Posts by technoise

Internet industry freaks out over proposed unlimited price hikes on .org domain names

Re: Domain names are all pointless

Domain names are not pointless for Dynamic DNS.

Treaty of Roam: No-deal Brexit mobile bill shock

Re: Um, guys, only 1 month left

Pascal Monett: Do you really, honestly think that there's a deal just waiting to be signed ?

Yes.

There is a deal that all 27 EU members have ratified. All that is required is for the contents of Parliament to develop the collective political will to sign it.

More nodding dogs green-light terrible UK.gov pr0n age verification plans

Re: Is this the stupidest idea ever?

This is by no means a stupid idea.

It is yet another precedent of the political class establishing more control over the Internet. Why would they wish to do so? Well some important institutions, like the BBC have already woken up to the Internet as being an existential threat, but also, the political class, in coordination with the established media, have until comparatively recently been able to control narratives, and act as a proxy for public opinion, and they now see their ability to do this slipping away as more and more of the population are talking to each other in forums that are beyond their control.

So more control of, and monitoring of activity on the Internet, and maybe the ability to know when and where to shut it down, must be a step in the right direction as far as the political and power class see it.

Oxford startup magics up metamaterials for next-gen charging

Oh joy... more gadgets we never knew we needed, chucking out RF in the HF bands...

Blighty: We spent £1bn on Galileo and all we got was this lousy T-shirt

PRS access

PRS access - the high precision encrypted channel, which is presumably what the angst is all about, is apparently under consideration for the US and Norway, and the EU has apparently made provisions for non EU nations to be permitted access,

https://spacenews.com/u-s-norwegian-paths-to-encrypted-galileo-service-open-in-2016/

http://insidegnss.com/delay-continues-for-effort-to-add-galileo-signal-to-u-s-military-receivers/

Re: FFS

This non-EU nation is in the project.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-becomes-major-partner-in-eu-satellite-program/

A new Raspberry Pi takes a bow with all of the speed but less of the RAM

Re: This is good.

Incidentally, you don't have to power the Pi via micro-USB: The GPIO header includes pins for 5V supply input.

Of course, but then you need to take extra care and possibly add your own circuitry because the 5V GPIO pin is unregulated.

Re: This is good.

Agreed. Anyone can make an SBC with any number of cores and loads of RAM. It takes a special kind of designer to come up with something economical of power, making an SBC suitable for an IOT type use case, filling the gap between embedded microcontroller boards and office capable computers.

I'm already somewhat annoyed by the use of 5v on a micro USB port, given the limitations of the port itself for carrying current, which thanks to Ohm's law, has to be greater than if a higher voltage had been used, and makes the system more vulnerable to reduced power thanks to the high resistance leads and connectors that are to be found too often on the typical cheap Chinese power supplies people will be using.

I really wish the designers had gone with a coaxial barrel connector for power all along, which would have allowed the user to specify and solder their own cables.

For this reason, I like the Latte Panda's use of a barrel connector and 12v.

Pain in the brain! Kaspersky warns of hackable brain implants

Charlie Brooker

With hackable brain implants, Charlie Brooker would be a bit late to the game if he started writing about them now.

They have been the main theme of the Ghost in the Shell universe since it first came into being in the late 1980s, and I suspect it's not the first.

Your RSS is grass: Mozilla euthanizes feed reader, Atom code in Firefox browser, claims it's old and unloved

If major browsers have a feature, then it's an entry point for newcomers and novices to the web. If major browsers don't carry RSS, how are people going to get to know of its existence?

I have just got back into RSS after a long time away, and now I hear about this. It's very disheartening. This is an empowering, disintermediating technology, that puts the user in control, and at the centre of the world of their interests. However I can see that this would mean that there it would be of limited interest for the modern, business-oriented world wide web in which the user signs up to a Faustian pact in which they trade convenience for their digital souls. This abandonment of RSS comes at a time when the need for this kind of disintermediation is more needed than ever before.

Anyway - I will use Live Links till they disappear, and I have Newsboat waiting to take over in my bash shell.

Tax the tech giants and ISPs until the bits squeak – Corbyn

Re: Boo Hoo

For the many not the few.

Shouldn't this mean that he is against regressive taxes?

Like the BBC licence fee?

And increasing the cost of ISP subscriptions so that even people who never use the BBC, and don't want to fund it, still have to? Meaning that even the option of not paying a licence fee is no longer possible for anyone?

