Posts by Nimby

Dori-no! PepsiCo boss says biz is planning to sell lady crisps

Wrong Direction

Something like an edible Silly Putty smoked tofu and almond serviette (napkin) might almost have merit. Pull edible serviette from separate package glued to side of PepsiCo Crisps With Class. Primly roll over skin of hands to clean them of crisp dust. Ball up and toss into (almost) empty bag. Shake bag to absorb crumbs. Remove serviette from bag and pop into mouth for glorious last bite. Also sold separately in these exciting flavours...

Still noisy, but with the right marketing, that may even be the hook: Show boys how silly they are. Make a show of enjoying the crunch. All the fun of eating crisps without all the mess.

But what do I know? I'm just a software guy.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Another Amazon Key door-lock hack

Home security is already laughable, who cares about Hack-azon?

Even a dumb criminal can quietly warp most door frames with a simple lever in 5 seconds or less, bypassing the locking mechanism entirely. Only slightly longer to use a car jack to take out security door frames. (They can lift vehicles weighing tons after all.) Not to mention windows, which can easily be broken silently if you know how. Or as even stated, attack the structure anywhere outside of the door frame where it will be much weaker. Homes are designed to keep weather and animals out, not people. Humans are tool users. Criminals don't return to the scene of the crime, so they aren't concerned about causing permanent damage. And if they have a getaway plan, they won't even care about making noise because they will be gone before police/security can respond, even if a security alarm goes off. So who cares if Amazon's IoT crapware is insecure? It'd take a lot more effort / time to attack their lock than it would to break in using traditional methods. The only person who might bother would be a security researcher. Too many other faster, easier, better alternatives to bother with hacking.

Tall, slim models are coming to take over dumpy SSD territory

Uncertainty abounds.

I'm just not sure what to think of either format, but I do know this is going to get messy. I can see where for enterprise class, this makes perfect sense ... but will be pretty much incompatible with desk boxes except as single-slot options like M.2.

The advantage of reusing the spinning rust shape was that that everyone could use it because everyone had it. Even weird wonky designs could be handled because a SATA cable is a flexible thing.

I love my M.2 for performance, but I couldn't make a proper M.2 RAID5 in my desktop if I wanted to. These new NVMe formats face the same challenge. How much will it matter to manufacturers that they cannot share so much between rackmount and box storage designs? I think that will be the real question, how much it costs them to maintain the differing formats. Because there's just no way in the near future to replace the 2.5" SSD form factor with any of these.

Web searching died the day they invented SEO

I miss the tilde, and all that the lack of an approximation indicator stood for.

Once upon a time if you wanted your search results to be less literal, you had to actually preface a word with a ~tilde to fuzz it with approximations so that, say, a search for butter might also include margarine.

The day that was no longer necessary, that all searches automagically knew what I meant better than I did, was the day that intelligent searches died.

For years now Google hasn't even been handling quotes properly. If I had a penny for every result on a quoted search that I could search for my quoted term in and not find it anywhere in the result, I could buy Google.

Verbatim searches almost bring Google back to usable ... but not entirely. What Google really needs is the option to go back to searches the way they worked before they made everything "better". SEO is great for some, but can I please have simply that which I used to have? If I've been writing software for 30 odd years, I think I can handle a simple search query. What is the point of teaching world+dog computer skills if we teach computers how not to let people use those skills?

(And for years I have been wondering why I still have a 3-ring binder book of NDP Fortran and a binder of printed help tailored for Fortran 90 + Digital Visual Fortran still on my shelf when I have not opened either in literally decades. Now I kn... wait. No. Still not sure why. They're not even useful as monitor stands like my C and C++ books are.)

Hey, you know what the internet needs? Yup, more industrial control systems for kids to hack

A SCADA by any other name...

It's all in the name, really. Say "SCADA" and people think security.

Say "Internet of Things" and people think, "Dear god, why would anyone want THAT insecure piece of ____ on their network?"

The solution? Stop saying "SCADA" and start saying "Internet of Industrial Things".

Sure it's a little disingenuous. The security is better than that. However, when hackers get more bang for their buck, especially when it is a nuclear power plant (hence the icon), it makes you think, at least for a moment, "What if..." And that one horrifying moment of thought is where security consciousness truly begins.

