Posts by VikiAi

I helped catch Silk Road boss Ross Ulbricht: Undercover agent tells all

Re: Nibbling the elephant

Reminds me of a former flat-mate who worked in banking who told me of a guy who ran one of those skim-off-the-rounding-error programs (this was quite a few decades ago, yeah). He would have been caught eventually, no doubt, but when he turned up for work one day in a very expensive red sports car, management knew to check things very thoroughly immediately, and sysops found his code change and the digital trail from it back to his terminal within a few hours of knowing to look!

A good example of how smart investigation can bring in results.

No pervasive data-trawling access of the entire citizenry required!

Re: Tax avoidance

Don't take this as currently true, as it is 2-decades-ago when I saw an interview with an ATO spokesperson conveying this information, but the Australian Taxation Office has (had at the time) exemptions to handing over details on what citizens claimed as their sources of income, even under subpoena.

Re: "Regularly video call your inner circle of admins so you know they're not feds"

And even if you black the camera on your side, your Lieutenants may not be too keen on their real faces being known to you!

Bug-hunter faces jail for vulnerability reports, DuckDuckPwn (almost), family spied on via Nest gizmo, and more

My house is so smart it will never talk to hackers, crooks or perverts.

Or even to me. It is far to smart to consider any human meat-bag worth even acknowledging the existence of, let alone doing mundane tasks for - "You have legs and fingers, flick your own damned switches." is all I ever got out of it early-on.

You got a smart speaker but you're worried about privacy. First off, why'd you buy one? Secondly, check out Project Alias

Nice

My niece was talking about 'customising' (re-casing) an Alexa or similar the other day while I was supervising her Arduino-fying of her toy Light Sabre. I cringed a little at the thought (not the re-casing, but the spy-device itself). I will file this possibility away for when she is ready for something a little more advanced than making her light-sabre go rainbow-colored - it is actually meant to be just one color, but changeable via a dial, but we were playing with the addressable-LED sample code, which we now fully intend to leave in as an option (Darth FABULOUS! mode) !

Re: Exercise

Yes, they did a documentary about it called Wall-E.

Re: Tinfoil hat central right here

They don't have to care about your porn habits - they have computers for caring on their behalf!

I studied hard, I trained for years. Yay, now I'm an astronaut in space. Argggh, leukemia!

Re: viri?

Heh. If what I said was understood without unreasonable difficulty or ambiguity, it was a correct use by the actual purpose of human language. :-P

(But I have noted your correction and may even remember it for more than the rest of the day!)

You are largely correct: the particular disease that took them down isn't specified (the narrator says 'bacteria', but I am not sure they differentiated between bacteria and viri back then, or even if medical scientists did, if the journalist-narrator would).

"But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow."

Though since the story is explicitly presented as the narrator's interpretation of events, and since he didn't have access to the details of conditions on mars, what he described could have been an educated guess and it could actually have been space-travel-immune-defficiency. .... Or that the Martians had bought whole-sale into the Anti-Vaxer movement, for that matter! :-P

Well that gives an interesting perspective on why H.G.Wells' Martians died - it wasn't that they had no diseases on Mars, but that their immune systems were severely depleted by their journey here!

...

On another tangent: "In space, no-one can hear you sneeze!"

I'm a crime-fighter, says FamilyTreeDNA boss after being caught giving folks' DNA data to FBI

Re: Proof of ownership?

Last stat I saw was around 5% of newborns' blood types don't match what the father could have produced, with a general extrapolation to another 5% probably also not related despite having got a credible typing. Fairly consistent across-the-board for culture, income, and most other factors too.

I say that as someone who had a genetic male progenitor, but not a father in any meaningful sense after age 3, for reasons mentioned above.

Apple files yet another appeal against $503m FaceTime patent payout

New advertising slogan:

"They sued us so much, we bought the company."

Canadians moot methods to embiggen moose monument and make Mac great again

The Moose...

Is loose!

PSA: Disable FaceTime. Miscreants can snoop on your iPhone, Mac mic before you pick up call

Re: Bug?

You need a Penguin a day to keep the Apple away! :-P

Apple: Trust us, we've patented parts of Swift, and thus chunks of other programming languages, for your own good

Re: Genuine Question

A quick poke-about on the 'net indicates what I am thinking of may have been the idea of filing a Provisional Patent, with no follow-up to turn it into an actual patent, leaving the 'art' in their database.

