Posts by tiggity

Beer rating app reveals homes and identities of spies and military bods, warns Bellingcat

Same for most social media style apps

If you are in a sensitive job don't use social media.

Even posting photos, without lat / long metadata is not safe, as possible to still find the location by comparing against other images and chance of some of those having location data (or even getting real people to ID the location for you using localish knowledge)

On a more prosaic note, never mind foreign spy agencies finding military personnel, anyone at risk from burglars figuring out local targets & jumping for joy when a social media post reveals they are on holiday away from their home address

Attorney General: We didn't need Apple to crack terrorist's iPhones – tho we still want iGiant to do it in future

Re: Common law duty

I disagree.

As an ordinary person I don't want a backdoor on my phone that could be accessed by any crook as it would reduce my security massively.

If an investigation fails due to a "locked" phone then its a pretty poor investigation

Nvidia's A100 GPU coming to a cloud near you, DARPA details AI war games, Intel wants to help scan your brain

hateful memes

All a bit down to personal opinion

Though if anything like usual FB censorship* then priorities will be

.. any hint of nudity, sexuality then treat as hateful

If its bursting at the seams with guns / similar weapons then not hateful.

* Based on reportage I have read, I don't use FB, but have read enough about it to be aware they are very much against love action, but so much a bit of assault rifle action

If you're appy and you know it: The Huawei P40 Pro conclusively proves that top-notch specs aren't everything

Wonder if the quoted excellent battery life

.. is down to not running all the normal Google "background" stuff that's typically whirring away on an android phone.

More seriously, how about a follow up to show how possible (or not) it was for reviewer to get a recent version of android onto the phone (there are hints its possible in the article) - and then see how well battery & camera then perform too! Because if a user was addicted to the Google ecosystem on android then surely they would want to try and get it added to the phone

You can't have it both ways: Anti-coronavirus masks may thwart our creepy face-recog cameras, London cops admit

I'm going to wear a face covering

.. a niqab

Embroidered on it will be the phrase, "Oi Boris, you racist, looks like the letterbox look is now a good thing"

Tales from the crypt-oh: Nvidia accused of concealing $1bn in coin-mining GPU sales as gaming revenue

Nvidia did what they could

Making mining specific cards showed they tried.

Not a lot they can do to stop gaming cards being used for mining

Quite likely a lot of "dual use" e.g. some people thinking I'll get a top end new GPU as as well as better gaming experience I hope to recoup some costs by bitcoin mining and make it more affordable (and when it became clear that it was not a magic path to riches for your average person in the street then "dual use" purchases likely to decline in addition to fall in dedicated miners buying gaming cards)

I'm sure they had their hunches that some surge was mining related, but coudl nbot really know without wasting a lot of time and money due to their distance from the majority of purchasers

Disclosure, nothing to do with Nvidia, just get a bit sick of whining share holders - hint shares are a risk

NHS contact-tracing app is best in the world, says VMware CEO... whose company helped build it

Lots of pervs can indulge their used pantie sniffing fetish by wrapping them around their face.

I use home made cloth mask (not made from pants!) - quite easy to do on a sewing machine - plenty of online guides for pleated masks ( recommend cloth doubled over and with gap to add filter disk if you like)

It wont make much difference to infection rates, but will make some difference (assuming people do not then feel artificially safe with them & act stupid)

Now we know what the P really stands for in PwC: X-rated ads plastered over derelict corner of accountants' website

Really?

"something that will put a dent in a company's prestige and trust."

In what universe do people regard PWC as trustworthy & prestigious?

All the big bean counters have plenty of past history of being asleep at the wheel / turning a blind eye (depending if you regard it as a mistake or deliberate to keep the money rolling in) and missing major issues when auditing companies

'VPs shouldn't go publicly rogue'... XML co-author Tim Bray quits AWS after Amazon fires COVID-19 whistleblowers

Re: "XML"

XML is good - especially when you validate against a schema - being able to perform such validation is a huge advantage compared to JSON.

Plus you can do a ,lot of great things to transform XML data using XSL.

Only drawback is that its bulky, but when getting it from a server its easy to set things up so its compressed when your client requests the data.

Academics demand answers from NHS over potential data timebomb ticking inside new UK contact-tracing app

Some vulnerable people missed anyway

Warning - over simplification / generalisation, I know some old folk are keen on their phones .... but..

Given that older people more likely to be vulnerable to COVID-19, coupled with older people less likely to slavishly carry mobiles, and if they do carry them, many are happy with quite basic models (e.g. basic call & text only mobiles popular - no app installation on those phones) then its not much use for a section of the older demographic.

Oh Hell. Remember the glory days of Demon Internet? Well, now would be a good time to pick a new email address

Re: One of the best early ISP's for sure.

