Posts by DuncanLarge

NASA boffins show Moon water supply could – er, this can't be right? – come from the Sun

Re: Paradigm shift ?

"It's only useful for us if we've got the infrastructure to keep it a liquid - like a pressurised environment."

Water can exist as a liquid in a vacuum. No pressure needed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In6ibUgDO3U

Well Holby damned! We've caught a virus: Brit medical soap operas team up for 'cyber' episode

Hoodie

Its probably the teen genius kid of a fired nurse wanting revenge, hacking past security doors (that use mechanical combo locks that somehow have been upgraded to emit digital beeps) to get into the hospitals basement.

There, he and a couple of mates of his, that form entire sentences out of slightly out-dated slang, put up their hoodies and tap away to grunge music.

The camera shows code, possibly actual C code or the cheap alternative HTML, scrolling up the screen faster than they type. What are they doing? Using an SQL injection attack? Crafting a Linux Kernel module to be modprobed into the hospitals server? Nope, they are "hacking" the admin password.

Maybe one of the kids is the "VR genius" and navigates the hospitals aging windows network using a very battered looking PSVR headset plugged into the wall.

While the hospitals systems fail, lights going out, microwaves exploding, hospital beds suddenly killing a patient, an old grey-beard hacker (of the white hat kind) offers his services. Having been at the hospital for a knee operation coincidentally at the same time, he tries to out-hack and even locate the attackers. He wins some, and loses some while making the observation that they are "really good". Eventually he manages to identify some information about the hackers that prompts one of the male Doctors to recognise one of them as the son of the nurse that he had a short relationship with before she was fired for gross negligence.

Deducing where they are before the armed police that have suddenly turned up, the Doctor heads for the basement. After a short search he finds a group of hoodie wearing teens, one of which would have been his stepson should he have not dumped his mum, due to the gross negligence thing.

They meet, like sandpaper meets paint, and discuss (very emotively) the situation, the past, the betrayals. Eventually the Doctor talks the lad around. Much to his mates disappointed slang filled shouting, the lad puts on the VR headset and begins to shut down the virus. Unfortunately, the virus was given A.I by the young hackers and is not going quietly (think lawnmower man here).

More people are thrown out of their hospital beds as the virus and hacker lad do battle. We already know the winner. The lads, now arrested by the armed cops are taken away. The Doctor and the lad glance at each other. He is worried. He says that he thinks part of the virus got out onto the net, and has a taste for hospital blood.

After the end credits we move to another hospital. The lights flicker. The coffee machine beeps and shakes a bit, scalding a nurse. A windows XP desktop in a corner of reception starts displaying multiple command prompt windows with the text "I AM HERE"

I seriously doubt that this episode will be that good, but possibly will be full of tropes and sterotypes.

Twilight of the sundials: Archaic timepiece dying out and millennials are to blame, reckons boffin

Re: Innovative sundials?

"To be fair, analogue watches don't work in the dark either."

Yes they do, they glow in the dark. Have done for a very long time.

Also there have been analogue watches that have a backlight around for long enough that you can buy one for your kid:

https://www.amazon.com/Watches-Analog-Waterproof-Backlight-Children/dp/B076GZ3PJY/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1550510926&sr=8-3&keywords=Analog+Watches+With+Backlight

Here is another analogue watch that sets the time by itself from a radio broadcast powered by an atomic clock, this also lights up in the dark:

https://www.watchshop.com/mens-casio-g-steel-bluetooth-triple-connect-chronograph-radio-controlled-watch-gst-b100d-1aer-p100014520.html

As that one too expensive? Here is one using Indeglo, a backlight trademark that came out in the 90's:

https://www.watchshop.com/mens-timex-indiglo-expedition-watch-t49713-p99946837.html

So yes, analogue watches work in the dark and have done so for a number of decades.

Return of the audio format wars and other money-making scams

What?

Maybe because its the morning and I have yet to eat my mid morning snack but I read the whole thing and have no idea what this guy was talking about :D

Ok I seemed to get the idea he was confusing CD audio ripping with ripping a vinyl, which cant be done with CD ripping software at all, much like how my DVD player cant mow my lawn.

