Posts by Potemkine!

A speech recognition app goes into a bar. Speak up if you’ve heard it already

Only 30 minutes for a lunch? You didn't fully adapt to your new location then. And you have to add to this the time requested for the mandatory nap!

When you hear the sirens and it isn't the first Wednesday of the month, then check the news. Long ago it meant listening to the radio, the public radio station. Now it means probably googling. If you have no connection it could be a clue something serious is happening.

The last time I heard those outside of the test moment was in 2001. A chemical factory just exploded killing 30, the recommendation was to stay inside to avoid potential toxic smokes travelling over the whole city and its neighbourhood. Hearing those sirens is never a good thing.

UK VoIP telco receives 'colossal ransom demand', reveals REvil cybercrooks suspected of 'organised' DDoS attacks on UK VoIP companies

Re: Keep POTS.

Use pigeons. It works without requiring cables or electricity.

It can't be hacked from the nether regions of the net.

I bet the opposite. PABX don't exist anymore, IPBX can be hacked, even if they manage calls transiting through POTS.

Banned: The 1,170 words you can't use with GitHub Copilot

Who did knew that

We will be saved from AI by political correctness?

In space, no one can hear cyber security professionals scream

There are some many ways to be pwned that sometimes I wonder why there aren't more systems going down. I guess this is because surface attacks are so huge and devices so numerous that miscreants haven't the time to target them all. For now.

Instead, there are lots of lawyers and political science folks who work in cyber policy and approach the issues from a purely theoretical perspective, using the newest buzzwords to get their unimplementable policy through."

This description fits a lot of domains, not cybersecurity only!

AWS Tokyo outage takes down banks, share traders, and telcos

Mandatory XKCD

Tripping on the chord

IBM sued again by its own sales staff: IT giant accused of going back on commission payments promise

Do it the soviet way

"When they will stop pretending they are paying wages, workers will stop pretending they are working"

Arms not long enough to reach the plug socket? Room-wide wireless charging is on the way

Filling the air with more power seems so idiotic on so many counts...

Fired credit union employee admits: I wiped 21GB of files from company's shared drive in retaliation

Re: Rather moronic

Even more moronic is the fact not having a daily backup of the data their business relieves on.

Requiring $10,000 to restore 21 GB shows shows this company has a clear data management problem.

Leaked Guntrader firearms data file shared. Worst case scenario? Criminals plot UK gun owners' home addresses in Google Earth

I haven't a gun but I frequently exterminate mosquitoes. I hope no animal activists will go after me!

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

Lobbyism is just another word for corruption.

Children of China, your state-sanctioned hour of gaming begins … now!

Countless hours spent on gaming, online or not, can be a problem for children. But it isn't up to the State to regulate this. All children are different, and one rule cannot fit for all. It's the parental responsibility to fix the limits. The State disempowers the parents, it isn't a good thing for the children either.

Bangkok Airways hit by LockBit ransomware attack, loses lotsa data after refusing to pay

loses lotsa data after refusing to pay

Nope, the data were lost before refusing to pay.

Bangkok Airways was right not to pay. Even if it did, it could expect having the data sold to other miscreants anyway.

Chinese developers protested insanely long work hours. Now the nation's courts agree

employees often do so – either because they don't see any other option, or on the promise of future pay-offs in the form of stock options. The options rarely materialize, despite the tech companies themselves often thriving.

China is a capitalist country in many aspects, isn't it?

allowing three children per couple

That isn't a good thing, until we are able to export people to another planet.

Good news: Japanese boffins 3D print what looks like marbled Wagyu beef. Bad news: It's tiny and inedible

Sci-Fi

We get closer and closer to Star Trek's replicators.

'No peeing towards Russia' sign appears on country's Arctic border with Norway

When I was younger I took a pee on the Berlin Wall. I'm glad I wasn't fined at this time.

You don't want to ruin that 200-year peace streak

Norway being independent since 1905, that would rather be a 116-year peace streak.

This way up: James Webb Space Telescope gets ready for shipment after final tests

So many things could go wrong

Crossing fingers.

We miss a spaceship able to travel in space to fix things.

When everyone else is on vacation, it's time to whip out the tiny screwdrivers

Working in bad conditions is a good way to disaster. Building a nice and sweet place to work is worth the effort in the long run.

