Posts by doublelayer

Guy is booted out of IT amid outsourcing, wipes databases, deletes emails... goes straight to jail for two-plus years

Plenty of small places have only one admin. Some very small places have no admin. I, for example, am a volunteer admin for a charity near me. Other than me, they have nobody, outsourced or not. When I arrived, their server was running on the "it better not fall over because nobody knows what it does or how its configured or the login password" paradigm. So it isn't that unusual to have only one admin, or at least one admin who manages all the systems with lower-level admins who do specific systems or systems in specific places. And I could destroy all this place's data in about five minutes should it turn out that I'm evil.

'This repository is private' – so what's it doing on the public internet, GE Aviation?

Re: DNS problem only?

The DNS in question would be the internal one for the company, for example instructing the actual public systems that the hostname could be found on a given internal system, and thus allowing a tunnel into the network to be created when that wasn't really desired. The other option is that some DHCP or static routing misconfiguration reassigned the server to a public IP and nobody noticed because DNS still resolved the hostname properly.

I have to say, though this isn't exactly on topic, that this is pretty much the only thing I'll miss when IPV6 takes over. It's nice to have specific IP ranges that won't be available publicly. Yes, I know that I can run an IPV4 network and NAT out to an IPV6 one, and that I should be firewalling anyway, but private space is nice because I know that, should the firewall be misconfigured, unsolicited traffic still won't be able to reach the server because the address can't be routed to.

Chinese government has got it 'spot on' when it comes to face-recog tech says, er, London's Met cops' top rep

I don't know what calculations you tried, but I think you're missing a variable necessary for the calculation of the false negative rate, namely the number of people in the sample who were supposed to be detected. Given that the sample was "the public" and the number of faces in the database is known but the number of people in the database who were actually there is entirely unknown, I would say that, even with an estimation of total sample size that we can assume is completely accurate, we cannot determine or even estimate the false negative rate.

I have no objections to judging the system as crap right now for its abysmal success rate and the unjust plans for its use.

Re: China's not England

"Its really just an upgrade of the traditional PC Plod who knows everyone on his beat"

It isn't and I at least wouldn't want that either. Facial recognition isn't a police officer seeing a person and going "That guy is typically here". It's a system that records my presence, possibly reports me as someone I'm not, then keeps my picture on file and cross-lists it with any other pictures from other places and other times, because they've said they're not going to erase any of this data. That's not what a normal police officer does. In fact, a normal police officer shouldn't spend a lot of time identifying unfamiliar people anyway because sometimes we people visit places we don't frequent, and we're perfectly within our rights to do that.

Now let's deal with your contention that this is just an upgrade of the previous role of a police officer. I don't want my police officers upgraded. We've spent a long time trying to give police enough power to stop crime without giving them enough power to harm citizens' rights. There are lots of ways we could "upgrade" the capabilities of a police officer. Let's start with the easy stuff: remove the pesky requirement to get warrants before searching places. That will speed things up dramatically. It will probably also increase the number of criminals arrested, because there are a few people who find out a warrant is being sought and destroy the evidence before the officer gets there. There would actually be some benefits to removing the warrant requirement. The only problem being that WE NEED WARRANTS TO PROTECT PRIVACY! We need a lot of these restrictions on police activity to protect privacy. Without them, the police become a much too powerful institution, prone to massive corruption and criminal activity in their own right. That's a profound downgrade, and we should not let it happen.

Re: Decisions, Decisions...

I "can't blame states" for wanting to control the internet traffic going through them in the interest of state security? I bloody well can, my friend. It's wrong by nearly every metric. It's censorship, violations of privacy, in itself breaks several human rights laws, and opens the doors to many more intense violations typically characteristic of dictatorships. Every country that does that, whether their control is just watching the traffic, blocking traffic, or manipulating traffic, gets as much blame as I can dish out. China, blame. U.S., blame. Russia, blame. U.K., blame. The sooner they cut it out, the better. To the extent I can, I intend to support movements that result in the cutting out of this unjust and completely blameworthy activity.

Got an 'old' Tesla? Musk promises 'self-driving' upgrade chip ship by end of 2019

Re: I like the idea

Personal self-driving cars don't have to be part of a taxi net. It'd be an optional choice you could do to make money. For those who don't need the money and value immediate access to the vehicle, it wouldn't be a very good use case. It'd be sort of the same as allowing people to rent out your normal car if there was a convenient way to let them in, which doesn't sound like a popular program idea to me.

