Posts by doublelayer

Boss broke servers with a careless bit of keyboarding, leaving techies to sort it out late on a Sunday

Re: Bosses shouldn't touch stuff...

"Along the way I had a few mighty 5MB and 19 MB, and, dare I say it, 40MB hard drives. And some diskpacks, ranging up to the incredible, no way we could ever fill that up, 300MB."

I've heard stories like this before, and I have to ask whether that was true. Not so much for a 300 MB disk, as I can see how that would look pretty large compared to files, but people who express similar sentiments with 5-20 MB drives. I know I'm demonstrating my relative youth, a serious blow to my standing in this community, but did anyone who got such a disk really think it would be hard to fill that? A novel consists of about a hundred thousand words, probably with an average length of about six letters. So storing just a text file of a novel would use up an eighth of a 5 MB disk. Even with a 20 MB disk, you could store 40 uncompressed books if we're being charitable. The fact that this disk stores less information than my bookshelf would probably have made me think I could fill it up if I wasn't careful to compress and prune data.

Yes, I know you weren't storing novels on the disks, or at least you compressed them first, but business documents and memos are also on paper and stored on bookshelves so the parallel is still direct. Maybe I'm just not understanding what you were storing those days.

CT scanning tech could put an end to 100ml liquid limit on flights by 2024

Other things to drink, toiletries that are liquids for longer stays than those tiny bottles work, probably some medications though fortunately not any I've ever needed, any liquid you intend to give someone (probably likely to be alcohol but who knows what people choose). Other options are available. I've certainly carried things through before where people would probably find it a bit strange, but all it has to do is fit the categories "I have it", "I want it there", and "It fits in my suitcase".

Low code is no replacement for software development, say German-speaking SAP users

Re: Could not be more right!

I don't think starting with coding necessarily means eliminating the thinking, and in fact doing it the other way around may not work. You need some understanding of how something can be done before you can successfully implement the solution, so learning what code does and where some limits are helps when teaching how to solve a problem with it. If you start with problem solving, you have to talk in generalities. You could say "there are limited resources so be aware of what you have to use efficiently and what you can waste harmlessly", but if they've been taught about the mechanics, you can give useful examples like showing them how much certain things use in RAM or CPU time and demonstrating how those limits come into play. You need to learn both, but practical details help give non-theoretical examples that can help get the lessons understood.

Guess the most common password. Hint: We just told you

This approach defends against blindly throwing common passwords at it, but little else, and even with that there are problems as other replies have already explained. It does little against password reuse where an attacker obtains credentials from somewhere and tries one or two of them on lots of sites, as a successful access will log them in almost immediately.

You might respond that this doesn't require basic passwords, and you would sometimes be right, but it still increases the likelihood of an attack. If I use a secure password and the site doesn't properly salt and hash the passwords, I'm still out of luck and shouldn't have reused it, but if I use a simple password, whether the site does or doesn't hash them, they will be crackable from the leaked database quickly enough that they're likely to be used. Don't reuse passwords and don't use "Password" as the password to anything. Not all the high-security constraints are necessary, and enforced changes can be harmful, but the basics are still right.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

If, for example, you're a person who makes their money by having a bunch of people engaged in something, you might use Twitter to attract customers or to generate fans. This is more likely the case for people who make their money by making music, art, or other media where the profit is determined by the number of people who view it. Not so much for those here who mostly make our money from making computers do stuff for people who have money they're willing to give us, so it seems unlikely, but there are more people in the former group than it would seem. I imagine some of them will suffer from this and end up relying more on other social media companies, although it's a thing they can and should be planning for since it doesn't look like things are going to stop.

Too soon? Amazon commissions FTX mini-series

Re: Surely that's prejudicial contempt?

Reporting on things you already know isn't a problem unless you're required not to disclose something for legal reasons. Since these are third parties, anything they know will already be public knowledge. Anything they make up will be fiction (they'll label the show as "inspired by a true story" to indicate that it's mostly lies that worked nicely in the script) which they will claim doesn't mean anything, and if it is likely to prejudice a jury then the lawyers for both sides will agree that they'll disqualify any possible juror who has seen the show. So probably it's not going to cause much of a legal problem unless someone involved decides to sue for defamation, but probably not the most accurate source of information about how FTX worked.

