Posts by martinusher

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Flattering, but still nonsensical

This type of sovereign citizen nonsense is a direct import from the US, a country that claims its constitution and legal traditions are ultimately based on documents like the Magna Carta. So these people are just demonstrating a profound ignorance of just about everything (which I suspect is par for the course these days).

Sovereign citizen types need to bear in mind what could be called Political Rule Zero -- "Political Power Grows Out Of the Barrel Of a Gun". Or, in the immortal (and Scottish accented) words of Shrek, "You and whose army?". In the US we have the much abused Second Amendment which allows the citizens to own all sorts of (militarily speaking) relatively harmless weaponry which allows these sorts of people to fantasize about directly confronting the government but the reality is that their notions of dragging legislators and judges to jail are going to run headlong into the Deep State (aka "The Rest Of Us"). (Meanwhile our country is littered with militarily useless, but still lethal, weaponry which invariably gets used against family members and random strangers.)

Zoom incompatible with GDPR, claims data protection watchdog for the German city of Hamburg

>So why they do seem to insist on using Zoom is unclear to me

Having tried some of the alternatives I guess its because "it just works" -- unlike those alternatives.

I'm not a videoconference enthusiast. I just resent spending hours messing with my system because its not got the right browser, the right version of Windows or whatever. Zoom works on anything (including my usual Waterfox/Linux setup).

Russia: Forget about the Nauka incident. Who punched the hole in the Soyuz, hmm?

Re: The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

If you read the Rusisian analysis of what happened -- and maybe took the politics out of the equation -- then you might realize that they have a point. There wasn't just one hole, there were several attempts to drill a hole but only one penetrated the skin. The Russians concluded from the marks that the hole was made by 'someone unfamiliar with the construction of the module'. Whether their conclusions about who did it and why were reasonable is debatable but the nature of the hole(s) and how they happened are not.

Now we've finally got a home-made launch capability again (thanks, SpaceX) maybe we should let the Russians and Chinese go and do whatever and finally finish with this whole Cold War Part Deux nonsense.

Fancy joining the SAS's secret hacker squad in Hereford as an electronics engineer for £33k?

Re: They can outsource it. To Russia or China

The Truth is sometimes stranger than Fiction. Some years ago the company I was working at got a contract to design/improve a piece of FPGA based hardware, stuff that looked as if it came out of a tank. The contract itself was from one of those defense companies that had hollowed out its development capability till all that was left was a project manager. The work was done by the only FPGA people we had, one being Russian, the other Chinese. Its true that both were naturalized US citizens -- obviously, being DoD work it had to be undertaken by 'merkans -- but it was still somewhat ironic.

(Since the cost of living -- and housing -- is now similar between California and much of the UK the 33K figure is a bit of a joke given the job expectations. The work might be interesting but we all have to eat.)

US watchdog opens probe into Tesla's Autopilot driver assist system after spate of crashes

Re: About time too

Its all a matter of common sense. When I wrote my comment yesterday I had just returned from a road trip out of state. The first part of the drive was close to 300 miles across the desert on Interstate 40. Ths is a two lane dual carriageway with a wide median and relatively sparse traffic. Autopilot would have no problem with this. Then at Barstow I-40 joins I-15, the main drag between Las Vegas and Los Angeles / San Diego. The nearest English analog to this is merging from a rural dual carrageway to the M25 around Heathrow but without the lane discipline, speed limits and traffic rules enforcement you'd get on the motorway. Autopilot -- or any adaptive cruise control -- might have worked but you'd be very unwise to rely on it. (Actually, it was a bit of a nightmare for about 40 miles....)

The article's title is a bit misleading, anyway. It appears that there's been 11 crashes over the last five years or so but the Trump administration adopted a laissez faire attitude to them. So all that the Feds are doing is playing catch up.

Re: About time too

There's a third possibility. ElReg is UK focused so relatively few people would have had significant experience driving on US roads. Out West where I live they are a mess, especially in urban areas like Los Angeles -- badly designed, badly surfaced, badly lit, inconsistent and erratically placed signs, you name it and its a safety nightmare. Obviously we humans adapt as best we can but its still very easy to make mistakes, especially at night where the notion of varying the brightness of signals -- something you take for granted in the UK -- is foreign.

(...and the road markings tend to disappear completely when the road is wet. None of that nice reflective plastic stuff you get in the UK, its just paint which 'may or may not work'.)(Road adhesion disappears when the road's wet as well -- cracked and patched concrete isn't an ideal braking material.)

So I can see how an AI system could be confused. We've got plenty of Teslas here but I'd guess that most owners aren't stupid enough to take the 'Autopilot' thing literally.