If this were attempted, there would likely be a requirement for dedicated vehicles for that service. In that case, I assume there would be charging stations located throughout the service area. When a car was low on power it would remove itself from the network, drive to charge, and only put itself back online when it had charged. Whenever there were gaps in traffic where more cars were available than in demand, the cars with the lowest charge would drive themselves to the charging stations as well.

Chrome's default-on ad blocker – which doesn't block adverts on 99% of websites – goes global

Brief summary

If you like privacy, or security, or control, or diversity, don't use Chrome. That pretty much covers any Chrome-based article.

Fibaro flummoxed, Georgia courts held for ransom, and more

Re: Lake City IT boss fired for ransomware payment

I concur in your argument, but most people whose job is hiring IT directors have different ideas. Keeping the systems up right now is their primary goal, plus getting new systems up as fast as possible. Thinking about the longterm is on the list but lower. At times, usually for financial reasons, backup plans are specifically left unfunded (no ability on the part of the IT director to reallocate funds to backup from something else). Of course, in that case, I'd at least have an improvised backup system, but I wouldn't support firing the IT director for a backup problem if this was proven to be the case. And then, there are those cases where someone does some misguided maths and decides that it might be cheaper to pay the criminals than to manually recover and a tech site says it's sometimes a good idea, which could also be a decision made by someone external to IT (though if that happened where I'm working, I'd protest the decision and make plans to leave. I admit, however, that these possibilities are unlikely to be the case in this situation.

Re: Lake City IT boss fired for ransomware payment

The story and videos (if watching these, expect to see about ten video ads inserted), make it sound like this, but I'm not sure. It is possible that the insurance company made the decision, but it is also possible that the city made the decision and the insurance company simply covered part of the expense. If the decision was due to the IT person not wanting to do the work of a restore or not having taken backups responsibly while having the ability to do so, I would see firing them as a logical option. Oh, if anyone from Lake City IT is reading this, you're going to want to reimage anyway because ransomware can just sit there waiting for more data to be put in before locking again. Your television station didn't make it clear that you know that, so just to make sure...

Metropolitan Police's facial recognition tech not only crap, but also of dubious legality – report

I'm not a downvoter, but your question is unanswerable and missing the point. Nobody knows how many people were present, as they didn't test it on that. Also, most of us here, myself included, are not that happy having a 80% rate of someone innocent being taken in for questioning on the back of a system that violates citizens' rights.

Re: It's in its infancy, but it will improve

"Pushing back against facial recognition is a bit of a waste of time. [...] Where you need to concentrate the fight is things like generating spurious criminal charges arising from concealing your face. [...]"

I'm not sure whether to upvote you for your last point, downvote you for your first point, or just boggle at how your last point almost directly contradicts your first point. Facial recognition equipment is in the same category as charging people for not letting them use their facial recognition equipment on you. They're two sides of the same coin, yin and yang. Since we both agree that charging people for hiding their faces is wrong, let's look at the first point. Having that equipment allows them to do the same kind of tracking. It makes it impossible for citizens to have privacy unless they specifically try to, in which case they will be charged. It is not a thing we should just accept, because in addition to it actually being illegal according to current laws, it is so unpalatable to those who like human rights that it should be made even more illegal through additional legislation.

Your comment that "Facial recognition is what cops do so denying them the use of a machine that will help do this is just not going to work" is rubbish for two primary reasons. First, there are plenty of things that cops do, and we accept, but we don't want to extend their abilities. Cops search suspects' houses for incriminating information, when they have a warrant. We could extend this by not requiring a warrant, but we don't because we don't want the police to have that power. We only want them to search places when they have a warrant to do so. Second, facial recognition is not the primary job of a police officer. Even those officers who work directly in public and not, say, investigating existing crimes aren't there to look at everyone's face and determine if they have seen it on a list. They're there to identify crimes and safety risks and deal with them. In almost all cases, they have not seen the perpetrator before, but they still go after them. If the police said they were going to throw away this system and instead employ a bunch of officers whose job it was to go to everyone and stare at their face to identify whether it's on a list, I wouldn't be any happier.

Re: It's in its infancy, but it will improve

* You have a personal tracing device in your pocket RIGHT NOW (your phone).

With as much tracking turned off as I can, and if I was worried that people were actively tracking me with it, I'd leave it at home.

* You have listening devices in your home RIGHT NOW (Smart TV, digital assistant, games console...)