New York cracks down on carbon fuel-based crypto-mining operations

Re: Crypto currency would go away if

You want the gold standard? No problem. There's a reason that countries stopped doing it, and it wasn't just because they want to print money for free, but if you want it, you can have it. You don't need cryptocurrency for it either. People have been advocating for its return for some time, and they found a way to get it: pay with gold.

In most places, you can carry as much gold as you like, you can pay banks to store excess gold, and you can give people gold. All you need to do now is start carrying it and convince people to take it in exchange. If you want to use cryptocurrency, you have to do both of the same things. If you don't like using gold, use any other metal you like. You asked for copper coins, so get some copper and pay with that. Of course you may find that your copper fluctuates in value with relation to gold, but that's what you get when using mineral currency. I'll also point out that copper wasn't coined (as in used for its monetary value) under the gold standard. It was made into coins which were valued in gold. Your suggestion might end up being even worse than the gold standard, but you can have it.

Alright, I'm back for the next point, specifically this allegation: "One [cryptocurrency] being oppressed by the government."

You need to learn what oppression is like. Here's a hint. Being regulated for environmental damage is not oppression. The same things apply to any large power-hungry industry. If someone wanted to set up an aluminium smelting operation in New York, they'd need permits and would be heavily regulated. Smelting uses a massive amount of power and produces pollution. Running a coal powered mining operation does both of the same things. There's a reason you need permits and why such things are limited.

Here's what oppression would look like. If the U.S. wanted cryptocurrency to die, they would ban transactions in it. Or they could create new tax laws to take it. Or they would ban mining outright, rather than just restricting building power plants for the purpose. Some people would welcome those moves, but I would not. There's a marked difference between those moves and a sane and entirely precedented environmental regulation. Painting this as oppression suggests you either have no idea what oppression is or that you feel there would be a benefit in advertising something with fake enemies. Far from oppressing cryptocurrency, most countries have been facilitating it both directly such as the incentives given by Kentucky in this article or indirectly through lax regulation on connected industries allowing legitimate exchanges and scams alike to thrive.

Re: What is in it for Kentucky?

The politician can make the following statements based on the cryptomining operations:

1. Anyone mining coal: look, I've made it so these coal power plants will never shut down by attracting users. Your jobs are safe. Don't think about whether that's actually likely given how easy it is to move the equipment.

2. Anyone unemployed: look, I'm attracting new industries to this area, both in running plants and operating mining equipment. Don't think about how many jobs that actually is.

3. Anyone in state government: look, by giving them a tax break, I've attracted the business of people who make lots of money. Imagine how much they could bring to the local economy that's still taxed. Don't think about the fact that none of the rich people are actually needed here to run their expensive equipment.

4. To opponent for next election: look, under my leadership, we're bringing high-tech industries and jobs to revitalize our economy. Don't think about the fact that the high-tech part was written by programmers and made by ASIC designers all over the place and is done now.

That is unless the cryptocurrency investors cut out the political angle and gave the politicians a more direct incentive to be nice with the taxes.

Re: Power plants don't have an on/off switch

You can let cryptominers or anyone else you want use this excess. There's a big difference between that and letting them turn on new power plants for their own steady use. One of the differences is that cryptominers don't tend to want to do the former if they can do the latter. While they can switch on or off at will, they've bought equipment and they want to run it as much as they can. Being told to turn off now because demand is increasing isn't something they want, which is a reason the rich ones have been buying power plants.

These people aren't running power plants because the rest of the grid needs them. In some cases, they're not even connected to the grid. They're running the plants for their own use, and as with any particularly costly activity, governments regulate such things.

"Or is this too conspiratorial?"

Sorry, but yes it is. Some of your arguments would have some validity if it weren't for two problems: you haven't done anything to calibrate your assumptions and cryptocurrency isn't working.