Incidentally, the DMV (our version of DVLC) has endemic problems with Teslas. See:-

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-bias-dmv-inhibits-ev-revolution/

Don't rush to adopt QUIC – it's a slog to make it faster than TCP

TCP is wrong for most network transactions

TCP emulates a full duplex serial connection which is why its proved so popular and enduring. Its really easy for application programmers to use. Its also grossly inefficient of both system and network resources++, its not very reliable** and it invariably requires programmers to implement ad-hoc framing and messaging protocols on top of it. Web programming, for example, uses the same messaging codes that FTP does (those three digit codes you see at the beginning of the frames. Its a mess and is long past the time when it should have been rationalized.

++A TCP connection requires at a minimum a couple of timers and an extra thread. If the socket is likely to drop then it needs a secondary process to monitor the connection to detect the dropped socket and silently reconnect. The protocol itself, being truly full duplex, needs coordination between the send and receive sides to minimize the sending of acknowledges (timers, i.e. delay). ACKs on protocols that already have ACKs (WiFi....) just leads to congestion par-excellence (but I suppose people will just tweak the protocols to improve this, usually by adding yet more timers to delay things.)

**TCP is not very reliable for long duration connections because of the problem of detecting a dropped socket and silently reconnecting. Its also byte (octet) oriented but many programmers don't realize this, they assume that sending a block of data into a socket will result in the same block of data turning up at a listening socket. It does a lot of the time but its a side effect, its not a property of the protocol, so when a block gets -- legally -- fragmented their home-made protocols fall apart due to a lack of framing.

84-year-old fined €250,000 for keeping Nazi war machines – including tank – in basement

Re: WTF?

The 88 might have started life as an AA gun but it very quickly found use as an improvised anti-tank gun and from that was further developed for offical anti-tank (and anti-just about anything else) use. It was an extremely effective weapon.

(If you want to shoot one then you need to be a 'merkan.) (See https://youtu.be/X_bGczFQIOc )

China tightens distributor cap after local outfits hoard automotive silicon then charge silly prices

Re: Smugglers

Its a clash of perceptions and reality. Although much of our stuff is made in China (or uses China sourced components) our politics and culture still treat both China and the Chinese as an undifferentiated mass living under the thumb of the CCP and the autocratic rule of one person. (How many times have you seen this word used in connection with China recently?) The reality is that its a large country -- its bigger than Europe -- that's got a huge population, all individuals with many who aspire to be entrepreneurs. Since the line between 'enterprise' and 'crime' is often a matter of opinion or interpretation its not surprising that given the opportunity to make a fast yuan then someone's going to take it. So the disconnect is the gradual realization that the place is just another country with all the quirks, foibles and shortcomings of a country. Its 'just like us' -- but different.

This kind of media imprinting is endemic in our culture. For exmaple, there are two Reg articles that together with their comments illustrate this. (These deal with Russia but as you may have noticed these days 'Russia' and 'China' are interchangeable, seemingly at random.) This kind of Cold War era image manipulation should be difficult to maintain these days but constant repetition keeps it front and center.

Huawei to America: You're not taking cyber-security seriously until you let China vouch for us

Re: Verify?

The initial pass throughs of Huawei's code would have uncovered all sorts of faults and deficiencies. We'd then all sit back and have a good laugh at their expense -- at least, those of us who don't know anything about software QA. More sanguine types would realize that the kinds of shortcomings found in Huawei's kit are likely to be endemic through the industry and that once uncovered and fixed Huawei's kit is likely to be a lot more sure than Brand 'C'.

Huawei's #1 sin -- apart from being a Chinese company, of course -- is that its effectively a co-op, It doesn't have to feed the finance industry maw so it can devote as much or as little resources to a task as it feels necessary. This gives it a bit of an edge when it comes to dealing with QA issues since they're not going to cause a dip in profitability and so a share price dip that would cause problems with investors and C suite remuneration packages.

Tech spec experts seek allies to tear down ISO standards paywall

I've some contact with a long defunct company that tried to pin its products to the OSI model, implementing the standards. This is where I learned that they just do not work. No ifs, ands and buts. They do not work. This is why IETF standards took over -- it wasn't just some theoretical wish list from a large scale organization rooted in telephony practice, it was the product of people who had practical problems to solve.

However, like a cancer OSI still lurks in standards bodies, spreading its poison to new standards. It turns up in IEEE standards with its bitwise back to front addresses and OSI type 2 hacks to host Ethernet packets on their protocols (WiFi, for example -- that sequence starting with 0xAA, 0xAA before the Ethertype is pure, and pointless, OSI) or whenever you find the term 'profile' being used to describe end point to end point transfer of specialized data. Its all there because the non-IETF standards bodies are so detached from real life that they're unable to let go of what was once the 'one true networking'.

Microsoft's Cloud PCs debut – priced between $20 and $158 a month

Re: Not great pricing, but they'll get the Office people.

> achieve what, precisely?

Monetizing remote access.

Redpilled Microsoft does away with flashing icons on taskbar as Windows 11 hits Beta

Have they any clue what an Operating System is?

I've read a lot of breathless, exciting, stuff about Windows 11. Mostly about how the GUI has been tweaked. Nothing at all about internals -- filesystems, users and resources. So I'd guess its going to be yet another dog's breakfast.