None of those. A few things have microphones and internet connections but I've set them up and know what they're doing. If I was worried that people were actively tracking me with them, I'd disconnect either the microphone or the connection.

* You have behaviour monitoring devices RIGHT NOW (activity tracker, internet connect fridge, home automation...)

None of those at the moment, but I once had an activity tracker that I gave away because I didn't use it. It monitored my heart rate during exercise, and could send it to my phone but I never enabled that. So it was a tracker whose tracking data only went to me, and it lacked the technical ability to report on me. If I was worried that people were actively tracking me with it, somehow circumventing the limitations of the device making this impossible, I'd leave it behind.

* You are using facial recognition RIGHT NOW (Facebook, Windows, Apple...)

None of those. I prefer passwords to log into my computer, and no Facebook account. If I did use a facial recognition system, I'd do so in such a way that the recognition was done using local processing on local data only.

* You are happy to be tracked RIGHT NOW (advertising)

I am not happy. That's why I have ad blockers, tracker blockers, and a DNS filter. Even that is tracking for economic purposes, not complete surveillance, so is not as bad an abuse as what has been considered (and done already) by governments.

Re: Help with "Innovative Solutions"

You may be happy for the Chinese to use your data, but maybe you'll change your mind when you figure out that they can use your data to help improve the technology they use to commit massive human rights abuses on someone else. Consider this (audio), for example. That's what they can use data for, and it can come here once they've perfected it and on the way used it to imprison and kill thousands and eventually millions of innocent people. Are you still fine with it?

King's College London breached GDPR by sharing list of activist students with cops

A suggested solution

As a developer, I'd like to suggest a software solution to this. The relevant modules are presumed to have been imported:

def dealwith(employee):

if !employee.ask("Did you have any knowledge of this?"): return

if employee.ask("Did you report this to the relevant authority?"):

authority=employee.ask("What authority was that, then?")

dealwith(authority)

return

supervisor_knowledge = employee.ask("Did your supervisor know about this?")

security.inform("We have another card for you to block out.", employee.cardnum)

hr.update(employee.id, employment_status=hr.NOT_EMPLOYED, flags=hr.DO_NOT_EMPLOY)

employee.employed = False

for colleague in employee.colleagues:

dealwith(colleague)

for subordinate in employee.subordinates:

dealwith(subordinate)

dealwith(employee.supervisor) # security warning, not trusting potentially unreliable result of variable supervisor_knowledge

employee.inform("Oh, dear. Unfortunately, you're going to have to leave now and never come back.")

return

dealwith(email_to_police.sender)

print("Done")

Microsoft has Windows 1.0 retrogasm: Remember when Windows ran in kilobytes, not gigabytes?

Re: 32 Gigs

Most machines in that class have their storage on soldered-on EMMCs. It's flash and not bad from a speed perspective, but nearly impossible to replace. Usually, these are best with a card in the available slot for all user data storage, but things that have to be on the main disk can still rapidly use up the remaining space, especially Windows updates.

Reach out for the healing hands... of guru Dabbs

The confessions of a fixed problem

I have to confess to rather recently doing the thing mentioned in the article. I had trouble with an internal resource loading--Firefox reloaded it a few times then gave up. An email with my colleague resulted in a theory that I didn't have access yet, so the relevant authority was contacted and access granted. Ten minutes after that, I tried to load the site again, with the same result. I tried Edge too; no dice. I decided I wasn't going to sink to installing Chrome on my machine and contacted my colleague again. When his meeting ended, he came over to check on the problem, but when I clicked the link once more, the page loaded completely fine. As it turned out, security grants only get propagated on the hour plus whatever random time skew the machine running it has and whatever delay is caused by the other grants going through that hour. Still, I felt that embarrassment that comes from having someone come over to help with something that doesn't turn out to be a real problem.

Oz watchdog claims Samsung's leak-proof phones ad campaign doesn't hold water

I'm not saying there is a good reason for complete immersion for a while, but two points are, in my opinion, valid:

First, people might really like the guarantee of water resistance if they think they might run into a water-related accident that could kill their phone. I've had that happen before--I was asked by a friend who was away to ensure a filter was running on a swimming pool they managed as they were trying to sell that house, and I slightly missed the edge as I stepped over. My phone did not survive the two seconds of immersion. If I thought that would happen again, I'd get a phone likely to survive. The same could be true of people who go out on boats for a while, people who frequently use their phone outdoors (E.G. navigation) when there are puddles about, or people who worry about being caught in the rain.

