Posts by EveryTime

BOFH: Free as in free beer or... Oh. 'Free Upgrade'

Re: Have Laserjets gone out of fashion?

Yes. LaserJets have gone out of fashion. Try getting Windows drivers. HP solidly hates that they are still around, and are printing more reliably and at far lower cost than anything they currently offer.

I gave away a 4200 (I think) with duplexer because it was too big. I currently have a 5MP with a JetDirect EX Plus (extra-double-plus obsolete), both entering their third decade of problem-free service. This printer has literally lasted 100x longer than a bubblejet

Did mock cop bot trot on fraught tot? Maybe not

Toddlers are frequently knocked over by running into stationary objects.

Some parents blame anyone and anything around when their precious baby falls. Usually by the second child they understand that toddlers fall over all the time on their own, and will often reach out in a way that makes it look like a collision.

In Palo Alto the median home price is $2.5M, and there are a wide range of cultures and economic levels. It's not surprising that the most minor accident could exploited as a big payday.

Presumably this robot did have a camera, but not the all-around, all-azimuth coverage that would be required to refute this type of claim.

It's 2016 and Windows lets crims poison your printer drivers

And printer "drivers" don't even need to be full device drivers...

Printer drivers aren't complicated. Or rather they don't need to be complicated. The simple ones take an input document and translate it an output document. They might query the printer capabilities and configuration setting, and load font files. They shouldn't need full access to all parts of the system. In a security-focused OS they should run in an environment far more limited than a user.

There was an excuse for screwing this up in the 1970s, but many systems got it close to right. Unix LPD was a good effort that was flexible enough to handle a wide variety of printers a decade later. Three decades further on and the worlds largest software company for two of those decades continues to do things that make it clear that getting software right is completely trumped by corporate politics and controlling a market.

Rolls-Royce reckons robot cargo ships are the future of the seas

Re: Distress

I don't think radio distress calls or a visually spotting a boat in trouble is an issue.

Both are better handled by computer analysis on-board and alerting an on-shore monitoring center.

That would be far better than the current situation on the high seas, where typically there is no lookout or radio response.

Jury awards US$3 BEEELION to HPE in Oracle/Itanium lawsuit

Porting the underlying database code is significantly more difficult than porting a general application. Locking, consistency, caching at every level, and quirks with every I/O system needs to be taken into account.

However the porting work was already done. Keeping things working still takes people and money, but the risk is much lower. Companies might grumble about the maintainers looking "retired in place" and only putting in easy 8 hour days. That's sometimes what experience looks like.

The real issue here was a management decision to renege on the contract. There was a written contract. External companies relied on the contract. The business might not have been as profitable as expected. That risk is exactly why there was a contract.

Oracle has a reputation for "that is just paper, this is now the reality". That usually works for them. You aren't going to sue them when the project is 80% complete and your job is on the line. Or when your company's vital information is locked up in their database. Or you need them to support the next generation widget you are about to introduce. You look at reality, think of the line "pray I don't alter it any further" said by Larry with a Vader voice, and bend over again.

NRA guns down 38,000 Surge.sh sites in anti-parody spray-and-pray

Re: Misleading

The NRA did not follow the DMCA.

They issued a DMCA "take-down" notice for an alleged trademark violation.

The DMCA take-down process is only for copyright violations.

And no, using a trademarked logo is *not* a copyright violation.

They were abusing the already-extreme power of the DMCA.

I don't hold DigitalOcean blameless in this either. They should have recognized it as an invalid notice. At minimum they should have asked for clarification about it's obvious deficiencies. Shutting off a paying customer because of such an obviously flawed notice should leave them liable for all damage, and earn them well-deserved negative PR.

You're not cool unless you have an app store, apparently. So Docker's building one

Dockers Khakis have been long been recognized as a fashion hallmark

The Dockers web store has been around for many years.

Disclaimer: For a while I wore Dockers when jeans weren't quite dressy enough. I still have a handful of them in my closet.

When can I buy a fart app? Or should it be "how many of those are demo and/or fart apps rather than something useful?"

Study of asexually reproducing honeybee ponders: But why the mass murder?

That is an interesting variation. But a primarily-invasive variant is going to be self-limiting, as they rely on strong host colonies to take over.

I do take issue with calling the queen 'all powerful'. From one point of view, the queen bee has as little power as the Queen. The virgin queen is selected before the egg is laid. She is fed only royal jelly (other bees get a balanced diet), which makes her larger and sexually mature. If she isn't killed by the existing queen, or another virgin queen, she is allowed to make a single mating flight. After that flight, she will likely never leave the hive again. The royal staff will lead her from one honeycomb cell to the next, where she is expected to lay an egg about once every minute. If she drops off that pace, the staff will build a few much larger cells off the main comb, and lead her to deposit eggs there. They will then make certain that she never goes back there and kills the immature queens.