WSL just seems to be a way of taking down Cygwin, to get users to distribute Linux-y Windows applications on WSL (which will, curiosuly enough, not be native Linux applications and they won't work on other distros). (For people who don't know this -- a lot of important development platforms that are distributed as Windows versions are really Cygwin. Windows is not able to handle complex development toolsets unless its for Windows platform targets.)

Fortunately, these days I'm out of the corporate "Use Windows" treadmill. Have fun, everyone.

Right to repair shouldn't exist – not because it's wrong but because it's so obviously right

Right to Repair is about control

The world is full of complex machines that can't be repaired without complex diagnostic systems that need the help of technical specialists to troubleshoot and repair. The change that's prompted the right to repair movement is that the traditional relationship between vendor and customer has been deliberately broken in order to generate an income stream for the vendor outside the actual product sale. In extreme cases the vendor(s) may practically give away the customer because their business model is based on the income stream.

Unfortunately, what works for business executives doesn't work for customers. A broken TV may be an inconvenience but a broken combine harvester incurs real costs. Not thinking this through is likely to cause customers to gradually drift away from a particular vendor -- the product may be absolutely stunning but if the cost and risk involved in owning it hits a threshold then people will find alternatives.

Russia's Pirs ISS module scheduled to fall away, much like Moscow's interest in the space station

Re: With a whimper, not a bang

>And to ensure that all the USSR's rocket scientists didn't all go IR35 for a bunch of middle eastern countries.

To give the Russians credit they've been quite diligent in preventing the leakage of this sort of technology to undesirable third parties. They've not been entirely successful, though. After Ukriane decided its future was with the West the factory in the east of the country that made missiles had to turn to more prosaic things --tramcars -- which left some of their engineers at a loose end. A bunch were intercepted at Moscow airport en route for North Korea. Fair enough, but about that time North Korea switched seamlessly from home made rockets that could barely get off the ground to missiles that could reach half way across the Pacific.

Most of the world's problems can be traced to politicians and their ilk not thinking things through. Our (US) politicians in particular seem to be very good at making the first move or two but then being totally surprised when the game goes out of control. This short attention span also explains their inability to provide long term funding for anything, be it ISS or just preventing our roads and bridges from falling apart.

Re: space technology from the Third Reich.

>Early rocketry tech perhaps....

Early or not it took decades for the US (and others) to equal or beat the technology in the A4 (V2) Particularly tricky bits were the high speed fuel/oxidizer pumps and the combustion chamber/nozzle and its cooling systems. Until SpaceX turned up we've not done anything much in the US since the ULA's rockets use motors purchased from Russia.

Here's a list of the flaws Russia, China, Iran and pals exploit most often, say Five Eyes infosec agencies

>So basically programmer laziness

Maybe, but there could be a lot of other explanations. The most likely based on my own experience is that there's just too many bases to cover and too few people to cover them. Management tends to underestimate both the scope and depth of problems, both tangible and likely, because it impacts schedules. They're particularly sensitive about programmers who are not actively working on a project they can book hours against even though those programmers may be doing what could be described as essential QA functions. (In my experience QA departments are very good at finding user interface bugs and other directly operational problems, they're also good at running canned test programs and certification scripts. What they're not very good at is really subtle problems because these actions have to deliberately look for trouble, they're more of a developer role than a tester.)

Anyway, its a bit unfair to just describe programmers as 'lazy'. Its a typical 'never done complex development in a team environment' statement, the sort of thing you get from disconnected managers.

Russia says software malfunction caused Nauka module to unexpectedly fire thrusters, tilt space station

...but ensure they cannot inadvertently fire again

Or, to echo that famous quote, "Give you a reprogramming you'll never forget".

Great reset? More like Fake Reset: Leaders need a reality check if they think their best staff will give up hybrid work

Re: misinterpreted money

Cash is only useful in small amounts.

Governments assume that large sums of cash are obtained through illicit activity and so will confiscate this unless you can prove that the money was obtained legitimately. (Typically they grab first and you have to fight to get it back.) So I reckon that there's no difference between cash and a central bank issued digital equivalent.

Dell won't ship energy-hungry PCs to California and five other US states due to power regulations

Re: As a Californian, all I can sat is "Who cares?".

The more people that leave the state the less demand for housing and so on. I'm all for that -- housing is expensive here not because of 'guvmint' but because there's such a large demand for it. So please LEAVE if that's your fancy. "Returning to sanity" won't work, you see -- we've had a Republican lock on state government in living memory which was dysfunctional; its signature achievement was Pete Wilson's electricity distribution liberalization that caused both power prices to rocket and supply to become uncertain.

As for the computer rigs, a couple of things. First of all, you can actually power off your computer, you don't have to keep it running 24/7. You could go into idle mode if you were not running Windows but my experience with Windows is that its far too active far too much of the time -- so just pull the plug.

