Posts by staringatclouds

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

Audacious - https://www.audacious-media-player.org/

Sorry, that's taken

How about something like "Harmony" as it's an antonym of "Audacity"

Not for children: Audacity fans drop the f-bomb after privacy agreement changes

Re: Strike three

Audacious is an audio player

Playmobil crosses the final frontier with enormous, metre-long Enterprise playset

*COUGH*

"including a stand in the shape of the Enterprise's emblem"

COUGHSTARFLEETCOUGH

I really must see a Doctor about this cough

Of all the analytics firms in the world, why is Palantir getting its claws into UK health data?

Cambridge Analytica database

A few idle questions

Cambridge Analytica built a database of voters using various scams & scraped Facebook data, it wasn't complete but it was good enough to target at least some of the electorate with ads playing to their concerns and may have affected their vote in the EU referendum

Does anyone know what happened to that database ?

Does anyone believe it was deleted when CA closed shop ?

Does anyone think it's not being maintained & augmented ?

Does anyone wonder how the Conservatives achieved an 80 seat majority with a little over 29% of the electorate voting for them ?

Let the downvotes begin

'Vast majority of people' are onside with a data grab they know next to nothing about, reckons UK health secretary

"Whilst of course preserving the highest standards of safety and privacy"

Right up until everyone has forgotten & a minister decides they can safely change the legislation because no one who hasn't opted out can opt out at that stage

Say 6 months to a year

In this round of 'Real life or Black Mirror episode', drones that hunt down humans by listening to their screams

"In Varela's defence, the technology is not intended to allow future autonomous battle machines - which may or may not look like the HK-Aerial craft from James Cameron's 1984 classic The Terminator - to track down the few remaining human survivors of an inevitable robot uprising by listening to their pitiful cries for mercy"

Skynet was "intended" to save lives

Snowden was right, rules human rights court as it declares UK spy laws broke ECHR

Re: Always listening to our customers

"Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him."

- Cardinal Richelieu

We’ve found them! Govt reinstates records previously missing from the Police National Computer

Manual insertion

“Over 99 per cent of the data deleted from the PNC was recovered within the previously announced timeline. The remaining records required manual insertion into the PNC ..."

As we all know this is a completely error free & accurate process :eyeroll:

I wonder who now has a record who didn't have one before & who did but hasn't now

Buttle/Tuttle anyone ?

'A massive middle finger': Open-source audio fans up in arms after Audacity opts to add telemetry capture

"Just to reiterate, telemetry is completely optional and disabled by default."

...until it isn't

AI clocks first-known 'binary sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system'. Another AI will be along shortly to tell us how to pronounce that properly

Piersons puppeteer home system?

I've heard rumours Netflix are doing a Ringworld series, I didn't realise their budget was this big

Parler games: Social network for internet rejects sues Amazon Web Services for pulling plug on hosting

Re: @AC and @ Author Thank god

"Because they agreed to letting Trump or anyone else sign up... they were ostracized by big tech."

Not true

They were ostracised because they allowed death threats, threats of violence & incitement to commit these acts.

Mike Pence was threatened with hanging for not supporting Trump, one user advocated skinning someones children, wife, brothers, sisters, parents & grandparents because they were lefty democrats & it would teach them a lesson to see their line ended.

The fact that Parler allowed this & did not promptly take steps to remove it is why they were shut down.

Not because they supported Trump.

It may date back to 1994 but there's no end in sight for the UK's Chief customs system as Brexit rules beckon

Re: Let's see

You still have no reasons for voting leave, or you would have articulated them

BTW calling something "bollocks" is not the killer put down you seem to think it is

"Lets imagine worst case scenario ahh we need food and meds to enter the country. Who is slowing them down?" - We are, we caused all this, or more specifically you & your mates are

"If our customs is stopping the flow of food and meds then we reduce our checks." - CALLING ALL SMUGGLERS EASY MARK HERE brilliant suggestion, do you also sell nylons out of a suitcase ?

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

"That would require reading comprehension from those who dont think reasons have been articulated, particularly as this is addressed so often it would require someone brand new to not know this"

Your words not mine, you say your audience is too thick or too bigoted

There's a very simple way to deal with "Not because you haven't got any reasons" and that's to give one

But you won't, you'll bang on about how it's all been explained, without providing one single reason or link to one or saying no matter what you say we'll dismiss it

Go on prove me wrong, show one reason that no one can knock down

Re: Let's see

If Leavers are correct then everything will be hunky dory & I will apologise

If Leavers are incorrect, and all the evidence to date is pointing that way, then people will die

Now I'm happy to apologise right here & now if we can avoid the latter, if that's all it takes to stop this nonsense I'll do it, not a problem, save lives? yes please, I'm sorry, there! done!