We'll start with the one about datacenter power usage. They use a lot of power to run a lot of things. Not all datacenter power bills are to run the financial system, in fact few of them are for that. However, you assume, based on not looking up any numbers, that cryptocurrency mining is a lot less. While identifying which servers are part of the financial industry is hard, it's not hard to understand that something that uses power on the scale of a developed country isn't going to be dwarfed by much. An argument for cryptocurrency gave a number of 26 TWH for financial industry server usage in 2020. I don't know where they got it, but they're arguing for cryptocurrency being small in comparison, so let's let them have their number. Bitcoin mining, note not all cryptocurrencies, used 90.6 TWH. Not small in comparison. The people arguing for cryptocurrency used various other estimated numbers to try to bring the finance industry up, such as estimating power used by bank branches (valid, but hard to guess at) and payment terminals (invalid, as cryptocurrency would need terminals as well). Even with all their numbers taken into account, including invalid ones, the finance industry used 125% of Bitcoin's usage.

Let's also consider what that difference entails. The finance industry does a lot of things wrong, which it can manage because it does a lot of things. It manages transactions from nearly everybody to nearly everything. Cryptocurrency doesn't. Cryptocurrency is not used for average transactions on the scale of existing systems, or by anything near as many people. Except with a massive overhaul, cryptocurrency cannot serve the purpose of the financial system without scaling up a lot, with significantly more power usage required.

This comment got long, so I'll leave it here and come back to other parts later.

New SI prefixes clear the way for quettabytes of storage

In order to fit the exapartition that would make, you're going to need a new kind of partition table. If we scale it in the same way that GPT does, that will take us from needing 16 KiB for GPT's current 128-partition limit to needing 128 EiB for the partition table assuming we don't want any more. That is unless you're comfortable nesting partitions and getting the OS to accept and perform well with partitions that contain partitions that contain partitions that contain ... eight levels deep.

Re: 10 to the power 24 (which would be a yottabyte).

It has nothing to do with how many bits are in a byte. You can use decimal or binary multiplication but each will use 8-bit bytes. Meanwhile, if you did have 10-bit bytes, a kilobyte would still be 1000 or 1024 bytes depending on whether you made a disk or RAM. It would store more stuff, and it would have grown from 8 to 10 kilobits, and it would require a lot of hardware and software changes, but those two ratios are independent.

The modification of the prefixes to use 2^10 instead of 10^3 as a factor leads to some interesting names if you use the insertion of "bi" into the second syllable. If you can find a way to pronounce "quebibyte, robibyte, zebibyte, exbibyte, pebibyte, tebibyte, gibibyte, mebibyte, and kibibyte" without sounding crazy, you get a prize.

Re: This is getting silly now

At one point, we didn't need tera as a prefix either. Who has a terabyte of storage after all when disks were 5 MB slabs, and when you get to the point of terameters different units start being used instead. Still, although any one of us could have done it, nobody talks about their 2*10^12 B drives. The shortened forms are useful for brevity if the measurement becomes common, whereas scientific papers can use alternate notations as they have done and still do. You also don't have to remember the units; by the time you need them very often, you'll come to know them. Few average people in the 1980s would have used giga or tera, hence the famous mispronunciation of giga in Back to the Future which nobody would make today, but now that they're more common, people understand what they mean. If we get to the point where we need quettabytes, we'll learn the prefix. Until then, nothing will require you to know it.

Re: This is getting silly now

Except we eventually needed numbers large enough that that wasn't a great solution. A quadrillion is not a number we need very often, but with the frequency with which we use trillion, we are likely to see it cropping up and it does happen now and again. It would get a bit old to call it a thousand million million every time.

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Re: Let it slide

You're proving that you don't understand what time is for.

"We might as well get rid of leap days too. Yes, this will make the new year slide more quickly from the winter solstice, but why should this matter? It's not like people sow and harvest according to the calendar any more."

Because "A January day in Australia" means something about the likely weather these days, but if we let January slide around the year, it stops meaning that thing. We use seasons, and having to look at season tables to figure out what was summer a couple decades ago will make things like predictions about weather and proper categorization of that data harder. And by the way, people do plant by the calendar as much as they once did and more in some cases. They always made adjustments for local conditions to optimize the harvest, but the general time of year is still used very often when deciding when to plant, and the main change is increased use of predicted weather which I've already pointed out relies on a calendar that matches the sun, because the sun is the primary determiner of our climate.

