Posts by DuncanLarge

Just keep slurping: HMRC adds two million taxpayers' voices to biometric database

My imagination

In my imagination I feel like Victor Meldrew reading about this in the newspaper in his kitchen, mug in hand saying "What in the name of bloody hell"

Users fail to squeak through basic computer skills test. Well, it was the '90s

Re: My keyboard's jammed

I just had to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGvblGCD7qM

The most annoying British export since Piers Morgan: 'Drones' halt US airport flights

Riight

So somebody saw a so called drone flying approx 1KM above the ground.

Must have been a f*cking big drone!

Must have had a nice big battery to get up that high considering the climb rate is not going to be amazing for many drones.

Who the hell thought they saw it? These things cant be picked up on radar. Is there a mountain near by that someone was climbing up and saw it?

I may be short sighted but I really doubt that someone can see a drone, lets say as big as a phantom, from 1000m, when its getting dark. Did a pilot see it when flying past? I dont trust pilots to be able to identify flying objects either as they have human eyes too, are distracted by many things so cant stare out of the window too long, and have been reporting UFO's for decades before. In fact I think most wont report a UFO in case of ridicule, but now we can call them drones I guess they feel safe to report that those things they have always seen up there are still up there.

You heard the latest Chinese CRISPRs? They are real: Renegade bio-boffin did genetically modify baby twins

Re: Gene therepy not needed for HIV-free kids.

Who in their right mind would go to all that trouble?

It would be better to accept the truth and just adopt.

"and cross breeding with natural varieties"

What natural varieties?

There are very few as most varieties have been bred and modified from the natural versions that are no longer grown. Are your carrots orange or their natural colour?

Many of the varieties we grow today were created by chucking seeds into a nuclear reactor to see what you got. I'd rather have a proven safe modified seed growing rather than a descendant of an irradiated mutant.

"Yep, we already have genetically altered crops."

I would rather have genetically altered crops (after testing of course) rather than the current offering we have had for many decades: crops grown from irradiated seeds with random mutations that seem to be ok.

Once I found out that many of our resistant crops in the shops today are descendants of seeds exposed to hard radiation to randomly corrupt the seeds genome to hopefully create a crop that shows the features you want I decided that accurately and scientifically modifying selected genes was a much safer and superior method.

I sometimes swear I can see my tomatoes glowing in the dark...

Core blimey... When is an AMD CPU core not a CPU core? It's now up to a jury of 12 to decide

Re: /proc/cpuinfo Never Lies (or does it?)

"A core on a multi-core processor has always been understood to provide an independent processing unit, including an independent floating point unit and independent caches"

Sorry but no. "core" at minimum would refer to a CPU and L1 cache (may not be present). A CPU is an ALU plus clock generators, instruction decoding logic and other glue logic plus some registers, amybe even just one. A CPU has been defined since the days of the very first computers that were constructed from valves but I'm going to only consider going as far back as the transistor based microprocessor, the Intel 4004.

Nothing has changed that definition since then. The Intel 4004 is a CPU as any other and thus a single core. Put 4 of them in one chip and you have a 4 core chip.

What I'm saying is the term "core" is not a defined term and is very flexible. Its definition thus would vary between manufactuers who would provide their "cores". If these cors were "modules" that shared an FPU between to Integer CPU's then that is the core. A core with an CPU+FPU+L1 cache is just a different kind of core and a 8 core offering would thus have 8 of THOSE TYPES of core.

Thus I argue that the definition of a core is a set of CPU's supplied in a single chip package. These are CPU's I'm talking about. They only do integer math at a minimum and dont have L1 cache. All a CPU need is an ALU, some registers and logic to fetch and decode instructions (opcodes) and data (operands) from external memory. Learning a bit of machine code is very enlightening.

So if I give you a chip with 4 6502 CPU's on it and a bit of logic to manage them all, thats a 4 core chip. If I give you one with 4x pentium cpus each with their own L1 cache and a shared FPU, thats a 4 core chip. If I give you a new design of that chip that adds 3 more FPU's dedicated to each pentium CPU thats a 4 core chip that has the potential to beat the previous offering.

Thus this AMD chip was an 8 core chip. It had 8x what AMD offered as cores. An 8 core intel chip would have been of a different design and as we know a better one.

The term core is not defined. It is marketing speak at best. This lawsuit is just nitpicking by people who dont know the terminology. If anything comes out of this it may be a formal definition of what a core is, as defined by non-technical people.

"Definitions change over time. For the past 2 decades it's been a given that a CPU includes an FPU because other than the issue with Bulldozer, all of them did."

That is only applicable to certain use cases. There are plenty of CPU designs in wide use today that dont need or have an FPU. You can do floating point maths using integers just fine, an FPU just lets you do it faster.

Plenty of microcontrollers and low power devices dont have an FPU. And before anyone mentions it, a microcontroller has a CPU. Its just part of the chip that includes the other bits that make a microcontroller such has onboard RAM/ROM and IO.