The queen does issue the scent commands to the colony, but she isn't actually the one that creates the orders. When the colony runs short of protein, they limit the queen's access to 'bee bread', a fermented pollen and nectar mix that is the bee's primary growing food. The protein-needy queen then issues the scent to concentrate on gathering more pollen. If the continues, she'll eventually stop laying eggs. But it's not really the queen making the decision. It's all decided by the queen's "staff", and she is just the figurehead.

Oooooklahoma! Where the cops can stop and empty your bank cards – on just a hunch

Wait, it's possible to get a 7.7% commision on shakedowns?

A company has figured out how to get a cut of a contra-constitutional practice? 7.7% for providing a card reader? (The $5K fixed payment is just a smoke screen around where the real money is.)

This is innovative. You couldn't horn in on the action when cash or drugs are seized. But technology provides an excuse for getting a cut. No doubt with Redflex-style kickbacks.

US Telecom beats up FCC over investment

We love competition..

.. among our suppliers.

A cracked window on the International Space Station? That's not good

Re: Kessler syndrome

Kessler Syndrome sounds realistic, but it's likely a too-simple model.

One big issue has already been mentioned: total momentum is conserved, but a big part of the kinetic energy is changed to heat. So only a small fraction of the debris will have the kinetic energy to remain in a stable orbit. The vast majority of collision debris will be put into highly elliptical orbits. An orbit that isn't nearly circular will dip into the atmosphere at perigee, with fiery results.

A second effect is more important: small objects quickly drop out of low earth orbit. Their cross-section area is high in relation to their mass. Collisions with stray molecules (too thin to be "atmosphere" or call it "drag") causes a rapid decay in the orbit. Again, ultimately with fiery results.

Japan's Hitomi space 'scope bricked, declared lost after software bug

Re: Son of Mars Climate Orbiter?

" people write code that does logical things but never stop to check that the inputs to the code are sensible or that the outputs are within reasonable ranges."

This appears to be the case where the inputs to a function were reasonable and the outputs were within a reasonable range. The issue was that there was a disagreement between estimated state and one sensor-reported value.

I initially wrote "measured value" instead of "sensor-reported value". But I realized that would be misleading. The terms used indicate your perspective. When you say "measured value" you imply that the measurement is basically correct. When you say "sensor-reported value" you start considering the sensor's inaccuracies, limitations and potential to be just plain broken.

In this case the software calculated that one of the sensors had an inaccurate output, but then went ahead and used that wrong-but-plausible value in subsequent calculations anyway. Which wouldn't have been fatal, except that the recovery code used the wrong center-of-mass estimate (which seems to have been a ground controller mistake, albeit one that could have been checked for had the code been written or verified with a more paranoid perspective).

Daft draft anti-car-hack law could put innocent drivers away for life

Imprisonment culture?

Today I propose lifetime imprisonment for jaywalking.

"I hope that we never have to use it," said Kowall. "That's why the penalties are what they are. The potential for severe injury and death are pretty high."

Millions of people that parked on the other side of roads without marked crosswalks will thank me for my legislative foresight.

Nearly two billion in the bank and yet this VC is slowly losing his beach-blocking battle

Re: Personally...

".I will withhold judgement on the fellow as we actually know very little about the situation. "

This story has repeatedly in the news, and 'we' (excluding you) know much about the situation.

It is very clear that he is an ass. He knew the situation when he bought the property, and was repeatedly informed about the law. He blocked off access anyway, and continued blocking access even when a judge ruled against him. He just threw more lawyers and filings at the situation. Through his lawyers, he has repeatedly made false claims about the historic situation (which didn't work very well since the locals actually have memory).

In California, not only is the beach public, the public is entitled to a right-of-way to access it.

An argument is that right "diminishes" the value of beach-front property. But the property owner never bought that right originally.

Khosla was really trying to steal from the public, purchasing beach-front property and then grabbing far more than he paid for. He really does believe that with enough money and lawyers, he can do whatever he likes.

Getty on Google: It’s all about traffic, duh

This sounds quite a bit like "I want the government/court to keep my business model profitable, even as the market changes".

Note that Getty Images specifically does not want to enable new competitors to their legacy business, where they hold a dominant market position. They want to fence off a company that changed the underlying market, which is often the only way to compete against a dominant company.

Big-screen Skype gets small farewell note

Someone that recently purchased a high-end TV has demonstrated their Value to Society as a Good Consumer. They are worth Serving because they can be Serviced (ref G. Carlin, Servicing The Account)

Someone using a seven year old TV, on the other hand, has no value in Society.

12,000 chopped: Intel finds its inner paranoid

Wait... "cauterizing the PC wound"?