"Time zones are now oddly shaped and some even differ only by 30 minutes from the neighbouring zones (and there are more than 24 zones)."

Yes, and those could be solved best by making them better match geography. You'll get no argument from me about that and if you ever control the world, I'm happy to give you 24 nicely-sized ones respecting borders and we can reserve a punishment for the guy who decided that China (which needs three time zones) would only use one and it wouldn't even be the middle one.

"We could get rid of this complexity by using TAI globally (without offsets). So what if school starts at 14:00 some places on earth and at 04:00 in other places?"

Midnight is the problem. The people around the prime meridian get to be asleep while days change, but everyone else gets the days switching while they're working. If you live in eastern Australia and the days switch at what would have been 10:00, do you stop working in mid morning when Friday ends? It also means that you can describe a time and everyone knows what that means in relation to the day without having to ask you where you were at the time.

"Let us have twelve 30-day months per year, even if this slides by 5.256 days relative to solstice every year."

Ah, so you're looking for months to slide around the solar year every five decades, reversing seasons from summer to winter three or four times in a lifetime. If I ever get to assign people to fix the time system, I'm afraid you're ineligible to work on calendars.

Re: Cop Out

The answer varies for each one. For example, there's a pretty good reason English wasn't used to name FIFA. From Wikipedia, when it was founded, its members were Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. No English-speaking countries on that list, but three where French is an official language.

"Formula One" doesn't look like French to me. The words work pretty well in English. I don't speak French though, so maybe they make marginally more sense there. It was made by the FIA, which is French, which makes sense because it was founded and is still headquartered in Paris.

FINA is the one example on your list that could work, as it was founded in the UK, although like FIFA, it was founded by a bunch of countries of which one (the UK) had English as an official language and two (Belgium and France) had French.

Maybe you should ask about things that weren't created by French-speaking countries if you're looking for gratuitous French usage. I'm not sure you'll find as many as you appear to think exist.

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison

Re: Were people at risk?

Not exactly. They did use existing machines rather than their own, but they weren't conducting the normal tests. Their claim was that they could test on a lot less blood on their machine. In order to hide the fact that they were using someone else's machine, they still collected less blood for use. The reason the competitors' machines use more blood is that you get unreliable results if you collect a lot less and pad the sample with other substances to get it up to volume. They were using reliable machines in a way that produced unreliable results anyway.

As for the results of this, it's hard to know. If the machines reported false positives, the patients likely sought medical attention and got corrected data from real machines. A terrifying and expensive situation, but not a lethal one. The lethal option is that someone used the test and got a false negative thus avoiding necessary treatment, but it would be hard to prove that because they would either have died without getting treatment or looked like someone who didn't bother testing until it was too late. They probably exist, but they're less likely to know it.

Re: And the bum tests?

"She and or her company was was not prosecuted for defrauding customers by charging for non existent technology."

Actually, she was charged with this one. Her COO was too and found guilty. She was found not guilty for reasons I don't understand or support. This was the charge they used to attempt to punish her for harm to patients, and you can also bet that the harm to patients was one of the reasons they wanted to pursue the other charges this far; she appears to have enough barriers to being charged with the direct harm, but she's still going to prison because they pursued charges that worked.

Re: And the patients?

They tried. Some of the charges concerned fraud to patients, essentially selling them useless or harmful tests. Unfortunately, the jury found her not guilty on those charges (her COO did get found guilty on those). I have no good explanation of why they did that, but it now means the chances of using the same charges against her are almost zero (you cannot be charged with the same thing again unless serious flaws were found in the proceedings). There aren't a lot of laws that can be used to charge her criminally, but she could still be sued by patients. I do not know enough to know if there's any chance of that working.

Believer in the technology? No, she was a manager who thought that shouting and forcing people to work would automatically fix any technical or scientific issues. In addition, she was knowingly faking everything that didn't work so she never had to consider whether her idea was possible or feasible given how many smart people couldn't get it working.