But thanks to Leavers we're committed to this experiment, so when the ports back up as they did the other day during a test & food & meds start to perish waiting for customs clearance & people start to die for lack of food, meds or both, how many Leavers will put their hand up & apologise ?

Because it won't be any use guys, it'll be too late

And it'll be the fault of Leavers

And if they think we're unhappy with them now, just imagine how happy we'll be with them then

That's the fault with waiting to see what comes out in the wash

A red sock in with the white load is an embarrassment

Blocking up the ports because there's no plan & never was & then people start dying is a little bit more serious, so if there's the slightest danger of it happening then every effort should be taken to avoid it

https://www.kentonline.co.uk/folkestone/news/brexit-trial-creates-lorry-queue-at-eurotunnel-237992/

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

Against an 80 seat majority & a 3 line whip Parliament neither approve nor amend, Legislation goes straight from a Cabinet ministers scribble to the statute books, the only minor hiccup being the House of Lords and even they can't prevent the cabinet pushing through whatever legislation it wants unamended

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

I'm sorry it's tiresome, but we're going to keep banging on about absolutely everything wrong with Brexit because a short *trial* caused massive tailbacks yesterday, yet Leavers still trot out "Project Fear"

The French trialled their boarding system which added 70 seconds per truck to processing time

I should note that the French have completed their infrastructure builds & have their IT systems up & running, they're ready to go, 1/1/21 they turn them on & we get tailbacks up the M20 almost instantly

We're still in the planning phase with a couple of weeks to go before they go live, you're an IT guy, how many major projects have you worked on that were still planning a few weeks before they went live ? How many of those weren't abject disasters ?

https://www.kentonline.co.uk/folkestone/news/brexit-trial-creates-lorry-queue-at-eurotunnel-237992/

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

So you're not going to try because you say your audience is too thick & too bigoted

Not because you haven't got any reasons

And people wonder why these debates get heated

Tax working from home, says Deutsche Bank, because the economy needs that lunch money you’re not spending

Re: Fuck off, Deutsche Bank

OK Deutsche Bank here's the deal

We're paying for our own electricity, lighting & heating

We're donating square metres of office space from our homes for free, space which we now can't use for anything else

We're eating our own internet data allowance, which we're paying for

On occasion we provide our own equipment, lots of people use their own printers for example

Our employers don't have to pay any of that, nor do they have to secure or insure the workspace

Sometimes they don't even need the workspace so they save on rent

The work still gets done, our employers have less expenditure so their profit margins are up, OK in the short term they may need to spring for some laptops woo, generally all the costs of WFH are borne by us

I'll admit we don't have to commute for hours a day & we don't have to pay for that commute

But if you add it all up I reckon employers come out on top and all the sacrifices are made by us

For example me & my partner work for different companies so we can't share a workspace because of confidentiality, so we've given up a bedroom & the dining room, what's the cost of 2 separate workspaces Deutsche Bank ?

So before we start talking about extra taxation for employees

We can be paid for for the workspaces we're providing

Or our employers who are making more profit can be taxed

Or we could call it even

Or you could just do what the OP said in the title

Still want to talk about tax ?

Brit Conservative Party used 10 million people's names to derive their country of origin, ethnicity and religion according to ICO report

Re: So what did they think of Boris ?

he's an American immigrant born in New York with Turkish ancestry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Johnson

He had dual citizenship until the IRS gave him a bill

Johnson's paternal great-grandfather was Circassian-Turkish journalist Ali Kemal

Brexit travel permits designed to avoid 7,000-lorry jams come January depend on software that won't be finished till April

There won't be 7,000 trucks in a queue to Kent

In order for a UK haulier to take goods to an EU member state they need an ECMT permit, these come in 2 flavours, monthly & yearly.

In March of 2019 the UK had 11,392 applications for yearly permits of which it allocated 984 with a possible 70% more ( 689 after rounding up ) to come so that's a maximum of 1673 annual permits.

They also had 2,832 monthly permits which hadn't been allocated.

