* Posts by tiggity

3143 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Oct 2015

Pair accused of breaking into US law enforcement database, posing as cops

tiggity Silver badge

Dubious wording

"used a police officer's credentials to access "a nonpublic, password-protected web portal" maintained by a US federal law enforcement agency without authorization"

Similar wording used on linked report.

When they say nonpublic are they (I'm guessing) just doing a security thru obscurity thing where it turns out the website is actually public accessible (& I include publicly accessible if it just has weak security measures such as IP "whitelist"* (as IP spoofing gets around that )...Or do they mean the accussed had to break into a network that was legitimately non public (i.e. on an intranet somewhere)

*Apols for non PC "whitelist" term, I'm sure there's some alternative I should use but no time to search as always just brief have commentard timeslots on this site while I wait for a build to complete, as too busy at other times!

Workers don't want these humanoid robots telling them to be happy

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Feeling better at work

**** robots.

To improve my work mood a reduction in excessive workload and better triage of support issues by the customer facing team, instead of 90% of issues being tagged as super urgent must be fixed ASAP (especially when its customer error and ideally the customer needs additional training to avoid it happening again & again), would be infinitely more effective than a robot.

Google taps Fastly to make cookie-free adtech FLEDGE fly

tiggity Silver badge

Just keep it simple

Ads related to the content of the website I am on are the best option for sites that want to serve ads.

The "interest" concept is too flawed.

If I am briefly visiting a lot of sites looking at washing machines (e.g. I need to replace a broken one that is beyond repair) and then stop visiting washing machine related sites (because I have purchased one) then, even though "interests" are supposed to be short lasting it would mean that for a while I potentially still get served ads for washing machines, no use to me, or the advertiser who has wasted their cash on those ads.

Similarly for lots of other things I may be needing to purchase but have zero need for ads relating to them once my purchase is over (apart from a relatively small number of sites I visit regularly, most of my web browsing is things to purchase & often not even an "interest" of mine as often partner has tasked me to order something). Live "in the sticks" and so in many cases online orders for more "specialist" items not available locally (such as a washing machine) less hassle to do that than a 50 mile round trip to nearest big city to look around "white goods warehouses" or whatever item I am looking to buy.

The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

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Re: Yet again the Tories come along with this bullshit.

The Lib Dems, the party that campaigned on an (overall) more left wing ticket than Labour in 2010 & got a lot of votes from people wanting the Conservatives out in marginals where Labour had little chance.

.. And then went into coalition with the most right wing party (the Tories) and enabled some unpleasant legislation.

Thus proving themselves equally as untrustworthy as the "big 2"

..But I'm one of those who does not really a useful vote* without some form of UK wide PR as live in a constituency where conservative party have had a significant majority in all elections I have lived in the area

* None of the parties really appeal to me (as I'm towards the left, unlike e.g. current Labour), but of all the parties to vote for, the conservatives are the ones I least like so my option is no vote or a tactical vote for a "marginally less bad than a Tory" candidate.

tiggity Silver badge

Ken Clarke was effectively cancelled

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_suspension_of_rebel_Conservative_MPs

tiggity Silver badge

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

I take it you mean things like this

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/aug/11/inheritance-tax-why-the-new-duke-of-westminster-will-not-pay-billions

Requiem for Google Reader, dead for a decade but not forgotten

tiggity Silver badge

Indeed.

General rule of thumb I found was if I used and liked a Google product then it would at some point be discontinued.

Result of this was I have long since given up using any "new" Google products as I cannot rely on them staying available - about the only personal use Google product I regularly use is Android on my mobile (& market share of Android is so big that I'm probably safe with that for a while)

Brit newspaper giant fills space with AI-assisted articles

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won't notice

Reach "local" news sites I have visited are a waste of space (& adblockers a must as without they take an eternity to load & even then sometimes crash randomly) as there's little in the way of actual news, just plenty of click bait style headlines.

If they do have some local news it's typically published far later than on the BBC local area section

Google: You get crypto, you get crypto, almost everyone gets email crypto!

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Re: Workspace Enterprise Plus ?

@Pascal Monett Why on earth would a user want that privacy destroying receipt functionality activated?

I know Google & privacy are words that do not go together, but (if what you say is true*) not supporting read receipts is a good thing... Saves the user with the slightest privacy concerns the hassle of having to reject read receipt requests!

You would typically* get a "bounce" message if email delivery failed - so if you don't see a bounce after a suitable time then you can assume mail delivered... Though no idea if sent to spam, deleted, read etc,

* A way to be sure would be to use your gmail creds and craft your own message setting the appropriate headers & send the message to someone you know who does have an email system that supports read receipts.

** Or not, may well not get a bounce sending to an email address, depending how server set up.

e.g. email to abc@xyz.com

If "user" abc does not exist then a bounce tells a potential malicious actor that address is invalid and they can continue crafting emails of different "users" and if no bounce then they have been able to work out a "user".