As an example, a car from 1950 is still seen as a car even if it does not come with seatbelts, heating, electric windows, a ECU, ABS brakes etc. Its still a car. But modern cars tend to have more stuff, but only tend to, its not a requirement.

The way I have always seen it

A core as far as I know and care to define it is at minimum an element of a modern CPU that can execute its own instructions on its own registers without interfering with other cores.

This means that all the cores could end up sharing an FPU and caches, although I would expect a decent chip to give each core its own L1 cache.

This means I have, and being an AMD user for years, had no issue with how AMD cores were designed. I knew their cores worked like this and understood that it was one of the main issues surrounding the performance difference between them and Intel CPU's. I just saw bulldozer as a poor architectural design forcing the cores to share too many elements like the FPU which impacted certain workloads.

This article suggests that the marketing information may have mislead peeps into thinking the cores were more independent than they actually are so maybe there is something to be argued here. However if AMD show that the FX chips outperform the non-FX chips for most workloads then I think that might win the the case.

I always saw the early multi-core cpu as a hybrid between the single core cpu and the multi-cpu systems I drooled over.

Stage fright or Stage light? Depends how far you dare to open your MacBook Pro's lid

Re: "Thin&Light" means Piece Of Shit.

"Problems with 4-y-o-iMac none"

You must be very lucky and also quite unusual among mac users considering you are running on a machine that the manufacturer will refer, to your face in the store in front of the public, as being vintage. Not being an Apple user I see my 1994 RISC PC as vintage and my 2012 Lenovo T420 as simply "broken in".

When Dell stop supporting that machine across from you, the user wouldnt really have much trouble getting inside it to blow dust off the fan and upgrade the ram or network card, perhaps even slotting in another M.2 (or mpcie) SSD. Replacing the battery would just be an issue of sourcing a decent replacement them slapping it in.

How easy does your vintange machine make that?

Re: "Thin&Light" means Piece Of Shit.

"Ever taken a look in the bag of an IT worker? You’ll find singles galore, and always have done."

I dont carry singles around with my laptop in my laptop bag. They are too fragile. I leave them at home and rip them to MP3's

:p

Re: "Thin&Light" means Piece Of Shit.

"How about the loss of the headphone jack, the wired LAN port, the full sized DP/HDMI ports, full sized USB Type A ports"

Dont forget a DVD drive. I WANT AN OPTICAL DRIVE IN MY MACHINE! Its neater than a USB one dangling off the side of a table.

UK.gov plans £2,500 fines for kids flying toy drones within 3 MILES of airports

Re: Droning on - There WAS videos

"I have enough trouble getting pictures of garden birds with the 450mm stabilised lens on my DSLR"

Use a shorter lens. Or a zoom.

"A phone camera would be totally useless for getting a picture of a drone unless it was really up close."

Total BS, if it captures a tiny dot moving (i'm assuming video here) thats evidence enough.

"The "real" resolution of most phone cameras is around 4MPx, optically limited. Call it about 2500 by 1500 pixels. Field of view around 90 degrees. The human eye has a much higher foveal resolution but peripheral vision is much weaker."

You sound familiar... Oh you are the guy who doesnt understand camera optics and sensors so makes up numbers.

"The distance at which a drone 500mm across would subtend 1 pixel is therefore about 800 metres. To be identified as a drone it would need to subtend more like 40 pixels, for a distance of around 20 metres. How many people at Gatwick are going to be that close to the putative drone?"

My god its like dejavu, are you really still using that digital camera from the early 2000's as your example here?

Look all anyone needs to see is a moving dot with flashing lights that sometimes hovers i.e stays in one position, them moves of again, gains height, moves off for 20 mins, then comes back. If this was an off the shelf drone they generally have flashing lights. The operator would have loved these as they would have let people know that the drone was there!

My Samsung J6 is more than capable of taking photos of stars in the night sky. So most decent phones (any DSLR or digtal compact will beat them so we will just think of the ubiquitous phones) are entirely capable of capturing something that can be seen to move like a drone.

This drone had to be seen my people also. None of your numbers consider the human eyes that "saw" it. Dont assume that they all had 20/20 vision either. So the drone had to be close enough or big enough to be seen by a human eye. Thus was also close enough or big enough to be seen by any camera I could think of. Ok maybe not a box brownie.

Maybe they heard the drone? That must mean is was close enough to be heard. Have you flown one? I have, it gets totally inaudible just about 10 - 20 meters away. Oh, yet I can still see the thing through my glasses I wear because I'm short sighted. Trust me if they could hear it they can certainly see it and if they could see it they can certainly video it.

Re: Droning on - There WAS videos

"I have enough trouble getting pictures of garden birds with the 450mm stabilised lens on my DSLR"

Use a shorter lens. Or a zoom.

Re: Droning on

"I suspect that they were more focused on finding the idiot controlling the thing than filming it."

That makes total sense. Find the guy, then find you cant do him for anything as the court wonders where your evidence is...

Friday fun fact: If Stegosauruses had space telescopes, they wouldn't have seen any rings around Saturn

Re: Distant Origin

"aaaaaand this is yet another reason why i hated Voyager."