So in any one month there's between 3,816 & 4,505 permits, which translates to the same number of UK vehicles travelling to the EU, no point setting off for the EU without a permit.

I doubt 2020 has a much larger allocation, given the state of talks.

And 11,392 applications were made, and that's when we had FoM and didn't actually need permits, we just thought FoM could end any day so we'd best get them, when transition ends those permits will be needed.

And that's for the entire UK, any port, not just the ones in Kent, we'll sharing those 3,816 to 4,505 trucks between several other ports as well as Dover.

So if there's 2000 UK trucks going through Dover we'll be lucky, though that figure's just a guess. I'd be surprised if UK haulage operators weren't looking at alternative routes to avoid queueing though. Any RORO ports that happen to be on the east of the UK & aren't in Kent will do see https://www.gov.uk/guidance/list-of-roll-on-roll-off-ports.

And any EU trucks that get stuck in a queue returning to base will only do so once as their operators won't send them again, sitting in a queue costs them money, UK haulage will be uneconomic so they'll finish their current contracts & won't pick up any future ones, after all they have 27 other countries they can haul to.

The Government will be well aware of all this as they're the ones that issue the certificates in the UK. I'd say they're just going to pretend they don't know and act all surprised in January in order to whip up some anti EU sentiment, "But we built all these car parks, disrupted lives, put a border round Kent & now the nasty EU won't even let us use them waaaaah, it's all their fault how could we have foreseen this" yadda yadda

Source for March 2019 figures - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47377037

You think the UK coronavirus outbreak was bad? Just wait till winter: Study shows test-and-trace system is failing

Youre the herd, this is a cull

This is bound to get me enough downvotes to be kicked off Reg

Lets see, which groups tend to catch Covid 19 & subsequently die

Mainly it's the old, the sick, the homeless, the unemployed/unproductive & the NHS professionals who treat them

There's a small number of children & a few productive members of society

I'd say it's fair to assume that most of these people are not natural Tory voters, so the Tory's don't care if they die

And the few that are Tory voters are regarded as a necessary sacrifice, they're collateral damage

On average more non Tory voters than Tory voters die from Covid 19

So don't expect the Tory Government to help you, you're a resource, nothing more, if they can't use you to make money or increase their power you're useless to them

They are not going to lift a finger to stop Covid unless they can profit from it & they do not see a profit in saving your life

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

In the late 70's when I was at uni, we had a PDP11/34 in a lab with about 15 teletypes hooked in

It turned out to be unusually susceptible to static, as several students including myself only had to touch the handle of the door to the room and every head poring over the teletype output would suddenly look up as the system crashed

Bit awkward when you had a class in there

We had porters going round with water filled spray bottles at one time damping down the nylon carpets, which did nothing, they eventually removed the carpets altogether which helped a bit

I found an earthing point and grounded myself before going anywhere near the room, which helped a lot more

UK.gov admits it has not performed legally required data protection checks for COVID-19 tracing system

Re: what charges...

Don't forget how PPE is counted 10,000 boxes of tissues with an average content of 100 tissues per box = 1 million items of PPE

Mysterious disappearance ?

Nah, creative accounting, misdirection & criminal negligence

EG multi purpose items

Silly example, say a bin liner can be used as a bin liner disposing hazardous waste or an emergency surgical gown or an impromptu body bag, all possible PPE uses

So a bin liner gets counted 3 times

Then it's used as a bin liner & only that use is ticked off the spreadsheet

The figures say you've still got 2 more items of PPE, good luck finding them

Twitter ticks off Trump with new 'Get the facts' alert on pair of fact-challenged tweets

Any close down of social media by Trump will last right up to the second he tries to tweet about it

Not that he can do it anyway

Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer

More Bullsh*tting Customers

I once was called to a client back in the days when I was desperate for work & did hardware calls.

They had a dead server, well it was a Windows NT PC they used as a server.

The server was situated on a desk in the middle of the office & was never turned off, but one day it just died.

They did a lot of grinding being an auto repair shop & there was a high concentration of metal dust in the case, which I dutifully hoovered out, but it still wouldn't turn on so I looked at the power supply.

Took out the PSU, tipped it on it's side & a large pile of highly conductive metal dust started to fall out, so I replaced the PSU & the machine started, I advised the client to get an enclosure to filter the dust, job done, I thought.

Then they refused to pay, saying I'd walked off site with a CD containing a reference database for parts & they weren't paying until they got it back.