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

This kind of mis-selling is rampant

I've just returned from visiting an older couple we know who bought an HP printer from Costco to replace the (probably perfectly good) one they've got. We''re all technically savvy on this site, right? So what's the big deal about installing a printer?

The problem is that HP has turned an appliance into a marketing fest. Installing the printer was a performance because the recommended software isn't interested in the printer, its interested in *you* and your pocketbook -- it wants to sell ink, send advertisements and generally mess about and, oh yes, it might print a page or two. Being modern its got the printer cartridges tied to the machine, of course. In its quest to be user friendly and marketing savvy it comes out as an annoying, dysfunctional, intrusive bit of software. What it says to people like me is "Avoid this manufacturer's products".

American products are all too often about selling services rather than products. The printer is only an excuse to sell incredibly overpriced ink, preferably by subscription. This might make sense in a business crowded with sales and marketing talent but light on engineering and manufacturing knowhow but its not the way to remain competitive. The only hope is to become a monopoly because that's the only way you can force customers to eat their dog food.

JD is well known -- notorious -- for making equipment that's very expensive to both buy and fix. Expect a robust market in older equipment. Expect also lobbying and legislative efforts to force customers to toe the line -- it will be all in the cause of being 'green', of course -- and expect Republicans, those champions of individual freedom, to be leading the effort.

The problem with JD kit isn't that the sensor prevents the tractor from running but rather that the diagnostic software that says "the sensor is broken" is tightly controlled -- its installed on a dedicated laptop which is in the hands of an authorized service agent. To even diagnose the tractor you have to fly in the repair tech -- remember, America is a big place, you could be half a day or more from the nearest city if you're driving -- who will run the software, identify the problem and provide the spare part. The result is a lot of valuable downtime and the cost of the tech -- $10K ins't unusual.

People are right to suspect JD's motives. If they were honest then they'd either have the diagnostics built in or available to download and run on any computer. As it is they tightly control the software and use the DMCA aggressively if they suspect reverse engineering. Its actually a good reason not to buy any of their kit but then if you're a monopoly or near monopoly what do they care? (Expect the usual action from Congress when "Happy Flower Tractor Co." sells as good kit in the US that is either cheap enough to buy a spare or you can repair -- its this kind of screwing around that causes people to seek out alternative makes.)

What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell

Maybe this is old school thinking

For a time at least.

We've been aware of a very serious skills shortage here in the US (California) for some time but post pandemic its gone critical as lots of people who were hanging in there counting out the clock to retirement or just looking for a change of pace have left the high skills workforce. Managers are, unfortunately, ten a penny so many of them haven't caught on to the seriousness of the situation yet, they still think that they're in those halcyon days where they can just hire and fire as the spreadsheet (and personal whim) dictates.

I was chatting to an old friend yesterday we met at a concert. He's an 'active search' recruiter, his company's been operating for many years both as inside and outside recruiting consultants. He filled me in about the current situation and he wants to get back to me for some advice -- a "long spoon" job since I'm retired, definitely, and definitely do not want another job. I worked past official retirement partly to help out, partly volunteering to train people but my employer never did anything (its not that I needed the money, either) but eventually you have to put your foot down.

So, people with skills, rejoice for now -- all those pseudo psychologists who have been in the habit of either treating you like a droid or just plain patronizing you -- they're really the redundant ones. Let Natural Selection Reign!

China sets goal of running single-stack IPv6 network by 2030, orders upgrade blitz

Re: Democracy and capitalism fails when it comes to long term planning.

IP4 is a very elegant and economical design while IP6 (IMHO) has a lot of design flaws that have contributed to its slow adoption. It could even be said that what we need is a IPv7 that has not just an enhanced address space but improvements to both the IP protocol and the rest of the stack. This is probably going a bit far so we're stuck with v6 with 40+ years of improvements to hardware and software mitigating its shortcomings. Since the Chinese need the (address) space and they make most of the kit anyway I guess we're all going IPv6.

(Can't speak about government attitudes towards China but I can't help noticing that the Chinese don't seem to care. Maybe they know something we don't?)

The cockroach of Windows, XP, lives on in London's Victoria Coach Station

You can't keep updating embedded kit every five minutes

This message hasn't permeated yet for some reason. Its a fact of life that you can't keep updating devices all the time, especially if they've been certified for some industrial or health related operation. The particular build of the OS and the firmware with it are SKUs for the entire device.

This hasn't permeated to the IoT crew yet. Its why I don't mind connecting my yard lights to an IoT switch but you'd never, ever, catch me putting anything large, expensive, heavy or critical on one of their devices.

Pentagon grounds own report that said China's DJI drones are safe

Surely you know by now not to take anything the Feds say seriously?

Trump was out and about at the weekend babbling about the routers used in polling places in the last election -- they have to have the routers because they're generating lots of votes and swinging the election (and so on). Its probably dawning on even the most stupid that the Dominion voting machines were not connected to anything so they are -- as we've been telling them -- merely ballot printers. So the next straw is the routers used to connect the clerks' laptops to the county voter database, the ones used to verify voter's signatures. (The ones were used were Crate devices, they were connected through the cell network directly to county.) So if you believe anything these politicians tell you you're in for a rough time when reality hits.

