Posts by rg287

Google's cloud services lost $14.6bn over three years – and CEO Sundar Pichai likes that trajectory

Re: Accounting Data

I fail to understand accounting data.

Increasing revenue whilst increase loss is good?

Increased loss in absolute figures, but significantly reduced in percentage figures - from a 42% loss in 2018 to 30% in 2020.

This is perhaps not surprising for something like GCP where economies of scale are everything and they're still some way behind AWS in their build out. Compare the GCP region map with AWS and GCP are far behind - no regions in Africa and somewhat behind in Europe and Asia. Lots of CapEx going on which is a reasonable place to make loss.

The significant number for them will be whether they're making an operating profit on their built regions. If your regions are profitable, you can afford to incurs losses from investing in new regions.

If your data centre makes £500k profit and you spend £1m building a new bit-barn to expand then on paper you'll have lost £500k that year, but it's not meaningful to claim you've lost money if you've just doubled your earning potential.

It does point at a significant competition issue though that the hyperscalers are now so big that you need to be able to sustain >$15Bn in losses before you think about turning a profit. The barrier to entry is enormous.

Nominet faces showdown with British internet industry: Extraordinary vote called to oust CEO, board members

Re: Rights to operate

Nominet is the admin and tech contact for .uk.

But that could change. In theory. If there was sufficient governmental and/or industry pressure on ICANN/IANA to recognise a new contact because Nominet had gone completely off-piste. They weren't always the contact (pre-98) and there's no technical or legal reason why - in extremis - a new contact could not be reassigned in future.

In the same way that ICANN/IANA could - in theory - have yanked the IP allocations for AFRINIC when there was talk of board members selling IP blocks for personal profit and reassigned them to a new RIR.

Ultimately the hierarchical nature of DNS means the .uk registrar is whoever the crypto keyholders for the root zone say it is. Everyone else is at liberty to run their own alt-root

Not having (directly) a horse in this race (not being a member or registrar) and not having followed such matters closely I always take such complaints with a pinch of salt. I have been around various membership organisations and there are usually two sides to every story - one being the side told by a disgruntled member willing to spread discord to whoever will keep them company at the bar but who ultimately knows nothing about everything or isn't aware of some legitimate internal pressure.

In this case however, I'm willing to make an exception based on one single action:

Nuking a membership forum mid-AGM is the sort of bizarro power-move I would expect from British Leyland management in the 1970s. I believe the kids these days would regard it as "a weird flex" - made all the more bizarre by the fact that they're a ccTLD registry. Their members are uber-nerds. These are the people who hold the internet together with wet string and duct tape. You think you can stop sysadmins and network engineers from talking to one another by turning off a forum? What precisely did Haworth expect to happen?

To paraphrase Turkish: "It had previously occurred to me that the nerds had taken the demise of their organisation rather lightly. For every action, there is a reaction. And a nerd reaction is quite a f***ing thing."

Someone with such astonishingly poor judgement has no place running an organisation like Nominet.

To see that the likes of Mythic Beasts are also listed as supporters of the motion on publicbenefit.uk also speaks volumes.

Re: Rights to operate

Under what authority do Nominet have the right to administer .uk? Is there a license (or similar) that they operate under that can be revoked? Or at least some regulator?

ICANN ultimately. The community could appeal to ICANN and ask for the root zones to be pointed at the DNS servers of a new-founded .uk registry.

Good luck with that - turning a supertanker with a rowing boat would be quicker.

That said, they might also point out that pulling Nominet's right to administer .uk is unnecessary as internal remedies exist - as evidenced by the membership being able to call an EGM and remove board members. They would keep their hands "clean" on the basis of letting internal processes run their course.

One careful driver: Make room in the garage... Bloodhound jet-powered car is up for sale

Re: Sounds like a job for . . .

Hammond is crazy enough to drive it.

Yeah, but they want it back in one piece at the end.

Not sure why the article is talking about 1000mph, that target/claim was dropped long ago and pretty sure you'll find no mention of it on their website.

Look harder. Literally the second FAQ entry.

----------------------------

Q: Are you still planning to attempt 1,000mph?

Yes, but there are now two phases. The first phase is to break the world land speed record – currently 763.035mph (1227.985km/h). This is necessary to understand how the car behaves as it initially enters the transonic and then supersonic speed levels. Part of this phase will be high speed testing in excess of 400mph (643km/h), which will take place at Hakskeenpan in South Africa. The second phase is to target the maximum design speed, which is around 1,000mph (1,609km/h). This will be dependent on the success and review of the first phase.

