Posts by ExampleOne

Microsoft delays controversial ban on paid-for open source, WebKit in app store

Re: Free as in freedom

receiving code that misleads about its origins

Actually, doing that for financial gain may be sufficient to count as criminal fraud in some jurisdictions.

Hear us out: Smartphone lidar can test blood, milk

Re: We now have smartphones with lasers

Apparently to make Theranos tech work…

Honestly, it looks like a simple idea looking for cool applications: add it, and figure out what to use it for later.

Re: Too good to true?

Except this time they are providing enough detail that it should be independently verifiable.

The question is can anyone scale this into real applications now, or will all the problems skipped over in the lab prevent it?

UK Home Office dangles £20m for national gun licence database system

Re: Why bother at all ?

I believe one of the UKs preserved destroyers solved the problem of the ships guns by buying a gun license and ensuring the turrets were locked when not giving tours.

'Please download in Microsoft Excel': Meet the tech set to monitor IT performance across central UK government

Re: in line with agile delivery best practice

I am amused by your optimism... RHEL 5 anyone?

Google sours on legacy G Suite freeloaders, demands fee or flee

That $72/month is per user. For the family usecase, MS365 is going to be significantly cheaper.

I suspect that the "freeloaders" are not as freeloading as Google think. If they are often operating vanity domains, it suggests a level of technical competence and probable influence.

Microsoft shareholders vote for a report into harassment within the company

Re: In a surprise to nobody...

I think I trust the government to regulate it. Just like I assume they will ignore the regulations when it suits them.

I mean, it’s not like our governments don’t have form for breaking the law when it suits and they think no one will find out.

Munich mk2? Germany's Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

Re: Cost to buy - or cost to run ?

“ I'd expect a decent Linux desktop admin to be earning twice as much as a Windows desktop admin.”

Well, I note the “decent” qualifier is only applied to the more expensive one, so… yeah, incompetence is cheap!

UK competition watchdog unveils principles to make a kinder antivirus business

The suggestion from the CMA is to check if software updates are being received rather than simply charging users year after year.

This seems a remarkably sensible suggestion, given the updates are all hidden behind an authentication wall. Are we sure this is a UK authority paper?

Apple beat Epic Games 9-1 in court. Now it's appealed the one point it lost

Re: Judge found Apple is not a monopolist?

There is no guarantee Apple will get the same decision on monopoly in Europe, which ultimately depended on how the market is defined. The ruling here appears to be that the market is all smartphone users, and not just iPhone users. There is a definite vibe to the ruling that Epic shot themselves in the foot, repeatedly, by focusing on the wrong things. Without getting the market defined as iPhone users, everything else was inevitable.

Contrast with Europe, where the competition authority seems to be laying the groundwork for treating the iPhone and Android app markets as separate, in which case Apple are going to struggle to argue they are not a monopoly.

SAP uses Scalpel to carve shape of post-Brexit UK ambitions

The UK has been afforded “adequacy” status by the EU in terms of data sharing under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). But that decision will be subject to review as UK law changes, so perhaps SAP is hedging its bets.

Isn’t the adequacy status also subject to legal challenge under the current rules? The UK doesn’t need to change its rules for SAP to want to hedge their bets, given the UK track record in having their rules challenged in CJEU.

Four women suing Google for pay discrimination just had their lawsuit upgraded to a $600m class action

A 600 million dollar, one off payment, problem goes away, deal strikes me as a bargain for Google if they genuinely are guilty of systemic gender discrimination.

Why? Because defending each and every one of those cases after the first couple is going to be vastly more expensive.

Apple's macOS is sub-par for security, Apple exec Craig Federighi tells Epic trial

> It’s a phone for gods sake, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.

Except it isn't, and never has been, just a phone. From its very start, it has been a computer in your pocket first and a phone second.

People don't buy smart phones to make phone calls, they buy them for the apps and flexibility provided by being a computer. Purely as a phone, I find all the smart phones have a far worse user experience than classics like the Nokia 3310.

Streaming mad: EC charges Apple with abuse of dominance, distorting competition in Spotify case

Re: “Monopoly” is a stretch

From the article:

The Commission noted that Apple users tend to be loyal to the platform, and seldom switch to competing operating systems, resulting in developers having limited (if any) leverage in disputes.

This would suggest the Commission are leaning towards defining the market as iPhone users, and not smartphone users. If the courts agree, Apple are dead in the water as far as defence is concerned.