Second, Samsung said their phones were waterproof, and showed examples which were wrong. It doesn't matter if we don't really think the uses of the phones are worthwhile if they were intentionally misleading people about it. If I make a drill and say you can drill through stone with it, you better be able to drill through stone with it or I have been misleading. It's not enough to say "Anyone really wanting to drill into stone would get a more professional tool. They should only be using a drill like that on wood." I said it in an advertisement, and fortunately that's one point where it's not legal for me or anyone else to lie.

Google's Fuchsia OS Flutters into view: We're just trying out some new concepts, claims exec

Re: Since Google invented it

You're missing the point. "Google invented search" means that Google invented an algorithm or rather a set of algorithms they used to create a search engine that was better than the others at the time and is still good today. Of course they didn't invent the concept of searching resources. Similarly, Gutenberg invented a useful form of printing press, but didn't invent the concept of printing or the printing press as a type of product. Arguing that he gets the credit for stuff that existed before him would be weird, but so would be attempting to deny him the credit for developing a technology that proved to be a very successful and influential implementation.

Re: A new OS from Google

Of course there is. I have to write a C compiler that's capable of handling every aspect of modern C because somewhere in its massive codebase, Google has definitely used all the things you never think about, oh and also I'll need a C++ compiler too while I'm at it. I also have to write a compiler for dart, go, and rust. However, I'm not worried that they're really compromising the toolchain. I don't actually need the compiled to differ from the source to be worried (though I think it will happen).

First, there will be a bunch of blobs that need to be added to the kernel to get it to do anything. Any or all of these might harbor any malicious functionality, just like now. There is not a good way to avoid that. I'm sure critical functionality will not be available in the open components, and Google will have nicely built all of that in a closed-source component. After a few years, someone will build an open source replacement for it that kind of works a little bit on some apps but you'll have to compile it yourself, root the device, and do some assorted hacking to actually replace it and also it will break a lot. In addition, without the requirement from GPL to release any changes as open source, manufacturers and mobile providers are free to do the same thing to the kernel that they have been doing to the layers above it. Can I say no thanks?

I don't think Fuchsia will be much worse than Android in the sense that consumer devices will contain a similar amount of spyware and irritating or potentially unwanted bits, it will be difficult to impossible to remove or even disable them depending on device model, and very few people would even try. However, given the choice, I would see Android as much better because we already have years of experience getting around some of this. We have Lineage OS, which, for all its flaws and limited device support, is a trustworthy OS that can actually run on a relatively large assortment of devices. At best, Fuchsia means a return to square one to do all this again. But it could be far, far worse.

ReactOS 'a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel', claims Microsoft kernel engineer

Re: @heyrick - Sounds like a bored dev is trying to make a name for himself

If you buy something with terms that say you now own that thing and the original owner agrees, then you own the thing. After that, it's your thing to use as you see fit unless you choose to sell or give it to someone else. For example, Apple wanted a new OS in the late 1990s, so they looked around to find someone who had an OS, which they found. They then bought that one and used it to make OS X. Before Apple bought it, it was the work and property of NeXT and it was nothing to do with Apple. After Apple bought it, it was the work of NeXT and the property of Apple, and after pretty much the same engineers who worked on it at NeXT did some work on it for Apple, it was the work of Apple. If I write some code and then you join my team and we both work on it, the final product is the result of both of our endeavors and we both get the credit. If you pay me to join my team, I still get credit if I did stuff. If you pay me for the rights to the software I had a lot of credit for with the clear idea that you get the IP and rights to sell, then you can decide how it will be sold, including what the price will be, how you'll advertise it, and what name you use.

I got 502 problems, and Cloudflare sure is one: Outage interrupts your El Reg-reading pleasure for almost half an hour

Even if we could magically decentralize CloudFlare and make people write nice HTML or at least store their own scripts, the internet wouldn't be a lot less fragile. The reason for that is that there are very few places that process all our traffic. There's only one line leading to your house that actually works, but that's a short length that isn't the main issue. The issue is that there's only one line that connects your ISP's local unit to whatever center they have for sending it out of local, and only a few lines (or maybe just one) connecting large areas to other large areas. What happens when cables stop working? Large parts of the internet lose connectivity. Routing around that kind of damage requires a web of lines, but a lot of the world operates on chains of lines instead. It's hopeless; the internet can't really route around damage. We just put our systems in lots of parts so we can weather most small disconnects and otherwise we're hoping nothing really bad happens.