So some servers set up to not send a bounce e.g. abc@xyz.com is NOT bounced even though no abc "user", but internally the emails are discarded except for those emails sent to an actual user.

As most GDPR interpretations regard email address as PII, then this is a defence against leaking genuine email addresses (plenty of scenarios where bad actors will look at company websites, get names of staff and try to elucidate an email address e.g. if employee "Jane Smith" mentioned on website they may try common name based formats e.g. Jane.Smith@xyz.com, Smith.Jane@xyz.com, J.Smith@xyz.com, Smith.J@xyz.com, JSmith@xyz.com etc, etc. typically a whole slew of variants including trying to guess initials, adding numerals etc for scenarios where multiple staff may have same first & last name).

Full Disclosure.

In the past worked on many software systems that involved emails.

Would always get customers excited to be able to enable delivery & read receipts on some emails the system sent out (e.g. they were emailing out invoices and wanted to know if they were being received / read).

They would always be disappointed at the few delivery receipts and the even more tiny amount of read receipts - we had to explain that lots of systems do not send either & of those that do choose to support it, the user will typically be prompted if they want to send a read receipt & will usually say no.

..So in "real world" use email receipts are far less effective than a chocolate teapot (https://www.thenakedscientists.com/get-naked/experiments/how-useless-chocolate-teapot)

Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed

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Re: What about the buyers?

@Wally Dug

If in Europe that sound like a nasty GDPR breach by the "dealership" selling the car.

With all the (IMHO needless) crud on modern cars that links to peoples phones then would expect a responsible dealership would have done a "reset" to get rid of any PII - otherwise there could be obvious PII from sat nav history giving address clue, Bluetooth phone linkage potentially leaving a contacts list in the car. Not to mention dubious phone linked apps that include "find my car" functionality (that some vehicles have now) which could let the ex owner see where the new owner keeps the car.

If you buy a second hand phone from a phone shop they have (in my experience) always reset the phone.

Car dealers should similarly treat a modern car as something that can leak lots of PII and clear its data as appropriate.

To the Moon? Emojis can be financial advice, says judge

tiggity Silver badge

Indeed, we have some (purchased) artwork on the walls purely because we like it, no expectation of it ever appreciating in value, especially as it is all by "unknown" artists (in a couple of cases by people who did it temporarily to earn an extra income and have long since stopped making artworks now they are more financially secure, so zero chance of them ever finding fame in the future).

We also have various books that have become "accidental investments", most extreme example is first edition hardcover "Adventures of Tom Bombadil" is only 60ish pages long but sells for hundreds (first edition only) - originally purchased second hand decades ago by my partner for pennies when it was essentially a book of no value (the Tolkien popularity boom had not occurred at purchase time back in the last century) - it was purchased because my partner loved the artwork in it & enjoys reading Tolkien, no "investment" decision involved.

Microsoft pushed 'inaccurate' Windows 11 upgrade to unsupported devices

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Windows 10 the last Windows you will ever need

I remember the slogan in the title above, usual MS BS.

2025 EOL for Win10 is likely to be non viable as there will be an awful lot of consumers with old hardware that is not Win 11 compatible so some form of security patched version will be needed afterwards.

For plenty of consumers a PC is definitely not a cheap item to purchase and there is an expectation that it will be replaced when it breaks down, not just at the whim of the OS manufacturer deciding their working system is only fit for the scrap heap.

.. Yes. I'm fully aware that other OSes are available to replace EOL Win10, (I have Linux on some of my kit, back in the days of the "forced" W7 to W10 upgrade, my old & not particularly IT skilled father was one of those caught by the update happening even though X clicked) & ended up with a totally borked PC. So (with the bonus of saving me from huge amounts of Windows related free support hassle) I ended up putting user friendly Ubuntu on it as he mainly did email / web and a bit of word processing & had no need of any windows specific apps, & his Ubuntu system ticked away happily, auto applying updates as needed, (outlived him). However plenty of people do not have the knowledge themselves to switch OS (or relatives able to do it for free) and so end up suffering from enforced obsolescence )

I really don't understand* why various regulators let the tech companies get away with such pitiful support periods for software, especially with security patches, (& don't get me started on the fiasco of Android updates (or more precisely, the lack of them, for many phone models))

* Well I do, pressure / inducements for key decision makers works wonders,

Companies can't shut you up using severance pay, at least in the US

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Re: Deemed employees

@elsergiovolador

Labour has long been a Tory-Lite party, full of political careerists, just marketing themselves as not as nasty as the liberals.

Admittedly it looked like it might change for a while with Corbyn as leader, but masses of media smearing, coupled with Corbyn being inept & not suing for libel to stop the smears, meant the Labour party soon returned to business as usual of a pretend socialist option (just to be on the safe side to stop any chance of a leftish Labour in the near future a huge amount of socialist have been expelled since Starmer took over).