I hadn't taken anything off their site I even left them the dead PSU to remind them about the dust problem.

This "he said, she said" continued for months until eventually the CD in question was found in the clients desk drawer.

It turns out someone installed some freebie ISO mounting software on the server & shared out an ISO of the CD over their network, putting the original CD in a safe place.

Because the server was never turned off they didn't put the ISO mounting & sharing instructions in the autoexec either, it all had to be done manually from a logged on account, it wasn't documented anywhere, so this was forgotten.

I let them figure out how to mount & share the ISO file.

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Just a quick correction

It's not an NHS App

It's a Marc Warner/Dominic Cummings App

i.e. the team that abused facebook data for the 2016 referendum to microtarget small groups of swing voters with adverts that played to their fears

That reason alone is sufficient for me to reject installing this app on any device I own

Even though I trust Google/Apple about as far as I can throw them I'll cheerfully put the Google/Apple app on my phone, as my trust in them is orders of magnitude greater than my trust in Warner/Cummings

Cortana, why are you still here? Microsoft makes the long-suffering assistant chattier for more countries with new Windows 10 build

Cortana can't be uninstalled as it's part of the core & essential as far as Microsoft are concerned

But you can get rid of it, or at least you could, so I'm not sure if this still works

The last time I got rid of Cortana I did this

Find the folder Cortana is installed in & try to rename it by appending something like ".old", this will fail as Cortana is running but you should get a popup with "retry", leave the popup on screen

Find the running Cortana process & kill it, then quickly click the "retry" on the rename popup before Cortana restarts

You may need to take ownership of the folder but some variant of that should work

Then reboot, as the folder has been renamed, Cortana won't start as the folder can't be found

I think the only thing that was affected was searching the local hard drive

Please note when windows next updates, Cortana will reappear

It does leave the software on the drive but at least it's not running

Wanted: An exit strategy from the overt surveillance of smartphone contact tracing

Re: Scary and Scarier

Are there any modern phones with batteries that can be removed these days ?

Reg fashion special: Top designer says 'video chat accessories' are in for spring!

Me too, I do have a plug in webcam somewhere, in a box, in the attic, in a filing cabinet, next to the leopard ...

(Sorry Mr Adams)

I used it once many years ago

I have a motorised telescope, I'm thinking of attaching it to that if I ever find it again

Seriously ?

Has no one made a "Max Headroom" filter for video conferencing ?

Just put up a green screen & be anywhere in the world or out of it

Definite gap in the market there

America: We'll send citizens cash checks amid coronavirus financial hardship. UK: We'll offer £330bn in biz loans

Re: Are we really still calling it coronavirus or COVID-19?

I've been doing that :blush:

Broken lab equipment led boffins to solve a 58-year-old physics problem by mistake

AAAAGGGH THAT'S WHY *facepalm moment*

I've been looking for blood oranges for sodding ages

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

A very long time ago in my first job, fresh out of university, I was hired as a software engineer and I was writing code in Fortran on a PDP11/34 in an electronics lab for a bunch of engineers.

I deleted all of my new bosses program files, just his files, in the first week of starting work.

There were no backups, despite the PDP having removable hard drives no one had ever thought to make 'A' backup let alone regular backups.

There were, however printouts, fortunately these were the early days of computers and disks were only a few megabytes in size, so while the deleted files were important they weren't so massive they couldn't be typed back in.

So I spent the next week, laboriously typing them back in, making sure they compiled & produced expected results.

Then I sorted out a backup regime.

After I'd done all this, my boss informed me that not all of his programs had compiled before & he was pleasantly surprised they did now.

Fed-up air safety bods ban A350 pilots from enjoying cockpit coffees

If they fall into the ocean I humbly submit that waterproofing the electronics in the cockpit isn't a primary concern

$360 million aircraft rarely fall out of someone's pocket to land in a toilet

The BlackBerry may be dead, but others are lining up to take its place

Re: YAY, slider QWERTY is back!