This major internet routing blunder took A WEEK to fix. Why so long? It was IPv6 – and no one really noticed

Re: But... why?

I think it was probably something like 2400:xxxx:.../12, I.E. a more specific address that then got truncated by the typo. For example in IPV4, if someone did 12.34.56.78/8, some programs would just assume that to mean 12.0.0.0/8.

Re: 'Why would anybody notice, particularly?'

I wonder though. It's true that an announcement of an IPV4 block gets reported immediately, but what if I did something like this and announced (we're presuming I have the ability to announce and be taken seriously) a new route for a /2 block, which is around the same size as this block? Once again, almost everyone has a more specific route taking them to the various parts of the network, and completely skips what I said. I think it would be noticed a bit faster, but I doubt there would be "discussion on social media within minutes" because it wouldn't break much. The reason the more typical reroutings do get announced so quickly is that either people start noticing the traffic taking a long time and check the route or the new announcement isn't paired with an ability to actually get to the resource meaning things are obviously broken. If my announcement gets ignored, someone has to notice the anomaly manually and deal with it at that point.

What happens in Vegas ... will probably go through the huge bit barn Google is building in Nevada

Re: Desert Solar Power ?

Rooftop solar panels, while they can power a house, would not be at all powerful enough to take the load of a cloud provider's datacenter. They could put a bunch of solar panels on the ground elsewhere, but they probably won't. However, as such a sunny state, there are quite a few people with solar panels connected to the grid supplying solar power at certain points. Nevada is one of the best states in America for renewable energy.

For a source, see this chart with data from 2017 (it seems from a quick search that solar use has been climbing since then). While the sorting (I did the without hydro option) makes it look like Nevada is actually not as great, its proportion of solar/wind to total is about the same as most of the ones that look to be ranked higher. Depending on which column you use, it looks bad not because Nevada isn't working but because they don't have much hydroelectric power and they're not as big as some other sunny states like California.

I don't mean to assign any credit for this to Google, but if they're going to put a datacenter somewhere, this isn't the worst state from the perspective of environmental impact of attaching to the grid.

Edge-lords crack down on trackers as Microsoft effortlessly kills off PBX phone system, and what's this? Windows Calculator on iOS?

Re: Expensive concerts...

The latest IoT isn't usually on something modern either. Usually, your choices are some version of Linux grabbed by the devs at random before they started coding the app, a version of Android grabbed by the engineers from the "tried and tested" AKA "at least two versions behind" group before they started building the prototype, or a custom lightweight OS that they paid an arm and a leg for and never actually gets security updates, but as long as it's not running the grid people won't bother to try to hack.

Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices?

Re: Things that breed ... things that heal

There are always those things that you expect to break but yet somehow hold on for a very long time. I was given a thermometer at one point, the kind that measures the temperature outside with a probe. It was clearly made as cheaply as possible, with lots of parts that really felt like they would fall off if you pushed hard enough. I put this on my window from which I was constantly knocking it, but it withstood very frequent falls to the floor without ever losing a piece. It also managed to last about twelve years on a set of batteries. It's still going strong, despite my firm belief when I got it in 2003 or so that it wouldn't last until 2004.

Or that one that is about five meters long because USB works great at those lengths. No, I don't know where it came from. It kind of works, so I keep not throwing it away in case I finally find a use case for it, the same way I keep various other completely working things that don't require anything strange to operate but I don't have any conceivable use for.

Re: "airborne splinters of razor-sharp shards of metal"

I typically remove the screws to reveal the platters, then simply wedge my screwdriver under the platters and give a sharp yank upward. The platters don't survive many of those, though I recommend enclosing the drive in a bag before doing so to prevent the need for aggressive vacuuming.

There's Huawei too many vulns in Chinese giant's firmware: Bug hunters slam pisspoor code

I don't think these are backdoors, the Chinese military is better than that, but let's look at a few possibilities in general.

If I want to embed a backdoor into something but not get caught, I have a few options. I could do the standard hard-coded credential backdoor. This has to go unnoticed by the public. If it is seen, it can be tracked to me depending on how much the company wants to protect me. A patch will be demanded to remove the credential, and after that's installed, I'm stuck. I might instead choose to use some libraries I know I can break into. I'd use the latest version with the vulnerability I want, and I'd probably leave a few different ones open. I'd make the access mechanism complex so people can't easily stumble on the way in, but this mechanism lets me have deniability because I can play the "incompetence and not malice" card. It also lets me patch one of my vulnerabilities and maybe get away with leaving another one open. It does take more programming skill to implement this well.

