Posts by Stratman

Coinbase CEO says everything's OK after SEC filing gives netizens the jitters

Stablecoin collapse sends tokens tumbling

Crypto-currency markets are being rocked after a popular token lost 99% of its value, dragging down a so-called "stablecoin" with it. (Link to BBC Tech report on tumbling funny money)

An international incident or just some finger trouble at the console?

"Yep, we just disconnected France." >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Cryptocurrency ATMs illegal right now in UK

Crypto ATMs. Do they have spinning wheels and a big lever on the side?

Photon fantastic: James Webb Space Telescope spies its first starlight

Hats have been doffed.

US Navy in mad dash to salvage F-35C that fell off a carrier into South China Sea

Re: F35 A, B & C models

Or more bluntly, the F-35 is FUBAR

HPE has 'substantially succeeded' in its £3.3bn fraud trial against Autonomy's Mike Lynch – judge

Home Secretary approves extradition

BBC article

Leaked footage shows British F-35B falling off HMS Queen Elizabeth and pilot's death-defying ejection

Somebody mught find themselves answering questions on the subject of the Official Secrets Act.

I can't believe that any images taken on board a carrier don't need to be cleared from on high before being published.

REvil gang member identified living luxury lifestyle in Russia, says German media

If they know who

and where he is, how come he's not hanging from a meathook with electrodes on his gonads?

Or is he???

IPSE: More than a third of freelancers have quit contracting since IR35 reforms

Re: Forgot NI? @elsergiovolador

*As long as there aren't nasty side effects like Brown discovered when he buggered pensions.

One problem with integrating NI with income tax is indeed pensions. Money paid into a pension scheme is paid before tax is deducted but after NI has been taken. By adding NI to income tax pensioners would therefore pay NI twice, once on the way in and again on the way out, something they might find objectionable.

There are a lot of pensioners and every one of them has a vote, something which will not have escaped the attention of politicians.

Guntrader breach perp: I don't think it's a crime to dump 111k people's details online in Google Earth format

Wouldn't it be a shame

if Ernie's name and address somehow appeared in the next issue of Hunting Monthly or whatever those types read.

Perseverance to take a second stab at Martian rocks ... but first it has to scratch'n'sniff

The rock in question

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Someone of a more conspiratorial mindset might say there are tool marks on Rochette.

A new island has popped up off the coast of Japan thanks to an underwater volcano

Has China built a runway on it yet?

Engineers' Laurel and Hardy moment caused British Airways 787 to take an accidental knee

I'm quite surprised there aren't automatic lockouts to prevent this very thing.

IT management biz Kaseya's VSA abused to infect businesses with ransomware

Once assembled, these fully functional firearms often become a tool for senseless violence,” said the state's Attorney General Josh Shapiro.

As opposed to all the other guns there.

Facebook granted patent for 'artificial reality' baseball cap. Repeat, an 'artificial reality' baseball cap

One problem

The likely wearers of the device will be like "Hey bruv, why iz the glasses on the back of me 'ed, innit?"

Brit watchdog shows some teeth over McAfee antivirus auto-renewals

Good. Now for the rest.

Amazon being a 'prime' example. If I were a regulator I'd mandate a 'Cancel' button alongside the 'Sign Up' one. It should be as easy to leave as to join, same number of clickthroughs, buttons of equal prominence as so forth.

Belgian police seize 28 tons of cocaine after 'cracking' Sky ECC's chat app encryption

I suppose this means Fleetwood Mac's reunion tour is off?

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

You'd love a TVR

Blockchain may be the machinery of mischief, but it can't help telling the truth

I keep having these thoughts that a blockchain would be a reasonably good solution to 'proof of vaccination', should one be required.

Why am I wrong?

For the sake of the question, I'm not necessarily saying one should be required.

Someone defeated the anti-crypto-coin-mining protection for Nvidia's 'gamers only' RTX 3060 ... It was Nvidia

What we need...

...is a concerted effort to trash the value price of Bitcoin. Something like GameStop giving the shorters a poke in the eye. What would it take and how could it be achieved?

NTT boffins reckon they’ve out-randomed current quantum random number generators

Re: Silly

Talking of random noise...

UK Supreme Court declares Uber drivers are workers, not self-employed: Ride biz's legal battle ends in a crash

I notice that

all reports of the outcome refers to 'workers', not 'employees'. Is there a difference in law? Does this mean Uber must pay employer's National Insurance? That would be fun to watch.

Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button

Has it been determined why the pop up appeared?

Hollywood drone pilot admits he crashed gizmo into cop chopper, triggering emergency landing

I always find it strange that a sentence doesn't reflect the actual crime but seems to depend largely on the outcome.

Fly a drone into a chopper, superficial damage - a year inside

Fly a drone into a chopper, injury or death - 200 years inside.

Notice the crime is the same in both cases, and it's not as if the perp had any control over the outcome.

Master boot vinyl record: It just gives DOS on my IBM PC a warmer, more authentic tone

Re: So he mentioned the amp..

Never mind the turntable, what cables did he use? Were they crystal aligned? Did they have special stereo electrons ? Did they have a nuanced mid-high separation of the ambience?

Other audiophool twattery is available.

NHS COVID-19 app's first weekend: With fundamental testing flaw ironed out, bugs remaining are relatively trivial

Police told not to download Covid app

According to the BBC

The National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) has confirmed officers are being told not to install the NHS Covid-19 app on their work smartphones.

The app detects when users have been in proximity to someone with the virus.

Some officers have also been told they may not need to obey self-isolate alerts generated by the app when downloaded to their personal phones.

Lancashire Constabulary has told staff to call the force's own Covid-19 helpline instead.

Read the linked article before letting slip the dogs of war ;-)

Epic, Spotify, ProtonMail and pals rise up as one against Apple's 30% cut, call for end to Cupertino-style markets

Why don't they

just pull their existing apps from Apple and exclude them from future apps? Remember, it wasn't technical superiority that enabled VHS to win the war with Betamax (Beta was technically much better), it was the availability of films. The VHS consortium bought the rights to a whole lot of films and released them on VHS only, if you wanted to watch one you had to have a VHS player.

Proposed US fix for Boeing 737 Max software woes does not address Ethiopian crash scenario, UK pilot union warns

What are they risking, apart from other people's money?

Contractor convicted of pinching supercomputer cycles to mine cryptocurrency

"he scored approximately AU$9,400 (US$6,800) of bitbucks but burned through AU$76,000 ($55,000) of compute time"

It's like filing the corners off a 50 pence piece to make a 10 pence coin.

Virgin Galactic reveals giant mirror feature in cabin design for Beardy Branson's space bus

FOTA;-

Russia, meanwhile, has re-launched its space tourism program and even offered the first citizen spacewalk, but at a cost likely to vastly exceed the price of a Virgin Galactic ticket.

...but a marginally better chance of survival.

Nokia 5310: Retro feature phone shamelessly panders to nostalgia, but is charming enough to be forgiven

Re: Facebook App

Even if you don't have a faecbook account is could still be reporting the contents of your contact list and anything else on the phone.

If facebook does indeed slurp via a baked in app, how does it obtain informed consent to hold data if the user, or someone in the contact list, doesn't have an account?

Twitter ticks off Trump with new 'Get the facts' alert on pair of fact-challenged tweets

Re: I would pay full ticket price...

Post it twice, for the terminally hard of understanding.

Breaking virus lockdown rules, suing officials, threatening staff, raging on Twitter. Just Elon Musk things

Re: Elon Musk Is An Ass

^^^^A somewhat under appreciated post.

UK COVID-19 contact-tracing app data may be kept for 'research' after crisis ends, MPs told

Anyone want to buy a Windows phone?

As per title. The Windows phone store went to its grave some time ago, not that they'd make a version for WP anyway.

Blackberry too?

Tesla sued over Tokyo biker's death in 'dozing driver' Autopilot crash

Re: Took delivery of a Model 3 just yesterday...

Interesting that Tesla appears to treat the speed limit as a target.

Assange should be furloughed from Belmarsh prison, says human rights org. Here's a thought: He could stay with friends!

Then again, anyone who spilled American secrets would be treated pretty well in Russia.

Spyware maker NSO can't claim immunity, Facebook lawyers insist – it's time to face the music

Re: Pot? Meet Kettle...

Can we not hope they both financially cripple each other to the point of disappearing

My initial reaction was to agree, but further reflection tells me all the money would end up in lawyers' pockets. That's bad.