----------------------------

This is hardly a surprise. Testing is always incremental - validate the basic chassis to 200+mph on a UK runway, then they went to South Africa and went to 628mph (the design intention being to engage the rocket motor at 650mph), so they've basically validated the initial jet-only phase and the desert wheels (as opposed to the rubber tyres used for runway testing). The final stage being then to go back with the rocket, break the LSR and then press on to 1000mph.

Doing it in two hits is to be expected. When JCB set the diesel-powered LSR they broke the record but ran again to hit their design speed of 350mph (because the existing record was rather unambitious, so it was inevitable they would break it on a proving run as they built up to the design speed).

What's the point of anything?

Sad to see such scorning and whining comments here and elsewhere about "the point" of such endeavours. I wonder what the budget is for Celebrity Love Island? Better this than that.

But such comments also betray ignorance of the project itself. As any fule knows, Bloodhound started off as the heart of a strong STEM education/outreach programme. They went into schools and pushed STEM - every industry needs a tent-pole project and Bloodhound was conceived as a leading bit of automotive engineering.

1000mph is of course arbitrary, but also achievable - Thrust SSC went for "supersonic", which is also perfectly arbitrary and the next obvious step from there was 1000mph, since SSC involved going 1200km/h and 2000km/h doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Also, 2000kmh = 1200mph which is quite a bit more and pushes your aspirational engineering into not-sure-we-can-actually-do-this territory.

It's not really accurate to call this a vanity project either. The much-vaunted wheels in particular are a very tricky bit of engineering. Developing wheels which can not only hold together under their own centrifugal force, but also stand up to the abrasion of running over salt pan at those speeds is no small feat and has applications in fields like rail or indeed high-speed flywheels - energy storage being an increasingly hot topic.

The biggest criticism might well be not of the project itself but whether Land Speed Records should be restricted to wheel-driven vehicles rather than jet cars where the wheels serve to technically connect it to the ground.

Is Bloodhound the most cost-efficient way of conducting flywheel or aerodynamic research? Of course not.

Is it a decent mix of aspirational engineering, cutting-edge manufacturing and STEM education outreach with a bit of "cool factor"?

Yup.

Google, Apple sued for failing to give Telegram chat app the Parler put-down treatment

Re: The duopoly needs to learn the hard way!

ii) Signal is exactly as you described a replacement for WhatsApp with no Facebook involvement. I'm not an Apple person but I thought imessage was instant messaging but allowed small groups and

Strictly speaking, WhatsApp was a replacement for Signal with better marketing and some more advanced group and sharing features - it's a fork of the open-source Signal codebase.

Signal has now caught up with a bunch of the consumery features and people should indeed move back to it.

Re: @Overunder Am I bad for not...

One of the arguments in favour of not silencing extreme views is that people can see them for what they are, without the subversive glamour of "the state is blocking them, so they must be saying something worth listening to".

This is a very reasonable argument with a lot of merit. The cleansing light of day can do wonderful things. On the flip side, reports suggested that misinformation fell 73% in the days following the suspension of Trump and others from Twitter. Perhaps it is not so much the speech as pinning down the catalysts - Trump never said anything directly white-supremacist, but quite clearly egged on people holding those views.

I recoil in horror at the idea that the nanny state should decide what we can be trusted to see or hear. Yet it is equally clear that there are lots of gullible fools quite happy to be strung along by conspiracy theorists and con artists. Which is their own business until they end up storming the Capitol Building and getting people killed.

Quite where you strike a sensible balance is a gnarly problem.

What's a COVID-19 outbreak? Amazon gets all Trumpy over Alabama warehouse workers' mail-in vote to form a union

Re: NFL Union since 1956

I completely fail to see the value in anything those guys (be it owners or athletes) are doing. I get that it is a fun pastime activity (I too love playing various sports with friends), but to have that as a job?

Don't act so shocked. We pay actors money to perform pieces of culture which could be written down and distributed as a book. It shouldn't come as any surprise that people enjoy watching individuals at the top of their craft perform their skills - whether that's acting a role, playing a sport (whether for points in a competition or for money with Cirque du Soleil) or working on a lathe (as the last 10 years have shown us, there's an audience on YouTube for makers, machinists and skilled artisans).

