Posts by Carpet Deal 'em

Remember the FBI's promise it wasn’t abusing the NSA’s data on US peeps? Well, guess what…

Re: Makes sense

The FBI has been overstepping its bounds and abusing its power since day one. An organization that clearly hasn't changed since the days of J. Edgar Hoover shouldn't be trusted with the keys to the kingdom for even a minute.

Father of Unix Ken Thompson checkmated: Old eight-char password is finally cracked

Re: I have to thank ken for my passwords

Such shallow thinking. If you're not willing to pay for a trip to the Challenger Deep, you don't deserve quiet.

Re: DES

Hopefully this was the same for both the login and password creation screens. There are lots of fun sites that only truncate one and not the other,

That lithium-ion battery in your phone or car? It has just won three chemists the Nobel Prize

Re: What about Rachid Yazami?

Nobel Prizes are never awarded to more than three people.

Cassini may be dead – but its data shows basic building blocks of life spewing from Enceladus

Re: Europea

ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

So we're good if we anchor our drilling platforms in orbit?

Landmark US net neutrality decision reveals that both sides won and lost out

It doesn't made if Trump is publicly executed or officially made God Emperor; the FCC will never be pro-consumer as long as Pai's around.

Careful now, UK court ruling says email signature blocks can sign binding contracts

Re: Signature versus signature block

It looks to be the "Many thanks" specifically that sparked the trouble; since the rest of the email looks like an unambiguous "we accept", the lack of disconnect can be read as a continuance of that concept. Had the signature block started with something like "Yours" or "In love, peace and crispy tacos", everything afterwards would have been unambiguously separate.

So this decision ultimately seems to "merely" be that autogeneration is no different than manual typing. It's not necessarily the most intuitive idea, but it does make a certain kind of sense.

Sussex Police gives up on £790k Gatwick drone shutdown probe

Re: Were there really any drones?

> "Mass hysteria"

After the first few sightings, this was almost certainly a factor, which means you could easily add "gaslighting" to your list.

DoH! Mozilla assures UK minister that DNS-over-HTTPS won't be default in Firefox for Britons

It's not that simple: somesite.com is very likely to share its IP with anothersite.net and numerous others with a server routing the requests based on the domain name in the packet. Encrypt the domain name and all anybody else sees is somesite.com's hosting provider(you may still be able to get something from the logs, but it's nowhere near as reliable).

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

But this does not then explain adoption by other Distributions like Debian or Ubuntu.

Debian has Red Hat people on its controlling board and Ubuntu is ultimately a Debian derivative.

Good old Auntie Beeb's mobile app berates kids for being rubbish online

Re: Goatse

While we're at it, Tubgirl and Lemon party are two things you should very definitely look up.

It's possible to reverse-engineer AI chatbots to spout nonsense, smut or sensitive information

Re: I personally don't understand

This research is to AI as pure science is to engineering: it might not be anywhere near relevant, but it will almost certainly be used at some point in the future.

We trained an AI to predict how bad a forest fire will be. It's just as good as a coin flip!

Re: You could have just asked the donald

Your forests simply need a good raking

Funny you should say that: some of the worst wild fires can be traced to refusing to let smaller fires burn long enough to clear out the undergrowth, letting fuel build up until the inevitable happened. So yes, a good raking would actually help.

(Not to miss your sarcasm, of course)

Call-center scammer loses $9m appeal in stunning moment of poetic justice

Re: Except the jury dont award anything, they decide guilt

As a matter of course, the jury typically isn't involved in setting a sentence. However, there is usually a separate sentencing jury in death penalty cases that ultimately decides the question of life or death.

Re: Not poetic enough

4] Incarceration until such time as a psychiatrist deems that he has grasped and internalized the pain and suffering that his fraudulent actions cause, that he empathizes with those persons, and shall not recidivism again.

I'd replace this one with "worked off the remaining restitution and fine on a prisoner's wage". With interest.