Oh and CD ripping software never went away. "apt install cdparanoia" gets me it without even thinking hard about it.

You could just go on Amazon and buy a CD recorder brand new, record the vinyl to that, then rip. Or you could just plug a modern turntable into the USB port on your computer and record it that way, or you could put an SD card bought from the supermarket into a turntable with an SD card feature then plug that into any laptop that has a reader or failing that USB, or you could be really cool and get a turntable that also has a CD recorder built in.

Or you could be cooler and buy a MD recorder, get some blank minidiscs off amazon and record direct to that.

Or you could forgo the MD option and remain cool by recording to cassette tape and walking around with a walkman, all of which are available brand new off Amazon.

Hmm Amazon seem to be popping up a lot. No wonder the UK high street is failing.

Time for second breakfast...

Oh Snapd! Gimme-root-now security bug lets miscreants sock it to your Ubuntu boxes

Re: Snaps from L. Poettering ?

It sounds like his install of Mint must be pretty out of date seeing as the snap tries to pull in so much.

I'm using Debian Stretch and they have VLC 3.0.3 in the stable repo so I would have expected Mint to have a newer version.

If he is running an older Mint then the options are:

- Upgrade to latest Mint, use the Mint pacakged version

- Use the snap pacakge to let you run the newer VLC on the older Mint. Note that using the snap system also gives you a nice sandbox environment to run VLC in.

- Try building from source. However you may find you might need to update certain libraries as required by the VLC source. Then again, maybe not and it may be happy with what you have.

The Snap format seems to have nothing to do with L. Poettering and although it is competing against a couple of other similar formats its general ideas sound great. Packages bundle all required libraries with the application and the application executes within a sandbox managed by the host system.

This reminds me of what I love about RISC OS applications which are basically self contained archives containing the libraries they need. Copying an application in RISC OS to an external drive copies it in its entirety as one icon.

The Snap package was originally developed for package management on Ubuntu phones.

Re: snapd and systemd

Hmm debian provides VLC 3.0.3 in its standard repos, are you sure Mint does not have a newer .deb.in its repos?

Am I Sam Beckett?

Who the bloody hell installs flash player on Linux these days?

As a Debian user installing flash player was a very conscious act as you had to download and manually install the tarball. Maybe Ubuntu provides it as a package but seriously who installs flash player apart from poor sysadmins (like me) who have to put up with old vmware management consoles that still need it.

Name and shame one site that still needs it (exclude ancient management interfaces).

A once-in-a-lifetime Opportunity: NASA bids emotional farewell to its cocky, hardworking RC science car on Mars

Moving parts need to be avoided as you dont want your panels to get stuck.

Might be an idea to use an ultrasonic cleaning system as used in digital SLR's for getting dust off the sensors?

Buzz the panels with low amplitude waves to get the particles into the air and the wind, when its there will just carry them away.

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

Re: Few questions ...

"How does this apply to books and leaflets ?

How do they know ?

How do we know what we're not allowed to look at ?

That's all."

Dont look at anything.

Re: Easy get-out?

What do you mean inadvertently?

About bloody time I say.

Oh crap v2

I'm in possession of a drone.

I watched streamed informational news articles that educated me on the ability of using a drone at an airport and the effect it would have.

Do I go to room 101 now?

Oh crap

I just opened google maps.

It showed me a highly detailed view of the location where I work, staffed by a couple hundred people.

It showed me details of road works in the area, and current traffic issues.

It allowed me to view a satellite image of the area zooming into which allowed me to take a virtual walk / drive along the roads, seeing details of buildings and obstructions and possible camera locations.

I think I hear them coming...

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

Re: Can't use smartphone GPS in Australia

"You do realise modern smartphones all support voice control ?"

You realise that turning on voice control requires you to permit the google apps to have access to ALL the data you carefully denied them access to months ago when you became aware of the privacy implications?