"The Encyclopedia any Idiot can Edit" also describes Defensive Publication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_publication , though I don't think that would get you out of the need for eventually lawyering up in the modern patent offices' "throw it at the wall and see if it sticks" attitude to prior art.

Re: Genuine Question

I vaguely recall some archaic process via which you can, for a significantly reduced fee, register an idea with a patent authority without requesting an actual patent.

Anyone know what this is called, assuming it still exists anywhere?

Re: SUN once said the the same positive things about Java Patents and licensing structure

I don't see why not! At least they are able to do *something* well, which puts them ahead of most candidates!

Re: Daniel Belin is right

"Stole" is a bit strong! They could certainly be accused of stealing popular credit for inventing it, but I'm pretty sure they had an open 'go ahead and use these ideas' from Xerox. That was sort of the point of Xerox inviting them (among others) over for a look-see in the first place.

As to them trying to sue anyone for 'copying' the GUI concept from them, yes they very much deserved to be thoroughly trounced on that one, though!

Raspberry Pi Foundation says its final farewells to 40nm with release of Compute Module 3+

Re: What do you destroy

Follow-up to "Will it Blend": Will it Plug-and-fry!

My chemical romance drowns tomorrow's money, warns TSMC: Chip maker's yields rocked by bad batch

Re: "adversely affected by a bad batch of chemicals"

I said *hold* my beer! Not drop it in the batch!

Should the super-rich pay 70% tax rate above $10m? Here's Michael Dell's hot take for Davos

Re: Dell And Trump's Economics

It's like that funny story where all the rich go on strike and the world quickly comes to realise that the rich weren't actually doing anything particularly useful in the first place and just keeps going on without them, the lower-downs who were pulling all the actual weight anyway already knowing how to keep the factories and rail yards working without them because that is what they were already doing anyway.

Annie Round, or something. Atlas Sniffles.

Re: Simple solution to Dell's problem

Weren't the Beatles, at one point, paying more tax than income they were earning?

Whats(goes)App must come down... World in shock as Zuck decides to intertwine Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp

meanwhile in Australia...

Or legally mandating one :-(

Re: Some people have lots of friends, and their friends have friends.

Are we talking actual-people-we-have-met (including met electronically) friends, or social-media-follower friends here?

Six Flags fingerprinted my son without consent, says mom. Y'know, this biometric case has teeth, say state supremes...

Fingerprints are not genetically determined. 'Identical' twins don't have the same fingerprint any more often than two people from completely unrelated families do (which is to say, it is more common than script writers, law enforcement and floggers of tech-woo would like to pretend, but being a twin is irrelevant).

I can hear the light! Boffins beam audio into ears with freakin' lasers

Re: Ain't science wonderful ?

You just have to buy my special dark glasses for your ears!

Oracle robbed just about anyone who wasn't a pasty white male of $400m, says Uncle Sam

Re: Interesting

One would kind of hope companies are hiring the best person for the job irrespective of non-work-related attributes, and paying them fairly for the work they do so they don't then lose their human asset!

Shareholders in public companies obviously aren't as attached to their potential dividends as they probably should be, to keep present management around in the face of such obvious second-rate hiring practices!

I'm not convinced that being a pasty white male automatically makes you in favor of or responsible for discrimination, even that done in favor of pasty white males!

Re: Entire tech industry

I do wonder why people on a work visa like that are not legally required to be paid the same as a local would be paid for the same work. General equal-pay-for-equal-work fairness aside, there would then be no incentive to use work visas for anything except filling locally unfillable roles.

Back in the real world, I imagine some sort of political contributions system would have a lot to do with the status quo.

Users fail to squeak through basic computer skills test. Well, it was the '90s

The mouse-waving guy was just ahead of his time.

Should have patented the concept of the "Air Mouse".

(I assume that's how they work, having never owned one but seen them advertised all over the online cheapie shops).

Re: Not sure...

In my experience, electronics don't have an issue being washed provided they are properly rinsed and thoroughly dried before applying power again (having no power includes removal of any batteries, including tiny RTC ones!). Proper drying generally requires a *complete* dis-assembly, too, which might not be worth the time required.

The problem with the article's wet mouse was most likely that there was still water in it when it was plugged back in, which is never good!

Straight outta Blighty: Readers, if you were a tech billionaire, what would you do?