I was hoping a tribute to Charlie Watts....Cristina Scabbia has a beautiful voice anyway, reminds me the one of Amy Lee

Online disinformation is an industry that needs regulation, says boffin

You cannot tackle fake news by laws but by education.

'Unicorn' startup CEO faked sales figures, deals to trick investors, prosecutors claim

"Companies and their executives must tell the truth when speaking about financial metrics that are material to the value of the business."

Of course, It's understood they can lie about anything else, when speaking to their workers or customers.Only investors matter.

Think you can solve the UK's electric vehicle charging point puzzle? The Ordnance Survey wants to hear about it

and it is trivial to have cars charge at times when it is most convenient to the grid.

What does matter for users is having cars charged when they need it.

EV are a dead end. Batteries are polluting to produce, require rare materials to produce, are hardly recyclable. let's also wait a couple of years to have more experience on how batteries behave when they get older. Also, the infrastructure you need to build to produce, manage, transport and provide the electricity for EV will generate a lot of CO2 (concrete making generates a lot of CO2 for instance).

That's 18GW*24h = 432GWh that we could have produced

If ifs and ands were pots and pans there'd be no work for tinkers' hands.

Anyway, even if whole Europe becomes carbon-neutral in 2030, CO2 in atmosphere will continue to grow because of India and China.

Becoming carbon neutral is a good thing, BUT:

- it won't be a solution to global warming

- There's no point of doing this if you produce a lot more of CO2 to produce new stuff to replace the old one.

My solutions:

- Hydrogen for vehicles (cars, trucks, trains) and for heating: hydrogen is a far better way to store energy than batteries. There are also incoming solutions to store hydrogen easily, even in a household.

- Give a high kick to CO2 storage, because we have urgently to find solutions for CO2 produced outside of Europe, which is by far the majority. In 2020, Europe accounted for 11,2% of the CO2 produced worldwide.

If you want to solve a problem, addressing 10% of it won't work.

Probably we need to charge ~3-4 million, but they only need ~5kWh/day (national average distance is ~20 miles, and 4m/kWh is easily done, various vehicles will do substantially more), or 35kWh/week.

You cannot reason in term of average to dimension the electricity network but in term of peak.

Hackathon

Why paying for something when you can have it for free? This is "how to exploit people" 2.0

Brit says sorry after waving around nonce patent and leaning on sites to cough up

law firm

The best thing law firms are able to do is to issue bills to their customers. For the rest, the quality of service is more random

GitHub's Copilot may steer you into dangerous waters about 40% of the time – study

Re: sprintf?

Given C's complete lack of array bounds checking, who in this day and age is so dumb as to use it?

Coders who are able to understand what they do. I know it becomes a scarce resource in our days....

UK government names suppliers on £3.5bn contact centre, shared services, and outsourcing framework

That's unfair, Fujitsu doesn't get its share of money.

Pakistan's tax office denies pirated software caused outage – admits it sometimes runs unsupported software

"unavoidable circumstances"

Love this. This PR BS reaches 10 out of 10 on the bad faith scale.

"- There's a bug in you product!

- No, it isn't a bug, it's an unavoidable circumstance".

Facebook used facial recognition without consent 200,000 times, says South Korea's data watchdog

Is this a joke?

So Netflix was fined US$2,700. Netflix annual net income for 2020 was $2.761B

The fine represents 0,000098 % of last year net income. Woah.... how deterrent! Netflix must have a bigger bill in paper clips.

Israeli firm Bright Data named as enabler of Philippines government DDOS attacks on opposition groups

When a government attacks local human rights organisations, it can be considered as a bad actor.

Surprisingly, I didn't hear about any sanction against the Philippines .

Junking orbital junk? The mind behind ASTRIAGraph database project hopes to 'make space transparent'

I don't get the analogy with the Rosetta Stone. What is the language to decrypt?

Lost in IKEA? So, it seems, is Windows

Spying is not an uncommon feature for Ikea.

Taiwan and Arizona economic groups agree to bring more chip industry to desert state

Après moi le déluge

There's no water for people? What's the problem as long as I get my cut from my industrial pals?