Remember that security probe that ended with a sheriff cuffing the pen testers? The contract is now public so you can decide who screwed up

Re: IF, and I stress the IF ...

It makes perfect sense: most places will have different measures in place during the day versus during the night, both of which are worth testing. But, more importantly, this is also a matter of safety: if the police aren't informed of the test, you invite a confrontation in poor lighting - and potentially fatal misunderstandings.

US government sues ex-IT guy for breaking his NDA (Yes, we mean Edward Snowden)

Re: Public interest defence

As long as the government isn't seeking an injunction on the publishing of the book, a public interest defence would probably be dismissed out of hand.

You can trust us to run a digital currency – we're Facebook: Exec begs Europe not to ban Libra

Re: Poor comment

100% backed up lending is impossible unless you want to lent money only by billionaires. All banking is FRB.

Full-reserve banking simply means the bank has to be able to cover all immediate liabilities at any one time; the making of illiquid loans simply requires the acquisition of illiquid deposits(which already exist in the form of CDs). The price of borrowing would go up, but the cost of failure wouldn't be as widespread as FRB tends to make it.

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google told: If you could cough up a decade of your internal emails, that'd be great

Re: Re "....10 years' worth of emails between top executives."

Well, they did until that unfortunate server crash the other day. Took all the backups with it, too.

Hold up, ace. Before you strap into Firefox's latest Test Pilot, ask yourself...

Re: Has there been a behind-the-scenes takeover?

When I see Mozilla publishing article after article on their blogs about how great 5G will be without any mention of the controversy about the enormous surveillance and health effects, I really have to wonder.

It could just as easily be blind technophilia. Such people are well known to pshaw just about every concern about whatever they're currently obsessed with as the fantastic complaints of luddites right up until(or even well after) it bites them in the ass. Sure, there's every possibility they're right, but the straight-up refusal to do even a basic health study(such as locking Ajit Pai up for a couple of weeks with a few full-powered microcells) is rather... interesting.

Consumer ransomware insurance? You could be painting a target on us all for avaricious crims

How often do the demands exceed $500, though? Even without a backup requirement, this sounds like free money for the insurance company.

Eco-activists arrested by Brit cops after threatening to close Heathrow with drones

Re: These are not the drones you're looking for.

If there is a "real" conspiracy, they're probably patsies who don't realize they were being played.

First water world exoplanet spotted – and thankfully no sign of Kevin Costner, rejoice!

Re: Thank you!

By the time you reach millions and millions of anything, the number's just noise to the vast majority of people(educated or not).

The gig (economy) is up: New California law upgrades Lyft, Uber, other app serfs to staff

Re: "the gig economy is the difference between paying rent and being out on the streets"

Sure, it is based on a lot of jobs paying wages that doesn't allow people to live on a single job and have to work two-three just to pay the rent.

Can't you see there's something inherently wrong in society if that happens? Why it didn't happen fifty years ago and happens now? Maybe because more and more companies off-sourced jobs to external companies that used loopholes to compress wages and pay people nuts?

If you look fifty years ago, you'll probably find minimum wage just as unlivable - because there was no need for it to be. The real outrage(and problem in need of solving) is that people have been reduced to trying to make a living off it, rather than being able to move up in the world before they had to.

Right-click opens up terrifying vistas of reality and Windows 95 user's frightful position therein

Re: pet peeve

Clearly El Reg is on a continuing mission to boldly split infinitives that no man has split before.

Not so easy to make a quick getaway when it takes 3 hours to juice up your motor, eh Brits?

Re: Charging your car

If home charging, it only takes 30 seconds to connect charger in the evening and it’s at 100% if you want in the morning.

Home charging isn't an option for the majority of people. From a society-wide perspective, it's basically a footnote. So the length of time spent charging is still a major issue and always will be.

Geo-boffins drill into dino-killing asteroid crater, discover extinction involves bad smells, chilly weather, no broadband internet...