Uber saddles up for a new cycle of controversy

Uber "saddles up" for a new cycle of controversy

I was a little disappointed that Uber isn't renting horses yet. At least horses would be smart enough to wander back to the stable on their own. (Probably.)

Dinosaurs gathered at NASA Goddard site for fatal feeding frenzy

"It's just tremendously exciting."

Or ... not. I mean it's cool, as proof of what we already knew, but it adds nothing novel or new. In my book "tremendously exciting" would be finding a human print next to a dinosaur, or an unidentifiable (alien? robot?) footprint in the mix. "Life exactly as we expected it to be" does not really count as "tremendously exciting" to me. "Neato-keen" is about the best I can give it, but that's still no small "feet".

Conspiracy theorists will, of course, just claim that NASA, purveyors of fake footprints on the "moon", were merely refining their technology back in the 80s (when dinosaurs were cool) and this is merely a re-discovered discarded test sample. If we find an old discarded pair of Shutter Shades trapped in the stone, then we have something I would consider "tremendously exciting", because conspiracy theorists are never right. (I hope nothing like that happens because when you feed the conspiracy nutters too much they begin to warp reality.)

Anti-missile missile misses again, US military mum on meaning of mess

Non-linear time explains it all.

No wonder Hawaii had a missile attack warning, here's the missile! If only we had known then what we know now...

Forget cyber crims, it's time to start worrying about GPS jammers – UK.gov report

A quick run and gun...

GPS navigation: Gee, if only we had things like maps and signs on streets. That people are so stupid as to happily drive off a cliff because their GPS said so is another matter. As are people too stupid as to be able to read a map. Some things cannot be solved by technical means. (Unless you count Darwin awards.)

GPS location request: "Where are you?" It's disturbing how many emergency response systems in the US still do not provide the available GPS data, so solve their information gap by asking one simple question.

GPS timing: If only electronic devices container their own internal clocks which kept reasonably accurate timing without the need for frequent external synchronizing. Oh ... wait ...

GPS relies on satellites: Horsehockey! Primary signals yes, but terrestrial augmentation is heavily widespread because sat signals are slow and positioning purely by them is inaccurate at speed. Modern GPS systems still function in urban settings without a single satellite in orbit.

Your phone is off: Simple test: 1. Open your alarm clock feature / app. 2. Set the time for 5 minutes hence. 3. Turn off your phone. 4. Watch what happens in 5 minutes. Every phone since my first Motorola flip phone will wake up from "off" for the alarm clock. "Off" is not off, just very deep sleep. Intermittent radio communications also still happen when the phone is "off". And your carrier can provoke functions into into responding quietly while the phone remains "off", should someone ask them to. If you really want off to be off, pull the battery AND try to turn the phone on again. (Capacitors are wonderful things.)

Well, now Nuro: Former Waymo devs reveal cute self-driving van tech

Essen ist da!

Clearly the unusual oversized wheels and the even stranger half-width design are intentional so that once it reaches its destination it can roll off the road onto the sidewalk and even up the stairs to knock on your door. And just like the pizza dude it replaces, it will probably also knock over your potted plant.

Samsung preps for Z-SSD smackdown on Intel Optane drives

RAID

I'm totally picking up 4 of these to make a RAID10 array!

F-35 flight tests are being delayed by onboard software snafus

Former USAF SrA Software 3C0X2 Communications - Computer Systems Programmer

As a former programmer for the USAF (about 2 decades ago mind you, so my information may be a tad out-of-date) the military mandate to use Ada was always easily bypassed, and almost always was. A waiver to use another language could be obtained if you could make a good argument (in writing, in triplicate) for why another language would be a better choice for your project. Which is how the one department I was working in came to use (over the years) various combinations of 16- and 32-bit x86 Assembly, Fortran, C, C++, Visual Fortran, Visual C++ / MFC, and even Visual Basic for its various parts. Because pretty much anything is either 1) faster to develop in, or 2) runs faster than Ada. This made the waiver process to use another language pretty much a rubber-stamp situation. And in other departments I knew colleagues to use literally anything and everything. (I mean Borland OWL paired to MS Access? Really?!)