Why? It was an excellent episode showing the issues with narrow mindedness and doctrine.

It took us a while to shake it off, although there are still those who think the earth is flat and at the centre of the universe, which cant possibly have any other life in it because we are so so special.

Step in the total perspective vortex!

Oracle exec: Open-source vendors locking down licences proves 'they were never really open'

My god its like I'm back in the 90's

What a retro minded individual.

Everything he says about having to "lock the source down" etc is right out of the 90's.

Lock your source down if you like. Leave Open Source (I'm presuming that includes Free Software in his statements). Bye bye, make sure you dont let the door hit you on the way out. Nice seeing you, thanks for bringing the bottle of wine.

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

How much are you allocating for the swap partition?

A little bit more than what you have in RAM if you want hibernation or 1GB would be enough otherwise.

You asked the wrong question. The OP was saying you can reclaim the 7GB reserved for windows, not the space reserved for the pagefile.

"I think it’s reasonable a computer should last between 3-5 years"

Unless it comes from Apple, who seem to not know what a computer is and have shocked their loyal fans when they said that "PC" users are to be pitied as they end up with machines that are 6 or more years old!

https://ifixit.org/blog/7998/sad-apple/

Re: 32GB HP Monstruosities

"You can't get any modern OS to run on 128MB of memory and 2GB of hard drive space. Not even a modern CLI-only Linux will exist happily in that*"

Well I decided to try it.

I downloaded Debian 9.0.6 x64 XFCE DVD#1 and ran the installer on a VM with 128MB of ram and a 2GB drive.

The installer said that it needed at least 167MB of free memory, although I was given the option to continue and a warning that it may cause issues. So I decided to bump up the ram to 256MB only for the smooth installation. I only installed the base system and standard system utilities plus SSH server. No Xorg or XFCE (that was an option). I allowed the installer to decide its own partitions (one partition was the default choice).

The HDD space was 46% used with approx 850MB remaining (some of the 2.0 GB was taken for a swap partition by the installer).

Upon boot the system is using 47MB out of the 256MB ram.

As I needed a more usable system than a base system I installed these:

Midnight Commander

Emacs24-nox

GCC (plus other needed packages)

lynx

So although 128MB ram was too little for the installer to guarantee correct operation I was able to get a system running with 256MB and 2 GB of space that can do some useful stuff. It can browse the web, transfer files, connect to a ssh server (and act as one) and develop python,perl and C.

I did try to install the bsd-games package however that was not on DVD #1 and I had not bothered adding a network mirror (I could have done so).

After all that I was left with 565MB of free HDD space. Totally enough to write some text based application code :)

I just wish I had Adventure on DVD 1. Guess I could add a network mirror or have fun writing my own!

The D in SystemD stands for Dammmit... Security holes found in much-adored Linux toolkit

Re: I guess it's a good time

To remind of RISC OS

It'll soon be even more illegal to fly drones near UK airports

Re: Keystone Cops

@veti

I would quote parts of what you said however all of it is simply silly.

Use your head. Havnt the police said that they have something like 60 credible reports (out of many more) that indicate a drone? 60 pairs of eyes at least saw something. Thats 120 HUMAN eyeballs that saw something (ok maybe the same pairs saw multiple sightings). If they saw it then the phone in their pocket certainly can. If they saw it multiple times then they are all totally incompetent to to have remembered to whip out the smartphone to grab some evidence. If any of these pairs of eyes were oficials working at the airport they are doubly totally incompetent in not recording anything. Bloody hell it aint that hard.

Thats not to mention the many more pairs of eyes that were present at the airport that could whip out the phone or as they were holiday makers, the enthusiast DSLR's. I'm sure a few of them also had or used drones so maybe they would have been even more motivated to try and capture the perp?

As for monitoring the sky? Its dead easy. You only have to point a few DSLR's in the right directions. You can monitor the whole sky! A 50mm lens covers 40 degrees so 360 continuous coverage would need only 9 cameras on a set of tripods. But get 9 humans to watch the sky together and let them record it when they spot something. You dont need to have these capture the details of the drone, just where this "thing" is and where it went as part of the evidence.

Bird watchers would be best.

WHy hasnt anyone asked why when this happened to gatwick in 2017 that they didnt look to implement anti-drone measures like with Southend airport?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/11/southend_airport_drone_detection/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40476264

Honestly, it looks like a few people need to get fired or have a stern talking to. If some group of people were to claim that the aliens had landed on their local green and demanded all their women, wouldnt you expect them to have some video or photo evidence or just say "Oh ok there are 60 of you all saying the same shit, I believe you and will go out and get the stuff I need to defend my women".

Found yet another plastic nostalgia knock-off under the tree? You, sir, need an emulator

From the back of the room

I'm an Acorn user ;)

Jingle bells, disk drives sell not so well from today. Oh what fun it is to ride on a one-horse open array...

Re: Always needed bigger and bigger drives.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to upload data to somebody elses computers, oops I mean a cloud service?