Re: Fahrenheit?

It's a positive outrage! Everyone knows they should be using Rankine!

Apple's making some announcements! Quick, lay off 435 Uber workers

Re: "always holding ourselves accountable"

"We've got CPAs and everything!"

Re: 27000 employees?

Those are probably the "independent contractors" they're forced to count as employees, which is pretty believable.

Equifax is going to make you work for that 125 bucks it owes each of you: Biz sneaks out Friday night rule change

Re: I'm going to make them work to not pay me

Accepting a class-action settlement waives your right to sue them individually. Granted, if you've got a bit of spare money you don't need, you could probably bleed them worse that way, but you won't get anything without solid proof of loss.

Apple programs Siri to not bother its pretty little head with questions about feminism

A UNESCO study released earlier this year came to that conclusion and suggested broader use of "male" voices for virtual assistants

Before they were replaced with silent models, the self-checkouts at my local supermarket used a male voice for the Spanish interface, instead of the female voice used for English. I think we're just running into cultural preference; we'd possibly have more male assistants had not all the players been in the same place.

Finally! A solution to 42 – the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything

Re: Nice.

It's highly doubtful that Fermat actually had a proof. First, he never wrote about it again for the thirty or so years he lived after the famous scribble(despite posing specific exponent versions as challenges to other mathematicians of the day); second, the actual proof was over a hundred pages and relied on recently invented techniques(which would mean a proof based solely on early/mid 1600s math would probably be well over a thousand pages - a magnitude that would warrant language stronger than "this margin is too narrow to contain").

Behind time and way over budget, but the James Webb Space Telescope has finally been put together

Let's hope the sunshield doesn't get ripped off again, eh?

But that Nigerian prince was so friendly!

AMD agrees to cough up $35-a-chip payout over eight-core Bulldozer advertising fiasco

Intel already tried that. It turned out to be an (sunglasses) EPIC failure.

(Icon directed at self)

Re: Advertising

Only if you ignore absolutely everything AMD ever said about Bulldozer. They were quite explicit that the design was to have two integer cores sharing a single FPU since floating point work was in the minority for the vast majority of use cases. If we go with a house analogy, what AMD did was sell an eight bed/four bath; the complaint is essentially people completely ignoring the realtor and whining when things don't meet their preconceptions once the deal closes.

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Re: With that name

The paradigm makes its own sense, once you get a feel for it: without the toolboxes being slaved to a particular parent window, you can use the same boxes in the same locations for multiple windows. I kind of like the result, but I don't really use it for much.

American ISPs fined $75,000 for fuzzing airport's weather radar by stealing spectrum

Re: History has proven that "light touch" regulation...

You seem to be ducking the actual accusation: that captured regulators are worse than no regulators*. At best, captured regulators will pass unnecessary and expensive rules whose costs the big players can eat, but drive the little guy out of business; at worst, they brazenly write the rules to favor their specific benefactors over everybody else. Reiterating the reason these agencies were created doesn't answer the charge.

*I think we can all agree that independent regulators tend to be good things(though sometimes you get things like the first FDA head trying to stamp out caffeine).

Hacktivist skids nip at Mounties' ankles, Emotet ransomware rides again, and more

Re: Hunting Polar Bears

"Hunting endangered animals bad" is easy to say from far away, but the reality of the situation on the ground is a bit more complex. Not only do the yearly quotas include the bears taken by the natives, the sport hunters also bring a fair amount of revenue to otherwise impoverished areas. But, then again, the perpetrator is probably the sort that can't be bothered with such subtleties.

My god, it's full of tsars: A gun-toting Russian humanoid robot is on its way to the International Space Station

Re: Why a umanoid robot in space?

So one last test before they send it looking for Sarah Connor?

Clip, clip, hooray: NASA says it will send Clipper probe to Europa, will attempt no landing there

for space station supermarkets throughout the solar system.

Fixed that for you. No capitalist worth his salt would let such an obvious opportunity slip by.