Its quite easy to monitor network traffic from a quadcopter to see what and who its talking to. You don't need the immense resources of the US government to do this and I'm pretty sure that if DJI had been interested in spying (any more than the normal commercial stuff we take for granted) then we'd have all known about it. Its just noise. The problem is that the 'merkan alternatives are not only nosebleed expensive but also are functionally deficient (they also use a lot of Chinese made components) so a couple of DJI devices were tentatively cleared for use by the government. They're needed for stuff like fighting wildfires, search and rescue and other sorts of things that don't permeate the typical politician/pundit's skull ("unless there's political capital in them thar hills, of course). Job #1 for the Feds should be "re-establishing credibility" and they're not going to do this by pretending that nothing's wrong.

Northern Train's ticketing system out to lunch as ransomware attack shuts down servers

Re: A quick fix

Actually, you just walked up to the window and bought a ticket. You didn't have to 'plan a route', 'book in advance' or specify a train or all the other 101 things that people have to do to travel on non-suburban trains. Since the process was straightforward if there was a queue then it would move quickly. Ticket selling is also easy to automate -- I don't think I've bought an Underground ticket F2F, for example, because they have been sold from slot machines since at leas the 1950s.

The issues with malware stem from two fundamental causes. One is putting systems on the public Internet that don't belong there. The other is using an operating environment that's notorious for being hacked. Both are easily fixed.

Ad tech ruined the web – and PDF files are here to save it, allegedly

Yes, but let's miss the point and argue about trifles

This sums up my sentiment about the current state of the web. It is all active content with the result that it fails as an information serving network, its now just a bandwidth and system hogging mess that is entirely self serving. Its also a major security risk -- passive content cannot host malware, its just data. Instead of looking at the big picture, though, the discussion rapidly degenerates to back and forth about the deficiencies of PDF, how HTML version this or that provides essential capabilities and even how disability unfriendly pure text is. Its just smoke, missing the point entirely

Ad-tech is a self serving business, a vortex of believers who absorb huge amounts of resources because the moment people stop believing in it a huge section of the economy would collapse. That's why you don't see much information about the effectiveness of advertising. I know that everyone likes to get paid but you have to draw a line somewhere and from my perspective that line was crossed a decade or more ago.

A beefy Linux 5.14-rc2 and light at the end of the tunnel for Paragon's NTFS driver

I suppose it wouldn't be too much to ask to go the other way?

Microsoft has shown very little inclination to build drivers that know how to work with non-Microsoft filesystems. I suppose its a combination of 'not invented here' and 'still wedded to drive letters' plus their other idiosyncrasies (like using the escape character as a path separator and a lack of soft or hard links) which makes it difficult for them to design mountable filesystems.

Its really corporate petulance (IMHO) -- Cygwin cracked the problem of matching Linux to Windows decades ago.

Windows 11: What we like and don't like about Microsoft's operating system so far

Back in the old, old, days Windows development tools came with a copy of IBM's Common User Access standards booklet. This CUA was a very carefully thought out set of standards for graphical user interfaces. If you can find a copy then I'd read through it because it will explain why UIs have got steadily more and more awful in recent years. Its also a demonstration of programmer psychology -- the UI is a visible and malleable software component so its an obvious target for programmers to tinker with, its just full of wheels dying to be reinvented (and its a lot more rewarding to fiddle with the screen than deal with system or task issues).

Shell (and scripting) seem to be going through the same processes. We've had powerful tools for decades but in order for them to be modern they have to be reinvented and improved, invariably by adding proprietary twists that make them unique to Microsoft.

UK and chums call out Chinese Ministry of State Security for Hafnium Microsoft Exchange Server attacks

The quote is attributed to Lenin, not Marx. Its an important detail because Karl Marx's mostly theoretical work predates Bolsheviks like Lenin by at least 50 years, i.e. a generation or more. Marx's work wasn't unique in the sense that other thinkers predate him -- you could say he belongs in the same Enlightenment tradition that brought us the US Constitution, the French Revolution and so on.

Why is this important? Everyone likes to diss Marx but few, if any, can refute him. He just asks the questions. He has some vague, idealistic, notion about revolutionary change but its typical for the era, hopelessly impractical. But the questions and the need for answers remains, as relevant as ever. Our rulers' greatest fear -- as it was in the 1840s -- is that someone, somewhere, might find a winning formula, a way to take all that productive effort and using it primarily for the benefit of the people making that effort.

The coming of Wi-Fi 6 does not mean it's time to ditch your cabled LAN. Here's why

WiFi speed is an illusion

I did a lot of development and testing work with WiFi back in the 2000s and it proved impossible to convince anyone -- especially people in Marketing -- that just because it said "54MBits/sec" on the box that the actual data rate you were going to get, even under ideal conditions, was considerably lower and the reason for this wasn't because the developers were lazy or incompetent.