Is the idea possible? Sure, eventually. Just as television would have been possible in 1800. Yet if I was running a company in 1800 and insisted that television could be invented if I shouted at engineers enough, none of the necessary technologies would have come to pass. In addition to being happy to commit fraud and to give people inaccurate test results, she was very bad at her job of managing people or or figuring out what advances were feasible and using that knowledge to obtain a real result.

Re: The rich investors deserved it.

A lot of them did. Every time she went to an investor who knew about the industry, they rejected her immediately. That's why she had to carefully find people who wouldn't ask too many questions and who could be fooled by faked financial and medical documents. Even those relatively stupid people asked for such things, but they assumed that when reports from companies or agencies well-respected for financial or medical expertise said the company was good that those reports were real. They were forgeries. Don't assume the investors were so stupid that they didn't look for any proof, as the effort to defraud them was real and serious. They didn't properly investigate and will deservedly lose money from it, but they don't deserve much of the blame.

Twitter set for more layoffs as Musk mulls next move

Re: Requirements

The latter two are monopolies. Twitter is not. It has more rights to do arbitrary things, both positive and negative, than the others would. Financial institutions are prohibited by law from doing that. Google has an obvious monopoly position in search and a significantly dominant market position in browsers, and it knows it would face extreme lawsuits if it did so, which unless they managed to tame the governments making them would likely result in their company being broken apart with a sledgehammer. Twitter does not have a monopoly in social media (the Facebook properties are larger even though they are separate products, for example).

Nvidia faces lawsuit for melting RTX 4090 cables as AMD has a laugh

Admittedly, it's probably running close to idle if it's just handling you typing a message. If you ran CPU and GPU-intensive tasks, that 100 W figure will get a lot higher. I'm not sure what your CPU's limit is, but the GTX750 can consume up to 55 W on its own if you stress it. I agree with you about the power consumption being crazy, and most users will not need anything close to the performance that this GPU provides. Your card has 512 shaders, whereas the one mentioned in this article has 16384 with another variant that goes up to 18176. You have to do a lot to justify something that performant. I'm not a gamer, but even the ones I know don't appear to need that much performance enough to justify the power consumption and cost.

It's not necessarily less important, given that they ran safety systems through that part (they had to recall cars over that system failing because all alert noises only sounded if that system was online). If they fixed that, it would still not be great for them to cut the power to something that is used to display things like views from cameras the driver might be using. The driver should be able to deal with the loss, but that doesn't make them expendable except when absolutely necessary. If the cooling isn't sufficient to prevent the batteries or the control system from overheating, then the only viable solution is to increase the available cooling or decrease the heat produced to a level the existing cooling can handle.

Security firms hijack New York trees to monitor private workforce

Re: Watching the watcher

Is that still true with the use of WiFi and Bluetooth used to obtain more specific data? Those methods, whether we like them or not, have been tried and used successfully for some time, and cities are full of things that emit a signal and don't move which can be used as landmarks for something identifying patterns.

Re: Watching the watcher

If you employ guards, you likely give them a communication method which you control, so you can prevent them from disabling GPS on that device and use that to track them. No less intrusive to them (though how much tracking is justified when you are working is subjective) but it does prevent the work and damage caused by installing tracking devices in trees.

US Supreme Court asked if cops can plant spy cams around homes

Re: re: Quick question... What's a foot?

The UK may have adopted metric units, but they don't seem particularly good at always sticking to them either. I certainly saw plenty of mentions of imperial units before the style change, not to mention that when we have comments written by people from lots of places, we're going to get whatever units the individual writing likes. You can't blame a comment's choice of units on El Reg's writing standards.

How easy is it to simply install that on a whim? Asking for a friend. I also have a feeling that it takes a lot of space and maintenance. Maybe covering the whole house with a massive blanket would work better.