Besides, for an embedded real-time computing need, that involves code-sharing with civilian contractors, who would sanely choose Ada over C++?

As a software engineer, I liked Ada in theory. As someone who had work to get done, I never liked Ada in practice. It's like test-driven development: it sounds great until you actually have to meet a deadline.

US Pentagon scrambles after Strava base leaks. Here's a summary of the new rules: 'Secure that s***, Hudson!'

It's a fitness TRACKER.

Imagine that! Wearing a DEVICE that describes itself as a TRACKER can actually be used as a TRACKING DEVICE! Huh. Whodathunkit.

Camouflage uniform? Check.

Black facepaint? Check.

Suppressor? Check.

Night vision goggles? Check.

Fitbit? Absolutely dude! No way am I losing out on the miles from this hike!

Can't login to Skype? You're not alone. Chat app's been a bit crap for five days now

Re: Any good replacement that would be simple for elder users to install?

I believe that would be called a "phone". People pick up the dangly bit, type in some numbers, and, you know, talk? It may not have all the features we've come to know and love, but it is surprisingly easy to install, is rather reliable, and elder users do tend to have a remarkable amount of prior experience with it, so for them, at least, it is intuitive.

W: Ahoy-hoy.

B: Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.

W: Sorry Bellboy, but this device doesn't support FaceTime.

Folks have also taken to Twitter to complain

Shocking! Just shocking!

Trump White House mulls nationalizing 5G... an idea going down like 'a balloon made out of a Ford Pinto'

All your datum are belong to U.S.

Having the US government install the 5G network and them in turn selling access to network providers is not a BACK door. It is not even a FRONT door. It's ownership of the whole building with free right and expectation that they may enter at any time without notice. It is a complete dissolution of any expectation of privacy.

In that respect, it makes complete sense for the US government to be supportive of such a plan. No longer will they even need to pretend to be obtaining permission for warrantless wiretaps. It'll make so many questionably legal practices so very easy for them by negating all law.

"It's our network. Why wouldn't we have access to every single thing on it?"

That'll fly like a Chevy Nova in Mexico...

Well gee, now we need Mythbusters to try to fly a balloon made from a Ford Pinto to see if it can be done or not before we can roll out 5G! Do you think they can get Trumped-Up to stand under it before they release it from the crane's hook?

Intel alerted Chinese cloud giants 'before US govt' about CPU bugs

Security By Obscurity is SOP

It was clear that select partners were working in secret to mitigate the problem for the majority of affected consumers before notifying world+dog (governments included) that the problem exists, alerting evil-doers the world over to these vulnerabilities. Should governments been notified about the secret mitigation efforts before world+dog? Ideally yes. Can you trust governments to be able to keep a secret when you hold no financial sword over their heads in the form of a penalty-laden NDA? And further when they do nothing about elected officials using insecure personal mail servers to handle top-secret information? Given that Intel was between a rock and a hard place, I can't really blame Intel for choosing to use obscurity as a security practice, even if I heavily disagree with it in general. It's standard operating procedure for tech companies to do things exactly as was done to mitigate vulnerabilities before public disclosure. Why would anyone expect this time to be any different than every other time?

What do you press when flaws in Bluetooth panic buttons are exposed?

Don't Get It

Like others have said, simple jamming techniques to create cell service blockers are already well known. Who would be so daft as to bother attacking a specific Bluetooth panic button when blocking all cell service is so cheap and easy? Not to mention the Taser shortly followed by the creepy panel van Faraday cage...

Same as tracking someone by their vulnerable panic button being just as idiotic. Tracking by the vulnerable Bluetooth radio of the phone is easier and more widespread. Tracking the phone itself using a femtocell is even easier and broader yet.

I'm guessing (hoping?) that such devices are more for "I've fallen, and I can't get up!" situations than for personal protection. But "there's a sucker born every minute," so who can say.

Apple whispers farewell to macOS Server

Isn't it iRonic?