Even uploading a small amount of home movies say 50GB of unedited original "master" files makes me think twice. I'm actually about to leave my PC on for the next week to upload more than this to Amazon S3, for off site backup of data I have already backed up on-site twice. A week. And thats just my newest data, not the older stuff I want to preserve.

Sorry but comparing the transfer rate of a spinning HDD or a decent SSD versus the cloud = no contest.

In the early 2000's I was happy with my spinning drives blasting data to and from each other at 150-200MB/s over PATA with SATA giving a more consistent speed between drives later. Show me an ISP that can give me an upload speed that matches a PATA HDD from the 2000's. Thats assuming that that service does not cost more than £50 a month, and ignoring the fact that the endpoint (the cloud service) may have its own issues along with anything in-between adding to the propagation delay.

Just for the sake of it, I'm on Virgin Media, who are really against giving you upload speed anywhere close to your download speed. Right now my upload speed is capped at 6Mb/s. The most expensive packages can double that.

Yesterday I tried sharing a newly taken photo from my phone to someone on FB messenger. I had what appeared to be a decent 4G signal. The single photo took over 2 mins to upload. Sat at 50% for a while. 2 mins to transfer about 20MB. SIgh. This is likely an issue at FB end to be honest but if that was something much bigger that 20MB...

Forget your deepest, darkest secrets, smart speakers will soon listen for sniffles and farts too

April is a way away

Is this a f*cking joke?

I've just started watching Black Mirror and the episodes that showed a fully aware digital consciousness performing the jobs we have Alexa doing today creeped me out enough, then I read this.

For fax sake: NHS to be banned from buying archaic copy-flingers

Re: There were tantrums when the Trust I worked for switched off their fax machines.

@ Uberior

Right. This is an interesting one.

So, you kill off a simple, easy to use fax machine at that trust. Ignoring the issues with how email is woefully inadequate for replacing the functions of fax, you let them "bike" the stuff to its destination?

Is that progress? Are we to return to riding horses instead of driving cars? Perhaps we should also scrap cruise liners and instead go cruising around the world on rafts. I know, lets get rid of those smelly and dangerous gas powered ovens and make everyone use coal. Progress, rose tinted progress.

My god man. What were you thinking? Biking private details. I really hope that they were on some medium that was not generally accessible to the public, such as LTO tape (I dont think many members of the public have access to LTO drives) and encrypted using public key cryptography before being handed to a spotty kid on a bike.

Why didnt you use something like a securicor van? You know, those vans that can guarentee security and have vans designed to make access to the stuff inside difficult. However even with this there is an issue with moving backwards from using a fax machine to using a van that rolls on the public road on inflated balloons called tires. That is those inflated balloons can leak catastrophically resulting in non-delivery of the contents.

Failure modes for old tech that uses inflated balloons on tarmac:

1. Robbery. Van = more secure, bike = good luck.

2. Balloon leaks. Van = time taken to replace balloon, aka the tire. Bike = rider walks or tries to repair tire and continue. Result = potential significant delay.

3. Dishonesty. Van = driver steals documents and sells them to whoever wants them. Bike = the same.

4. Accidents. Van = Multiple issues such as the van hitting the rider of the bike, the driver has a heart attack or is taken ill, the van collides with a car or other object and so on. Bike: The rider is hit by the van, the rider comes off the bike and goes to hospital.

5. Industrial/political action / disobedience. Your van driver or biker goes on strike and refuses to deliver till the union says its ok. Or they get held up by rampaging mobs of climate protesters who are blocking the bridges over the river because idiots like you wish to have a van spewing out CO2 to deliver data that could be sent down a phone line.

Bike?

Re: At least 10 years late

"Official guides in how to use a fax and remain secure are big thick binders and it requires all fax machines to be in locked areas and under supervision AT BOTH ENDS when in use."

That is a lie.

"No, faxes are not inherently more secure than email."

Go on then, intercept one in transit.

"Fax messages are unencrypted and unencryptable."

That is a lie. The FAX standard has always used encryption and FAX over the internet uses TLS. I suggest you do your research rather than making things up because you want to look like you know something about how technology works.

"THis is a good, and long awaited, thing."

Yep, it wont be long till we see the headlines and BBC rolling news items about the GDPR data breaches of private medical information stolen while sitting on a third party server somewhere that was configured to be an SMTP smarthost for the NHS by a worm introduced via some secretaries flash drive her 4 year old son found in the plant pot outside and gave to mummy, and the pandemonium caused by an outage of the email system due to someone forgetting to pay for an SSL certificate.

"Or use one of the many camera apps that store only on your phone "

Or just use a compact digital camera. There are plenty around new or even secondhand. I got a nice 4MP Casio for £2 from a charity shop. It would work just fine for taking photos for a little magazine.

New ones of course have all sort of bells and whistles not to mention higher resolutions.

Total facepalm, now face is bruised.