I cant even use voile dialing on my android as they killed off the on-phone voice recognition that worked fine and replaced it with a cloud service that if I turn it on, to tell it to call someone, it requires access to my web history. WTF has my web history got to do with a contact name?

Back in the 1970's everyone was worried about us all freezing to death in a new ice age evidenced by the massive cooling and harsh winters.

Re: Yay landfill!

Many people still use them as they are made more rugged than phones and work when there is no mobile signal.

Typically those using GPS devices like these are likely orienteering / hill walking and using the Garmin like a high tech compass to help get bearings to waypoints.

"I remember the bad old days too, map scrunched up on the steering wheel while you desperately try to work out if the motorway exit just disappearing is the one you really needed."

Well thats just bad driving. You should have memorised that part of the route when you stopped at the services.

My satnav is only used in combination with a map (that may be google maps). I plan my route on the map and program the route into the satnav. Its job is to prompt me on the route and to get me back onto the route should I get diverted for some reason.

Last year I let the satnav do all the work when planning my route from Gt Yarmouth to Bedfordshire. Instead of taking me under Norwich it decided to take me on a tour of the best housing estates Norwich has to offer. I thought, ok thats cool, its having me avoid traffic hot spots, its supposed to do that. Till it tried to have me drive down a road that ended in a wall, expecting me to drive through the wall and turn right onto an A road.

This was a TomTom with the latest map. I had to park up in one of the housing estates, bring out the map (combined with google maps to zoom in on some bits) and plot a route using bloody waypoints (why are they called waypoints? I'm not playing Homeworld) to get me on what turned out to be the main A road that it was trying to avoid taking me down, which also turned out to be pretty quiet anyway.

Anyone who does not at least have a large road atlas in the car is asking for trouble.

And just to point out, I'm not 65 and learned to drive in an Imp. I'm 38 and work as a third line IT Systems Technician. I designed a 6502 based computer when I was 12 and cut my teeth on GNU/Linux by booting it off a floppy disc distro. I live in the commandline and the GUI is there to watch youtube and manage the windows the commandlines happen to be in. I have a degree in computer science, have experience programming in everything from C64 basic up to Java, C# and Haskell. I fully understand that satnav on my windscreen yet I happily chose a superior, recent paper map (and google maps lol) over it.

When I chose a map I know exactly why I chose it. The satnav is a tool. It was allowed to dictate to me once, and it blew it big time.

"Seriously, in this day and age?"

I hear what you are saying but we are talking about ancient tech designs here. Still use a mobile phone to make calls and send SMS's etc? You'd be surprised just how 1990's the call/text encryption on those things are, yet we are sold them for a grand.

Do you listen to DAB radio? Lovely bit of 80's digital tech that is (not).

After a while you get used to it and realise that nothing we use today is bleeding edge. The stuff that is bleeding edge is the stuff that dont work properly or is still being talked about in universities and showed off at conventions.

Treaty of Roam: No-deal Brexit mobile bill shock

Re: Um, guys, only 1 month left

"Where are BoJo and Farage at the moment? They seem totally invisible recently."

Well Farage is on LBC everyday at 6pm and as he is still an MEP he is doing that stuff too.

As for seeing him involved in UK politics, he left it.

Re: Um, guys, only 1 month left

"and the roads were a bumpy unpleasant mess even in a Merc and the whole trip was carpeted in rubbish hanging from trees and stuffed down rabbit holes. How the hell do people think Brexit is going to improve matters. "

Well, being in the EU certainly improved matters then... oh wait.

Yawn

Might have roaming charges again, yawn.

I really dont care. I personally think that #firstworldproblem is a very relevant hashtag for anyone who is concerned about paying a little more for a phone call, which can be made in other cheaper ways in the host country, instead of freedom and independence from a plutocratic mess that has lost its way and is clearly in need of a major rebuild/redesign.

Reminds me of Cypher in The Matrix wanting to go back into it so that even though he is a slave he will think he is living in bliss because he can enjoy the taste of chicken over the slop he has to eat in the real world.

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