Deloitte settled HPE's Autonomy lawsuit for $45m back in 2016 and agreed to cooperate with US DoJ

HP appear to be taking "HP were misled" (undeniably true) and "Autonomy tried to mislead us" (possibly true) and combining the two and hoping that no one notices that there is a serious problem in the chain of which can be summarised as "Autonomy couldn't mislead HP as HP had already misled themselves".

Do I think Lynch is innocent of all wrongdoing? Not really. Do I think Lynch is guilty of trying to mislead HP? Probably. Do I think Lynch succeeded in misleading HP? Not at all. HP did that perfectly fine without needing a fradylent due diligence report they never received!

Everything you need to know about the HPE v Mike Lynch High Court case

Re: Why so pro-Autonomy?

My understanding is you need all of causation, mens rea, and mens actus.

While HP may or may not have proved the mens rea andens actus, due to HPs own incompetence causation looks dubious.

Even if Autonomy did mislead the KPMG auditors, with the intention of misleading HP, HP have, as I understand it, failed to explain how that mislead them, given they didn't wait for the final due diligence report. Further, it is hard to claim the HP board was deceived when one member of that board was strongly opposed to the deal.

Ironically, it is possible that Lynch could indeed be guilty of criminal fraud (i.e. doctoring the books) while still being innocent in this civil case (I.e. that doctoring didn't mislead HP because they didn't read or rely on the doctored books).

A pox on both their houses, I say.

HPE urges judge to pick through Deloitte-bashing report it claims demolishes Autonomy founder's defence

I am still failing o to see how Autonomy misled HPs auditors and as a result HP given it is on record that HP didn't read or even wait for their own auditors report, which it turns out was never finished and likely would have raised issues if they had waited.

HPs case, as far as I can tell, is that Autonomy were committing fraud, so had to be guilty of lying and misleading HP. The defence, as far as I can tell, is that HP misled themselves, regardless of whatever Autonomy were doing.

A pox on both their houses, as far as I can tell.

Mozilla Firefox keeps cookies kosher with quarantine scheme, 86s third-party cookies in new browser build

Blocking cookies simply stops the easiest and laziest way of tracking people. It isn't hard to track by abusing the browser cache.

Of course, I have rarely seen a discussion of alternative methods of tracking, it is all about the cookies.

Can we exhale yet? EU set to rule UK 'adequate' for data sharing in post-Brexit GDPR move

A cynical person might suggest this allows the commission to kick the toxic problem of UK "adequacy" down the road few years until the case gets to CJEU, allowing them to ignore this problem for a couple of years while they try to figure out rather more important details like how physical trade is going to work.

Of course, a bunch of EU politicians would never be that cynical, would they?

Intel sues former staffer for allegedly stealing Xeon cloud secrets in USB drives and exploiting info at Microsoft

Because, complicit or not, it plays out much nicer for MS to cooperate and deny all knowledge. I mean, they already got the benefit.

EncroChat hack case: RAM, bam... what? Data in transit is data at rest, rules UK Court of Appeal

If data in RAM is in storage and not in transit, does this mean that all DVD players are now, under this interpretation of the law, making copies of the DVD in storage? The figleaf that the "copies" were in transit clearly can't legally match to this ruling can it?

There are definitely significant implications of this ruling outside the "snoopers" angle, I fear.

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

Re: Why terrifying?

A single 220V, 20A connection sounds quite small and reasonable. How about 100 of them for a SMALL office car park?

This quickly turns into anything from a grid substation for every office block to a full on power station in the basement for a large office block with a multistorey car park.

There are large parts of the EV power supply picture wither being glossed over or outright ignored. Yes, getting power into the battery is a probably solvable problem, but that is ignoring the question of getting the power to the car to put it into the battery which is a much larger infrastructure problem.

Ironically this might actually be an easier problem to solve for rural residents, who are far more likely to have space for local wind turbines and other local power generation options meaning they wouldn't be relying on the grid to provide the bulk of the power.

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Re: Nothing wrong with ads ...

Seriously, advertisers should pay for success (clicks) only. That way all the spam would earn Google et all nothing and targeting would improve.

There are advertising networks that operate on this basis: guess what, they need tracking as it is required for attribution.