Some of the sums do seem decidedly disproportionate though - but it's what the market will bear.

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Re: Not for noobs

It's not even about being built in though - as per the comment by Sven Joachim, they maintain two copies - a "pure" version that is broken for most laptops (which they put front and centre) and then a version that works (which they hide).

So the current situation is that we make an active effort to produce two different types of installation media: one that works for all users, and one broken for most laptops. Some sort of FOSS version of an anti-feature. Then we publish the broken version on the front page, and hide very carefully the version that works.

There's nothing wrong with saying Debian is a purist distro, useful for headless servers and as a proto-distro that is built out to fill different roles by others (Ubuntu, Mint, etc).

But they're not - they're maintaining two versions and then not making clear what's what. The entire free/non-free debate is quite irrelevant - it's bad website design, bad UX design, bad communication.

Engineers blame 'intentionally conservative' test parameters for premature end to Space Launch System hotfire

Re: Well That Doesn't Sound Too Bad

Doesn't really work that way with rocket engines. These burn H2 and LOX - the recipe for the best in-vacuum performance. H2 is bastard hard stuff to work with, and a fresh design is going to be at best only incrementally better than the existing design. Redesigning those things is likely not going to produce any worthwhile benefits.

Don't forget that there's only a finite number of the Shuttle's RS-25 engines in existence. We're not going to run out because SLS won't launch more than twice - but if there was some risk of it being used regularly then we'd have to start manufacturing new ones, which we haven't done for decades. If that happened, they're not going to do it how they did it in the 1980s. They're going to use modern manufacturing techniques - many-axis CNC, DMS. Major components are going to be redesigned to be manufactured using modern methods. If you're doing that, then you'll end up optimising and improving the design, at which point you're not far off doing a clean-sheet design using the existing engines as a reference.

No one's really improved on the car.

Err... Modern car design is a whole different beast compared with the 1970s - yet many rocket engines in use are only a few iterations from Apollo. Cars have improved annually - safety, efficiency, comfort, reliability. SpaceX's Raptor engine may use less-efficient Methane, but are massively innovative, being the first Full-Flow Staged Engine to make it off the test stand and fly - they've traded off fuel for a more complex design which wins efficiency gains over the (Fuel-Rich) Partial Staging of the Shuttle's RS-25.

SpaceX are avoiding H2 by using methane - basically a compromise between very difficult engineering and performance. It performs better than kerosene, but isn't as hard to engineer for as H2. That's fine, because the only performance targets they need to meet are their own. But AFAIK they won't be able to achieve as high interplanetary velocities as the SLS.

That's absolutely true.

But at this stage, nobody cares. Multi-billion-dollar single-launch moon missions worked for Apollo when no other infrastructure existed, but they aren't sustainable for running a moon base and are wasteful in a solar system where you have space stations and intermediate ports. SLS is never going to send people to Mars because the capsule is far too tiny for multi-month voyages. Inevitably you'd assemble the Interplanetary ship in orbit, launch crew in conventional capsules and transfer (as per The Martian) - or if you're SpaceX, launch the lot on StarShip and refuel in LEO.

There's possibly a niche use for lobbing up science probes going to outer planets, but at this stage the costs are working out far in favour of using a BFR to truck mass LEO. If you need a super-efficient H2 stage for going to Uranus, then F9H/New Glenn/Starship can take you to (or past) LEO and you can use your own H2 upper stage to boost you out - using it for the first stage is of very marginal benefit given the difficulties in handling and engineering. Maybe it's a bit more efficient and elegant - but if it costs you a billion dollars instead of $100m, then you'd be a fool (or a pork-barrelling politician) to pick the SLS option.

Brave bets on the decentralized web with IPFS browser support for a more peer-to-peer approach

It's there for as long as a copy is available on at least one node (just like BitTorrent). This is the same as any content-oriented protocol.

We shouldn't blame the protocol for what is effectively a self-propagating system of mirrors and caches.

Trump's gone quiet, Parler nuked, Twitter protest never happened: There's an eerie calm – but at what cost?

Re: AWS now liable?

With delicious irony, I'm afraid it's you who needs to keep up. The case is heading to the European Court of Human Rights, though with Northern Ireland apparently half in and half out of the EU after Brexit who knows what the consequences will be.