Perhaps you actually haven't looked at Intel's results.

They are still making money hand-over-fist.

Yes, the PC market is declining. It's been declining for quite a while. Intel responded long ago by moving more of the system revenue into their pocket.

The only place where Intel has been bleeding money is where they have leveraged their extremely profitable market domination to enter other areas. Tablets and phones have both been money-losers. They continue to stick with both, including cellular modems that can't be making much. Why aren't you suggesting that they 'cauterize those wounds'?

Laying off 10% of your workforce while raking in money is not a "bold vision". It's the opposite. Those employees got you to the top of the heap, and you are still at the top of the heap.

Intel literally decimates workforce: 12,000 will be axed, CFO shifts to sales

I'll echo the previous posters:

Intel is hardly struggling. Sales are still growing. Profits margins are fat. The only they are lacking is meaningful competition that forces them to invest in improving their products. What's the reward for the employees that put them in this position? A layoff, or at least the stress of wondering if you are next.

Intel lobbied for more H1B visas. They'll lobby for more next year. We need a change to the system so that layoff such as this disqualifies them from taking advantage of low-cost workers.

MIT boffins build AI bot that spots '85 per cent' of hacker invasions

Uhhhgg, yet another "AI" system demoed on the same data that it trained upon.

Pretty much like training on historical stock data, then demoing that the system would have had an astonishing return. All that you have done is prove that the model training worked.

Even if you get past the issue and can accurately predict trends that the model was not trained on, you still haven't proven you have something useful. When you deploy a financial model to actually trade on the predictions, it changes the market enough that the model is no longer predictive.

In this case I expect that the system is little more than a virus pattern scanner. It can accurately detect all of the obsolete attacks. And it will be able to detect new attacks as soon as they are old enough to be added to the database... at which point they are obsolete.

USB-C adds authentication protocol

Re: Will this allow the host to disable power?

How with this stop the "voltage multiplier in a thumb drive case" scenario?

Just mix a certified device with the malicious hardware, and piggyback on the power. Sure, it will cost a bit more. But you probably are especially cost-sensitive when building a destructive device.

Nor will this stop mis-wired cables destroying devices.

Half of people plug in USB drives they find in the parking lot

First, this isn't a representative sample. University students are in an economic realm that makes them more likely to use a dropped USB drive. And in a community where they are more likely to return it if they can find its owner.

But the real point of the story is that people will plug in a USB drive. So what? Linux isn't going to auto-run that .exe file. It's fairly safe looking at a random .html file with most browsers, even if they load images from the World Wild Web. Errmm, fairly safe from a technical point of view, even if you need brain bleach when see That Which Cannot Be Unseen.

Actually the worst one I've seen looked like a USB drive, but actually emulated a keyboard. It spewed a bunch of characters that opened a new browser window and typed in a URL. Or would have if I had been running Windows. Instead it just typed mostly garbage to the shell. If it had been a bit smarter it would have detected a Linux host (easy enough if you profile USB initialization timing) and might have typed something truly evil.

Anonymised search engine page found on 'kid-friendly' search site

The message, for those that missed it, was that this was just another slapped-together thing that promises parents "safety", while inside the brightly colored padded surface is jagged rusty metal and broken glass.

On an somewhat unrelated topic, I was recently surprised to find that Twitter is a massive porn trove. I went there with a fresh browser and found the experience much different than my usual logged-in, ad-blocked view. Amusingly some PG rated pictures require an extra click, adjacent to hard-core movies and animated GIFs that autoplay.

Field technicians want to grab my tool and probe my things

A historical correction here..

TV repair men didn't change to satellite dish installers.

Antenna installers changed into dish installers.

It's an easy mistake to make. Some shops actually did TV repair. Most shops weren't that skill-intensive. They did TV installation, with a sideline of having a tube testing machine and selling replacement tubes.

TV installation was a real mans' business. Old TVs were very heavy, awkward and delicate. Delivering them often took a pair of burly men. Erecting the antenna and running the antenna cable took time and physical construction. Even if there was an existing antenna, it often needed to be replaced (aluminum and steel exposed to the elements).

Dear Windows, OS X folks: Update Flash now. Or kill it. Killing it works

Google "zero days since last accident"

I've tried deleting Flash, but there is always some vital website that needs it.

Read America's insane draft crypto-borking law that no one's willing to admit they wrote

I hope that this trial balloon has been considered popped, stamped on, spit upon, burn, irradiated, buried and forgotten.

Google, Facebook's CAPTCHAs vanquished by security researchers

I don't get why this is more than academically interesting.

Spammers are willing to spend money on humans to solve trivial problems. CAPTCHAs should only be one element in a broader set of protections.