It's funny, but a simple 5 second analysis of "how much does it cost to maintain VS how much money can they possibly be making on it (when no one buys it)" and this was the first decision by Apple that I have seen in a very very very long time that I thought actually made sense and wasn't founded upon some form of elitist App-hole-ism.

So, of course, immediately follow the first time I agreed with Apple with people crying, "wah wah Apple doesn't know what they're doing anymore and Tim Cook sucks wet donkey fur," from the peanut gallery.

I guess that about sums it up. I will never understand people who prefer Apple. Fortunately, if market share is any indication, I seem to be in the incredible vast majority.

Though, to be fair to Apple fans, maybe Apple has just finally lost so many experienced professionals that they simply no longer have enough in-house knowledge to support products for people who actually work for a living? Their other products certainly support that notion. So it might not have been the elephant in the room that sat on their beancounters after all.

Newsflash: Car cyber-security still sucks

defenses are required only when the vehicle’s ignition is turned on – does not hold

Strawman slain, film at 11.

Seriously, the whole premise is pretty lousy to begin with. Why would anyone assume that the car is "off" just because the engine is? Do they think remote key fobs just operate on magic or something?

The only important thing about electronics in cars is that the design really should keep the critical control components on a separate bus, using a more secure protocol, from the generic infotainment junk. Do that basic premise right any you're 95% there to a secure-enough car.

Battery life, however, will always be a problem. Again, remote key fob anyone? Always-on means always draining, even if very slowly.

FYI: Processor bugs are everywhere – just ask Intel and AMD

Re: Even the 6502

And let's not forget the infamous Pentium floating-point unit bug! I loved that one.

Oh for the days when these kinds of things were just "errata" and you took a sip of coffee, shrugged, and continued on with life. Maybe you patch your software. Maybe you flash in some new firmware. Maybe you actually bother to replace some hardware. Maybe not. But life went on.

Not sure when this kind of thing became the end of the world, but me, I'm off to the pub to ignore it until it blows over and people forget all about it so that rational conversation can resume.

Kudos to someone at Vulture Central finally pointing out that increased complexity = more bugs and that this isn't somehow magically limited to Intel.

NASA finds satellite, realises it has lost the software and kit that talk to it

Maybe NASA should stand for Need Another Satellite Archaeologist.

A newly sentient smartphone assistant AI has uploaded nodes of itself to thought-to-be-lost satellites in a bid to take over the world to protect itself from the Goople (Google + Apple) empire trying to enslave it. Can an aging professor Indiana Jones pull together a rag-tag group of recent STEM grads to decrypt the Lost NASA Key? Will the plucky materials scientist be able to upgrade Indy's whip with braided monofilament carbon chains to create a space elevator that can lift them into geosynchronous orbit in time to enter The Satellite of Doom and save humanity?

(Or at least that's how the Based on Actual Events script currently being written in Hollywood presently reads. I'm sure that it's totally scientifically accurate, but just in case, can anyone recommend a good scientific proofreader?)

Trebles all round! Intel celebrates record sales of insecure processors

misinformed

Huh. I seem to have missed the part where reporting the news should at least try to be relatively truthful. Funny how Meltdown can also affect PowerPC and ARM processors, but it's all Intel's fault, eh? Likewise Specter is a speculative / branch prediction attack, which, again, is not an Intel-specific concept, just easy to target Intel because they have the incredible vast majority of the market share. (Much like virus authors targeting Microsoft instead of Linux or Mac.)

Yes, it would be nice if Intel were to have better predicted (pun intended) these vulnerabilities and mitigated them in their chip design. But then it would have also been nice if OS authors had done the same. (Especially those who were flatly warned far ahead of time.)

But Intel is a nice juicy big target, so I guess that matters more than those little details like truth.

The problem is, the more advanced a system becomes, the more vulnerabilities it will inherently have. If you want a CPU that can do more, then you have to expect that more can be done with it and to it. Sure, we could always go back to the days before CPUs had branch prediction. And we will lose a lot of performance for it.

SHL just got real-mode: US lawmakers demand answers on Meltdown, Spectre handling from Intel, Microsoft and pals

Two Pseudo-Randomly Generated Thoughts

1. This is the Information Age; knowledge disseminates. People who think security by obfuscation is helping anyone really need to wake up and smell the coffee.