That's how backdoors work. The reason I don't think these are deliberate is because coding standards are so bad. If they were in the middle, I'd have some suspicion, but nobody needs openSSL from 1999 to get a backdoor and that's just calling attention to problems. However, there's one more thing to consider.

If you were the Chinese government, and you wanted a backdoor in Huawei equipment, and the company didn't already have one for you and wasn't planning one for you, what would you do? This would be my plan: I'd get a PLA programmer employed at Huawei. The person I chose would be very skilled and knowledgeable about the type of equipment. If possible, I'd train them on Huawei source code, to which I assume the Chinese government has easy access from a government contract or having broken Huawei's corporate security. This person would then insert some carefully crafted vulnerabilities into the code for the devices. Nobody will notice internally; they're letting obviously insecure libraries through. When libraries are updated, this code can remain for quite a while, being disguised by the unintentional vulns left in by poor coding. This would also be harder to detect because so much focus is being placed on understanding all the rest of the codebase that my relatively small addition can last a while without being questioned.

Re: I'd like a true comparison

That is not true. There were points where three manufacturers were compared, and Huawei lost in that comparison somewhat badly. I am more than comfortable assigning the "bad practices used" label to Huawei from this report. My concern is that other manufacturers may also deserve this label, and I'd like to see it assigned out to all who deserve it.

I'd like a true comparison

I would like to see this type of thorough analysis performed on other manufacturers and their products. Not that I doubt the findings here, but problems like this are critical and something needs to be done about them wherever they may be. No manufacturer should be left out of this investigation; it matters little if a bug was introduced deliberately or accidentally if it is used by a malicious party. Whatever your view on Huawei and the American government, this situation is very bad.

The seven deadly sins of the 2010s: No, not pride, sloth, etc. The seven UI 'dark patterns' that trick you into buying stuff

Re: AVG FREE ANTIVIRUS, I AM LOOKING AT YOU.

How about this one that happened to me just a few months ago. My father (he's not reading this, so I can safely call him nontechnical) wants to do something his laptop can't do right now. I find him a good piece of freeware (in this case true free software with code on github, score) that does that. Knowing how search engines work, I give him the address to type in over the phone, no fooling me. The site looks nice and clean, with only one link saying download, so all I have to do is get him to select the x64 instead of the x86 and we're done and I can show him how to use it. The problem is that I have an ad blocker and he doesn't. He clicked on a download link and installed the thing it auto-downloaded (fortunately not malware but definitely not the thing I had in mind). I got him to run a defender scan just in case and removed the unwanted application with extreme prejudice next time I was near. Ads allow people to infect good sites with their nastiness; this is why we need to block them.

Re: think of the children!

In my experience, you can expect the following reviews:

Five stars:

95%: "$Product works great.", and that's it.

5%: "This product is excellent and here's a page on exactly how I use it and what it does."

One star:

80%: "$Product is crap."

5%: "$Product arrived broken [in some way]", with details that seem like it could be the fault of the manufacturer, the shipper, or simple bad luck and you don't really know.

10%: "Product broke after not very long" with even less detail than the arrived-broken people so you really haven't a clue. One time, I read a review of a hard drive (internal mechanical kind) where the user complained that it had lasted only a few months when strapped to a motorcycle, which wasn't exactly the most instructive in estimating its lifespan in something normal.

5%: "This product doesn't work, and here's a page on what I did with it and why it wasn't sufficient."

Those final 5%s on each of those categories are wonderful, but frequently they're absent. That's why I tend to discount all the one and five star reviews of a product if it has enough reviews and focus on those people who assessed it in the middle. Failing that, I weight reviews by length and go with the longest ones I can find. Failing that, I weigh them by use of certain words. I've found that nearly any review mentioning the word "Linux" is useful, even if you never intend to use the product with Linux.

Re: A Prime example

The problem I typically run into is that, while a seller's site may offer lower prices, it also offers a worse experience through and through. Take a market for electronics parts. I place a relatively small order with them, with my bill coming in at the price of a standard meal. My shipping bill was twice my actual purchase price. I was told I could get a discount on shipping (not free shipping, but a discount) if I increased my order to about the price of a cheap laptop. After purchasing, I got my email receipt, but no information about delivery date or package tracking. Frequently, this is not necessary. In my example, I didn't care when the parts got there and I didn't need to be present. However, it is useful that Amazon provides some clarity as to package delivery, and their low shipping prices don't hurt either, aided strongly by the fact that I can buy all the things I want from multiple suppliers at once and they can be shipped to me in one go. If only they could make it so that the search results were relevant to my search query and included one, but not zero or seventeen, of each unique result.

