Posts by Jimmy2Cows

Zoom goes boom, Teams tears at seams: Technology stumbles at the first hurdle for this homeworking malarkey

Yeah some lifestyle changes are going too far! We don't use cameras for conference calls. Saves bandwidth.

Yeeeeah [he said, shiftily]. Bandwidth. Definitely to save bandwidth. Absolutely not anything else ------->

Yeah but who has their camera under their desk? That's not a flattering angle even when wearing pants (left- or right-pondian variety).

Well. Most of the time. There will of course be certain... ahem... extrovert exceptions.

Re: Hangouts seems to have held up the best

PHB: Look how stable it is!! All the other plaforms are falling over!

PFY: Yeah our 6 users sure are getting great service.

Data centres are warm and designed to move air very efficiently. Are they safe to visit during the pandemic?

WHO guidance... regularly disinfect work surfaces, keyboards and telephones

An actual, valid reason for telephone sanitisers to exist...? What has the world come to!

In case you want to flee this wretched Earth, 139 minor planets were spotted at the outer reaches of our Solar System. Just an FYI...

Re: Dyson rings?

Thanks for that :)

Google reveals the wheels almost literally fell off one of its cloudy server racks

No queues though...

(yes I know you can't actually go there at the mo)

Hey, friends. We know it's a crazy time for the economy, but don't forget to enable 2FA for payments by Saturday

Be away with you, you and your rational, sensible way of looking at these things. Damnit! Away with you I say!

European electric vehicle sales surged in Q4 2019 but only accounted for wafer-thin slice of total car purchases

Re: Real low cost electric cars

It's just trying to outcompete that paragon of electric vehicular safety, the G-Wiz.

Re: Still not convinced

BEV are sort of a stop-gap solution. The tech mostly works, for some people it's inconvenient and/or doesn't suit their needs, and numbers are low enough now that vastly increased generating and charging infrastucture isn't yet essential. But it will become essential, and that's where things get tricky.

Ethanol (carbon neutrally sourced) or hydrogen fuel cell seem better for convenience in the long term, and existing fueling infrastucture can (with some effort of course) be adapted more easily than a massive generating capacity build-out and rewiring everyone's home and street to handle the current demand.

But the tech really isn't there yet for widespread adoption, so BEV fills the gap. The question is can the gap be closed fast enough.

All well and good, but most people don't buy a car based on TCO.

They look at what they can afford to pay now, or over 2-5 years. The extra up-front cost of electric cars simply puts them out of reach for many people, even if that cost can be recovered over the ownership period.

Apple reopens stores in China as Middle Kingdom regains control of COVID-19 – after closing all its outlets in Italy

Re: Boris listening to experts

The cynic in me suggests that maybe:

a) Boris chooses his experts.

b) Boris' experts have a vested interest in saying what he wants to hear.

Quarantine doesn't kill the virus. That's not the aim, and don't believe that is being suggested. The aim would be to slow its spread to manageable levels that don't overwhelm local and national health services.

Re: So what did China do...

Sadly yes. Some people really are.

Re: Lockdown won't work, as France and Italy will discover.

Italy left it too late, and when they did respond they did it piecemeal, hence why they're in the shit now.

China left if too late and it rapidly ballooned almost out of control. Almost. It's only after drastic quarantine was enforced that they got it back under control, and even then that took a few weeks to see the effect. But it is working, as the steady decline in new cases shows.

Didn't mention curing it. Vaccine development is being fast-tracked, new methodologies attempted, though it's debatable whether that will ultimately succeed. I fail to see how to manage viral spread at a low level by allowing it to run unchecked through the population. Easy to say when your partner doesn't have severe asthma and a blunted lung from plurasy earlier in life.

Re: reasons not to close schools...

3 weeks covers the incubation period. After 3 weeks most people infected will either be over it or should remain isolated until their symptoms clear or they can be hospitalised.

There will still be a peak, but it will be lower because it hasn't had a chance to run rampant through the population.

Letting it run unchecked now will bring on the peak. Italy didn't react soon enough and their health system is teetering on the brink of collapse. But sure, let's do the same thing here because this time it will be different.

I agree enforcement would be a challenge. But I'm not talking months. Start with 2-3 weeks. Monitor the spread. Monitor containment and enforcement of isolation rules. Most people will go along with it because they don't want to catch the virus.

I respectfully disagree. Where's the evidence this approach will have that effect? I am aware that's the reason being trumpeted from not taking stronger measures yet.

Allowing spread unchecked through the population will not spread the peak.

Also, I find the advice to workers and schools contradictory. Workers advised to work from home wherever possible, to minimise viral spread. Yet schools not closing; the same workers advised to work from home are taking their kids to school, along with typicaly hundreds of other parents at each school. That will surely eliminate much of the gain made working from home.