UK.gov is ready to talk data safeguards with the EU – but still wants it all

Re: DNA?

Doesn't GDPR have exceptions for law enforcement and security?

Buttonless and port-free: Expect the next iPhone to be as smooth as a baby's bum

Re: More Deadly Waves!

Not so much worried about the deadly aspect, but the EMC (Electromagnetic Compatibility) issues. What is this going to do to radio receivers, or other devices not designed for the brave new world of wireless power, which might have bits of circuitry unwittingly acting as antennas for these frequencies, and what frequencies and field strengths do these systems operate at?

Incidentally, there is already some mains power getting into the ether. Anyone who possesses an oscilloscope knows a quick test if it's working is to touch the tip of the probe and see the 50 or 60 Hz mains sine wave your body is picking up from the unshielded mains cables.

JURI's out, Euro copyright votes in: Whoa, did the EU just 'break the internet'?

Re: Hand Off My Internet

It might look that way from a distance, but when you look closer you'll see that generally internet connections are star shaped networks, with an ISP having all their customers connecting to them, and only a small number of routes out. Likewise, most links between cities and countries all come together in peering exchange points, and of course submarine cables tend to follow similar routes, and land at the same places.

For these words of mine to reach you, most of the way they'll be travelling over corporate owned networks and systems, only the last few meters are somewhat 'free'.

At the hardware layer, yes, but at the interpersonal layer, which is what the legacy media and the large commercial enterprises are concerned with, we can communicate directly without having to go through their intermediation, and that is a loss of power to governments, media, corporations, and the politico-media bubble, and the corporate state.

But the hardware layer, and much of the application layer, are controlled by business entities, and the corporate state can now use legislation to control those. If we let them succeed, they can get all communication back under their control. That is bad for us, and freedom and democracy, and ultimately, bad for everybody.

We are not talking about some idealistic utopia, we are talking about something we already have, which, if we are complacent, we are in danger of losing.

Re: Hand Off My Internet

Internet is simply a delivery/distribution medium. The same laws as for printed material, bill board ads, TV, Radio content, and Mail Order must apply, as appropriate to content and/or service.

No - it's not simply anything at all.

The Internet and World Wide Web are not like the other media you are talking about, which are centralised, and rely on a lot of concentration of capital and/or power for someone to use, hence making them centralised, star networks - it's a decentralised, mesh based network, allowing many-to-many communication, and the big powers don't like that, because they have cottoned on, maybe too late, to the realisation that the very medium itself, has a natural tendency to shift the centre of gravity away from power and money, to the individual citizen, where it truly belongs, in an actual democracy.

However, power and money, and the legacy media,having realised this, will naturally perceive that as an existential threat to their power and money, and influence, and so can be expected to use legislation to try to make the Internet look like any other centralised distribution system that has existed to date.

Finally: Historic Eudora email code goes open source

Re: Keep it going

El Vark: oh, Pine, how we miss thee

For those still pining for Pine, there's always Alpine...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_email_client

Sysadmin unplugged wrong server, ran away, hoped nobody noticed

This story doesn't make sense.

If the two cables were intertwined so that both would be disconnected if just one was pulled, how come his own server didn't switch off as well, the first time he tried to disconnect?

And I presume the "blinkenlichts" were just power LEDs? You would surely shut down the server before disconnecting the power?

Modern life is rubbish – so why not take a trip down memory lane with Windows File Manager?

A step backwards for user interface design

Given that twin panel file managers (Midnight Commander style, or Directory Opus for Amiganuts) had already proved their worth for many years prior to the release of this, Windows File Manager looked (to me) like an unnecessary step backwards for the GUI when it came out.

OK - you've sort of got two panels with the directory listing on the left, but its use for drag and drop feels clunky, particularly if you accidentally click a directory in the wrong way and end up with the clicked-on directory ending up displayed in the main panel on the right.

Now, who is going to bake a twin-panel file manager by default in a modern OS? You can get the option in some Linux desktop environments but it's usually by means of a hot-key for power users.

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, off you go: Snout of UK space forcibly removed from EU satellite trough

Trough?

"Snout of UK space forcibly removed from EU satellite trough."

Who put the swill in the trough in the first place? Where does that come from?