Indeed, was with them since the 90's, but jumped when it was obvious Vodafone were just destroying it

Trello! It is me... you locked the door? User warns of single sign-on risk after barring self from own account

Re: Yours / Theirs

You could mention them to FAST or similar..

GrubHub, DoorDash, Postmates and Uber Eats sued by hangry, overcharged coronavirus customers

Re: "We are going to be very strong on food supply."

There are problems with WHO

But what do you expect when it gets pitiful funding (e.g. way less than US CDC, and WHO acts worldwide)

And (did not work well on this occasion) the info provided to WHO by reporting countries should be reliable, WHO acts on good faith when given medical news from countries (be it China, US or wherever)

Ofcom waves DAB radio licences under local broadcasters' noses as FM switchoff debate smoulders again

Depends where you are

Out in the sticks, DAB reception often a total joke - typically dire sound, when its not cut out totally.

FM is often poor in places, but it degrades nicely and is always listenable (degraded DAB is often just total ear pain)

I'm sure OFCOM claim areas I travel frequently are covered by DAB .. but its teh same as various telcos claim there is mobile coverage there - the DAB equivalent of edge! and not fit for purpose.

Not only is Zoom's strong end-to-end encryption not actually end-to-end, its encryption isn't even that strong

Re: People don't buy encryption

Perfectly reasonable that 1/3 did not have a strong preference for any of the candidates.

Could also be that given the pandemic meant campaigning was "stopped" (arguably a few contraventions) and with everything else going on pandemic wise then could be that casting a vote was not uppermost in the mind of lots of Labour members

And cannot rule out that with government sitting on a big majority many maybe CBA to vote as expecting Conservatives in power for a while.

Re: Why do so many businesses seem to need video?

Though of course pupil dilation can be due to other things like "attraction"

Hence the use of belladona (Atropine) to give mydriasis back in the day

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

I quite like MOTO devices

Cheap and cheerful, OK spec without excessive camera quality (as someone who does not really use mobile camera (DSLR for proper photos) then don't need a great one (as long as it can tape a half decent snap just in case something I need to record out and about sans proper camera), would sooner have a cheaper phone) make a decent effort to keep providing security patches / OS upgrades compared to many vendors.

Moto also don't add too much crud to their phones compared to some vendors, so not as vital a need to root them as with some phones.

Great they are still keeping headphone socket, and as for micro-USB - no issues with that, plenty of spare micro-USB cables around for replacements which is a bonus (unlike USB-C where not yet accumulated a decent stock of "spares" for cable deaths)

How many days of carefree wiping do you have left before life starts to look genuinely apocalyptic? Let's find out

Huge margin of error on "average" consumption

e.g. the classic of toilet paper

Numbers will be way different for someone with IBS who needs lots of toilet visits per day.

There is huge variation on toilet visits made per day and amount of sheets used per visit as large variation in individuals especially due to various health issues.

As someone who does most of the shopping for a house that includes people with disabilities, I can say that TP usage considerably higher than the supposed average as even 1 heavy user in a household can skew the numbers a lot

Zoom's end-to-end encryption isn't actually end-to-end at all. Good thing the PM isn't using it for Cabinet calls. Oh, for f...

Security Services

Surely they (Security Services) should have been sorting out a more secure solution?

It might not be as much fun as trawling through everyone's data , but they could make a bit of an effort.

Even if its the fault of someone at No 10 not liaising with the Security Services, you would have expected a near instant reaction from the Security Services when they saw the screenshots of zoom usage posted every where and they would have been onto No. 10 in a flash to help get them to sort something secure out.

What's a Google Play? Huawei talks up fledgling AppGallery store, shows off another voice assistant with a female name

Good and bad

Good for people who dislike all the Google junk on a phone & the privacy issues (that might be a lot of reg readers but not of wider public)

Bad for wider public (who are not that bothered about privacy) who want their favourite apps to be easily available to install, many people have "must have" apps & if they cannot easily install them its a deal breaker - It's not just getting the "big" apps such as FB, Twitter, Insta etc. its all the niche apps that do not have monster numbers but some people "need"

'Azure appears to be full': UK punters complain of capacity issues on Microsoft's cloud

Re: Cloud.

I think lots could have predicted this - plenty of novel viruses over the last few decades, we fortunately missed a lockdown bullet with plenty of them e.g. SARS not being as problematic as some feared, this time not so lucky.