As an example, Yahoo financial message boards. No regular user registers, then immediately proceeds to post 100 messages to 100 different boards separated by only a few seconds. A CAPTCHA per posting won't block this spam. Analyzing behavior will quickly shut it down.

Neighbour sick of you parking in his driveway? You'd better hack-proof your car

I'm with the other posters that thinks this sounds like a meaningless jumble of technical words.

This company might be doing something useful, but from the description it comes across as a scam.

They claim to be OS agnostic. Security isn't OS agnostic. You can do stupid things at any level, including inside the OS, as Microsoft proved in the 1990s. Don't execute picture files as programs. Don't allow active email messages. Don't gateway unchecked external communication onto the car network.

Iceland prime minister falls on sword over Panama Papers email leak

This is shaping up to be a Wikileaks, or even Snowden-level, revelation.

Tesla books over $8bn in overnight sales claims Elon Musk

This is a market researcher's wet dream.

Which would you rather hear:

"We did a statistically valid poll: 10% of the people surveyed want to buy your product"

or

"Perhaps only 0.1% of the population want this, but they each put $1K of their money down to get on the waiting list."

SEC chair blasts Silicon Valley for its hokey valuations

Re: Here here

There are many problems with 'unicorn' valuations, even if it superficially looks like private investors playing with monopoly money.

A big one one is employee stock compensation. These companies are hiring employees with promises of stock options or RSUs (essentially stock grants). That's a major part of the compensation. They are taxed on the claimed value, as if it's income. They have no way to find out what the stock is really worth. They must rely on the board, which unquestionably owes them a fiduciary responsibly to act in their best interests.

Does anyone believe that the regular employee shareholders are being treated equally when a $10M investment gets 1% of the company (plus a hidden term 10x warrants to buy more shares at a much lower price, plus a payback of the investment amount with interest, plus a seat on the board, plus a requirement to buy 'IP' from a third party that the VC owns)?

BMW complies with GPL by handing over i3 car code

Re: Car thieves will be very happy with it...

Why would car thieves find this useful?

What makes you think that the older closed-source systems are more secure for being closed source?

BMW relied on security-by-obscurity for their key system. It meant that for a long while only thieves could make keys, while regular people had to go to the dealer for their $250 replacements. Or spend far more if they ran out of the firmware limit of 10 key codes.

Eventually the same techniques used by thieves filtered down to serious hobbyists and now to less-dedicated car people. With an $60 AK90, it just takes following directions to read and modify the key module, and write new key transponders. Including re-using key slots so that you don't need to buy a new key module and new keys if a few keys have been lost.

Some of the newer models were reverse-engineered so thoroughly that new firmware was written. (Or perhaps they just discovered an existing hidden function.) The key ECU can be manipulated so that it would detect a blank key transponder in the ignition and write the contents to work with the car, without additional hardware . Yes, the car would bypass its own electronic security. Right now that system is many thousands of dollars, but I'm guessing that it will soon be available for much less.

London's $40m 'flash crash' trader is to face extradition to the US

The core of his illegal actions was that he offered to sell things that he did not have, and made offers to buy that he had no intention or ability to complete.

You can argue that others were doing the same thing on the selling side, notably in the form of naked shorts, but that doesn't excuse his actions. And on the buying side presumably the others were less aggressive and had the ability to follow through purchasing based on their bids. (Intent might be difficult to judge, but the lack of ability to purchase isn't.)

I don't see any of this as a 'free market' issue. Financial markets are highly regulated, partially as a substitute for transaction parties needing to be well informed about each other. Otherwise "100 shares of INTL held by X" would necessarily be different than "100 shares of INTL held by Y" because of the difference risk.

Apps that 'listen in' to your mobile get slapped by US watchdog

I'm surprised the information is sent at 18KHz - 19.5KHz.

I would have guessed a carrier a bit lower than15KHz, with the assumption that anything close to or above the traditional TV horizontal scan rate (15.625KHz or 15.734KHz) would be filtered out. A 15KHz tone might annoy a few teenagers, but it's not as if they are the target consumer.

20Hz - 20KHz is the golden standard. Many pieces of audio equipment claims to reproduce that range. But I pretty much believe that 99% of them are.. untruthful.

Flying Scotsman attacked by drone

I am so reassured that the majority of my fellow readers had the same reaction that I did.. 'drone:0, train: (did you hear something?)'

Millions menaced as ransomware-smuggling ads pollute top websites

I'm not exactly going along with the sites being "innocent victims". That's just posturing to disclaim responsibility.

I didn't go 'xxxsleazypornandmalware.com'. I went to NYTimes.com. They are the ones collecting subscription money. And the ones that selected the ad network. I didn't get to choose the ads delivered, or a warning about the unexpected risk from their poor choices.