Proofpoint wins $14m from ex-VP and French email security rival in IP theft court battle

An American jury deciding that a foreign company pursued by an American company is guilty... What a surprise.

Enercon must have a forced laugh right now.

NASA postpones spacewalk as it would be too much of a pain in the neck for astronaut

Re: Still...

What a terrible and unfair rumour. Everybody knows it's because of the Chinese. Always blame the Chinese.

Oh the humanity: McDonald's out of milkshakes across Great Britain

Government has responded by lifting caps on daily driving limits from nine hours to 11

That seems to be a really stupid idea, unless you want more truck crashes.

On the bright side, there are way too many lorries on the roads, causing a lot of pollution. It's time to improve railways to be less truck-dependent.

Gartner Gartner on the wall, which is the hypest cycle of them all?

Sci-Fi

Gartner is fun, but I nonetheless prefer Phllip K. Dick. His anticipations look more realistic than Gartner's ones.

Re: Missing phase

Reusability is a pillar of IT (claim vendors for the last 50 years)

Infosys CEO hauled in to tell minister why India's tax portal is still a glitchy mess

Don't mess with taxes.

You can screw whatever governmental IT project and get free with it, but not the one related to tax, ever.

Politicians are paid from taxes, you know. They are very attentive everything goes smoothly when they are directly involved.

Robots don't smoke, says Alibaba, and that's why they deliver parcels so fast

Doesn't seem safe yet

1,000 robots making 20 deliveries each => 20,000 deliveries per day.

Robots can avoid 99.9999 % of collisions, so they collide every 0.0001%.

Can we expect two collisions per day?

Cop drone crashes into flight instructor's airplane

Police version

The Cessna voluntarily attacked the cop drone, the pilot is probably a terrorist. It's confirmed by AI.

A man spent a year in jail on a murder charge involving disputed AI evidence. Now the case has been dropped

Re: do people have a propensity to try to abuse AI systems?

Not if the victim turned his head in the direction of the shooter, being called for instance.

Anyway, if someone went for so long in jail with such a light and disputable evidence, then there's something rotten in the process.

China's Mars rover assigned extended mission after exceeding life expectancy

China wants to make Mars its own, because it's the red planet.

Judge dismisses objections to spaceport in Scotland from billionaire who also wants to build spaceport in Scotland

It's a fantasic idea for Polar Orbit.

Are you sure? : Whatever the orbit the northern you go the less additional velocity you get from Earth rotation.

If it is an advantage to go north to reach a polar orbit, I wonder why the US launch their rockets from Vandenberg Space Force Base rather than from Alaska?

A Spaceport in Shetlands? Is this a good idea to send a rocket to space from such a northern latitude? :~

UK's Surveillance Camera Commissioner grills Hikvision on China human rights abuses

Re: An Easy Equation

#FreeHK

Epic lawsuit's latest claims: Google slipped tons of cash to game devs, Android makers to cement Play store dominance

"Don't be evil", they said

"a senior Google executive proposed that Google 'consider approaching Tencent,' a company that owns a minority stake in Epic, 'to either (a) buy Epic shares from Tencent to get more control over Epic,' or '(b) join up with Tencent to buy 100 per cent of Epic.'"

Is this the Google's version of "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse" ?

Live, die, copy-paste, repeat: Everything is recycled now, including ideas

Will this column be recycled?

Ah, Ringo... old memories come to mind. His most famous moment was a small fist fight with an unexpected anarchist during a TV show. Another great moment of playback singing.

Here's a great idea to save the planet: use toilet paper both sides.

Activist raided by police after downloading London property firm's 'confidential' meeting minutes from Google Search

Re: In France, someone was convicted for nearly the same thing

UK is like France. When the State wants somebody to be condemned, the courts follow the State.

Re: In France, someone was convicted for nearly the same thing

It's a little bit more complicated. Discharged in a first trial, Bluetouff was finally condemned because he recognized having seen a login page on the server. The second court decided it was a proof he knew the access was illegal, even if he reached that server with Google. The decision was absolutely scandalous, and the State through the different Procurators made whatever possible to make Bluetouff condemned.

Unless you are part of the judicial system, you have very few possibilities to avoid the wrath of the State.

He was taken into custody

Police is a tool in the hands of the 1 percent. No wonder this poor guy was arrested when he committed no offence.