It is not necessary to ... call muddling through it a plan (UK).

This.

Current response here seems designed to intentionally cripple the NHS as many (hundreds of) thousands become needlessly infected over the next few weeks.

Put the UK in quarantine now. Yes it will bring some short term economic pain. It will also dramatically stem the spread of the virus.

Re: reasons not to close schools...

Consequences for the elderly... I'm torn of the stance being taken here.

Yes, if the kids have COVID-19 there's risk to the grandparents. But it's not clear yet if many kids actually have it. Some do, but how far has it spread among their friends?

Since bugs spread like wildfire among school kids, shutting schools now would surely help stem that tide.

Keeping the schools open seems a sure-fire way to guarantee many kids will get it at some point in the near future, and then will pass it on to parents and grandparents anyway.

This "let's let it play out a bit longer and see what happens" approach seems only likely to overwhelm the NHS over the coming weeks.

My feeling is lock everyone down, now. That will do wonders to halt further spread and allow the NHS to focus care on the remaining, much smaller number of people, who will get seriously ill. Yes there will be an economic hit, but that's nothing to hit when 80% of the population* get COVID-19 and half a million* of those die from it.

* Currently the stated possible outcome by BoJo's science advisors. Who admit they're guessing and there's no way to really know.

Tinfoil hat brigade switches brand allegiance to bog paper

Re: On my head, you dolt!

As opposed to...?

Asking for friend ------>

Uncle Sam stonewalls probe into its secretive airport facial-recognition technology. Now the ACLU is suing

We won't scan everyone. Pinky promise!

In December, Homeland Security dropped plans to scan the faces of everyone traveling through US airports, and instead focused on identifying anyone not a US citizen or permanent resident.

And how do you make that determination without scanning everyone?

UK.gov sits down with mobile big four to formalise plans for rural shared 4G network

Kilometers...?

Why's a UK government dept putting out coverage figures of a proposed UK network enhancement, by UK service prodivers, for rural UK areas, in kilometers? Did we go fully metric overnight or something? Seems odd for a country that typically measures distance - especially roads and large areas - in miles and square miles. Maybe they know something we don't...

NSO Group fires back at Facebook: You lied to the court, claims spyware slinger, and we've got the proof

Have. ...would have bothered...

Of all grammatical bastardisations, for some reason this one irks me the most.

Upvote for the post, though.

Four months, $1bn... and ICANN still hasn’t decided whether to approve .org sale with just 11 days left to go

Re: PIR is soliciting comments until March 13

Ah, to be idealistic once more...

Regardless of what Joe Public has to say, they'll continue pretending nobody really cares.

ICANN is just gonna sit back, have a nice cup of tea and wait for all this to blow over.

Want to own a bit of Concorde? Got £750k burning a hole in your pocket? We have just the thing

Re: donner vehicle

For anyone who always wondered where those "elephant's leg" giant skewered lumps of kebab meat came from... the mystery is at last solved!!

[ I like my kebab meat well done -------------------------> ]

Alleged Vault 7 leaker trial finale: Want to know the CIA's password for its top-secret hacking tools? 123ABCdef

Re: more scary than coronavirus

So more scary than something with a far lower mortality rate than seasonal flu, with mostly significantly milder symptoms. Sure, no one wants either, but it seems there's a lot of hyperbole and hysteria around COVID-19.

If you're wondering how Brit cops' live suspect-hunting facial-recog is going, it's cruising at 88% false positives

Re: There were 8600 faces detected and 7 were flagged as probable matches

Oops... 7292 people on the watch DB, not 7492. My bad. My other points still stand.

Re: Motives and false negatives

Requires that they give two shits about false-negative rate. I doubt they do. I'd be surprised if those in charge of deploying this stuff even know what it means, or why it's so important.

Re: There were 8600 faces detected and 7 were flagged as probable matches

We don't know how many people on the watch list of 7492 were actually among the 8600 people scanned. We don't know how many real people-of-interest it missed. Are the 8592 people it didn't flag true-negatives, or are some false-negatives? We have no assessment of false-negatives.

We only know that of 8 people it thought it found, only 1 of those was a correct match (true-positive). The rest were false-positives, innocently going about their business.

So that's a 12.5% success rate for flagged possible matches. Not an auspicious start.

They aren't sharing the false-negative rate. Probably don't even care about such things. After all, nothing to hide, nothing to fear right?

But without knowing the false-negative rate it's impossible to assess accuracy, acurately.

Hence we can only draw conclusion based on the false-positive rate, which shows piss-poor 12.5% accuracy for true-positives.

And that's the best possible interpretation. It gets worse the more false-negatives there are.

Re: "inaccuracy rate of 87.5 per cent"

They'll paint it as an accuracy rate of 99.9186 per cent (8600 people scanned and only 7 false positives).