World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course

The only problem was that the situation being joked about was rather plausible. At least with the last round of firings, it was Twitter/Musk choosing which people to fire. That didn't mean they knew what they were doing, but at least such a process could have avoided firing anyone who was obviously necessary to the manager suggesting names. This round has employees choosing whether they're staying in the inferno or bailing out, which means that literally anyone, no matter how critical, could have chosen to leave with effectively no notice at all. It wouldn't be surprising if someone required to maintain physical security left. Those making sarcastic jokes sometimes need to judge whether the situation they're lampooning is plausible enough that their joke makes sense as a statement of fact.

Re: I'm going to need more popcorn

Calculating how long it takes to burn would be difficult as it depends a lot on the shape of the pile, the airflow both at the beginning and as the burning took place, and what if any compounds were used to sustain the flames. I can, however, give you information on the size of the pile.

If you're really good at stacking, you could try putting each banknote directly atop the previous one, and if you could, the stack would be 4805 km in height. Since this would start messing with satellites before you'd even gotten halfway, let's not do that. If we aim for a cube shape, we can get a more manageable pile that measures 36.65 meters on a side. This still requires you to be pretty good at stacking, because that would have over three hundred thousand layers of bills and my calculations don't allow you to have air between those layers.

Conveniently for our purposes, the internet claims that a dollar bill weighs basically one gram. Since I was using size measurements that went to the 0.01 mm precision, I'm happy to have easier calculations regarding weight. With a weight of 4.4*10^8 kg, this pile would need quite a lot of oxygen to successfully burn it all. You'd also want to be very careful what you stacked this fortune on, as that's significantly heavier than the average house.

Koch-funded group sues US state agency for installing 'spyware' on 1m Android devices

Re: how the software got on the phone

The Play Store app does not have to ask permission to perform an installation, and that was the mechanism used according to reports from the time (I didn't know about it then and just looked them up now). The ones I've read don't say who asked for the installation or how it got to that stage, but it was sourced from and installed by the Play Store app. If that's installed as a system app, so basically any device with Google Play Services installed as part of the image that hasn't been replaced, then it can bypass the need for notifying the user about installations, something a user-installed installer can't do.

Re: What about the mandatory installation of Facebook?

Not that different, but the reason they won't be sued is that you could have checked whether Facebook was on it before purchase, whereas this was added to devices that previously didn't have it. I'd really like for preinstallation of that kind to be illegal, but we don't have a law that does that. I'd also like for root access so such things could be removed to be mandatory, but I won't count on getting that either.

Re: ASSuming

A search seems to indicate that an app was certainly installed automatically using the Google Play updates. Some reports also indicate that it would be reinstalled if removed. What is less clear is whether the app that was installed was given access to the user data claimed by the lawyers or what it did without the users opting in. A Google statement from the time says that the app, while installed, was not activated, but that could mean anything from not running at all to not presenting warnings but doing everything else. The lawyers will have to prove what the app did and when it did so, but that it was installed doesn't seem easy to disprove.

"Now, on the whole, the right are more likely to be COVID deniers but in this instance I don't care about that. The State did wrong and it needs to be on recorded at court that they did wrong,"

This is an excellent summary and deserves repeating. Possibly some of the people doing this have other objections to COVID policy which aren't justified, but the pandemic did not justify any action like the one alleged by the state government. Unless the state can prove that the allegations are simply false, it was unjustifiable and needs to be punished harshly so the next person who thinks up the idea, whatever purposes they envision for their spyware, knows it will not be allowed.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: What were people expecting?

"I am curious to know exactly what value are these staff providing to Twitter a loss making company?"

A lot of them were doing the things needed to make any money, for example finding and working with advertisers, preventing the thing from being so horrible that advertisers ran away from it, or maintaining the infrastructure so it stayed operational. Probably there were many who weren't being useful. Only problem is that you can't figure out who is doing useful things and who isn't in a few days, which is all it took to start massive waves of firings. If you fire people at random, you could easily find that the loss-making company has started making losses much more quickly.

"Isn't it somewhat disengenious to complain about Elon when all of ths staff were sold out by the previous owners?"

How exactly were they sold out? By selling the company to him? They tried blocking him repeatedly. It didn't work. By the time they decided to make the sale, he had done enough damage and the owners wanted their payout so much that there wasn't much choice left, and few people had the power to prevent any of it. None of those people were the employees.