Twitter algorithm to be open sourced 'next week,' says Musk

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@Elongated Muskrat

Problem is that peoples opinion vary on whether something meets that criteria

e.g. A women objects to a trans woman (TW in this example man self IDing as women, who has not had male genitalia removed) sharing female swimming pool changing rooms as she will be in a state of total nudity at times & does not feel comfortable with possibility of being seen by the TW or seeing the TW "girl penis" *, in same way she would not be happy with seeing any other biological male in what she regards as what should be a female only space as involves full public nudity within that space & in this case the woman has been previously raped making presence of a biological male even more triggering.

In that example some people (e.g. me) will say that's a totally legitimate expression of a woman's right to privacy and to feel safe.

,, Other people will say that is rampant transphobia.

* always find that phrase odd & don't understand why so many TW use it, almost as if the vast majority are AGP and just a tiny minority genuinely have gender dysphoria.

Workday sued over its AI job screening tool, candidate claims discrimination

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Re: Why is he putting his DOB on his resume?

A DOB is not needed for "minimum" age estimates

Given employers typically want dates of academic qualifications, job history* etc...

e.g. If someone got their degree 20 years ago then a fair guess they are in their 40s or older.

*Often see last n jobs or last n years

Last n jobs may seem innocuous, but is not if someone has been in each role for a relatively long time as could easily have a job start date of decades ago.

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

tiggity Silver badge

I'm fortunate that we have paid off our mortgage (partner has taken early retirement already)

Took current role in lockdown with proviso that it would continue to be mainly remote (as I live in the sticks and office is a nasty commute by car and total nightmare by public transport (shame as I prefer public transport) & so not viable for me to be in the office often).

I'm able to have dedicated, quiet space to work in with decent sized desk, lots of room for multiple screens & computers in my home.

WFH more productive as less interruptions & less tired as no tiring commute (as you get older an arduous commute can be surprisingly mentally draining compared to when young).

I do go to the office occasionally - just to "face to face" with colleagues - these are far less productive than WFH (open plan hot desk offices so noisily disruptive) but useful to have those "social in person meetups" now and again.

If I had to be in the office regularly I would hand in my notice (but many people don't have luxury of being able to do that) as I could get a low paid, low hassle "local" job stacking supermarket shelves or similar & we would get by OK financially - but realise most people would not have that luxury & would have to stay for a while until they found a new role.

.. But, years ago when in cramped rented shared accommodation, WFH would have been a PITA as little space, rowdy flatmates etc and so office would be more productive, so for some regular office a great option (& like many, have found it possible to be friends with some colleagues over the years, not just acquaintances).

A good employer should be aware of differing levels of enthusiasm for the office based on personal situation and deal with it, not try a one size fits all approach

Marketing company chases Twitter for $7,000 over 'swag gift box for Elon'

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Re: "Almond milk"

@Elongated Muskrat

Oat "drink" is (IMHO) the best of the milk substitutes (& also quite a green / environmentally friendly option compared to e.g. soya, almond) - though my tea (with milk, not lemon) drinking partner says that none* of the non dairy options really do the job in tea. I don't drink tea so cannot give an opinion on that

Avoid hazelnut drink for adding to beverages as strong hazelnut taste makes them taste very odd - but its great on a nutty muesli!

* Tried soya, oat, hazelnut, almond "drinks" - I'm aware there are other options such as spelt but not seen those others to buy & try in the shops (living in the sticks less choice) so cannot comment on how good they are.

I can't do that, Dave: AI drowns top sci-fi mag with story submissions

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Re: "...AI could turn writing from a serious craft into a cheap commodity"

@Peter2

Unfortunately in paid for books editors do not always do the job they should do.

Years ago when daughter was young, partner & I read her the Harry Potter books (in smallish chunks each night) as a pre sleep activity.

You could see that in the later books the editing was minimal and they were really bloated compared to the early books (which were reasonably fast paced), a good editing session would have at least halved their size.

We assumed that, by the time of the later books, that HP was such a big phenomenon (& making so much cash) that Rowling was able to ride roughshod over the editors demands in a way that was not possible before she hit the "big time".

We did end up on the later books doing a bit of a speed read - speaking a concise version in own words to her, another pause & speed read ahead, then speak the concise version etc. If we had not daughter would have lost all interest as ratio of words to useful content was too high for a young child (probably fine for an older Potter fan reading it themselves, but no use for "bedtime story" reading)

Open source software has its perks, but supply chain risks can't be ignored

tiggity Silver badge

always the same

"effectively outsourced 90 percent of your development to people you don't know and can't trust.

.. which equally applies to proprietary software - at least with open source if an issue arises you can (if you have the abilities, fix the code yourself)

I have frequently used open source code - however never gone the auto pull stuff in approach.