Stats are great for making shit smell like roses.

Brit MPs, US senators ramp up pressure on UK.gov to switch off that green-light for Huawei 5G gear

Re: Why is it a risk?

All fair questions. Trouble is, governments everywhere are full of confused non-techies who believe China will somehow be able to exfiltrate any data they want without being detected, just because Chinese (the horror!!) hardware is in our civillian networks. Conveniently oblivious to where most electronic gear is made these days, because it comes in a box with a non-Chinese name.

Re: I remember...

Would those be for blockchain, er... logs...?

Re: Cisco or the NSA

A little from column A, a little from column B, plus some good old MAGA protectionism for good measure.

Uncle Sam's nuke-stockpile-simulating souped-super El Capitan set to hit TWO exa-FLOPS, take crown as world's fastest machine in 2023

Re: And the most unintelligible article title award goes to....

Uhhh... you know this is a tech publication right? Pretty sure most people here can follow it no problem at all. Hardly word salad.

Fancy that: Hacking airliner systems doesn't make them magically fall out of the sky

But only when there's a conveniently placed crash barrier to turn left into.

MPs to grill Post Office and Fujitsu execs on Horizon IT scandal after workers jailed over accounting errors

Re: lives in the toilet

But is that glowing praise, or a damning indictment...?

Re: punish the corporate officials be making them retire with a golden parachute

Hardly a punishment. Fire them with extreme prejudice then charge them with fraud, perjury and perverting the course of justice. There's ample evidence so secure convictions.

In other words, nuke them from orbit.

Re: The whole thing stinks

Is it too much to hope criminal records will be expunged after such a catastrophic clusterfuck? Certainly should be expunged.

And 10k compo is just a joke. Try 200x that, with PO and Fujitsu execs jailed for their roles in this.

Brexit Britain changes its mind, says non, nein, no to Europe's unified patent court – potentially sealing its fate

Re: pharmaceuticals

So what you're saying is: anyone found to running a patent troll company should be crucified? Pray continue...

Drones must be constantly connected to the internet to give Feds real-time location data – new US govt proposal

Re: I'm doomed

I see someone is hearing "Wooosh" as they press the downvote.

Maybe their sarcasm detector is unable to recieve a network signal, or they failed to pay their monthly sarcasm detection subs, so it has shut down to prevent illegal operation.

Have an upvote to balance.

Re: Sounds like FUD, surely this data is just for ATC/LEOs.

Yeah, just like cellphone user location data is privileged private infomation, only availble to the cops. And to anyone with $100 in their pocket (see the long and inglorious history reported in these hallow'd pages e.g. bounty hunters, anyone pretending to be a cop, etc.)

Re: "... destroy privacy ...", they wrote, unironically.

Totally not the same as a blanket requirement that your car be permanently connected to the internet, reporting constant position information, and stopping / unable to start if no network signal is available.

Re: Hmmm..

You just described a Whitehall data fetishist's wet dream. Stop giving them ideas, damnit!

If it's Goodenough for me, it's Goodenough for you: Canuck utility biz goes all in on solid-state glass battery boffinry

Re: Still a problem though

Significantly more feasible and attainable than liquid helium temperatures, though.

Sophos was gearing up for a private life – then someone remembered the bike scheme

Re: Well that's embarrassing

Ummm... woosh...?

The Ghost of Windows 10 Past shrinks back as Microsoft's axeman tiptoes ever closer

90k PCs, 5k Windows Store apps, "a handy pointer"...

So... a tiny proportion of all PCs running Win10, with sample data entirely skewed toward those running a subset of Windows Store apps. That's some quality* surveying right there.

Like looking out the window and saying "I can see blue sky therefore it's sunny everywhere.".

The only thing "handy" about this report is if it's printed out and I've run out of toilet paper.

*For values of quality at or near useless.

Rotherwood Healthcare AWS bucket security fail left elderly patients' DNR choices freely readable online

I thought that actually was one of his tweets.

London's top cop dismisses 'highly inaccurate or ill informed' facial-recognition critics, possibly ironically

Re: Possession...

Can we get them to rush that through and apply it retrospectively, to... let's say... plucking a number off the top of my head... 15 years ago?

Re: What next?

But if you tread on the squares you marry the bears. What's a chap (or chapette) to do?

RE: Dick claimed that “the tech we are deploying is proven not to have an ethnic bias.”

Yet one of the mouthpieces with her went the opposite way, saying bias in the UK system has not been proven due to lack of evidence either way.

Dick contnues being a dick, treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence.

Have to wonder which specific crimes she's on about, that would have been prevented by LFR. Resigning myself to the answer being "all of them".

Nah, for such grossly heinous crimes, burn them at the stake. The irony of them generating the very CO2 they are fighting passively-resisting against...