Re: Tonight's Headline

I think that's true in many countries, including the U.S. In practice, however, if the attackee declines to participate, most police forces won't decide they care unless it's a big crime (you couldn't use that to get out of a murder investigation, for instance). Also, if they need the attackee to testify and they don't agree to do so, they may have trouble actually proving a crime. It's not that they are forbidden from pursuing a case if you don't have someone who agrees to, but that if everyone agrees that they don't want to do anything, the police usually don't have a reason to ignore that and proceed anyway.

Similarly with NATO, any NATO member is free to decide that Poland was attacked by whoever and they're going to fight a war over it, but if Poland doesn't make an official request, it's very unlikely that any will.

Re: Tonight's Headline

Russia's missiles have been hitting all over Ukraine, including the Polish border. Ukrainian defensive missiles therefore need to intercept Russia's incoming missiles in all of those places, including the Polish border. It's not that difficult for a missile from either side to land on the other side of a border near which they're already firing. As Ukraine's missiles are being fired only when and because Russia's are being fired, the responsibility can be placed on Russia even if it was Ukraine's missile that went awry (though the person aiming it might get a remedial course depending on exactly why it went off course).

Re: The Twitterverse will soon be silent

I sometimes wonder why people leave things this late to renew domain names. After all, there's no chance they're not going to want it and if they did go bankrupt, it's still a more valuable domain name than in general. Renewing the thing for several years is so cheap there's no harm in doing it.

Re: Fair

I don't use these services, and I wouldn't object if they simply ceased to exist. Other people do like them, and they want them, and people know they could make money by giving those people what they want. Whatever you may think of them, it's not us who get to decide if a replacement is made. If the original falls, there will be many attempts at replacing it and we will have to deal with that, whether we like it, hate it, or are indifferent.

Re: Tonight's Headline

"Why would the same rules not apply to a different non nato country attacking Poland?"

For two reasons. First, because it only matters whether the country being attacked wants to do something. The same reason that, if you punched me, I could decline to press charges and tell the police that it's fine and they would leave you alone. There is no requirement that anything that could be considered an attack gets an instant response.

The second reason is that it appears accidental. Even when I heard the initial reports that it was a Russian missile, my initial thoughts were that this was not a deliberate attack on Poland but a missile intended to hit Ukraine that missed. Certainly something Poland would have complained a lot about, but not necessarily worth starting a world war about. Calling in NATO to discuss it would have been a way to indicate to Russia that a mistake like that was really not good and bad things could happen if they weren't careful. If the newer reports that suggest it could have been a Ukrainian missile trying to shoot something down prove correct, it is still an accident and not likely to start a war. As I'm not Poland, I cannot say what their government would have or will do under each case, but that's a pretty good reason why they would choose a different action, which contrary to your statement is entirely within the rules.

Swiss bankers warn: Three quarters of retail Bitcoin investors are in the red

Re: Not surprising

Yes. Depending on your country, they may be more or less common, but about 62% of adults in the UK have one. Other countries vary, from Canada's 83% through the U.S.'s 66% and Germany's 57% to India's 4% (it goes further down, but I'm looking for countries where most El Reg readers are). Perhaps you're in one where credit cards are less common, but although you don't need them, they're reasonably common in many places.

Re: Hang on a minute

It can't go down by more than 100%, but the sentence refers to it going up by more than 100%, which is more possible. It went down by 73%, which is within the 0-100% possible range for it going down (unless you're willing to have it go down by a negative rate instead of going up).

Re: surprised

No, not like a Ponzi scheme. It could be like a scheme, but the specific type would be a pump and dump scheme. The different schemes have very different executions which leads to differences in detection and recovery. Importantly, a Ponzi scheme requires a central operator taking Ponzi's place, and a pump and dump scheme can work without one with individuals working, either in concert or without coordination but to the same effect.

It might also not be a scheme at all, given that the major difference between a pump and dump and a bubble is about the private thoughts of participants. Definitions are important.