Downloaded the open source components, audited for vulnerabilities and licence compliance, (plenty of tools to help be it commercial stuff such as Mend (AKA whitesource) through to open source free stuff) and tested them and added to source control.

That way you know what you are including - none of this randomly pulling the latest & greatest version from online & hoping for the best.

It has its drawbacks - when there is zero day you cannot just rely on your software picking up the latest & greatest fix when its available, instead you have to wait and incorporate it into your software (after testing it).

But, so long as your own software has ability to auto update (though ideally with user approval) then its not that much of an extra delay (just the time for you pull new version of open source component, audit and test it and update your source control repo).

Though the upside is that testing makes sure the fix does not break your software or have other issues (as with "emergency" bug fixes do sometimes see situations where initial "fix" is sub optimal and further fixes soon get rolled out)

Other drawback is, have to regularly do pull, audit and incorporate periodically anyway - be it for new versions for less critical bugs, improved performance etc. - but in "mature" open source components, you fortunately don't have to update that often as depends on your usage of that code and what has changed in the open source component: Scenarios where it's quite OK to run an older version without any issues tend to be common.

More hard work with this approach, but you're insulating yourselves from random code poisoning via the internet .

The second dust bowl cometh for America, supercomputer warns

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Re: All I can see

@Version 1.0

All a bit simplistic re dredging rivers to make them deeper - it can total destroy the river ecosystem (some of us think the natural world matters) - even if the river and underlying river bed and underlying older sediments are "clean". A riverbed is often a surprisingly complex habitat and as such has a complicated related eco system.

But it gets even more problematic with rivers where older underlying sediments are "dirty".

In the UK, a lot of rivers were very polluted in the past with a variety of toxic materials as for a long time polluting industries just discharged into the local water system (and with UK getting heavily into "industrialization" relatively early historically, then a lot of pollution done long before people became aware of / concerned about such issues).

What this means is that dredging rivers could involve some very nasty materials being liberated and causing nasty problems.

e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-64242217

Essentially almost everyone with a scientific clue (apart from the govt cronies who whitewashed the "investigation" into this) regard the Tees dredging (& toxic materials released) to have contributed to eco system damage in the area.

What Brit watchdog redacted: Google gives Apple cut of Chrome iOS search revenue

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Re: Flawed logic

Also don't see the incentive for Apple to make a search engine.

Either it makes a huge loss .. or they have to go the ads route

Ads (with current bidding marketplace) does not really sit well with the we respect your privacy vibes Apple like to give.

Uncle Sam backs right-to-repair battle against Big Ag's John Deere

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Re: It’s about increased profits, of course

@bombastic bob

I'm in UK & live in a rural area, a lot of small farmers still around (wrong landscape for huge cereal farms, so mainly livestock) - most of the farmers have the mechanical skills to keep their kit running & do a lot of repairs / fitting of replacements themselves. It saves them money & its part of being a small farmer. Obviously for some things they have to go to a third party for repairs, but that's fairly uncommon...

Though don't know any farmers that use John Deere kit (mainly MF users round here) so no idea what the service / repair lock-in scenario is in UK for John Deere kit.

Russian crook made $90M exploiting stolen info on Tesla, Roku, Avnet, Snap, more

tiggity Silver badge

evidence free

Obviously they may well have been guilty, but I'm generally unhappy about evidence free convictions (as, there was no mention of any proof they "hacked" financial data) - a bit like the appropriate US classic quote "it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer.".

Although big companies usually ban employees from discussing financially / commercially sensitive data its quite easy to get a general vibe about a company from social media if you have the info to connect a decent number of accounts to a particular company (which would tally with only trading in a small number of companies as a lot of hard "legwork" involved).

e.g. if you see post(s) about reduced work related travel then could be a hint of cost cutting & potentially sign of a "dip".

whereas if you see some sales folk bragging about smashing their targets / expecting a big juicy bonus, then you might gamble the company is on the up.

.. and that's without inferences from other press coverage (e.g. you don't have to be a financial wizard to guess Twitter might not be the best choice of stock to invest in).

Then there's more nebulous stuff like looking at peoples LinkedIn profiles and trying to gauge their level of enthusiasm for their current role (obviously this can be affected by factors other than how well company is doing, if someone's PHB is a total **** then you may spot a lack of enthusiasm despite that company doing really well) .. back in the day when I used LinkedIn to communicate with some ex colleagues, it was certainly possible to gauge how content they were in their role just on a quick read of their public LinkedIn content.

So, their defence is reasonable, IMHO.

Hyundai and Kia issue software upgrades to thwart killer TikTok car theft hack

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Re: Hack to death ratio

@Captain Scarlet

Cover on steering column removed by force, not the wheel

The Pentagon is shockingly bad at managing its employee smartphones

tiggity Silver badge

I never understand this

There's plenty of ways to lockdown phones. *

In the case of work phones provided by employer then employer just needs to go ahead & lock them down as tight as they want.