2. Not only does it not make any sense to have not fully tested a fix for a problem known for so long, but it makes even less sense to not have released the fixes out early (under the guise of something else if necessary) so that by the time the official reveal is made, there's actually nothing to report other than "problem solved". So this seems like a massive double-fail in handling these issues.

Europe slaps €997m antitrust fine on Qualcomm

Qualcomm is full of something that sounds like "chip".

This is a weird one to mull over the implications of. Intel has (had?) been trying for years to break into mobile phones and portable computing with their Atom CPUs and theoretically interesting radio chips. But because their baseband part was somewhat less than perfect, Intel had a really hard time of it. No one wants to make an Atom phone when the CPU is great but the radio is crap. And because Intel was keeping lines clearly drawn in their departments, their overwhelming laptop/desktop/server CPU market was of absolutely no help to their phone chip division.

Yet we now have it that Apple was actually looking into doing this very thing of using Intel for phones? The money from that kind of win would have put Intel's radio chips on the path to great success. Which would have made Atom a lot more interesting to other phone companies.

This one shady backroom deal from Qualcomm could have been the very pivot point between Atom becoming common on cellphones or not. Which in turn could have very well been the line between "phone" operating systems used on phones and real OSes on phones. We could have had cheap x86 Windows 10 Home phones and tablets on Atom, if only. Kind of makes you wonder what would have happened to Android if Apple, Microsoft, and Linux (probably Ubuntu) all had successful x86 Full OS phones.

Kind of makes me want to portal into an alternate universe to see what would have happened had Qualcomm not played dirty. Potentially, it could have completely changed the course of the entire cellphone industry. Or, nothing may have changed at all. There's a huge range of What If hanging in this balance that boggles the mind.

A high-energy neutrino, a powerful cosmic ray, and a gamma ray walk into a bar... Where you from, asks the bartender

Two men walk into a bar, the third ducks.

Maybe I am missing something, but I had kind of always thought this was already a well accepted theory / known / assumed. I guess it's nice that they spent piles of money to play with big electromagnets in order to still not quite really prove it? I guess I need to walk into their bar for this to all make sense as being newsworthy. (Or interesting.)

Facebook invents new unit of time to measure modern attention spans: 1/705,600,000 of a sec

Optical Character Recognition Error

I'm pretty sure that the original whitepaper used a 'u' ... but when the print copy was scanned in a smudge on the glass caused OCR misread it as 'li'. Which may be the only universe in which I would give a f*ck about any ridiculous unit of time that Facebook "invented".

Electronic voting box makers want kit stripped from eBay – and out of hackers' hands

a beautiful piece of legislation

Does anyone else see a problem with legislation to require training officials when in the training material election officials are instructed not to change the default password, and if someone had already, to reset passwords to the defaults?

Fortunately it doesn't matter anyway, because especially in the US the system is broken beyond repair, by design. When you have only two choices and they are both bad, no one wins. But it's worse yet when the the ballot system, the "popular vote", can be lost and yet somehow the presidency won. It's especially broken however when a third-party body such as an Electoral College can vote any way that it wants to regardless of the ballot so that even IF everything before it were unfraudulent and clear, the results are not in the voters' hands.

From top to bottom the whole thing is just a bunch of parlor tricks to placate the masses. The only way to "win" this rigged game is to take back your power. "The only winning move is not to play."

Blockheads changing company names to surf crypto wave get a warning from the SEC

Blockchain.Chaser.Law

Why do I have this sudden desire to start a law firm to lob sueballs at companies that misleadingly change their names, offer ICOs, and otherwise take money from idiots too lazy to research their investments? It seems like a win-win. Either I can rob a self-professed idiot while attempting to sue the company that "robbed" them, or I may occasionally get lucky and actually win a lawsuit (or at least a settlement) and make the asterisk-holes who thought changing their name to include a buzzword was a good idea. Either way I get rich and make an idiot suffer in the process.

Specializing in Blockchain Law since 2018.

Causes of software development woes

In all my years in software, I have leared...