"Email is much more secure and miles more effective than fax machines"

I'm hoping that you will implement secure email correctly? It can be done just fine as long as you know what you are doing AND TRAIN YOUR USERS to use email in a way that they have never used it before.

Seems like punching a phone number (or even using a speed dial) and dropping a bit of paper into a sheet feeder of a fax machine is quite a lot simpler. Perhaps there are devices that work like fax machines but email securely instead? I swear I have seen them. I swear that modern FAX machines also can email so there must be secure emailing FAX machines about.

"they will require signed directions or prescriptions – something easily achieved "in the real world" by taking a photo on your phone and sending it via SMS."

SMS, are you f*cking serious? You want people to send their prescription requests and signatures via SMS? SMS has been cracked for ages now. It is no more secure against a kid with a raspberry pi, 1TB of HDD space and a software defined radio as a postcard is against a postman. SMS is great for sending that message from the side of a cliff when you are on holiday with only a low strength 2G signal. Its great for sending a message to tell your hubby to get 2 loaves of bread. But for sending a very personal and private communication that if intercepted can be used to help commit ID theft, where have you been?

How come nobody seems to know that just because its easy, or "high tech" or "modern" does not mean its safer? You want to replace an old system with a new one? Ok well do some proper research and prove that every element of the new system can directly replace or improve upon the old. This includes, as in the case of fax machines, understanding how someone today would go about intercepting such messages or tampering with them. I would argue that due to the shift towards using IP networks that most "hackers" these days are ill equipped to intercept faxes and much more likely to succeed with emails.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3HFOlYba-4

Boffins build blazing battery bonfire

Re: Interesting idea

Every time I see someone throw the figure 99.9% about like it means anything at all (it doesnt, its a marketing term made popular on antibacterial spays) I wish I could be paid 99.9% of a pound so within 99.9% of my lifetime I may live 99.9% as a rich person.

Bloke fined £460 after his drone screwed up police chopper search for missing woman

"I fly RC models - which cannot maintain stable flight beyond LOS - and unfortunately I and my fellow RC pilots have been caught up in the drone legislation through no fault of our own."

I would HOPE that you did finally come under such laws and regulations considering the much more dangerous activity you are involved in.

Your so called "RC" (read unmanned) aircraft are inherently more dangerous than the typical drone today (above the lowest toy grade) as they, by your own admission, can not maintain stable safe flight beyond line of sight or even loss of signal.

Typically a drone would have GPS onboard as well as other sophisticated devices that enable it to be aware of its position relative to launch point / waypoint, altitude and 3D accelerometers letting it know where it is headed, how far and how fast. Upon loss of signal it will attempt to navigate back to its take off point and land. It will also do this if commanded by the owner and if its batteries are getting too low. Loss of sight is an issue for the operator that can be mitigated by the inclusion of FPV on the drone that can allow the operator to reacquire sight or attempt to land it safely should a return home command be iffy due to a low battery. Also if there is loss of sight the drone can simply hover, not bothering anyone, not simply falling out of the sky or plowing into a family picnic like with your "models".

Your so called "RC models", which is an archaic term for an unmanned aircraft these days, do none of this. They wont return home when commanded, when running low on power or when they lose comms to the controller but will happily fly about in an uncontrolled manner (as you pointed out) till they hit something or someone.

Your "models" are highly dangerous should you lose control. What happens if you have a heart attack? What happens if you get distracted by someone who is in danger or get distracted by your kids who really need an adult. Are you going to always be able to say "hang on, try to stop bleeding while I land the thing, not long now"

If any of those things were to happen to me I can quite simply press the RTH button. The drone, not needing my assistance, while I deal with the emergency will climb to a decent height and slowly make its way back to the launch point where it will then slowly descend till it touches the ground and shuts off its motors.

I'd much rather be near a drone than a flying missile any day. Yep, things can happen to cause the drone to fall out of the sky like a rock but at least its designed to not do that by default.

Up to three million kids' GPS watches can be tracked by parents... and any miscreant: Flaws spill pick-and-choose catalog for perverts

How ironic :D

How ironic it is that these devices, designed to spy on children, grooming them into accepting surveillance as a normal part of their lives, coming across as a way to "protect" them in a way that no generation of children before them needed in all the thousands of years past, actually puts them more at risk.

I honestly thought this was a joke. A device designed to track and spy on kids? No child before them has been subject to such horrible invasion of their privacy. You could argue that devices like these will help keep kids from getting lost from parents at a theme park etc where there are lots of people, the devices could help the kids and parents narrow in on each other. That seems fine. But tracking and listening in on them and whoever they happen to be with (or simply nearby) is plain creepy.

I personally know someone who came to me saying that he thought it was very creepy that Microsoft was watching his own kids internet access and emailing him reports on what his son had been up to every week. He works with me in IT.

These devices need to be banned. They should be offered out by the police to help tack and trace celebrities children following messages from a stalking fan etc, not available to the general public. They never get made correctly anyway. We live in a world of bluetooth enabled baby monitors that allow any device to connect from the street, letting them monitor (or even talk to) the kiddies or even to attempt to see if the house is empty and ripe for a rummaging.