Re: FTFY

I suppose, but those "ownerships" aren't exactly very useful. With a stock, you own a piece of a company that will never listen to you about what it is doing and which the company can damage with little risk. With wine or art, I hope you actually bought it to enjoy that aspect, because if you bought either with the hope of making money and you can't, having an expensive liquid to drink won't help much if you don't appreciate the qualities that make it so expensive and you can get something nice to look at for much cheaper. Every investment comes with some risk, so I wouldn't automatically assume that something having a more obvious tangible value means that much. This doesn't mean that cryptocurrency is good (I recommend that nobody buys it as an investment), just that tangible value is no guarantee of anything.

Re: Not surprising

At one point, setting up a relationship with a broker did require the minimum deposit that you claim. Today, not so much. Online trading platforms have significantly reduced minimums and fees such that several of them have values of zero for both. Trading stocks or other exchange-traded things for a retail investor is significantly easier than cryptocurrency in many ways, although it's not really that more likely to work out. People who are new to investing often don't know what they are doing, and that holds true for stocks and cryptocurrency. Stocks are less volatile most of the time, so they're less likely to lose everything immediately, but not guaranteed at all.

Your reference to GME (to other users, an American company GameStop which was talked up by an online message board and had a surge in activity in 2020) suggests you should already know this. After all, people were buying that stock without having a clue about it. Some people suggested a reason the company could have more value. Their suggestions weren't understood and could have been lies designed to get others to buy it and increase the price so that the original buyers could sell at a profit. A lot of people made money from that. A lot of people lost it. The stock is trading 94% below its peak during that craziness. This is the chaos that comes from people gambling (it could be called investing for people who studied the situation, but since they didn't, it's no different) with things they don't understand and, in most cases, make no effort to learn about. If you put a lot of your money into something, it's useful to know something about it.

Re: Not surprising

I'm guessing you have had debt, specifically a credit card. If you use a credit card like I do, essentially just as a way to make payments with all bills being paid off in full as soon as they come in, this counts as repeatedly taking out debt for a few weeks and successfully paying it. This establishes a history of credits without you having to pay any interest and is one of the safest way to increase a credit score. You are more likely to have gotten good credit terms with a history like that than if you have never used a credit card and literally have no credit record for banks to look at. You could have gotten one even under those conditions just with information about your job, savings, and income, but given that you're online and probably in a developed country, I think it's likely you have a credit card somewhere that you use.

Arm shells Qualcomm's Snapdragon launch party with latest salvo in license war

Re: Qualcomm RISC-V "KomodoDragon"

Yes, it would. It would also be interesting if Russia announced it was splitting itself into three countries and immediately ending its war in Ukraine, both in the good event sense and the lots of changes sense. That's not going to happen either, definitely for now and probably not in the long term.

Commercial companies wanting to sell chips don't put their designs in the public domain. The best case scenario is that they lose a ton of business. Qualcomm's interest in RISC-V is also not advanced enough for them to announce SoCs shipping very soon either. Designs take a lot longer to go from initial development to fabbed and ready for sale. Making stuff up doesn't help with anything.

Commercial repair shops caught snooping on customer data by canny Canadian research crew

Re: Hmm

It's still illegal to look under the CFAA in the United States. Finding files without snooping is a grey area, but reading lots of files, even if they do contain evidence, is not permitted when the service being performed doesn't require it. Whether or not a crime was committed, and based on the actions of law enforcement there has been no confirmation, searching a drive is already illegal.

This is why I don't use them

As with most of you, I'm approached by many people who know me asking me to fix their machines, and as with some of you, I'm not always thrilled with the prospect of doing what could be quite a lot of work for free. People like those mentioned in the article is one of the reasons I still accept each request when it comes in. Even when I don't want to. I've seen way too many repair techs who violate the customer's privacy or who do very shoddy work (the kind of person who thinks wiping and reinstalling Windows with no backup counts as successful repair). Meanwhile, since I have the skills concerned, I also don't know any repair techs I know I can trust. I therefore can never recommend someone to go to get a device repaired at a shop and would usually advise against it, so much that I take on the work if they don't have another technical friend because there's no options left.