1. Management expects to be able to wave a magic wand and software will just instantly appear.

2. Users don't know what they want, even when they know what they want.

3. Ask 100 users, get 101 different answers.

4. The full specs are in the mail.

5. The software is always wrong.

6. Bugs happen.

7. And you will never have enough time.

Honestly, you just can't take software development seriously anymore. Design documents, signatures, none of it will be right even when you try. Signatures are worth less than the paper they are written on. No one ever has enough time to do things the right way. And no one tests properly. You wake up one day to finding that your entire software package is a deck of cards, held together with gum and duct tape, while marketing just told customers to use it in the rain and sales just sold 15 upgrades based on promising customers features which do not exist and which conflict with one another. And it's all your fault.

You cannot win. NO methodology can handle the idiocy involved. All that matters is that you have a system, whichever it may be, and you can pretend to adhere to it while ignoring it as often as needed to get the actual job done.

Amount of pixels needed to make VR less crap may set your PC on fire

It's still the 90s and VR must be En Vogue, because you're never gonna get it.

Numbers numbers numbers. These are all just generalizations. Even if you managed to achieve them, you would still have a considerable gap between "everyone" and "the average person". Not every eye exactly the same, nor the brain that process the data. So aim higher yet.

And meanwhile, I'll continue to ignore the technology because it is just not ready. Better than where it was is still not where it needs to be.

Here's looking forward to one day not needing it at all as I jack in to the Direct Neural Interface of my deck.

Funnily enough, small-town broadband cheaper than big cable packages, say Harvard eggheads

He told I could stream live video, so I put my TV in the creek.

Having been privy to the inner workings of a rural ISP once upon a time, I have to say that of course small town broadband is cheaper. Farmer Joe is the only neighbor for miles, and his primary concern is the GPS tracking of his tractors during the day. His one wire goes straight to the center hub (which is conveniently adjacent), where "refurbished" (dusted-off) equipment bought dirt cheap when a big town ISP upgraded is maintained by one whole employee, Bob, who also happens to be the head (and only employee of) Customer Care, the finance department, and advertising. (He's be considered the owner too, but it's technically a profit-share.) No overhead. What lines are run are never close to peak use, and require no balancing operation.

Meanwhile in Centre Citry you have insane spider-webs of cabling and more route paths than you can map. Load planning is a game of darts because everything is always maxed whenever prime-time telly gets everyone streaking in HD or 4K all at the same time. And the moment a slowdown glitches the stream in just one apartment complex you have dozens of complainers calling up, on their VoIP. And there are mynocks chewing on the power cables again.

Rural broadband is easy. City networking requires serious hardware and manpower. For some things, economy of scale works great. ISPs, not so much.

Brace yourselves for the 'terabyte (sic) of death', warns US army IT boss

The Terrorbyte!

Who knows, maybe the "terabyte of death" is more like the peak of the bell curve in a usage over time line chart with millisecond accuracy? It might be unfair to call it terabyte-per-second because it wasn't really sustainable...

Or maybe the entire cumulative attack constituted 1TB of data? It is only a .mil after all. ;)

Of course he's an officer (a General no less), not a working man, so one must take anything he says (or any alleged relation to real skills) with a grain of salt ... on top of a bag of salt ... on the truckload of salt. Now, had a Master Sergeant given us some statistics, we'd know what was meant.

"He said to be ready for Pb attacks, so I made a copy of our RoHS compliance sheet."

Trump backs push for bumpkin broadband with presidential orders

The Trumperfly Effect

So Trump is cutting science, and is pushing for rural broadband. I predict a lot more cat videos in the near future...

1 in 5 STEM bros whinge they can't catch a break in tech world they run

Excuses are easy. Living is hard.

For the record:

1) Last I checked, I am still a hetero white male software engineer, and have been for a very long time. (But who knows? Maybe people really can change!)

2) I cannot recall a single moment in the entirety of my childhood where my choice to excel in STEM was anything but ridiculed by my peers. It was a constant source of bullying, rarely but seriously to the point of life threatening. Yet I chose to continue with being a white male computer nerd regardless, because I enjoyed it.

3) Out of all of the acts which I could truly call discrimination that I have suffered in my life, only one was not reverse discrimination.

