Posts by Thomassmart

Quick, get the popcorn: Amazon Web Services says Microsoft's benchmarks for Azure are a load of stripe

Re: Need an independent TPC-Cloud Benchmark

Useful for situations where the cloud provider decision is based on facts, but it rarely is in my experience.

With a warehouse of unsold AR goggles, Magic Leap has a brainwave… let’s rebadge ‘em and sell to business!

Re: Contacts, anyone?

An alternative approach could be to stop trying to get organic lenses to focus where the shouldn't, and find ways to send data directly to the optic nerve? The visual equivalent of those bone conducting audio devices?

Our hero returns home £500 richer thanks to senior dev's appalling security hygiene

College passwords

My college used to give all new students a default password at the start of the year with a requirement to change it on first login. The default password was always "Welcome" followed by the year. Login was an incrementing 5 digit student number. Fairly trivial task to then check through this year's series of student numbers to see which ones hadn't logged in yet and use this account to upload a bunch of cracked software, movies, etc to the school network drive, allegedly.

He's coming home, he's coming... Hutchins' coming home: British Wannacry killer held in US on malware dev rap set free by judge

Re: Hear, hear! @werdsmith

"If you illegally sell arms you dont get tried for a list of murders."

Actually that sounds like a pretty good idea, for legal sellers too.

Make creators and sellers of (cyber) weapons at least partially accountable for how they are used. Then they might apply a bit more scrutiny to the people buying them.

Hi. Sorry, we're still grinding Huawei at this: UK govt once again puts off decision to ban Chinese giant from 5G

"dont have a presence in n-korea" does not mean "does not do business with n-korea"

Gamers get a chance to battle an AI on the QT. Plus: Robo-marines, and fisticuffs over facial recognition in Detroit

Re: General (5 stars) Electric

For pipeline inspections they often use petrol drones that can fly for a few hours, and a canister of petrol is probably easier to carry around than batteries

Freaky photo flingers face fat fines for flagrant phallus flashing fun

Re: Potentially a good idea.

b) carrying a pocket knife of any size

Looking at knife crimes in London and other cities I don't think this is a bad law. Also, Singapore is all city, it's not exactly the wild outback where you need a leatherman to survive

c) feeding pigeons

If you had been here during bird flue epidemic you would know why

d) public singing of 'naughty songs'

I've never know it to be enforced, plenty of it happening in the central bar district, and around geylang if you include hokkien songs

e) not flushing the toilet

Never heard of this one, but considering the constant high temperature and number of immigrants that may not be familiar with a toilet, I wouldn't say that's a bad law

f) walking around naked in your own home

Are you aware of how close the apartments are in sg? Mate of mine can see his neighbours going to the toilet in glorious bushy detail.

g) same-sex relationships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Singapore

This one annoys me and many others, but as far as I'm aware it's never been enforced on 2 consenting adults.

Sorry friends, I'm afraid I just can't quite afford the Bitcoin to stop that vid from leaking everywhere

Re: euphemisms for the women now, have we?

Funny coincidence, "mouse" is the Chinese version of our feline euphemism. "Bird" being the male chicken equivalent.

'Men only' job ad posts land Facebook in boiling hot water with ACLU

Not defending the companies in any way, but I haven't seen this mentioned in the comments:

I believe it costs more to advertise to a larger group of people. The assumption might be that "women wouldn't be interested anyway, so why waste advertising budget on showing them the ad.". Again, not defending this view but it could be part of the reason (which is still sexist/discriminatory).

Virtual reality meets commercial reality as headset sales plunge

Usually that's related to badly made environments/experiences, not modern hardware

Crappy IoT on the high seas: Holes punched in hull of maritime security

Cybersec shwibersec

I'm currently in this industry, can confirm cybersec is a complete joke. Half the owners don't even know what they have on the vessel that's connected. I've seen automatic software updates (that were enabled) completely brick a device that left the ship stuck in Port for 2 weeks (costing a small fortune to do so and in lost revenue). That these ships aren't being pwnd and crashed into harbours on a daily basis still amazes me and it's probably one of the reasons they are not doing much about it yet....

DropEverything! DropBox DropsDocs to DropStocks

I used Dropbox for a while, actually have 10gb or so in my free account because you used to be able to get more with certain activities.

Now I use spideroak. I pay 120$ a year for unlimited zero-knowledge encrypted storage. Currently using 9 TB. :)

We won't need to go outside if these haptic tricksters have their way

Where is my

Matrix brain spike tech?

Heart of darkness: Inside the Osówka underground city

Re: "A clear mandate for destroying the British economy, then."

....and recommended Linux as a better solution, and probably something about bitcoin.

Germany says NEIN to purchase incentive for Tesla Model S

*cries in Singaporean* a tesla would cost in excess of 200,000 euros here due to import taxes and the required certificate.