I've found that very few people really understand how wireless works. Our culture is steeped in notions like 'channels', the idea that we select information by tuning a radio, and its proving very difficult to dislodge. This doesn't just affect WiFi. The 2.4GHz band is used for a whole bunch of other things including radio control of models and I've found that modellers, people who were brought up on the notion of exclusive channel use, have difficulty getting their heads around why they can appear to fly so many models on the same frequency and yet for some reason when they fly near those houses over there the planes are likely to go out of control.

Extra R/F bandwidth is always welcome. But ultimately you're going up against a shared medium that requires significant inter-frame gaps and uses a relatively low symbol rate (a dozen of those symbols on the front of each packet carrying clock synchronization and housekeeping information). You get the high data rates by a combination of symbol coding rate and spreading over a lot of spectrum (running channels in parallel, in effect). Everything combines to give you a decent throughput but it will never approach the consistency and reliability of a cable. So I use WiFi for 'intermittent use' but I stream using Cat-5.

Annoyed US regulator warns it might knock SpaceX's shiny new Texas tower down

Re: Am I the Only One Who Wants to See Elon Frog-Marched Out of His Offices in Handcuffs?

On the whole Musk has delivered far more than any other individual since Thomas Edison. Sure, some of his promises are over optimistic (he now admits that "self-driving cars are hard"). He's also learned that the stock market isn't a force for good, its a casino that will destroy you if there's money to be made from it. He might be ungodly wealthy -- on paper -- but he doesn't live like royalty, he's just interested in making stuff. He's usually right about regulations as well -- a launch was aborted unnecessarily because an errant light plane had strayed into a huge TFA, 1950's technology and mindset colliding with 21st century thinking. Things need to be tidied up.

As for labor law violations, I doubt it. SpaceX has a startup culture which means that the work is likely to be interesting, exciting even, but at the same time you're get worked to death unless you're careful. Its a tradeoff and anyone getting involved with this sort of company who expects a generic 'job' is likely to have a rude awakening (assuming they get hired in the first place).

Incidentally, I'm not a Musk groupie.

FAA -- Environmental Champions?

The one thing you can say about aviation is that its an environmental disaster area. Its the one industry that paves over large chunks of land, uses up incredible amounts of fossil fuels (airports are the only place in the US you can buy leaded petrol, its used by most light aircraft) and doesn't give a damn about noise pollution (for a start). It gets a pass because it is socially necessary -- currently its benefits seem to outweigh its costs.

The FAA's interest in tall structures is typically confined to putting some kind of marker on them to prevent low flying aircraft from running into them. SpaceX's launch facility is off limits to general aviation so there's little danger of that so what's the beef? My guess is that there's some crusty old geezer in the agency that just doesn't like Musk. The FAA is a bit of a boy's club anyway, you have to have a certain clubby mindset to join and be a part of that industry.

Still, harassing SpaceX probably makes a bit of a change from bothering aircraft modellers and looking through ADS-B logs for anything that could be regarded as a violation.

Google fined €500m for not paying French publishers after using their words on web

Re: Thick skin

The French have a very individual idea of copyright compared to the US (for example, they don't have the notion of public space -- in theory any photograph you take on the street is subject to copyright). If I were Google I'd just turn the place off until they try to negotiate sensibly -- its not like Google's been ignoring the request to negotiate with copyright holders, its just that the negotiations haven't gone as as fast or as far as the court thinks is appropriate. So its shakedown time.

FWIW -- I mostly use "DuckDuckGo" as a search engine. You don't have to use Google for anything, its just that it works and is convenient for many. So let's stop trying to pretend that everything's Google's fault and let's stop trying to shake them down at every opportunity.

FCC finalizes $1.9bn compo deal for telcos forced to rip'n'replace Huawei, ZTE gear

My Tax Dollars At Work

Says it all, really. There might be a strong case for not buying any new Huawei equipment but junking perfectly good kit to make a political point....

Hong Kong working to share its digital IDs with mainland China

Bejing is just the Federal government

China is made up of a number of provinces, each with their own provincial government and local laws. There is another layer of government which in the US, Australia, Canada, Russia and other large countries is called the Federal government. In the US the Federal government mediates disputes between states, develops and enforces standards and generally works to make sure all the states play nice. If you think of Hong Kong as just another province then it makes sense that it will work to integrate various government functions with the nation as a whole.

We in the West seem unable to grasp the fact that Hong Kong is part of China. We seem quite OK with trying to break up other peoples' countries but are not at all happy when people try to do the same in our democracies (what happened in Spain with the Catalans being the poster child for dumb and pointless repression -- its not as if the Catalans were going to go anywhere, they're stuck in the EU). As for Hong Kong's border regime its in the same kind of situation as Northern Ireland is with the UK/EU -- culturally its in one country but physically and practically its in another. Only time will fix this.

Lenovo says it’s crammed a workstation into a litre of space – less than three cans of beer

Re: The tiny sounds neat...