Relying on people to "do the right thing" will fail as people are fallible, if a proscribed app can be installed, someone will install it.

* Yes, there are ways to workaround some common lockdown methods on android (not an iPhone user so cannot comment on those), but then that takes the users who did that workaround into a whole different misconduct zone than someone who downloads a "dodgy app" because there is nothing preventing them.

Thunderbird email client is Go for new plumage in July

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@Filippo

If it does what you need just don't upgrade it to the newer version until you are happy with new version.

... e.g. try the new one in a VM first just to see if it has problems.

Main things I care about is that they keep the download headers only option in their changes: That's my preferred way to download to reduce malware mail risks.

..And that they retain text only mode, as that's how I view those where I do download the content to allow inspection of any other potential nasties.

Learn the art of malicious compliance: doing exactly what you were asked, even when it's wrong

tiggity Silver badge

I'm confused by this:

"We tend to cook from scratch, so a lot of pots, oven pans, frying pans + the steamer or slow cooker... none of which can go in the dishwasher."

Most of our cooking from scratch, plenty of oven cooking and steaming

Stainless steel steamer - fine in dishwasher, so are stainless steel oven pans, frying pans* etc.

"Crockery" oven pans / dishes are fine in dishwasher too.

I can understand the slow cooker as I'm guessing you have an all in one "plug in" slow cooker

But I'm still confused about the rest - do you have all your cooking items made of exotic materials? Or are even things as basic as a sit on the hob set of steaming pans replaced by a plug in "all in one" bit of kit?

* Though obviously if pans are "seasoned" e.g. as a wok should be, then do not dishwash them (wash carefully by hand) as you want to keep that surface intact.

Roses are red, algorithms are blue, here's a poem I made a machine write for you

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Ryan Giggs

No matter how dire "AI" poetry is, it cannot be more cringe worthy than the efforts of "Giggsy"

UK PM splits govt department in 4, creates dedicated 'Science and Tech' bit

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Re: Davos

A lot of the unions unimpressed with Labour (and plenty of Unions are disaffiliated). Labour / Starmer v. busy courting wealthy individuals / corporations for funding, purging as many socialists as they can (although still a few they dare not go after), Labour now essentially Tory Lite - essentially pushing flag shagging neoliberalism but implying they will be a bit less nasty than the conservatives. .

.. Look at the recent noticeable lack of enthusiasm by Starmer & the shadow cabinet to show any support for recent strikes, effectively banning Labour MPs from picket lines etc.

If Labour get control of next parliament, don't expect much socialism in their policies.

That's why there's not much criticism of Starmer / Labour in the press as it would essentially be business as usual.

Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting

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Re: Who loves cryptocurrency?

Yes.

Pay a few things via post using cheques (generally invoices which are sporadic & variable amount & need me to double check* them before payment and so not really suitable for direct debit being set up) as I don't do online / phone banking & all the bank branches are shut down near me so difficult to go in and arrange a transfer (and banks don't like opening at weekends either so screwed when working Mon - Fri)

* pun intended

Bank of England won't call it Britcoin but says digital pound 'likely to be needed in future'

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"great care will be required to ensure the public understands that the currency affords the same privacy as cash."

But it won't. It will have less privacy.

If I take cash from a cash machine or, more likely get it over the counter at the bank, its possible the serial numbers can be linked to me (assuming all new sequential notes used to fill the bank till / machine & they track each card and what notes should be dispensed to each user)

However once I make a series of small transactions, which could via serial no. trace me to using that shop, spending a twenty each time I end up with a stack of 10s, 5s and coins that are difficult to link to me, as although there potential serial no. linking me to being a user there, it's quite difficult to go much further in the "change notes" - e.g. quite likely the 10 I got in my change was never registered to the store, instead was from a previous customer.

I tend to use quite a lot of cash as I don't do online or phone banking & few places take cheques (& I don't use storecards despite the bribes e.g. I was in Tesco last week and some things were on offer as £s cheaper but only if you had a "clubcard" - not open to a non "loyalty card" user).

So tracking of my spending habits is fairly minimal, only tends to be big ticket items such as "white goods", holidays etc. that are non cash transactions.

.. Not that there's anything exciting about my spending (I wish I was having a misspent fun filled middle / old age of buying quarters of hash or bags of weed etc. but recent non food purchases have been decidedly dull such as tins of paint & brushes and rollers & similar DIY stuff to save a few quid)

..Just don't want to be tracked in my spending habits (& added benefit of no financial apps on my phone, so in unlikely event of being mugged for my budget android device, about the worst the thief could do is post some fake beer reviews on the untappd app.