But a lot of those sort of people are not in "decision making" positions as they tend to be castigated for being "negative" and do not rise the greasy pole (cautious risk assessments, considering near worst case scenarios (i.e. consider most bad possibilities but ignore the you're screwed regardless beyond Carrington event level possibilities) all mean raising concerns a lot of people do not want to hear)

Whoa, someone actually texted you in 2020? Oh, nvm, it's just Boris Johnson, telling you to stay the f**k at home

Re: Didn't get it

My partner did not get the message, I and other household member did, so definitely a few foul ups on the messaging

Apple grudgingly opens up its check book, pays VirnetX $454m in patent royalties after a decade of wrangling

Please get rid of the .co.uk reg domain

As it is really irritating seeing a "UK" domain but then "check" is prominently displayed instead of "cheque"

Just give up pretences of UK ness and revert to simplified English for everything, it will be less annoying

Supply, demand and a scary mountain of debt: The challenges facing IT as COVID-19 grips the global economy

Just In Time

And similar systems beloved by accounts are great in good times but fall apart big time in scenarios like this.

Keeping decent stocks (oh, the horrors of a bit of warehousing) costs more but brings resilience.

Decisions were made to sacrifice resilience to keep costs down.

Not helped by mania for everyone wanting the "latest & greatest" (as Dan 55 said - planned obsolescence is a real issue in IT kit) so in fast changing areas like IT keeping large stocks is less of an option than in industries with a slower pace of change)

Sure, check through my background records… but why are you looking at my record collection?

Re: Human League

I assume its still the only hit single about sericulture

Microsoft's Windows OEM, Surface sales looking a bit peaky as coronavirus takes toll on China supply chain

Its not as if its a high fatality rate bug like Ebola (assuming nobody is lying about death tolls!).

Tipping point will soon be reached where its acknowledged that spread is inevitable.

Obviously China might still go their own way on movement restrictions, quarantine etc. but I expect once widespread recognition that blocking efforts have failed then in many cases it will revert to business as usual.

The Wristwatch of the Long Now: When your MTBF is two centuries

You missed out the oak gall ink on vellum (not vegan friendly) - still in use in UK

London's Metropolitan Police flip the switch: Smile, fellow citizens... you're undergoing Live Facial Recognition

Re: That's not my picture

Your memory got some lines but not Lenny

hint WInston Kodogo / Constable savage / NTNOCN

Don't use natwest.co.uk for online banking, Natwest bank tells baffled customer

Re: In context of a domain mismatch...

To be fair that could well have been the social media service used mangling the URLs into a "shortened" form, the likes of Twitter don't like raw URLs

Galileo got it wrong – official: Jupiter actually wet, not super-dry: 'No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet'

Re: “No one would have guessed"

Indeed, the banding on Jupiter is feature that leaps out to the casual observer. I'm sure lots of his colleagues and other planetary scientists unimpressed by that comment as lots of different sampling points are vital for getting clues to what is happening.

Forcing us to get consent before selling browser histories violates our free speech, US ISPs claim

ISP should be treated differently

People cn choose to use Facebook or whatever, use ad blockers, script blockers on browser to keep privacy.

However (yes, methods people could use to try and evade this as why should they go the extra hassle of VPNs, tor, tunnelling whatever workaround, especially as a decent VPN will be an extra expense so consumer essentially paying for privacy) as ISP is default pipe to websites visited they have unique record of all sites visited that ad companies will not have. ISP argument is similar to mail service looking at every letter I receive and selling the data on - their job is as a data carrier and that's it.

Vodafone: Yes, we slurp data on customers' network setups, but we do it for their own good

Re: BT does the same

Kodi is not intrinsically bad - depends what people do with it.

I use mine to watch recordings on network PVR from a different room

Just like torrents, people can use Kodi for nefarious purposes but lots of legit uses.

Call us immediately if your child uses Kali Linux, squawks West Mids Police

And a lot of the "girls in blue" are busy suffering varying levels of sexual harassment / discrimination from some of the "boys in blue".

This comes from someone who knows several (ex) "girls in blue" that quit due to the toxic environment faced as a woman (& was even worse for the non white woman I knew who quit)

Ever dream of being an astronaut? Now’s your chance. NASA wants new people for the Moon and Mars

Not applying

Not a USian and too old, but meet everything else on their list.

Though would be quite sensible to recruit older people for a Mars trip as plenty of scope for things to go wrong on first attempt(s) and for that to be a terminal one way trip. At my age I would happily take a potentially very high risk of death for chance to reach Mars, but would not have done so in my youth.

Aw, look. The UK is still trying really hard to be the 'safest place to be online in the world'

And it has made it harder to find sex traffickers, abusive pimps.

Previously US agencies could get details from easily found & well known to general public websites to help in investigations (e.g. BackPage) , now that companies are taking cautious route then the ads are no longer there on sites that used to help the police. Thus it makes job of police more difficult as helpful potential evidence now far harder to find.

And, as has been said, much worse for sex workers as the sites that allowed them to work more safely are now nuked.

Crazy idea but hear us out... With robots taking people's jobs, can we rethink this whole working to survive thing?

Re: The Future

The big builders have huge land reserves, its in their interest to dribble out houses below demand so they can charge more.

Artificial scarcity. Basic economics and although never proven, very much cartel like similar behaviour.