The EU is depriving itself from further funding of a project that is to go 50% over budget, so are cutting off their noses to spite their face.

Re: From the department of bleeding obvious

"Since the UK are voluntarily withdrawing from this project, why would they get the money back they've already spent?"

The UK is not voluntarily withdrawing from the project.We're withdrawing voluntarily from the EU. Kicking us out of this is just pressure to keep the rest of the EU project going with all our other funding of it.

The upside is that we will be able to use the GPS system withouth having to fund any more a project which is to go 50% over budget.

No wonder Marvin the robot was miserable: AI will make the rich richer – and the poor poorer

With the masses earning no wages, the whole thing collapses. This has already started to happen. The rich don't seem to realise that being rich in terms of possession of money, does not mean riches in terms of actual wealth. A better distribution of money in the form of wages (the healthiest way of getting liquidity into the economy) aided the massive advances of the Post War era.

UK drone collision study didn't show airliner window penetration

Asymmetry

Just putting my paranoid X-Files hat on, but...

Has anyone considered the outrageous and extremely unlikely hypothesis that maybe those in power want to be the ones with the drone technology and not us, and that if any of us can obtain anything with any serious capability, they might just want to be able to keep tabs on us?

After all, they seemed so reluctant to give us CB radio when it was popular. The Internet got under their radar, but maybe they might not want to let that kind of thing happen again.

All of the above, which I have written, is obviously an outrageous paranoid fantasy, presented for your amusement before being rightfully dismissed, and I am sure our government always act in our interests, like a concerned parent.

Firefox 57's been quietly delaying tracking scripts

Re: Firefox 57 on Ubuntu 16.04

Alister: Posting this on El Reg is unlikely to get you much of a response. Why not try the Mozilla forums?

Rhetorical questions don't expect an answer.

Firefox 57 on Ubuntu 16.04

Can somebody fix the memory leaks on Linux? 4 GB of RAM should be enough to run the OS and Firefox without having to use 1/3 of the swap partition.

Thank you.

Engineer named Jason told to re-write the calendar

Why not change to the French Revolutionary Calendar? Or a Japanese one?

Australian central bank says 'speculative mania' and crime fuel Bitcoin

Re: Mining new coins

Adam 1: Ok agree that the inevitable crash will be pretty spectacular. I don't think the cost of production rises because there are less left. It rises because there are more people mining.

I may have got this wrong, but I am under the impression that it is not a matter of supply and demand - I think that it becomes harder because of the maths of probability: the chances of mining a new coin gets less and less the more are mined, and so it becomes computationally harder to get a guaranteed income stream. For this reason I think it is still worth having a go mining, even with a poxy level of processor power, as you may still luck out.

Am I right?

Ex-cop who 'kept private copies of data' fingers Cabinet Office minister in pr0nz at work claims

Why now?

Most people here seem to be focusing on the allegation itself. There are more interesting questions arising our of this.

1. Why was this not dealt with at the time?

2. Why now?

How is it that someone has kept and held this information for all this time, and why have they chosen to do it now?

Abolish the Telly Tax? Fat chance, say MPs at non-binding debate

Re: 40p is a small price to pay to avoid US TV hell

You can make any huge amount of money seem small by dividing it into smaller and smaller packets and looking at that.

40p - what is that - per person per hour? Per day?

The money the BBC gets from the licence is £3.7 billion per year.

Now think of that going on cookery programs, dancing programs, and the media/political bubble's views on practically everything, particularly the rightness of collecting the licence fee.

With £3.7 billion per year they could take on Hollywood....

Re: And hence......

Just Enough: The BBC is also broadcast over the air. How do you build subscription charges onto that?

Satellite broadcasts come "over the air," as a digitally modulated RF signal - they are subscription based, why cannot terrestrial broadcasts do the same? TCP/IP comes "over the air" as 3G and 4G. The future appears to be digital streaming of one form or another.

Re: Telly Tax or Adverts

Iorisarvendu: The Beeb gets £3.7Bn from the License fee. At present only those who have TV broadcast receiving equipment pay it. If you pay for it out of General Taxation, then every Tax Payer will be contributing, regardless of whether they watch TV or not. I thought this was what people were complaining about.

If it came from income tax, it would be related to ability to pay, rather than being exactly the same for a mansion owned by a Baron, with a household of servants and dependants, as it is for a single mum in a bedsit in a council flat in Sunderland.