I've got one of their older ideaCentres. It runs Linux a lot better than it runs Windows.

Biden takes another step to discard Trump-era Chinese social media app ban

Re: Wrong dots?

>But these are not real companies..

They're very real. One investment issue we have these days is that in terms of growth and potential ROI Chinese companies can be more attractive than US ones.

As Europe hopes to double its share of global chip production, Intel comes along with $20bn, plans for fabs

Cost assertions don't make sense

We're schooled in the long obsolete notion that Asians work for peanuts (or rice or whatever). They don't. They earn good money, comparable with the wages paid to US workers (here I mean 'workers', not executives). Land and utility costs in the US can be low, especially in states like New Mexico. So where's this "Costs 30% more" coming from?

I have always been a bit skeptical of these cost assertions because its always where I'm working that costs too much, is uneconomic and so on. I had an interesting experience that underscored this a decade or so back when I became an 'accidental Intel employee' due to an acquisition of a company I was working at in Southern California. As the relevant IP was sucked out of the company we were obviously 'uneconomic' -- the work my group was doing was eventually outsourced to Russia -- but while I was working there I had to spend a week at Intel's facility in Haifa. Israel. The working conditions there were unbelievable -- it was the free food (breakfast and lunch -- nice stuff as well, none of your prepackaged junk), the relatively short working hours compared to what I was used to. Then there was the free car -- all employees above a certain grade were eligible for a free vehicle (below this they just got a subsidy). Compared to our relatively mediocre wages, 'work all the hours God sends us and then some', the cube farm mindset.....anyway, you get the idea.

Journalists need to be skeptical of these kind of numbers, the ones that say "You're not working hard enough". I've lived with this both in the UK and the US for my entire working life. Companies have an infinite number of ways to divert profits so taking anything they say at face value is likely to get yourself conned.

With a straight face, Putin agrees to do something about ransomware coming out of Russia, apparently

Its just criminal activity.

Russia's well known for having not terribly well paid but excellent programmers so its possible that its a source of malware. Its not a given, though, especially as this kind of ransomware is malware-as-a-service, its a bad payload packaged for distribution by clients using other tools to gain entry to target systems - a business, in fact. Its one we'd all like to see taken down but like the Indian call center it just keeps on going because our everyday technologies tacitly encourage it -- we're reluctant to change our ways because it might interfere with the way we do things (and that's just too much effort).

So its easier to just make noises about "Putin" and do nothing. Putin has actually called our bluff by stating that the Russian government has received no requests for help in tracking malware operators. Its likely that they're not in Russia, anyway, but its a lot easier to just mouth Cold War type comments than get off our collective backsides and actually do something.

Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts

You've stumbled across the dark secret...

The inconvenient truth is that a lot of applications development is concerned with stopping what should be a straightforward application from working unless the user has the correct credentials to ensure that said application is monetized appropriately. This alone accounts for why Linux programs appear to 'just work' while their Windows equivalents can be just a world of hurt.

I understand people need to eat but this continual compromising of functionality to suit marketing imperatives (and its close cousin, "security") impacts productivity. Ultimately a program like Teams doesn't do anything that hasn't been done decades ago, its just now in a shiny Office wrapper with all the attendant issues of compatibility, maintainability and usability (and I'm not sure that constant distraction is the key to a productive workday either).

Uncle Sam sanctions Chinese AI outfits for links to Xinjiang Uyghur human-rights abuses

Its probably more about thinning the competition

I learned one rather telling snippet of information recently while I was reading up an article on the search for the origins of the Coronavirus. We all know it originated -- or at least, was first detected, in Wuhan in the south of China and up to now I'd just thought of it as a somewhat out of the way provincial city. Its not. Its bigger than New York.

This lack of sense of scale probably makes it difficult for us to comprehend what the Chinese are doing. All we know is that some of their companies are becoming global leaders in their fields and this tends to attract the attention of the US government by way of industry lobbying groups. The Entity List is then invoked. This list was originally intended to prevent the leak of sensitive technologies to potentially adversarial states but in recent years its being used to prevent companies in those states doing business with us -- we're buying, they're selling, not the other way around. Since we - that's the US -- is a sizable but overall not very large market from the Chinese perspective the obvious conclusion is that all these bans and lists are designed as anti-competitive measures. (Anyway, if we were truly concerned about human rights abuses then we wouldn't be trading with half the world......)

Biden order calls for net neutrality, antitrust action, ISP competition – and right to repair your own damn phone

But monopoly is in the nature of capitalism

Although we're schooled from the cradle to think that capitalism is all about competition benefiting the consumer and so on in reality its name says it all -- its all about capital. This has huge implications that are always being glossed over because of all the inconvenient truths it exposes. Return on Investment, for example. Capitalists want the highest yield for the lowest investment (like everyone else) so naturally they want to eliminate competition (form monopolies or cartels) and manage markets to sell what product they have for the highest prices. It really isn't important to them whether their activity is socially useful or not, their world is the spreadsheet and if the spreadsheet says that they can make more money by investing in a parasitic activity -- or laying off thousands of workers -- then that will be the course of action chosen (tempered by any legal or public relations considerations -- timing is everything).