Plenty of small builders looking to build houses (& better ones than the bland boxes the big builders do), they tend to lose out to big boys in bidding for the land though.

Disclosure: A mate of mine is a builder and would love to build more houses if he could afford to outbid the big building companies on land. Main house building he does is the occasional house on small plots that are not worth it for the big boys to bid for.

Social media notifications of the future: Ranger tagged you in a photo with Tessadora, Wrenlow, Faelina and Graylen

Re: Vanity names?

In UK in 2017 over 63K unique baby names regsitered

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/babynamesenglandandwales/2017

kudos to "house of games" this week for mentioning that stat so it was fresh in my mind

Wake me up before you go Go: Devs say they'll learn Google-backed lang next. Plus: Perl pays best, Java still in demand

Re: Some thoughts about "slow languages"

All depends on the task in hand what language to use and how speed critical it is

I used to write perl scripts for doing heavily string processing intensive work on large datasets for the support team.

They wanted to know why, when most tools were written in C#, they had to use Perl for this...

So I wrote a C# app to do the equivalent and they then saw it was orders of magnitude slower (crucially slow enough that support would say this is no use for our needs) as C#t was just not a good language for the task whereas Perl was.

RIP FTP? File Transfer Protocol switched off by default in Chrome 80

Re: Use Firefox!

That was one of many addins that was nobbled in newer firefox when it killed old style addins

.. and fireftp cannot be rewritten in new addin model as needs low level stuff that is unavailable.

So, use Filezilla or some other file transfer tool (or use a very old version of firefox)

That's what makes you hackable: Please, baby. Stop using 'onedirection' as a password

Damn, images of Wendy wearing little more than black tape now doing through my mind

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

Re: Nice Asimov.

upvote for the Harlan Ellison reference

Thunderbird is go: Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest

tracking

As well as issues mentioned about images disabled, a lot of people will make use of TBs fetch headers only functionality.

So only mail headers grabbed, you then choose to get the content (or not)

It's obviously slower, as have to click mails you want to read, but has advantage of letting you assess emails that have got through your mail virus / spam checker for full cautious mode

Everyone loves our new desktop web search design so much – the one with ads that look like links – that we're tweaking it, says Google

Re: Google search has become almost useless

Aggregators e.g. dogpile, can be useful as they fire query at a variety of search engines so you typically get a "better" (FSVO better) set of results than if you just used one engine.

Beer necessities: US chap registers bevvy as emotional support animal so he can booze on public transport

Re: Trains and Boats and Planes

There's only a handful of "posh UK unis" - you may as well name the culprit

We need to make it even easier for UK terror cops to rummage about in folks' phones, says govt lawyer

No

Given that just about anything gets deemed a terror group if the govt / security folks don't like it, then scope creep will be massive.

FFS I remember decades ago getting targeted photographed by the cops (before contentious video days) when protesting about racism / apartheid in SA (back when Mandela was still in prison & regarded as a terrorist by many UK MPs) at an event where SA ambassador was present. Being anti-apartheid back then meant you were regarded as very suspect indeed (waves hello to old Special Branch folk who used to hassle me).

If these changes go through you'll see Extinction Rebellion (or whatever harmless (but inconvenient for some) protest group is causing a bit of traffic chaos in London) magically fall into terrorist investigation category.

Rugby legend Will Carling tells El Reg: Techie stats bods will love this year's Six Nations

So much of rugby is about off the ball movements, if stats relentless track every players position it might show the movement some players put in, because to be in the right place at the right time takes planning / good guesswork as well as running. Could make man of the match awards more likely to be fairly awarded

But frankly I'm just happy to watch and enjoy the game (too old & slow to play these days)

Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons

Re: Why indeed...

Upvote on the active Diamonds.

Still attach kit to mine every now and again - instead of a bluetooth speaker just have headphone jack to phono lead and connect mobile phone to Diamonds when I want to listen to music on phone without using headphones.

Alan Turing’s OBE medal, PhD cert, other missing items found in super-fan’s Colorado home by agents, says US govt

Inventory

Why did the school not have an inventory?

Documenting what you have received is in the basic initial steps for any donation.

EU declares it'll Make USB-C Great Again™. You hear that, Apple?

little impact

I'm probably odd as I use things until they break (be it a mobile phone, fridge, TV etc.).

Main additional waste I will see from this rule is (when my various micro-usb using devices expire) some micro-usb cables that I no longer have a use for.

It's a long time since I saw a charger with integrated cable, only ones I have seen for years have USB socket and you add in your cable of choice.

Who says HMRC hasn't got a sense of humour? Er, 65 million Brits

Hamster

That sounds a valid excuse

We had a hamster that would leave ts hamster home every night, roam the house and return to its home for the daytime.

It loved to grab paper or card and shred it for nesting material.