Re: Telly Tax or Adverts

Anonymous: The BBC has always been a foreign policy instrument

The BBC World Service used to be, before the days of David Camoron, payed for by the Foreign Office. By sleight of hand it was shoved into the Licence Fee, thus transferring yet more general taxation into a regressive tax.

Re: Threatogram received from Crapita today

Dr. Mouse:

"I haven't been to the doctors in years, why should I pay for the NHS?

I haven't had any issues with crime, why should I pay for the police?

I haven't had a fire, why should I pay for the fire service?

I haven't had any foreign countries try to attack me, why should I pay for the armed forces?"

How does something that preserves life, or defends it, like the NHS, the fire service, or the military, equate to an entertainment service? And why should we be forced to pay for information we aren't necessarily interested in, or agree with?

If you think this hand-picked entertainment and information is so essential that we all have to pay for it, why don't we all pay for all the other information and entertainment out there? And why is this payment necessary for us to see all the other stuff that this tax doesn't pay for, and for which we have to pay extra?

The whole idea of the TV licence is a nonsense, but it represents a large pot of money (£3.7 billion per year, not 40p a day) that the establishment of this country appears to be so addicted to, that they continually support it within the Westminster bubble.

Munich council: To hell with Linux, we're going full Windows in 2020

Exchange Servers, eh?

It sounds like the fatal decision might have been to use Exchange servers for mail - whose brainchild was that?

The document format issue is a red-herring because Office and LibreOffice can both use Open Document Format.

Bearing in mind that MicroSoft themselves won't trust their precious Office365 cloud services, or Azure, to run on their own server OS.

One-third of mobile users receive patchy to no indoor coverage

O2 is better? Funny you should mention that...

I am on GiffGaff, which piggybacks on O2. I am on 3G (old phone) and I have good reception indoors, but I heard that O2 is on the lower frequency 900 MHz band which should get better penetration through walls..

It might be a good idea to analyse the frequencies used by each service provider...

Let's make the coppers wear cameras! That'll make the ba... Oh. No sodding difference

Re: Rational vs irrational behaviour

veti: Policing is hard. Most mistakes are honest ones. Sure there will be exceptions, and they'll get all the attention - but to mistake the exceptions for the rule is one of the basic fallacies.

It's for the exceptions that the cameras would provide a safeguard. If a public servant does not wish to be accountable, maybe they should not be in the job in the first place.

An unarmed Australian woman was shot and killed by a Minneapolis police officer from the passenger seat of his squad car, and strangely neither the dashboard camera or body mounted cameras were switched on at the time.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/18/justine-damond-shooting-australians-last-moments-heard-over-us-police-radio

Their use will have to be automatically monitored and officers with non-functioning cameras automatically recalled from duty to have them fixed, if these cameras are to be fit for purpose in safeguarding the rights of the public.

Vodafone, EE and Three overcharging customers after contracts expire

Re: Moral of the story

Absolutely - with GiffGaff here - I have never had a contract on a mobile phone, though I have on broadband.

Contracts achieve two things for businesses.

The first is anti-competitive - for the time that you are locked in, you cannot switch, so market forces cannot operate for that time. If most people are on contracts most of the time, then the market is mostly suspended. This is particularly bad in the energy market where the government claims we are expected to switch to bring prices down, but many of us end up entering into agreements that prevent us from doing so. In the energy markets, customers who enter into fixed term contracts also unwittingly become speculators in energy price futures, which unsurprisingly, the smoke-and-mirrors energy retailers are much better at.

The second is securitisation. The moment you are in a contract, you have entered into a debt obligation which can be sold on instantly, for an instant upfront profit for the telco / energy provider etc.

Contracts are the gift that keeps giving as far as businesses are concerned, and it is a pity that most of us do not realise this and refuse to enter into them. If we did, we could have a proper competitive market.

No, the FCC can't shut down TV stations just because Donald Trump is mad at the news

Re: The Americans are lucky...

Hans 1: If you don't like immigration, fine, but stand to it and go back to West Africa!

Because as we all know, the problems that we now face with a world population of 7.6 billion, and diametrically opposed cultures with vast numbers of adherents, are exactly the same as those that faced Early Man on the savannas of Africa 100 000 years ago.

The Americans are lucky...