Microsoft: 2TB or not 2... OK, OK! 2TB. OneDrive dragged kicking and screaming into selling more storage

Easy option

Storage providers should really start looking at the $price per gigabyte or multiple thereof option. At that rate, customers who want lots of data can do that, and the company gets paid. They could do the tiny price for a small amount of storage (E.G. $0.012/GB) version or the larger unit version ($1.20/100 GB), and users would simply buy a bunch of data not having done the maths as to how much it costs. This method would seem to give lots of options for making money as well as keeping customers satisfied. I wonder why few major storage providers do it that way.

Re: "Google will take £7.99 a month off you for 2TB of space"

I think the major use case is for storage of video. If, for example, you either need to take video for your job and quickly send it or simply like the experience, cloud storage lets you take video from one location, quickly sync it off-site, store it in a system that has security and hardware managed by someone else*, pull it down in another place whether you're there or not, and maintain a certain amount of old footage for whatever reason the user might have. Since I don't do this, I don't use very much cloud storage. I do use some on a personal server (I think this counts because it works a lot like cloud), because there are sometimes things I want to have available from multiple places or devices, even if I haven't manually copied it to each one.

*Security and hardware managed by someone else, who might do it badly. Cloud is no guarantee of reliability or security or anything for that matter. Terms and conditions apply. Consider multiple factors before purchasing.

EE-k, a hundred grand! BT's mobile arm slapped for sending 2.5m+ unwanted texts

Re: So EE can't now tell its customers to upgrade to a cheaper plan if they've opted out?

It's a marketing message. Even if it would be a thing I'm interested in, it's marketing. If I stopped you on the street today and said I was selling laptops for any piece of scrap paper (always assuming I was being honest), I'd be marketing to you even though you would probably see how many pieces of paper you could find in your bag. This is the deal with advertising. Sometimes, it actually tells people about things they decide they want. Sometimes, it is an annoying intrusion. Those two sets aren't necessarily mutually distinct. This is why we have things like opt out/in methods for customers to tell places whether they want to see the ads; I have opted in to some communications and opted out to others because I've decided what I want to see.

Please stop regulating the dumb tubes, says Internet Society boss

And there doesn't technically have to be. Firefox supports it, but you can use any DoH server you please by changing the config. I've suggested running a system-wide DoH client that performs requests for applications that communicate with it locally. However, I wouldn't expect Chrome to make this easy to change.

Remember that crypto-exchange boss who mysteriously died after his customers' coins disappeared? Of course he totally stole them

That's unlikely. If he was killed by someone else, they would have had to go to a lot of trouble to get the death ruled natural. His business partners and family members, those who are having property taken to make up the debt, would announce immediately if there were any suspicious parts of the death so they could delay or even prevent their property being seized under the theory that whoever was responsible for his death could also have stolen the money. Since they're not doing that, this leaves only two logical options: 1) he actually did die and you figure out the details that make that work or 2) he stole the money and faked the death, and the company either knows about it or have given up on being able to catch him.

While the first option is possible in that he could have lost the money through some other means and then died coincidentally, possibly aided by stress after losing all the money, the second option is a lot more logical, especially with the small number of large withdrawals as described.

Responsibilities

Clearly, he is almost certainly guilty of massive theft and would have to repay as much as he could if we could find him. I'm wondering, however, what responsibility the rest of this company and its employees should or do have. If, for example, no accounting records were kept since 2016, it implies that the employees of the company were not doing their duties to prevent fraud or keep the company functioning. I'm not exactly sure what exactly they were doing before and after all the money disappeared, but it would seem that they have a lot to answer for, potentially with significant fines as well.

Go fourth and multi-Pi: Raspberry Pi 4 lands today with quad 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cores, up to 4GB RAM...

Re: Yay!

I can't really agree with a zero and a 4 being the only models. The zero is great for its use cases as a controller for hardware, battery-powered machine, or headless WiFi device, but it's pretty much useless for everything else. It can't so easily be used for education because the price in getting its weird HDMI (that mini one that is between standard and the small one people decided to use) to connect to a school monitor and the USB OTG cable and hub to get input devices makes it more practical to just use the standard pi for that. The compute module helps people build stuff with the pi, which encourages open source development and helps support the foundation as well.