Criminal mastermind signed name as 'Thief' on receipts after buying stuff with stolen card

Re: Constable Savage

According to the linked Smoking Gun article:

Ellis [...] is a convicted felon whose lengthy rap sheet includes convictions for drunk driving; disorderly conduct; assault; burglary; criminal mischief; receiving stolen property; theft; narcotics possession; reckless endangerment; and firearms possession.

Latimore, records show, has a rap sheet that includes convictions for disorderly conduct; marijuana possession; reckless endangerment; possession of drug paraphernalia; public drunkenness; and making terroristic threats.

Have a second link on me.

Microsoft Notepad: If it ain't broke, shove it in the Store, then break it?

First up in new stuff is the long overdue arrival of GPU temperature in the performance tab of Task Manager. The change sees the current temperature shown beside dedicated graphics cards in Celsius. Odd, considering the US-first approach usually taken by the software giant.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone who cares about such things measure it any other way, regardless of region. Giving Fahrenheit as a secondary would probably be a good idea if they're just going to stick it in front of all and sundry, though.

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

Re: ORLY?

even the cupholder one im 50/50 on

I've come across at least one joke program that promised a complementary cupholder and then ejected the CD tray when you accepted; given the average user, I've no doubt that somebody fell for it(and if they had one of those flat jobs you put the monitor on top of, it could well have worked for them - temporarily).

You can easily secure America's e-voting systems tomorrow. Use paper – Bruce Schneier

Re: Some States

Don't go looking for a corrupt state to allow its voters the referendum if they don't already have it, and don't be surprised if states that do have it make "modifications" to rules to limit those pesky citizens actually accomplishing much.

Given that the South Dakota legislature sat in emergency session for the sole purpose of repealing the results of one(on corruption, of all things), I'd say we're well past "don't be surprised".

Ransomware attackers have gone from 'spray and pray' to 'slayin' prey'

Okay, pressing that button nearly gave me a seizure and set my hair on fire. Surely pushing it again won't cause any problems.

-Many, many people

Who will save us from deepfakes? Other AIs? Humans? What about vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings?

I think it's obvious at this point

That we're on the verge of discovering the ultimate question. After that, all we can do is hope for a better fate than other single-purpose supercomputers.

Ohm my God: If you let anyone other than Apple replace your recent iPhone's battery, expect to be nagged by iOS

They need to be fined billions because that's the only language they'll understand.

Unless you're talking long count, that would at most result in some low-ranking executive having to settle with twenty-two karat gold plating on his yacht.

Neuroscientist used brainhack. It's super effective! Oh, and disturbingly easy

So I guess VR was just a blip in history

It clearly won't be long until this can give tactile feedback anywhere on the body(letting you feel the wind, blow of the axe or the... special... touch of the skin) and probably not much longer for it to let you command using the normal motor signals without having to have a padded room to keep you from hurting yourself. Now we just have to make sure we don't accidentally start making games that kill you in real life and the VR of today will be superseded before it can catch on.

We've, um, changed our password policy, says CafePress amid reports of 23m pwned accounts

He's an expert and he's only wondering? What will it take to make him sure?

Is the term "rhetorical question" anywhere in your vocabulary?

Researchers find development and conservation aren't mutually exclusive

So what they're saying

Is that environmentalism is a luxury good? That being able to set aside large tracks of land for non-use requires you to be advanced enough to not need it? This should really all be obvious, but instead we get people pointing to the "noble savage" as an excellent example of treading lightly on the environment(even though people at this level of development are the ones who wiped out most of the world's megafauna).

Now, is a larger human population(as enabled by current technology) harder on the ecosystem? Yes, but the impact of a first world country is mostly overhead(for example, even if we slashed the global population in half, we'd still need about as many trucks, trains, ships, etc with their concomitant infrastructure to move goods between populations); the impact of any added individual isn't that high(we're just good at adding enough to make a noticeable difference).