There are also advertising campaigns that fundamentally don't function on a "pay per purchase" model - any advertising campaign that is build around brand building rather than hawking a specific product is an obvious candidate.

How a nightmare wormable, wireless, automatic hijack-a-nearby-iPhone security flaw was found and fixed

Re: shock!

All correct, and none of them relevant to discussion of a bug in a near kernel module written in C++.

Re: shock!

> Apple should spend more time modernizing critical legacy code in iOS like vm_map.c, written in 1985 and still in use today.

I am not sure why the fact it was written in 1985 is a problem. I am also going to observe that this file was not the one with the bug if the claim the bug was in C++ code is correct.

So yes, there is some justification for saying Google are playing marketing games with this.

£8bn digitisation strategy for UK's health service doesn't count as a strategy, says spending watchdog

"Furthermore, the national organisations have not yet put in place the planned levers and incentives to encourage trusts and other parts of the NHS to take the appropriate action on the ground.

Surely if your digitisation plans are actually beneficial and improving things, you don't need "levers" and "incentives" to "encourage" trusts to adopt them?

If the plans are obviously an improvement, surely the trusts will adopt them without major push-back. If they aren't obvious improvements, perhaps the trusts are correct to push back given the risk involved when things go wrong?

Uber is now a food delivery company with a substantial sideline in taxis

One problem I can see with the just-eats business model is it basically relies on a captive market of people who aren't locals or regular customers of their preferred eateries, and a lack of local word of mouth. I'm not sure that is sufficient to allow them to "rent collect" from the hordes of take-aways who also take orders directly, as in practice they can't monopolise the space.

No, your software ideas aren't copyrightable, US judge tells SAS amid its long-running feud with Brit outfit

Re: Gilstrap Made this Ruling?

Or it could even be "You lost three times already. Now it's four. Please go away."

Brit accused of spying on 772 people via webcam CCTV software tells court he'd end his life if extradited to US

As both governments have agreed she had it, she had it.

This is not justice, it's not nice, but sometimes the system is a bitch, and breaching that immunity would set a very chilling precedent which would endanger British diplomats all over the world.

Today's tech giants won't be as naive as I was in DoJ dealings, says former Microsoft chief Bill Gates

Re: Subscribe to a hammer?

They are hilarious! What professional is going to touch those?

Proposed US fix for Boeing 737 Max software woes does not address Ethiopian crash scenario, UK pilot union warns

Re: What might be harder to ignore...

Wow. Surely some of those findings, if provable in a court of law, are corporate manslaughter, and potentially in some of them, should allow individuals to be prosecuted as well?

Net neutrality lives... in Europe, anyway: Top court supports open internet rules, snubs telcos and ISPs

On the one hand I can see that these zero cost tariff options (e.g. Netflix, Facebook, Youtube traffic doesn't count) are good for the consumer

Actually the court, according to this article, is quite clear that these are NOT in fact good for the consumer in the medium and long term because they reduce competition. From the article:

It went on: “Furthermore, the greater the number of customers concluding such agreements, the more likely it is that, given its scale, the cumulative effect of those agreements will result in a significant limitation of the exercise of end users’ rights, or even undermine the very essence of those rights.”

Is Little Timmy still enthralled by his Leapfrog tablet? Maybe check he hasn't sideloaded an unrestricted OS onto it

Nothing against the device, everything against the company.

LeapFrog are owned by vTech, the company who when they had a data leak involving childrens personal information, simply updated their T&Cs to exclude liability [1, IIRC there was an article on this site that is escaping my google foo] and insist parents signed over any right to sue or complain, under an explicit agreement. This behaviour is beyond reprehensible, and is completely unacceptable generally, for a product targetting children.

[1] - https://www.troyhunt.com/no-vtech-cannot-simply-absolve-itself/

Presumably, once you have 14.1 on it, making 17 work should simply be a matter of bumping version numbers in the build system? The technical challenge here is getting anything on to it in the first place?

That said, it is still a LeapFrog device, so I would refuse to buy it or allow it into the house...

UK and Japan agree to free trade deal that excludes data localisation requirements

The deal is the first negotiated by the UK alone after Brexit and is being hailed as a template for the many such deals to come once the nation completely and utterly departs the EU and is no longer bound by the bloc's existing deals.

So the template for UK trade deals is "roll over an EU one with a few tweaks"?

Hidden Linux kernel security fixes spotted before release – by using developer chatter as a side channel

Your inability to manage your Linux estate does not mean it is unmanageable.