Our favourite Nurse Ratched doesn't want to do anything as innocuous as close down TV stations, but jail people for up to 15 years for persistently viewing "far right propaganda," whatever that means. Since UKIP, or people who simply oppose current levels of mass immigration, have been called "far right," this can mean views we want to suppress.

Amber Rudd: I want to make sure those who view despicable terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions, face the full force of the law,” said Rudd. “There is currently a gap in the law around material [that] is viewed or streamed from the internet without being permanently downloaded.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/03/amber-rudd-viewers-of-online-terrorist-material-face-15-years-in-jail

Unlike the Americans, we don't have a written constitution or a first amendment to protect us.

US yanks staff from Cuban embassy over sonic death ray fears

Re: I'd bet my monies on...

Mephistro: And it'd be trivial for the USA to deploy sound analysers able to identify sonic attacks. Hell, they could probably do it with an app for smartphones and tablets!

Maybe not for smartphones and tablets since they will be equipped with microphones designed to work in the normal range of human hearing. However, yes, I think even a hobbyist could rig up devices for monitoring AF and RF at a wide range of frequencies.

UK third worst in Europe for fibre-to-the-premises – report

The Old Green Copper Ropewalk

If Openreach can keep upgrading the ADSL services so that the copper loop lines can be kept in place as long as possible, then they keep in reserve the inevitable upgrade to fibre as a massive amount of future revenue.

Headless body found near topless beach: Missing private sub journalist identified

Re: Making light of tragedy

Oscar Wilde's comments concerning the death of Little Nell were referring to a work of fiction.

Virgin Media mulls ditching 1 in 3 UK facilities, starts £20m spend audit

Virgin on demand (not)

The problem I have with Virgin is that they want to sell me their media, but they don't want to do the only thing I want from them, get high speed fibre optic services to my house. I know that they have a box just 50 yards from my house. I saw some Virgin techs at work on this box, so I asked them if there is Virgin fibre there. They said "yes." I asked them if it could be connected to my property. They said "yes," but every time I contacted Virgin, it was "computer says no."

Form my personal experience, therefore, I am not surprised to hear that they are having to downsize.

Don't panic, but your Bitcoins may just vanish into the ether next month

Re: "virtually zero" How are Morgan Stanley counting?

Markets need speculators to work. I am not sure what the ideal level is.

Really? Why?

From what I can see, markets seem to need speculators in order to fail catastrophically.

UK.gov tips £400m into digital investment pot

Travel was a meat thing.

I've just been reading William Gibson's Neuromancer, and was struck by one sentence: "Travel was a meat thing." A dismissive view of physical travel versus digital communications. Why are we spending billions on HS2 to facilitate business travel when we could revolutionise our economy for a fraction of this cost by delivering high speed fibre to every home?

Five-eyes nations want comms providers to bust crypto for them

Follow that camel

Given that, after the unfortunate result when he turned on his satellite phone, Bin Laden relied only on couriers and sneakernet to convey messages, and T.E Lawrence managed to conduct an entire insurgency campaign in the Middle East using nothing more for communication than messages carried by camel, could the "Five Eyes" prove to us what plots could have been averted using the decryption of strongly encrypted messages, what plots were coordinated using strong encryption, and what terrorist actions could not be coordinated by other means, i.e messengers and sneakernet? Bearing in mind that once an operation is under way, communications won't even need to be encrypted, and you'll have a pretty good idea the operation is happening, anyway?

The clock ticking while the boffins try to decipher the message to discover the location of the bomb, while the grinning terrorist sits there in his cell, keeping stumm, is just too much of a Hollywood movie plot scenario.

HMS Windows XP: Britain's newest warship running Swiss Cheese OS

Re: RE: Most what?

Steve Davies 3: F-35's are so much pie in the sky.

I like it! From now on the F35 will be known as The Flying Pie. ^_^

Ex-MI5 boss: People ask, why didn't you follow all these people ... on your radar?

Re: "hideous ideologies" whose sole aim is to kill

It is wildly simplistic to say that terrorists' sole aim is to kill. It is much closer to the truth to say that their sole aim is to appear on television.

This is not the Baader Meinhof gang - the extreme Islamists believe that if they die waging Jihad against the infidel, then they will go straight to paradise. They aren't doing it just for publicity, or to spark a reaction - they are also operating from the simple Stoical philosophy that if they are killing us, they are doing the right thing.