We dont need our kids to be carrying around internet connected microphones that condition them to accept tracking as "normal" while allowing anyone to listen in on anything in the vicinity.

I can imagine so many plots for films where there is a scene where the parents send their kid to next doors kids party and use this device to listen in on the neighbors to prove they did indeed steal the giant light up snowman as a way to get back for breaking their lawnmower. Or where a kid is given a fiver to go stand next to those business men looking innocent and cute while Jason Borne gathers some intelligence from their conversation...

Between you, me and that dodgy-looking USB: A little bit of paranoia never hurt anyone

Re: A paranoid mount option ?

"Maybe someone could dream that up with a Raspberry Pi ?"

I was just thinking of doing this with an Arduino. No need for the RPi's power.

My solution was to create a device about the size and length of an adults thumb that allows you to plug a USB A device into it. It would then tell you how that device was presenting itself to the host. You would be able to see that a flash drive is presenting as a flash drive and as a HID device at the same time.

If it is a USB keyboard I was going to have this device try to capture any keystrokes. You can use it to test a real keyboard or see what a flash drive is trying to type into your shell if it appears as a keyboard.

I was also thinking of having an option to wipe out the partition table of the flash drive so to reformat it you need not plug it into a computer at first, putting that machine at risk should it do something silly and generate thumbnails for images on the drive when you accidentally open it instead of right clicking ;)

It could also let you confirm that other USB devices seem to be working, so you can check that second hand PS4 controller seems to be trying to connect and has an unbroken cable.

Using a RPi would allow you to do many more things such as check the files on the drive etc.

Thinking about it, an RPi zero would fit the form factor I'm thinking of.

Re: It'll only get worse

"As you can route PCI over USB-C"

Oh f*ck

Dutch cops hope to cuff 'hundreds' of suspects after snatching server, snooping on 250,000+ encrypted chat texts

Re: "End-to-end encryption" isn't?

"I have a distinct impression that the vaunted "end-to-end encryption" of WhatsApp, Telegram, etc., suffers from the same kind of flaw."

Whatsapp uses the Signal protocol. Adopted from the Signal chat app that is fully end-to-end with MITM protection. But as its now owned by Facebook, we might find something changes eventually.

Telegram has always been broken. They were audited and failed as they had "rolled their own" crypto, which you simply dont do. Telegram has the marketing but not the features. Its end to end encryption is off by default and it relies on a homegrown encryption method that is considered to be buggy and untested.

Use Signal, or something that implements the Signal protocol. Or Threema which is also good.

Best thing to do is listen to the EFF and Edward Snowden when they make recommendations. Its worth noting that the EFF have stated they have serious concerns over Telegram. Edward Snowden uses Signal almost exclusively.

Signal is also entirely licensed under the GNU GPL v3 and GNU AGPL v3. Unlike Telegram which has only parts licensed in any "open source" way.

Re: New???

@Steve 53

"Well, yes, but I'd say paying €1.5k for 6 months with a phone with "unbreakable encryption" and "a panic button if you get nabbed by the fuzz" is probably reasonably grounds to suspect it's not just a private conversation about what groceries to bring home."

Then why dont the police go out and arrest anyone driving a car that has an engine larger than a 1.6?

Honestly, anyone wanting acceleration from an engine greater than 1.6L is intending to speed, possibly while out-running the police after robbing a bank or kidnapping a child.

I saw someone driving what looked to be a Morgan recently. A wooden expensive car with a high top speed and huge acceleration! I shook my head as I drove my Hyundai Getz 1.6 (the "i'm innocent" limit) thinking of how many horrible crimes he must be involved in.

Why are fast cars on the market?

Why dont the police wire tap the phones of those who purchase them?

In a country that has a speed limit of 70/80MPh there is totally no need for anyone to even sit in one of these crim-cars unless its on a track and has a special license like a gun owner would.

Use your common sense man.

British fixed broadband is cheap … and, er, fairly nasty – global survey

Re: Is this Time Warner's site?

"They mean streaming directly to the player, as opposed to downloading and then playing."

Streaming is what you call downloading without saving.

When you get data, you are DOWNLOADING data. It is impossible to get data without downloading it and your bandwidth directly affects the speed at which you can download data. You want to stream a movie, you MUST download it while playing it. Just because you dont store it makes no difference to your need for fast download speeds.

Even if you are watching the first half of a 1 hour programme you still rely on your available DOWNLOAD bandwidth to be able to watch it in HD or at the same time as another device that is streaming something else.

Remember, there are only two things that you can do with a network connection. UPLOAD and DOWNLOAD. It matters not what you do with the data after or during. Not at all.

Does anyone (other than gamers) actually download a 5GB file?

- Anyone updating Windows 10 to version 1809.

- Anyone downloading an ISO for installing (or live booting) an OS such as Linux, or Windows 10 1809, or the latest MacOS.

- Anyone restoring an iPhone or android device that has a modest amount of apps and pictures/videos.