Trust, not tech, is holding back a safer internet

tiggity Silver badge

Trust the government / security services / police?

No.

From the UK, plenty of cases when security services & police have performed some very dubious actions (ranging from "big stuff" security services trying to bring down Harold Wilson, through to, at a more "Personal level" of abuse of power, "spy cops" getting into relationships with naïve peaceful protesters including having children with them, Brazilian electricians shot for no valid reason etc.).

So, not a fan of trusting them.

And as for the UK government - clowns, but malicious clowns (more Pennywise than Grimaldi).

Even in the unlikely event there was a government / security infrastructure you would trust with your personal data, no guarantee that in a few years time things it all may be totally different & trustworthiness has plummeted.

.. And I'm saying that as a fairly average sort of "nothing to hide" person who is not involved in crime & corruption & does not avoid / evade taxes (I'm obviously not Tory MP material!).... though I have long since been on the state "wrong 'un" list, back from when I was filmed by the authorities on anti SA demos (when SA was a white apartheid state & Thatcher called Mandela a terrorist) as conspicuously being against govt policies (even when those policies are obviously dubious) tends not to be approved of

It's your human hubris holding back AI acceptance

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If an AI recommended D I would ignore it

But would ignore it if a person recommended D.

As the best option is C.

Given that there is no proof of ulcer rates in the statement - just the physicians unproven "It's clear that we suffer significantly fewer ulcers, per capita, than they do."

Then C. "A person in the physician's country who is suffering from ulcers is just as likely to obtain a prescription for the ailment as is a person suffering from ulcers in one of the other two countries."

Would give supportive proof that the concluding, fewer ulcers per capita statement was correct (Given "prescriptions for ulcer medicines in all socioeconomic strata are much rarer here than in those two countries").. Though even then fewer ulcers may not necessarily be correct.

Its possible incidence of ulcers is same in all the countries, but in the country of interest ("I") the prescriptions given are more effective (maybe a better performing drug, or as is often the case with treatments, the population in "I" actually follow instructions & take whole course).

This would give scenario in "I" where ulcers near 100% treated first time successfully, but in other countries the first treatment was a lot less than 100% success, so a lot more "additional" prescriptions needed as the condition was not resolved by the first course of treatment.

It's really difficult to make accurate inferences without a lot of data, especially in the area of medical treatments * - and quite often you need data that might appear irrelevant but can be key

D just shows 2 more countries with more ulcer prescriptions. But that is meaningless as amount of prescriptions is not necessarily correlated with incidence of the ailment. in some countries there may be pressure to not prescribe certain medications compared to others - classic example would be antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance is a big issue, some countries put (too little, but some) pressure to reduce prescriptions, others do not. So antibiotic prescriptions can vary greatly between "similar" countries.

* No prizes for guessing that before I switched to IT, one of my earlier degrees had a big pharmacology element. The general estimates (back then, little in the way of decent quality data on this as lots of people lie about finishing prescriptions & lots of "old drugs" get binned rather than disposed of through the correct channels) of amount of treatments that are prescribed but the whole course of treatment is not followed used to be between 1/3 to 1/2 of patients, given human behaviour is stubbornly change resistant in some areas I would guess its still in the same area.

Prepare to be shocked: Employees hate this One Weird Clause

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Re: Training costs!

Had a similar (though in this case the "paybacks" expected still applied over several years.

A big line was put through that part of the contract *along with my signature) and I explained it was not acceptable, especially as company had history of sending people on training in the past that they then never used in their work (& training was typically not anything CV worthy that would appeal to other employers such as CCNA or MCSE - if the training courses had been something "in demand" that could make me more likely to be "poached" by a competitor then some form of negotiation may have been an option)

US government calls foul on Apple and Google over walled gardens for apps

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meh

As an android user I can sideload anyway so not much of an issue.

What I would like is for phones to not be set up with lots of not possible to uninstall junk apps* that I don't need & take up space (e.g. not an FaceBook user so a pre-installed FB app is a waste of space, in all meanings of the phrase)

* Yes, I know there's a few things I can do (without rooting a phone) to mediate the issues if I connect in via adb - however such action should not be needed - there should be an easy way to remove them from just using the inbuilt phone tools so that they can be removed by the average user who might not have the required knowledge / confidence to enable dev options and then connect & run command line operations (especially as it is possible to screw up your phone by accident doing this)

Microsoft injects AI into Teams so no one will ever forget what the meeting decided

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Sort out the basics

As someone who has to use Teams for work...

It uses a ludicrously huge amount of resources.

Plenty of bugs that need fixing, some quite irritating, my 2 most hated bugs are:

e.g. 1. sound / video often fails to work correctly on meetings, especially if you have the temerity to switch between different camera and microphone / headset setups*

e.g. 2 Intermittent, but quite often Teams suddenly stops sending you reminders of meetings. Which can be a PITA when you are deeply focused on work & easy to lose track of time & you rely on the annoying noise of a meeting alert to snap you out of dev mode & into meeting tedium mode.