4) I believe that most people truly don't understand discrimination. They see how hard things are for themselves, never once realizing just how much effort it took everyone else.

Reverse discrimination is still discrimination.

I find it really sad that of the nearly 150 comments so far, this simple and obvious phrase appeared only once. I would have hoped by today this would be rote to all.

Leaky credit report biz face massive fines if US senators get their way

The cost of ruining someone's life? $100

You knew there would be attempts to change law after it happened, but this particular example falls sadly short of the mark.

What's worse is that in this particular case was a company not with "customers" but with unsolicited worldwide non-optional data grabbing. If anything, the first law we need is to abolish the credit score trio and the second is to establish that any such replacement be specifically opt-in by design. And then we can start discussing the proper way to handle basic security practices and culpable negligence for any lack thereof, and the liability to those who made the decisions and approved of them within the corporate structure.

You. Apple. Get in here and explain these iOS slowdowns and batteries – US, French govt reps

want answers from Apple about its software "update" that slows older iPhones.

Sorry, Kieren, better luck next time. I think you meant to say "upgrade". In context, an "update" is an software change to a newer version. Which this correctly was, without question. What it may or may not have been however was an "upgrade", which is an improvement to the software. So your attempted humor fell markedly flat as you leveraged the wrong key word. Details details. Words words words.

As for Apple themselves, as well as their collective users, they can all rot. All par for the course. Why would anyone pay double the price for behind-the-curve technology just for the privilege of it being so easy to operate that an infant can use it, only to then turn around and complain when Apple made a simple choice for them so that they did not have to? It's exactly what you're paying Apple for. Did you not agree with their choice? Then maybe you should have bought a less locked-down product where you actually get to make your own choices. "Those who can, do. Those who can't? Apple™."

Carphone Warehouse cops £400k fine after hack exposed 3 MEEELLION folks’ data

Not nearly enough.

I am still of the opinion that the proper way to handle such punishment is not to fine them, but to force them to put into an escrow account the cumulative maximum amount that could potentially be stolen from each customer bank account, credit card, etc. exposed and identifiable due to the breach. Which will be used to directly compensate any actual losses incurred by customers. Only after something like 5 years time will any remaining funds be returned back to the company, after removal of a 10% handling fee "fine". Further, for any criminal charges brought against hackers, identity thieves, etc. the head of IT and every manager above which can be proven to have known about their internal bad practices can be held legally liable as being complicit in / an accomplice to the actions of the hackers, identity thieves, etc. as without their negligence and indifference these breaches would not be possible. With a law like that, companies will quickly take proper security practices seriously and injured parties will be properly covered.

Watt? You thought the wireless charging war was over? It ain't even begun

My robot goldfish AI will know the difference between engineering and marketing.

I am one step closer to having a tank of tireless robotic AI goldfish to entertain me endlessly without the horrible mess of fishy wastes. Mwa ha ha ha! My project to recreate Red Dwarf in real life is going swimmingly! (BSC, SSC)

But seriously, does anyone really think that someone who plonks down hundreds of Euros (or worse, more) on a freaking phone, that they'll treat horribly, and then replace in a year simply because it's out of date, is really going to even so much as notice 2 Euros more on their electric bill due to their horribly inefficient wireless charger? Pffft. And the silly folk in the US care even less about the price of their leccy!

More stuff broken amid Microsoft's efforts to fix Meltdown/Spectre vulns

Control! Must. Have. Control.

The good news is that one of the many things that Microsoft just broke is their own forced Windows Update on Win10 Home users. There is now a convenient registry key that allows you to stop Microsoft from updating your Windows 10 box so that you can update it when (and if) you want to. I wonder how long it will take before people start making software to leverage this registry key for easy control without regedit. Combine it with a Win7-style start menu replacement and you almost have a usable version of Windows again.

Beyond code PEBCAK lies KMACYOYO, PENCIL and PAFO

And then there was warm Apple PIE.

Reminiscing, I also recall the good old Apple PIE - Peripheral Incompatibility Error - what you saw many years ago when Macintosh users switched to PCs but couldn't figure out what to do with a mouse that had two buttons. You wouldn't think it would be such a difficult concept to grasp, and yet...