Re: Worst product launch ever!

Probably not. I'm sure the price for the memory upgrade is somewhat less than $10, but it's not like the pi people are going to be raking it in with the small margin on that. Meanwhile, Apple charge premiums of $100-$250 depending on how much additional memory is installed. Their memory may be faster and thus more expensive, but they are making more profit on them, their devices already have a rather large profit margin, and it tends to rub people the wrong way more often. I don't think that's a major problem, but it's useful to concede that there is a difference.

Re: Pi-top

Given their previous pricing, it will probably be a lot more expensive than it should be. My problem with the PiTop idea is that they're making a laptop without some of the hardware standard on other laptops and yet still at a higher price. Having the pi as the brain is great and all, but I give the pi a lot more credit for that than the enclosure.

Re: Gone is the full-sized HDMI type A connector,

This is nice, and I'm tempted as usual to buy one of these. Of course, the pi continues to walk further in the direction of power problems. I understand why they do it, but it makes it harder. At this point, a strong mains powered device will be almost necessary. Gone are the days when you could power a modern pi from a USB phone charger. The zero can do that, but I don't think anything else produced in the last two years can. Similarly, people now need to be recommended to purchase a dedicated power supply with their pi rather than using the old mains to USB adapter and USB cable everyone has in the closet.

Re: Upton reckons that the 2GB version will be the most popular

For me, I'd only consider the 4 GB or 2 GB models. I have enough of these with only a gigabyte of memory. I have never said to myself "I really need more processing but my memory usage is small". Every time I've been tasking the processor, most of the memory is full, too. For that reason, the 1 GB option holds little appeal. 2 GB and 4 GB would both significantly advance. Of course, I have to put all the pis I've collected over the years to use before I start buying more. Or maybe I'll just succumb to the desire again; who knows?

Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity

Re: Good reason

I can see only two times when a factory reset of a light bulb would be desirable. The first is when ownership over the bulb is about to be transferred. Given that we're talking about cheap light bulbs and not phones or computers, that seems relatively unlikely, although the app reset mechanism would work just fine in this scenario. The second and in my mind more likely situation is that the bulb is not working properly and does not respond to app commands to reset, resync, or reconfigure. In this case, the app can send out its code all it likes and the bulb might easily ignore the reset code because it's broken. The software needed to receive the code is more complex because it has to run the bluetooth receiver and properly decode the result. A simple program in the bootloader that responds to power on/off can run at a lower level, just as a physical reset button could. These options circumvent the problem of a software stack that might break too often. They also introduce the difficulty of flipping switches or removing bulbs from sockets. It's a game of tradeoffs.

Re: Good reason

I think that won't work as well because they need to reset things when they can't connect to an application. Given that, if the bulb can't connect to its app, it's probably well into not functioning territory, it probably won't be correctly using its microphone or light detector. By cycling power to it, the code can be a lot more low-level. Of course, you could have the app play a tone that the bulb listens for when it's turned on, and that could be similarly low-level and would also work.

Re: Good reason

That depends whether these bulbs have some facility for extra power. If they can be removed and stay operational, a reset button would then be safe to include. If not, then you have very few good options. Even if the bulb is in a lamp that doesn't require standing on furniture to reach, it will be rather warm most of the time. It could be configured to reset when removed from the socket, but that wouldn't let people move their configurations from one place to another one. Unfortunately, I have to suggest that turning off and on is probably the best method of resetting the bulb in this scenario. Of course, doing it with less requirement for precise timing and for not that long would really help.

Brave urges UK's data watchdog to join Ireland in probing claim Google adtech breaches GDPR

Re: AI database

Alternate suggestion: don't store them at all. Not in Google's database, not in a normal personal database, not in your whatever-it-may-be database, nowhere.

It's all in the wrist: Your fitness tracker could be as much about data warfare as your welfare

Re: @Splurg The Barbarian - No, no, no, no, no!

But this requires a large amount of user buy-in. If a hundred users start spamming voice assistant things on average once a day, it will be nothing at all compared with the millions of users actually saying real things. Even if we scale it up to a thousand people and twenty times a day, it's still a drop in the bucket. That's one thing neural networks are useful for. We'd need a lot more junk data. If we try to automate it by recording specific things, they won't have to bother with the algorithm; they simply find the weirdest spikes in the data and delete that from the dataset, if they don't find the recording of "Alexa" or "OK Google" being used and program the units to stop recognizing it.