* When WFH will sometimes use webcam (with inbuilt mic) for video and audio, other times inbuilt laptop camera and mic (depends on how good the video quality needs to be), and sound output via laptop inbuilt speakers. In the office will use a headset (don't do that at home as prefer not to have kits on my head as it's not comfy) but obviously in office do not want your audio to disturb others.

Please fix the many faults before adding yet more (doubtless even more resource consuming) frippery.

Should Google location data be a tool for cops?

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Re: Going equipped

.. and of course burner phones have been used by crims (& on occasion people wanting anonymity for legit reasons (abortion already mentioned) other examples include someone in an abusive relationship making their escape (as many a controlling partner puts spyware on phones, beyond the inbuilt tracking options so ditching your phone a must before leaving))

Castrol immerses itself deeper into liquid cooling with researcher

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Not huge news as just announcing a link with a research group

A chemist friend of mine recently retired from a large chemical company that has some products that compete with Castrol.

Company he worked for had been involved in data centre fluids (and have products on the market aimed at datacentre cooling). *

Castrol have a similar product.

Essentially all the big movers & shakers in oils / lubricants got into datacentre cooling fluids a while ago, as obvious synergy with their knowledge & skills - betting big on it being a lucrative growing market (which looks a good bet so far).

* All these companies have products where thermal transfer is key, only really hurdle as to whether there is already something that you can rebrand (or whether a bit of tweaking needed to generate a product) is issue of electrical conductivity as for full on immersion obviously don't want to use a liquid with electrolytes present!

They did a bit of "eating their own dog food" - in the location my friend worked in, some of the computer kit used their immersion cooling (though they did not have datacentre amount of gear obviously. Allowed real world small scale tests of some of their different products - and, although its not really a thing at the moment, these companies also hoping that home PC liquid cooling might take off at some future date once it becomes a cheaper and easier option as that could be a nice cash cow, hence usefulness of testing out small scale cooling with an eye on the future.

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

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Re: Harmony by disharmony

As someone who has lived in the UK a long time, decades ago they changed siren style and the "new" ones made it extremely difficult to estimate the location of the siren compared to the old style.

.. The "new" sound, was audible from further away though, so maybe that was deemed a good reason to replace the easy to locate one as people had longer to try and find the sound... Though given how many people drive with sound system on loud*, they probably don't hear sirens until they are close by.

* I don't - but that's because I find the radio distracting when I drive

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

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Re: Fascinating history

@Andy 73

smallest useful division of a pint is 1/3 in many real ale pubs...

Plenty of pubs do a taster triple - a pint in total - 3 different beers, each in a 1/3 pint glass.

You can sample 3 beers you have not tried before (I know most pubs will serve you a tiny dribble to taste as a freebie, but really need a decent volume so its had a proper pour to get body & head developed)

A good way to try a few different beers without getting too merry - e.g. trying 6 beers is 2 pints in this way, but if doing that with 1/2 pints then its 3 pints.

1/3 pt is just enough to be able to adequately sample the beer, anything smaller (e.g. 1/4 pint) or less would be a struggle to get decent body & head (and you also need enough volume to have several tastes to properly sample a beer)

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Re: No to cups or spoons

@John Brown (no body)

It is now g vs ounces, but its usually 25g markings on butter, so slightly less than an ounce.

.. But when looking at old ounce based recipes and mentally converting to metric, the easy maths conversion is to massively simplify oz to g and treat an ounce as 25g (essentially 3 and a bit #g less, but that way no need for calculators, pen & paper etc just easy mental maths, & if doing large amounts of ounces and want to match volume to what it should be then add extra "ounce" for very 8 as further approximation) so the 25g markers on UK butter are useful as they are "easy maths" ounce equivalents.

.. On the topic of UK weighing & approximate weights, if any UK readers know why I used to have a few half pence coins (long after they went out of circulation) amongst my various imperial & metric weights that were occasionally used on my balance scale then you are a naughty boy (or girl)

Musk: Tesla's doing great. I mean, have you seen my Twitter follower count?

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Followers

"Let me check my Twitter account. OK, so I've got 127 million followers. It continues to grow very rapidly. That suggests that I'm reasonably popular," Musk said

Do we know what's going on with his Twitter changes? *

* Not a social media user so no idea what's going on, I have read people moaning that his tweets seem to show in their app even though they don't follow him - so wondered if he has had devs do something to make his visibility artificially prominent on peoples apps (which may help him to potentially get new followers)

Tesla's Autopilot is losing out to Ford, GM in self-driving tech

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Re: So many problems...

Swerving slalom style...