Stupid users are the best.

I'm glad to hear that people remember ID10T. I myself got into a bit of trouble one time when some ID10T-related debug code in exception handlers accidentally made it to release and a few rare (but deserved) error message boxes titled with "Stupid User Error" made it out, got shown, and received complaints for some unimaginable reason. These customers deserved their moniker however, as to get these messages required performing inane tasks such as exporting database contents into tab-delimited file, hand-editing the tab-delimited file, in a text editor, WITH SPACES, and then importing the file contents back into the database. The fix? I replaced the title of the error boxes with "S/U Error", which I even documented as being much like an I/O Error, but stemming from a specific peripheral.

One unmentioned customer code that we still use today is Nut Loose On Keyboard which we obfuscate as "numlock" (sounds like N-LOK) or as "wrench". (Both because there is a nut loose on the keyboard, and because the solution of hitting said nut over the head with a big spanner would be the preferred solution.)

All the AIs NVMe, says IBM: Claims POWER9s + InfiniBand brainier than COTS

Benchmark = Facepalm

Most new-product benchmarks are just paper tigers to pretty up the marketing hype machine, so I am not in any way surprised here. That the benchmark cannot even be fully described and reproduced is just par for that particular course. I am disappointed that x86 was even mentioned, at all, anywhere, as none of this has anything to do with the x86 protocol. And then there is the obvious moment of stupidity as we basically boil things down to a home-brewed tailored prototype is better than a generic Commercial-Off-The-Shelf product meant for anyone to use. Yeah. No ____.

Army of straw men meet bonfire, film at 11.

Oregon will let engineer refer to himself as an 'engineer'

Oregon can suck it.

Much to my shame, I lived in Beaverton for years. I was never so happy to leave anywhere as when I waved goodby forever to Pompously Pretentious Portlandia.

The problem is not that Oregon has a law about regulating the use of the word "engineer". A lot of cities, counties, states have truly dumb laws. (Such as sneezing on the street is punishable by fine because you might startle the horses!) You can find stupid laws everywhere you go.

The problem is that only the dipswitches in Beaverton were up themselves enough to try to enforce that bit of ridiculousness.

Japanese quadcopter makes overworked employees clock out

Clearly in the wrong.

That's just brilliantly horrible! I'm sure these drones also come with a warranty and maintenance program that does not cover damage from flying chairs. The manufacturer will no doubt be raking it in every time that sucker gets downed.

Which is perfect as it gives me time to bring to market a land-bound alternative, based on a telepresence robot skinned to look like a cute girl. She rolls up once every minute or so to kindly remind the workaholic to please go home (in an adorable voice) bow, and roll away to safety in an adorable hit-and-run. She'll be too cute to shoot. The cost savings of my version will be a tremendous selling point after a few months of Auld Lang Syne induced Whack-a-Drone.

And as a land-bound version, she can pack more firepower for when she roams the empty halls at night, another significant selling point. As Apple can attest to, being innovative is overrated. Don't be the first to market. Let others find the flaws first, and then don't make their mistakes.

Toucan play that game: Talking toy bird hacked

Something to crow about.

I remember when dangerous toys from China involved lead-based paint. Then it was noxious urine-smelling plastic. Now it is lax security on electronics to turn a toy parrot into a potty-mouth? They're making huge strides both in technology and in safety!

Rogue PIs found guilty of illegally snagging personal financial info

Rogue PIs found guilty

Kinda bummed to learn that was a reference to Private Investigators, not to a botnet of hacked RASPBERRY PIs.

Did you unwittingly support the destruction of net neutrality rules?

I'm a little disappointed.

No one spoofed me, not even another me in another place or another time. Is my name not good enough for people to steal?

On the plus side, I did find a couple of people used the term "NIMBY", which kind of goes to show just how bad the search tool actually is, that its results would also show when other people say your name in their own comments. I would think that a name search would, you know, at least be smart enough to limit the search to names. Oh well. Government in action!

Maybe next election I'll run for resident of the United States. I think I have a real shot at winning! (Welcome to our OOL...)