- Anyone watching Netflix in HD, certainly to more than one device.

- Anyone watching iPlayer in HD, certainly to more than one device.

- Anyone watching Youtube in HD, certainly to more than one device.

- Anyone updating a TomTom satnav (others are available).

- Anyone (school child) downloading the latest OS image to run on their school supplied RaspberryPi

- Anyone with kids who have come home from school and do any of the above.

Need I go on?

Really that statement is as ridiculous as the "640K is enough for anybody" statement made by Bill Gates when everyone was wondering who would need more than 1MB of RAM.

'Pure technical contributions aren’t enough'.... Intel commits to code of conduct for open-source projects

Re: What's all the hoopla about ?

* Using welcoming and inclusive language - This seems to suggest that I must meet and greet them offering sweets and cups of tea, rather than getting to the point and moving on. Sure I agree swearing may be not a very good thing to do but I respectfully wont bend over backwards to welcome them into my virtual home/office and offer a virtual biscuit, chit chat about the weather, then talk about why their module needs to be updated to use the patched version of a library.

* Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences - That can never be expected to work every time. I may be right, they may be wrong and are stubborn enough to act like an ostrich when you tell them. I know, I was the ostrich and its an instinct, not a choice, but I grew out of it. You may also be talking to someone who literally annoys you just because of the way they eat their lunch while talking. Does this CoC also demand you dont eat with your mouth full? My family did, so dont expect me to be very respectful after a point of you spurting chewed sandwich at me for too long a time.

* Gracefully accepting constructive criticism - This is a nice idea but unfortunately you cant just demand it. This seems to assume that after getting constructive criticism that you are making a deliberate decision to not accept it. Many people simply cant handle it so the person giving the criticism should consider an alternative such as dropping hints that something is up in the code here and its doing this rather than that and could they have a good look and see if they can figure it out.

* Focusing on what is best for the community - This is fine but dont oust those who try to tell the community its going in totally the wrong direction.

* Showing empathy towards other community members - Again, nice I suppose but you cant make the mistake of thinking that empathy is a universal thing.

Re: what.

@ Warm Braw

"those who lack interpersonal skills

... are capable of learning them and deploying them when they're required."

Easier said than done when you have Aspergers, or exit somewhere else on the autism spectrum. You might learn the skills that everyone else demands you learn, rather than they offering to adapt a little to meet in the middle. Perhaps someone who is wheelchair bound can be demanded to fix it somehow so that they can climb multiple flights of stairs to save your annoyance in having to provide a lift or ramps.

Myself, I get totally drained having to fake who I am only to save neurotypicals from having to deal with the REAL ME. The real me bashes his head against a mental cage wanting to get out and simply relax.

He isnt a horrible person, just fed up of having to constantly think 10 steps ahead to try and decode neurotypicals hidden useless languages and signs they throw at each other. Constantly reminded that he exists on what feels like an alien planet he finds great relief in being very open and verbose on the internet, trying to avoid bringing emotion into the text unless he wants to share a laugh. Yes, he likes a laugh with people.

Watch the Imitation Game. Its message can apply to more than just A.I pretending to be human and humans pretending to not be homosexual. I play it every day.

Take this code of conduct out of what should be an open a free internet. Just ask people to be decent and nice as much as possible and leave it at that. Those who are not decent and nice all the time can be ignored or the listener can grow a thicker skin and deal with it whatever makes more sense at the time.

UK.gov to roll out voter ID trials in 2019 local elections

About bloody time!

Ever since I started voting when I came of age I have always wondered who would permit such an insecure system that is so open to abuse. I'm the guy who knows how computers work and will protest against electronic voting machines or counting machines but I simply could not believe that I wasnt even required to prove that I had possession of the vote card that came through my door!

Anyone who knows my name and address can feel free to use my vote. Jesus, why not leave our houses unlocked when we are out, blindly trusting that only persons who live there would dare to enter...

As long as they have no way to correlate myself with my vote and dont record/store/count it electronically I'm game.

Android fans get fat November security patch bundle – if the networks or mobe makers are kind enough to let 'em have it

Google abandoned my Nexus

I have a fully working and frequently used Google Nexus 7 tablet (2013 model bought in 2015). The last update it got was back at the end of 2015. Since then nothing.

I will be upgrading it to LineageOS to get a secure device, however, I would have bought a new replacement had google not scrapped the whole concept of a tablet and offered a replacement.

Mourning Apple's war against sockets? The 2018 Mac mini should be your first port of call

"Macs typically have a longer usable life than Windows PCs"

Really? Well tell that to the genius bar who will try to convince you that your 4 year old mac is a vintage computer.

Apple's launch confirms one thing: It's determined to kill off the laptop for iPads

Riiight

So this delicate slab of glass can replace a laptop or my home tower PC?

So can it:

- Dual boot into GNU/Linux and windows or any hobby OS I can chuck at it?

- Access data I have backed up to optical disc without an adapter?

- Have a firewire card added to it so I can capture SD or HD video off my mini DV tapes.