There's quite a few instances on that on roads near me.. I say roads, a mosaic of pothole and road. Judicious slalom moves needed to avoid the biggest & deepest damaging potholes.

Doubt any cruise system would deal with them though, no white line in centre or side of road, no pavement, road edges very poor quality & merge into vegetated rocky earth which any car vision system would struggle with in winter when most vegetation dead and so its quite dark & harder to tell road from soil (on occasion areas a bit more delineated as areas of dry stone wall)

Software devs targeted as British tax authority makes fraud allegations

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Re: HMRC : alway defining new ways

Legal does not necessarily equate to being a good thing (can be legal but morally repugnant)

e.g. before 1992, forced sexual activity within marriage wasn't illegal in the UK.

i.e. legal for a man to rape his wife.

I don't think anyone reasonable will say that was a good thing just because it was legal at the time.

Similarly anti woman, as an older female friend of mine often mentions, until the mid 70s it was legal for banks etc to treat men and women differently and essentially if you were a single working class women then getting a mortgage in just your name was essentially impossible until then (i.e. if you were not a "professional", as banks did make a few exceptions for some "well thought of" professions and (of course) the very wealthy who often had no job). My friend had an irritating wait to be able to switch from rentals and "buy" (mortgage purchase) a house for herself & her child (husband had long since ****** off, started his divorce plans when he found out she was pregnant!)

Twitter tweaks third-party app rules to ban third-party apps

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@Zola

Indeed, that was my thinking.

Kill alternatives and then fill the official app with ads that users cannot avoid .. Except they can avoid them by leaving Twitter.

Given there's a market for 3rd party products that give better functionality than the twitter client, I'm guessing a lot of people who use better alternatives might just quit Twitter rather than use official client? Could be interesting if some of those are popular accounts on Twitter as would make Twitter even less attractive to people (or are stories of a mass exodus to Mastodon unfounded?).

Tone deaf? Microsoft must have booked Sting for Davos because he's a good singer

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Over staffed?

Given the amount of bugs (& breakages when a new Windows patch comes out) instead of layoffs maybe some staff could instead have been redeployed to improve the quality of the software?

Tales from four decades in the Sinclair aftermarket: Parts, upgrades and party tricks

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Thanks for providing a transcript

Very helpful for those of us that don't deal well with videos / sound & prefer text

Nuclear-powered datacenter throws open doors to tenants this year

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Re: No such things as carbon free

@JelliedEel

.. and for nuclear there's always the unknown cost (in cash & lots of carbon in whatever form you want to measure it) of decommissioning...as in doing it properly, not the current scenario of just kicking the issue into the long grass & hoping some "magic fix" appears in future to make a full clean-up viable.

An awful lot of people like the idea of nuclear but are concerned that we really do not have sufficient processes & tech in place to clean up nuclear power stations when their productive life is over. They are the people the nuclear industry need to win over to gain more support.

With renewables the cost of decommissioning is much more simple to estimate and so a reasonably reliable estimate of total cost to build, operate and decommission is possible. Until that applies to nuclear then deciding what a nuclear power station costs is just a guessing game.

Hey, online pharmacies: Quit spreading around everyone's data already

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URIs visited

If I visited BestAbortionPill.com (or similar named website) then tracking or no tracking, just a log of IPs / URIs visited from ISP would show a "red flag" to an anti abortion state.

So, could be relevant to know how easily ISPs give out such data in the US - if they give it easily then web trackers are the least of someone's concerns.

.. If someone is visiting an online pharmacy with an innocuous name (that sells a whole range of products & abortion pills are just a tiny part of the range) then trackers may be more of an issue (though again, some ISPs may log all requests users make, so if "suspect" search terms are logged the user could be in trouble via ISP data again ).

Netflix changes CEO-sharing arrangement, teases paid password-sharing

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Confused

"Netflix has therefore trialled a scheme whereby folks outside a household can stay attached to an account by paying a password-sharing fee"

What do they mean by "outside a household" - how would they measure such a thing ?

e.g. lets say a "nuclear family" (rare these days) of 2 parents & 2 kids

One (or both) of those kids away at college e.g. staying in college accommodation & return home in all college holidays - they are part of the "household" even though they will spend 50% of the year away from home & be streaming

Maybe one of the parents has a job where they are on the road a lot, again lots of streaming away from home, then there's holiday (maybe in a different country or continent).

Either password sharing will raise no extra revenue or it will massively irritate people by charging them extra for "normal use" (e.g. if Netflix try and block usage they "think" shows signs of a password share violation.

Caveat, I am not a netflix user (there's too many streaming services, to see all content I might enjoy would need multiple services & (deal breaker!) lots of cash outlay so I don't bother - there's plenty of stuff I can record & watch at a later date on terrestrial TV / or watch via iPlayer, certainly more content I might like per week than I would ever have the free time to watch as "TV / Film" watching is not my number 1 leisure activity )