Re: Security by obscurity, yawn

For public evidence, I think this very site has the best example when they blew the lid on spectre early.

It clearly can and has happened.

Ex-Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain loses US appeal bid against fraud convictions and 5-year prison sentence

Re: I thought we had abandoned extradition

Obnoxious as it is, and infuriating for all parties as it is, it is highly questionable the extradition request would survive contact with a court room while both governments agree she is entitled to diplomatic immunity. Unless and until either she or the US government waive that immunity, legally speaking there is no case to answer in UK law.

Yes, it is horrible. No, it is not justice, but sometimes the law ends up working that way, and the principles involved in diplomatic immunity are kind of important.

The bigger question that should be being asked is why she had immunity in the first place, and why the government continues to hand it out easily to associates of credentialed diplomats from the USA given their track record on immunity over rather more minor issues (parking tickets and speeding fines).

US election 2020: The disinfo operations have evolved, but so have state governments

I still don't get the foreign interference argument. I mean, are people really suggesting that foreign states are spending anything more than a small fraction of what the political parties are spending? Of not, are we really saying that the political parties are so incompetent that foreign interference is that much more proceed effective?

Trucking hell: Kid leaves dad in monster debt after buying oversized vehicle on eBay

Clearly someone, somewhere, in this chain operating a credit facility. I would start asking if the appropriate ombudsmen should be got involved.

Alternatively something in this story doesnt quite pass the sniff test.

FCC: Remember that confidential paperwork you gave us, China Telecom? Yeah, well, we're handing it over to the Feds

They are judging everyone else by their own low standards.

This has been fairly clear from the start with the stream of innuendo a d the complete lack of any evidence other than "they might..."

Google allowed to remember search results to news articles it was asked to forget. Good

Re: If only there were the idea of a spent conviction?

But with increasing numbers of jobs doing vetting, those convictions will still show up, just later in a different step.

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users. It's meant to work like that, right?

My point is that amazon A) knows what I have purchased on amazon, and B) don’t appear to be able to make the leap to related products. Even a basic recommender system should be able to make the related product leap when fed amazons dataset. I mean, surely the dataset makes it clear someone who bought a drill is more likely to buy screws than a new drill?

I find it amusing that the ad targeting produced by the internet advertising is so appallingly bad. It's worse than the supermarkets did 15 or more years ago based on their "loyalty" cards. What is really sad is how basic many of the mistakes are: I am pretty certain the "recommender systems 101" course I did about 12 years ago would avoid them once even slightly trained.

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

Re: What a surpirse. It's muppetry.

The problem isn’t the analog receiver, the problem is the lack of a DAB receiver. They didn’t need to ban the former to mandate the latter.

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

Re: Next great idea

Well, HP are the only printer vendor I am aware of trying the subscription ink circus. Ironic, given Canon, Epson, and Brother are all going down to ink tank/CIS system route.

Sony reveals PlayStation 5 will offer heretical no-optical-disk option. And yes, it has an AMD CPU-GPU combo

The installation to the internal storage isn’t the issue, the issue is not wanting the device to ever connect to the internet.

It may be an unpopular stance, but a hard air-gap will require less policing than any form of allegedly moderated content filters.

Having young children, a major drawback of the online only approach recently became very obvious: how do you get content while blocking online access?

Retaining the optical drive isn’t just a pragmatic decision for compatibility. This is a games device, it really needs an option for completely offline single player usage.

In colossal surprise, Intel says new vPro processors are quite a bit better than the old ones

And I don't see the value in integrating the WiFi. There is a well-defined abstraction to the network with moderate bandwidth required. It's the archetype for a functionality that should be on a separate chip with a vendor-neutral interface.

I think, in battery powered mobile devices, there is a power benefit to integrating it.

Away from the battery powered mobile device use-case, I completely agree it is better off chip.

Briny liquid may be more common on Mars than once thought, unlikely to support life as we know it

Re: Oh, I dunno ...

I was thinking something similar. Given the terrestrial environments life has been found in, it seems presumptuous to dismiss the possibility out of hand. This may be an environment outside the known parameters, but unless we have multiple examples of such environments here on Earth we can’t say terrestrial life couldn’t survive it, just that it hasn’t had a chance to.

Is this environment that much harsher than the brine lakes under the ice cap in the Antarctic?