- Connect to a scanner without an adapter.

- Rip any of my DVD's containing movies I have bought on the cheap from charity shops, without an adapter.

- Run a game I used to play on windows 95 running in a virtual machine.

- Develop applications using an IDE of my choice, in a language of my choice.

- Print stuff to a printer that does not have wifi, without an adapter.

- Keep itself cool while running at full speed all day while I render videos, compile some code and play that game on my VM.

- Connect to a surround sound system using a set of 3.5mm jack plugs or optical cables.

- Access the SD card that is used in almost every DSLR to this day.

- Connect to another ipad via ethernet cable to transfer user data across a gigabit connection faster than using the AC wifi that is already over used by other devices.

- Play Crisis?

- Allow me to add a serial RS232 port to it so I can program a PIC microcontroller using a home built programmer sold as a kit that is sold today on Amazon

- Let me use my IBM Model M keyboard for that retro clicky feel.

Yes, that slab of delicate glass containing components designed to overheat or expire after the warranty, that can not be repaired by myself without me being called a counterfeiter, that will be considered "vintage" by the manufacturer who will refuse to repair even the simplest of issues for less than the cost of a new machine, blatantly lying to my face in the shop, will replace my 2012 lenovo laptop that contains an i7 CPU or my Ryzen 5 6 core PC.

Pull the other one apple. My 2012 lenovo beats your ipad.

Goodnight Kepler! NASA scientists lay the exoplanet expert to rest as it runs out of fuel

Re: Fuel? Why no solar panels?

It has panels all over it. But you cant use electricity to move a spacecraft (yet). Ion engines are ok for constant acceleration.

To move a spacecraft you must squirt something out with force. That means you need fuel.

Roughly 30 years after its birth at UK's Acorn Computers, RISC OS 5 is going open source

Re: Good luck

@ cuddlyjumper

Oh yes that is certainly the case, and the developers know it. Its what happens when the parent company breaks apart and the code gets no significant attention. I remember a few years ago somebody was writing a new SSL library to replace the convoluted spaghetti code mess that OpenSSL had become. LibreSSL I think it was callled and it basically chucked most of OpenSSL out of the window to get rid of the mess. OpenSSL is still widely used and became such a mess due to the fact that this heavily used code is developed by a team of...two.

Heartbleed happened because one of the two developers made a typo.

Somebody out there was interested enough to start writing LibreSSL, just like somebody out there is still interested in maintaining GNU Emacs. Someone will enjoy moving RISC OS into a multi-core world.

"and there's no immediate vision of where it's going" erm I think they know exactly where they are going. They even will PAY you to help get it there.

https://www.riscosopen.org/bounty/

@ elgarak1

There are plenty of applications to cover most stuff. In fact there are UNIX/Linux compatibility libraries that allow for easy porting of software from Linux.

RISC OS might not fulfill every need, just like Linux did only 10 years ago. In this day and age though most users tend to use multiple devices and operating systems and spread their needs across many of them. I know of a few people on youtube who say they use Linux for most things but switch to a machine running windows just to use some certain video editing software either because they know that software well or the Linux equivalent does not yet support something.

George R.R Martin maintains a DOS machine just so he can use his fave version of Wordstar to write his novels. He knows Wordstar so well that he sees no need to move to something more modern as that will incur a significant learning curve that he simply doesnt want to bother with. I'm sure for most other things he uses a more newer machine but when it comes to writing it must be Wordstar or bust.

One of my needs is to use Free Software wherever possible as I'm one of those guys who likes what Richard Stallman says and totally agrees with it. I do however remain flexible enough to allow personal exceptions such as booting Windows so I can use Sony Vegas as the Linux equivalents did not fully support the HD DV video format I was using. Then they started to, and now I boot windows to install windows updates and play certain windows based games/steam.

Yay finally!

RiscOS was the first OS with a GUI I ever used. Before I used the machines at school I was solely using a C64 at home.

I have a RiscPC slowly being upgraded to be the best RiscPC it can and all my RPi's run RiscOS 5. All my other machines run Debian, one outcast still runs windows 10 :D

In Risc OS 5 I can program the RPi in BBC basic with full access to the GPIO. Some have said that the BBC basic on the RPi gives you the fastest access time to GPIO pins (next to using machine code). Plus with BBC basic having an ARM assembler built in its a win win for mucking about with a bit of code and GPIO.

Being very into Free Software and the principles behind it and the GPL I have always felt a twinge of uneasiness that parts of my fave hobby OS were still locked up here and there. Now that it has moved to the Apache 2.0 license it feels a lot better now its truly Free Software.

I'm off to play Zarch

Motorola: Oops, phone busted? Grab a spudger and go get 'em, champ

Re: So glad Apple was mentioned

Agreed

Apple : But surely, a 4 year old device is "vintage" right?

Me : Let me ask my 2009 Lenovo thinkpad that runs Debian Linux just fine, goes on holiday with me all the time, acts as an android development workstation and an entertainment centre playing my fave movies in HD while I camp in a tent / caravan.