We've been through a generation of deregulation, unfettering capitalism to do what it does best. I don't know why people complain so much -- they keep voting for this. They may have noticed that their views are irrelevant since with the media consolidated and government captured they're not really that important any more -- as some notable dictators in the past (and one or two Republican politicians of today) have noted its not the number of votes that count but their quality.

That time a startup tried to hire me just to push clients' products in job interviews

Job Interviews are great intelligence gathering activities

When I want to learn about a company and what it does the first place I turn to is their job board. This will tell you what sort of work they're doing and where they're doing it and you can also glean from the distribution of those jobs whether the firm is solid or chaotic, even bordering on collapse. A job interview is even more telling, especially if you're a senior level developer. Ignore HR and their attempts at psychological profiling -- the truth is that if the company needs you that badly they'll ignore HR's voodoo anyway (it doesn't hurt to play along, though -- no point in developing a premature attitude problem!). At the interview, which may well last all day, you'll get to meet other developers and in the process of them forming a picture of you as a potential colleague you'll get a very good idea of what they're doing, how they're doing it and what kind of problems they have.

Its a bit of a waste of time pitching products in these situations but on the other hand if I was working for a VC or investment bank interested in funding the company I could very quickly figure out if its worth putting money into.

If you've mastered Python 101, you're probably better at programming than OpenAI's prototype Codex

A small snag.....

My wife of many years has a bit of a love/hate relationship with computers (mostly hate, actually). We've had them at home since about 1980 and the novelty quickly wore off when she realized that she had to adapt her way of working to the machine rather than the other way around. Because she, as a teacher, knows about "computers" she got tapped to go on innumerable courses to learn all sorts of computery things, whatever people thought was what you needed to teach kids so the would be ready for the Bright New Age that was dawning. Despite all this immersion, though, she confided to me that while she knew the standard programming moves -- statements and control functions in the language du jour -- she never quite figured out how to program, how to marshal a problem so it could be implemented on a computer. Since this is something I've been doing for ever it wasn't easy to explain, either -- its been described as a "knack", its one of those things that is either blindingly obvious or completely opaque. (It doesn't help that I find a lot of program code confusing and opaque myself -- sure, its syntactically correct, at least the compiler thought so, but the logic's convoluted, the data's disorganized and there's too many wrappers on wrappers.)

So there you have it. Any experienced programmer will tell you that the coding bit is easy. Its knowing what to code that will get you. (A lot of programming may be copy and paste but it will only get you so far.)

Tencent uses facial recognition to enforce China’s curfew on gaming kids

Re: Company or state?

They're not "an extension of the CPC", they're trying to behave like good corporate citizens -- in the context of the society they live in. Nothing much more to say, really.

Except that we as a society seem to be regressing to our teenage years. No limits! You can't make me! Who are you to tell me what to do? Anything that pushes back against that is "brutal repression" or "the nanny state" or whatever. (There is a certain irony here because those that are loudest protesting this unwarranted state intrusion into their freedom invariably support causes and politics that directly impacts society's freedoms. But that's for another thread....)

Kaspersky Password Manager's random password generator was about as random as your wall clock

Re: If you value your security get a hardware random number generator -- or two

>Why do you trust trust TrueRNG? How can I trust your reply?

I can't. That's why my choice of words does not recommend anything.

Audacity users stick the knife – and fork – in to strip audio editor of unwanted features

Not a new problem

This isn't the first time people have issued adware infested applications -- early versions just enabled annoying pop-ups, though, rather than the intrusive 'analytics' that they now want to collect.

What I can't figure out is how Audacity users would form a distinct enough class of people to warrant collecting marketing information about. I guess the Internet marketing business is probably 95% froth caused by a mass of believers who all support each others' efforts less one unbeliever causes the edifice to collapse so every bit of data is precious, no matter how useless it actually is.

Biden to sign exec order calling for right-to-repair rules for farmers, maybe rest of us

"May" require?

The specific complaint farmers have with John Deere's equipment is that when it breaks down you have to get a technician from an authorized service center to visit the unit with a laptop that has proprietary software on it to diagnose the problem. Apart from this being expensive its also rather inconvenient -- these units are likely to malfunction in the middle of a field which will effectively be in the middle of nowhere. Farmers and harvesters also can't afford the downtime.

The counter argument is that the manufacturer needs to keep control of firmware to control emissions, safety systems and the like which, while true, is piling it on a bit. Just about every vehicle you're likely to find on a farm will have emissions controls and safety components like anti-lock brakes. These aren't the sorts of things that are liekly to go wrong (and if they do its a module swap). What the farmer's facing is an Apple like situation where the unit fails to function unless its been given an official repair by an official person at official prices even if its a simple mechanical defect.