Motorola casually trots out third UK release in as many months: This time it's a 'Lite' take on the Moto G8 Power

Ooh, a replacement for my Windows phone I thought. Simple, long battery life, reasonably priced etc. Then I saw it has 6.5" screen. I don't really want to walk around with a small television in my pocket, so what phone do I want? I'm not interested in the camera, I've got a camera for that. I'm not interested in streaming endless pop videos or hilarious youtube pranks. Make one of these with a 4.5 or 5 inch screen and I'll buy it

The Windows Phone keeps ringing but no one's home: Microsoft finally lets platform die

Re: The best interface

I still use my Lumia 520 running 8.1 as my only phone. It does everything it did on the day I bought it, namely phone calls, SMS and email. It has some handy things like a calculator and it syncs with my Office Outlook calendar. Easy to use too. I'll keep using it until it breaks or I can't live without a phone that's also a heart monitor or tells me how long it's been since I last looked at it, or one of a thousand pointless other things.

The silence of the racks is deafening, production gear has gone dark – so which wire do we cut?

Now happily retired, I used to work for a world famous UK based broadcasting corporation, in TV outside broadcasts. Way back when we had live limited overs cricket on Sunday afternoons, we were happily well into the first innings when all the fans started rhythmically speeding up and slowing down and bulbs got brighter and dimmer. I glanced up at the incoming voltmeters which were swinging up and down like a fiddler's elbow. The AVRs on the input couldn't keep pace with the swings so there was only one thing for it. On a live, non repeatable broadcast I reached up and hit the breakers, turning off the technical supplies to the kit and removing cricket from thousands of tellies up and down the country. The dividing door between us engineers and the production gallery popped open and an inquisitive looking head poked through.

We explained if we hadn't done it we'd have lost the programme completely as every fuse would have blown whereas now, once we get to why it happened, enough kit will have survived to get something on air. many OBs are powered by a portable generator (think the size of a bin lorry) so our capo di capi went off to pass the time of day with the genny man. It turned out he had a minor problem with the stabilisation control system on the generator so though he'd use the time fault finding. He bypassed the system completely, then grabbed hold of the engine speed controller and started to give it a good workout. While the error of his ways were explained to him we'd been on our hands and knees, scrabbling around behind dusty bays replacing fuses. We lost about five minutes of airtime in total and came out quite well in the subsequent enquiry.

Next year's Windows 10 comes bounding into the Slow Ring, which means 19H2 waits in the wings

It would be nice if...

...the default home network settings weren't effectively "Thou shall not network".

Chinese sleazeball's 17-year game of hide-and-seek ends after drone finds him on mountain

Being incommunicado for seventeen years he was probably unaware drones even existed, and wouldn't have seen the need to foil them.

Baby alert! Japan Air lets passengers book seats far away from screaming abdabs

Noise cancelling headphones.

They work with braying businessmen, raucous ruggerbuggers and serial snorers too.

Belgian F-16 pilot rescued from power line after emergency ejection

Hmmm.... 'Security' or 'Emergent Tech' ;-)

Wake me up before you Gogo ... so I can jump out: Kenyan MP takes on aeroplane flatulence

Obviously Easyjet would charge to be allowed to breathe on their flights.

They'd do special offers though, where breathing in would be free and you'd only pay to breathe out.

Where e'er thee be, let thy wind go free

Need to automatically and securely verify a download is legit? You bet rget this new tool

Re: Not a panacea

Blockchain! We need more blockchain!

Giffgaff goody-baddy-bag billing faff: Ofcom fines operator £1.4m for overcharging folks by almost £3m

Overcharge by £2.8 million

and get fined £1.4 million. Here endeth the lesson.

Outraged Virgin slaps IP trolls over dirty movie download data demands

From now on I'll stop downloading the film when it's 99% complete and I'll be in the clear. Result.

Pity you can't download the last bit first, after the housmaid/nurse/fitness instructor has said "Its hot in here isn't it".

Industry reps told the UK taxman everything wrong with extending IR35. What happened next will astound you

Re: Unsurprising

Get rid of NI, bundle it in to Income tax

Don't upset the Pensioner Vote, we're a powerful lobby. NI was deducted from our contributions on the way in to the schemes. By adding it to income tax we'd pay it on the way out as well, a double whammy.

We may be old but we ain't stupid. Any party proposing that would lose a lot of votes.