I've got an order in for one, they're made in China & the Coronavirus is causing a delay

LG announces bold new plan for financial salvation: Trying to actually make phones people want to buy

Re: Here is a phone I want to buy

I believe the micro usb standard is data or power but not both

If you're lucky enough to find a device that allows charging at the same time as transferring data then cheer loudly & enjoy, but don't expect it as a feature on every device

Re: Here is a phone I want to buy

(4) "why do you care ?" - Because he does, he's buying it, this is what he wants, he doesn't need to give a reason beyond he's parting with his money for it

(5) "no, these buttons can be integrated into the main screen, doesn't hurt, and reduces size" - Some people hate typing on a screen with a passion, some people hate having main system feature buttons on the screen with a passion, again see the answer to 4

I'd quite like one that has 2 usb sockets so it can be charged at the same time as using an external device like a flash drive, not necessary but I'm quite happy to pay for it

*Cough*SlideOutFullLongestAspectKeyboard*Cough* like an F(x)tec Pro 1 but more up to date with chipsets

They're BAAACK: Windows 10 nagware team loads trebuchet with annoying reminders to GTFO Windows 7

Looks like I'll be upgrading my system to some version of Linux in 2020

Re: Oh well,

I've got zorin on an ancient laptop, that doesn't look bad

Oh, irony of ironies: Gov.UK's transparency report reveals... nothing

No doubt written by the same person who lashed together the Brexit white paper

Bring it BACK... with MODs! Psion 5 storms great tech revival poll

Yep another vote for Linux here, and please please please keep the keyboard, I hate typing on screens

Trump signs 'no privacy for non-Americans' order – what does that mean for rest of us?

Re: Trump has become more deranged

Before that, I remember my dad telling me a story his dad told him, which was something like

The boy stood on the burning deck

The bombs around did fly

He stuck his head between his legs

And kissed his arse goodbye

So that's turn of the 20th century, probably even earlier than that

I still can't get used to this being the 21st century where's my bloody flying car & job on the moon ? Why have I got to worry about the bloody cold war restarting again ? Why did America elect lord bloody Snapcase ? Bah humbug ! ... mutter.... mumble... grump....

Investigatory Powers Act signed into UK law by Queen

Bad guys getting hold of the log is one thing, but it's too easy to plant evidence in your ICR log without your knowledge, all it takes is a couple of lines of JavaScript inserted into a legitimate 3rd party script and content from any site in the world can be downloaded to your PC and be logged in your ICR without your knowledge and no antivirus or antimalware in the world can stop it.

Re: I wonder.....

All these references will be stored at your ISP & you'll pay for the storage, so the more you generate, the more you pay.

Plus it will soak up your data allowance, not everyone has an unlimited connection

Plus anyone searching your ICR log can search through a couple of gigabytes with a laptop in minutes the random entries won't help

My comments from 5 months ago http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/2897276

And before that http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/2797508

It seems no one listens

As soon as the ICR logs are up and running you can no longer trust any site you visit not to contaminate it with dodgy references, your only solutions are to use VPN's or Tor to bypass the ICR and these have their own drawbacks

The internet was designed to survive nuclear strikes, Theresa May just destroyed it with a pen

Ad-blocking ‘plateaus’, claims hopeful ad industry

Dear sites that want to serve adverts to me,

I don't mind adverts providing they satisfy the following conditions.

1 - They are only animated or make a noise when I click on them, so no following the mouse round the page, flashing, playing videos with a soundtrack while I'm trying to listen to the radio etc... a static picture with some text will do fine.

2 - Adverts must be declared to be adverts and not disguised as links to other articles.

3 - They don't obscure the page and are reasonably discreet, I don't really mind if an ad picture occupies half the page as long as I can still read the article.

4 - They are wholly located on the site I am visiting and that site accepts 100% of the responsibility for their content being safe & appropriate, so no 3rd party ad sites or scripting sites as these are common targets for hackers who want to download malware in compromised adverts. You will need to check your adverts & scripts regularly to ensure they haven't been compromised & if my PC is infected with a virus which can be traced back to an advert from your site, you pay for the cleanup.

5 - If clicking on an advert would take me to another site then this needs to be clearly indicated before I click on the advert.

6 - Clicking on an advert is not a pre requisite for viewing the content of the page.

7 - Adverts should not consume significantly more bandwidth than the article I'm looking at unless I click on them to initiate a video/audio stream.

I can probably think of a few more but that will do for the moment.

Do this and I'll cheerfully look at a few ads to generate revenue for your site, don't do this & I'll block every advert I can & if I can't block ads from your site I'll block your site instead.

You want my traffic, these are my terms, they are not negotiable.

You really do want to use biometrics for payments, beam banks

You really do want to use biometrics for payments, beam banks

Um no, no I really don't