Apple now supports it in Safari

Re: No mention of Firefox which is a shame

In the article:Mozilla has managed to declare its neutrality with regard to JPEG XL

Australian cyber-op attacked ISIL with the terrifying power of Rickrolling

But the question is: did they get a refund?

Re: Link for non Australians

That seems to only work from the UK. For US-based readers, you should use this link.

This malicious PyPI package mixed source and compiled code to dodge detection

Re: The more things change the more they stay the same

Don't worry, if devs need ot go back to writing code themselved, ChatGPT will be there to help them!

Bookings open for first all-electric flights around Scandinavia … in 2028

Some routes only have a few flights per day, on those recharging times should not be an issue. You can also hope that airports will have a fleet of batteries, so recharging is a matter of swapping batteries rather than plugging the plane to a station.

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

Re: Height please.

From what I've read, air-rage situations originate mostly at the start of the flights, for typical reasons such as armrest usage, crying baby or people not seating in their allocated seat. Pre-flight booze often plays a role, legroom less so.

Re: optional?

It's easier to relocate a single passenger than a couple or family. I don't think the adjustment needs to be accurate to the kg.

Still, you'd need to know the exact conditions when you take your first measurement: have all passengers disembarked and luggage been unloaded? Are there any cabin/cleaning crew aboard? Any luggage handlers in the cargo hold? Has refuelling/loading started?

It's not uncommon to have refuelling or luggage loading happening at the same time as boarding, so that wouldn't work all the time.

Absolute mad lad renders Doom in teletext

Impressive? Yes. Playable? No

The rendering is surprisingly fluid on the demo video, but the poor resolution and black&white display would make it very difficult to play once you've passed the first levels, unless you're so familiar with the game that you could play with your eyes closed. Monsters are only visible in close range and items such as locks and keys hardly at all.

Still, as a wise man said: 'Completely useless, so absolutely necessary!'

Of course Russia's ex-space boss doubts US set foot on the Moon

Absolutely. As a proof, I once had a CDG-JFK Concorde ticket, but never flew it (true story, unfortunately)!

WordPress plugin hole puts '2 million websites' at risk

Re: Really?

True, but all of these measures could easily turn into hundreds of pounds anyway, depending on the size and traffic of your website.

Also, weird that he only recommends the migration to owners of hacked sites, surely you'd want to do that *before* you get hacked if you're serious about security? (yeah, I know...)

Saturn's rings are shrinking and boffins will use the Webb 'scope to find out why

Re: It would be handy

You could get some tips from the friendly beings in the Klendathu system.

Re: Oh gravity

I have no idea what you're Tolkien about.