Posts by dirtygreen

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Re: Countermeasures?

Rubbish. You can shield everything except a control antenna, and lightning protection demonstrates that you can expose an antenna without risking things it is connected to.

When it comes to personal data, we're on a highway to hell

Re: Woe Be The Professional That Loses Control of Confedential Patient/Client Data In A Rental

Sounds like such professionals should do as I do then. Never ever sync your phone with your car.

FWIW, I never use my phone for anything financial, so there can be no risk to my finances through it. It sounds like these professionals should do the same with client/patient data - never let it near their phone. Or keep a separate phone just for that purpose with no other apps or uses and never synchronised etc.

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

Re: “Evolving Appliances For You” and the return of Orwells' Telescreens

'The company offered the example of a family that moves to a different home, and different climate, and upgrades its clothes drier with routines suited to local conditions.’

Err, why does a Brabantia rotating clothes drier need "routines", whatever they are. You peg the clothes out, they blow around for a while, tehn you bring them in and put them on an airer to finish them off if necessary. No appliances, no evolution.

Pentagon wants to drive digital and AI onto the battlefield

Re: Baffle Gab

Is that like a Gabble Duck?

RAF chief: Our Reaper drones (sorry, SkyGuardians) stand ready to help British councils

Re: Sill they be armed with…

The US is different though. It's legal there to overtake on the inside, with the result of considerably less stress all round. Contrary to the huff-and-puff here.

Astronomers detect burps of interstellar cannibal from 480 million light years away

paywall?

Whilst it's true that the published paper in Science is behind a paywall, it might be worth noting that there's a free version on arXiv.org at https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01752

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

Re: Bunker size

How does zoopla manage to believe that the overall size of the bunker area is 149.5 m² whilst simultaneously believing that the area of one part of it (bunker 1) is 23.96 x 9.14 = 219 m² ??

Enquiring minds want to know!

Boffins find an 'actionable clock' hiding in your blood, ticking away to your death

Open access

The Reg says, correctly: "The team's paper has been published under closed-access terms in the journal Nature Aging."

But some people may be interested to know that there is an open-access preprint at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/840363v1.full.pdf+html

Brit MPs and campaigners come together to oppose COVID status certificates as 'divisive and discriminatory'

requires both data about an individual's health and, linked to it, confirmation of their identity

I went for my second jab today, at the appointed hour that was set when I had my first jab. They couldn't find me or my reference code on the system! Luckily they agreed to vaccinate me anyway (I guess there's not a lot of motivation for old codgers to try to game the system somehow) so now I've got a paper card that says I've been vaccinated twice and that records my vaccine batch numbers. And I'm confident there's no computer-based record of it all. So how is any computer-based system going to validate that I'm vaccinated?

I have an Android phone. I haven't downloaded any apps onto it, because that would require me to have a google account, which I don't want (and can't figure out how to create anyway). So no app-based solution is going to work for me.

So it sounds like they will want to see my little piece of cardboard, if I haven't lost or burned it by then and haven't forged another, and make a QR code out of it somehow in order for me to be allowed to do whatever it is they say I have to be authorised to do in the brave new future.

Bill Gates on climate change: Planting trees is not the answer, emissions need to be zeroed out to avoid disaster

"limestone plus heat equals calcium dioxide plus carbon dioxide"

The article claims that Bill says that. So is that a typo/misquote by El Reg's heroic workers, or a big booboo by His Gatesness?

Limestone plus heat equals calcium oxide plus carbon dioxide. CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2. Calcium dioxide (aka peroxide) is something very different.

Voyager 2 receives and executes first command in 11 months as sole antenna that reaches it returns to work

Re: It's a different world

I think Doctor Syntax was referring to the gas turbines that use air as a working fluid and are commonly referred to as wind turbines.

Considering the colonisation of Mars? Werner Herzog would like a word

Terraforming

His Muskiness could perhaps practice his terraforming skills somewhere a little easier to start with, such as the Sahara. Once he's proved he can do that we should all support his ambitions for Mars.

Cops called to Singapore golf club after 'wrongdoers' use scripts to book popular timeslots

Re: Why would that help?

Duh, that's the point of an auction. After the auction, the person who wonhas already paid the full value of the slot. There's no value left for a tout.

Facebook to surround all of Africa in optical fibre and tinfoil

Re: Why don't they join the ends?

Because the ends are already effectively joined anyway, by existing cables. You can already view websites in Spain with no problems from Blighty, yes?

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

ALGOL 60 was the first language I learned, at school in the Computer Club. Turn round was a bit longer than ten minutes. We used to write programs on coding sheets, which were then taken to the nearby university and typed up by data prep ladies, run by the operators on the ICL1909, and the coding sheets, pack of cards and printout was returned to us a week later. That did make you concentrate fairly hard on program correctness; my first program calculated primes and I've still got the output somewhere. After a while a friend and I learned that we could get off the bus on the way home, walk up to the university and punch our own cards on IBM 029 punches, and then watch while the operators ran the program. That made things a lot faster and meant we could write bigger programs - my favourite was a linear regression program for the results of our physics experiments. It made them look much more 'official' :)

And then we discovered the unversity had a free access PDP-8 so we learned BASIC on DECtape and the joys of typing into an ASR-33 and Friden Flexowriters. And then ...

... the university got a copy of the POP-2 compiler. Still my favourite language ever! Programs to synthesise English using Chomsky's grammars etc etc. Machine Intelligence 1, 2, 3 ...

Where the hell Huawei? It should be a bit easier to tell now the AppGallery has its first proper navigation app

"Doesn't matter if they reach app parity with GMS, the question of trusting those apps will linger unless they stamp out dodgy apps and I suspect that will not be high on their list of things to do."

That kind of implies that you do trust Google. I certainly don't and won't have google play store on my mobile. But admittedly f-droid has less on it.

So how do the coronavirus smartphone tracking apps actually work and should you download one to help?

Re: First, understand the problem you're trying to solve...

No because the app measures how long you are next to the other person and discounts short periods of closeness.

Re: Bluetooth by itself = FAIL

If you think that, you need to look at the Singapore TraceTogether code then, since it estimates the distance apart of the two BT phones quite cleverly.

SUSE, what? Adoption's still growing, shrugs OpenStack Foundation

typo

Why does the drawing legend mention Rackspace when Canonical is fourth as shown in the diagram and described in the text?

Which? That smart home camera? The one with the vulns? Really?

Which don't seem to pay much attention to their members feedback either. I've had problems with both an induction hob and an electric blanket that I bought because they were recommended. Afterwards, in each case, I found lots of member comments who had encountered the same problem. But the which recommendations still stood, for years in the case of the hob.

So are there any good security cameras or reviews of them?

Transparent algorithms? Here's why that's a bad idea, Google tells MPs

working demo

It seems to me that when somebody like google puts forward a contrary idea, the onus should be on them to show a working demonstration of the system that they propose.