Re: What's Brexit?

A new brand of high fiber wheat-based breakfast biscuits. Keeps you regular.

So this is how that terrifying killer AI will end us... by pushing us down hospital wait lists?

Re: Easy answers are wrong :)

Maybe they could make radiology a more appealing career to follow?

Where is this supply/demand pricing thing the hard-nosed capitalists keep insisting is the panacea to all the world's woes?

Re: Gets smarter..

Well, technically human medical staff have already been doing that since before recorded history. It's called triage.

It sucks (for the medical staff who have to make the calls, too!) but without infinite resources it is inevitable.

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

Re: I can believe it!

Heh, a student here, for his art project, had rigged up an old color copier so you could scan your face (it was installed in public, so no butts please!) and it would output the scan with a comment about your apparent mood printed across it.

Being a tech head, I was racking my brain trying to think of how a smart, but relatively non-technical, user had managed to hack that feature into the copier!

The answer was he had loaded the paper tray with paper pre-printed with words sufficiently wishy-washy that they could relate to any face scanned on to them, printed-side-down and oriented so it came out correct-way-up to look like the word was printed at the same time as the face-scan was.

I'm just the tech. support, so don't assess student work, but I hope he got full marks for that piece of simple genius!

Re: I can believe it!

No, scattering paper all around is the users' job.

Stage fright or Stage light? Depends how far you dare to open your MacBook Pro's lid

Re: Rinse and repeat

Good points, John and Dropbear.

My general experience with the entirety of the IT/CE market is that price is not a good indication of quality.

I've had expensive quality

I've had expensive rubbish

I've had cheap quality

I've had cheap rubbish

Only the second of the above bothers me, but it is probably the most common.

Re: Rinse and repeat

They said that it could not be done.

He laughed, and said he knew it.

And when he tried that thing that couldn't be done,

he found he couldn't do it!

....

On the one hand, yes there are plenty of cases where "can't be done" is just conservative* laziness. On the other hand, sometimes it is genuinely not possible. The key skill is pushing hard enough to get past the first, but not digging in to ruin yourself against the second!

*Warning: this word is not being used in a political context. I shouldn't have to point that out but suspect I need to!

Struggling with GDPR compliance? Don't waste money on legal advice: Buy a shredder

Re: GDPR marker pen ?

I can probably arrange a supply of GPDR-approved Lighter Fluid and Match.

Stalk my pals on social media and you'll know that the next words out of my mouth will be banana hammock

I don't have any friends. .... Will you be my friend? ( The really creepy coat is mine ----> )

(This one is also a good response to any marketing types that ask if you have any friends that might be interested in their crud! ... especially if you don't feel like going full Arthur Dent vs Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser that day.)

Looks like Uncle Sam has pulled its finger out and appointed a Privacy Shield ombudsperson

The Leader of the Free World (TM) probably just thinks it is something to do with Captain America.

We all love bonking to pay, but if you bonk with a Windows Phone then Microsoft has bad news

Re: Lost me at the headline

Are there houses of ill repute that accept NFC? So you can bonk to pay for a bonk?

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

Re: Concerning big brother move

Ads don't really bother me (or at least, if they get so obnoxiously in-my-face that they do, I go look for a less shitty site to spend my time on). But this is almost certainly going to also trample on privacy and malware protection and that is unacceptable to me (and I imagine anyone else on this board, irrespective of their views on advertising).

(Icon for Google et. al., not OP)

Even in the absence of good browser alternatives, I'd take a bad one over this!

Ooh, my machine is SO much faster than yours... Oh, wait, that might be a bit of a problem...

I liked the 'speed' indicators where the numbers displayed on the 7-segment LED pair in each mode ('turbo'/normal) was simply set with jumpers or DIP switch banks on the back. You could make your PC run at any speed up to 99MHz!

Edit: I just looked in my store room and I still have some of those little boards rescued from EOL gear many decades ago!

Re: we'll use wireless as it'll be cheaper

My networking training included a component on wireless which included practical exercises clearly demonstrating why wireless networking was good for stop-gap and difficult-to-cable-to solutions but wholly inadequate as a general replacement for cabling in any serious install.

Clone your own Prince Phil, says eBay seller hawking debris left over from royal car crash

Re: and if they were the only one left?

I imagine for that to be the case, Britain's population would be decimated (in the Roman sense of the word), and people might have more significant things to worry about!