Brexit has absolutely no relevance, since the ECHR predates the EU by some decades and has literally nothing to do with them. It is a court of the Council of Europe, which we have not left.

The ECHR will support the Supreme Court because the alternative is that a Muslim printer would be compelled to produce your hilarious series of cartoons about Mohammed, that a company run by an immigrant would be compelled to produce anti-immigration material for a right-wing group.

This is an interesting case which is not actually about (homo)sexuality - it's as much about whether you can compel someone to reproduce or publish your political beliefs (Gay Marriage being a significant political matter as much as a religious & civil rights matter).

Would they have refused to produce that cake for a heterosexual client? Also yes? Then it's on the content not the customer. Undoubtedly Ashers are bigoted and were I a local, I would avoid doing business with them. But they have the right not to produce designs they find offensive - whoever the customer. Articles 9 & 10 of the Rome Convention are pretty clear on that.

Re: AWS now liable?

If he's not worming out of it with the busy lie , and its one of reason those last reasons , isnt that the same as " because the customer is black or homosexual" ?

Well yes, but prove it. This is why we have courts - to make that distinction based on the available evidence.

In this case, Asher's Bakery had sold Mr Lee cakes before, and in this case offered him the cake but declined to provide the decoration. It was actually pretty clear that the distinction was on the content, not the customer. Certain commentators like Ian Hislop correctly predicted that the initial ruling would be overturned on appeal because the longer tail of consequences set by such a precedent get pretty silly pretty quickly - like compelling a Muslim printer to run your hilarious series of cartoons about Mohammed.

In other cases it will be harder to spot. In retrospect the example of Pink News may not be the greatest because it often contains political content and one could trivially decline to print it on political grounds. Good luck challenging that. You could not be compelled to print it any more than you would be compelled to take a job printing material for the National Front. By contrast if you refused to print generic flyers for a local company who happened to be a proudly inclusive workplace, then it might be easier to show discrimination.

Ultimately this is going to go to the ECHR where they will most likely uphold the Supreme Court's (unanimous) finding. You can't compel people to print or manufacture product that breaches their freedom of conscience & religion.

Re: AWS now liable?

No, rg287 is referring to the USA case, not the Belfast one.

No, I quite literally linked to a story about the Ashers case in Belfast. The Colorado one has it's own nuances which I have not delved into.

Re: AWS now liable?

The 'Ashers' case of 2018 put paid to that. Within the UK, it is illegal to refuse to deliver a service offered to the public, based upon the suppliers Religeous/Political beliefs or opinions.

Um, not really. In the Ashers case the bakers won. You can decline to provide a service if the product would conflict with your own right to freedom of expression and conscience - such as the particular text on a cake or the content of a print job.

You cannot refuse to serve a person due to them being black/gay/disabled. Those are protected characteristics and we didn't need the Asher case to tell us that breaking the Equality Act is a crime.

Re: AWS now liable?

But if you run a business, depending on which state or country you're in, you're not free to do so without breaking the law. As an example, there have been multiple cases both in the US and Europe where companies refusing to decorate a cake with a same sex marriage message for religious reasons have been found guilty of sexual discrimination.

Do keep up. There's a very fine distinction there - you cannot discriminate against an individual, but you can choose not to take jobs you find distasteful.

The case of the "gay cake" was ultimately ruled in favour of the bakery - to cancel a gay couple's hotel booking because they are gay is homophobic and a breach of the Equality Act. To refuse to make a cake bearing a message you disagree with is not discrimination.

In this context, as a printer you would have more or less total freedom to pick your work.

* Refusing a print job because the customer is black or homosexual would be discrimination.

* Declining to print Pink News because you don't want the work is not.

Web Hosts can pick their clients entirely at will, provided their decision is based on the product and not discriminating against a customer's protected characteristic.

Julian Assange will NOT be extradited to the US over WikiLeaks hacking and spy charges, rules British judge

Re: pft

But journalists are not permitted to commit a crime in order to discover facts for a news report. Not that I am saying that what Assange did was not justified.

Certainly within the UK there has generally been a view that journalists should not be prosecuted under Official Secrets. If they have access to classified material, then it's because someone gave it to them - in which case the priority is to put your own house in order. If data has been leaked to a journo, it could as easily have been leaked to a foreign state actor. The problem here is not the journalist.

The Home Secretary was furious when members of the military and Security Services orchestrated Duncan Campbell's 1977 arrest in defiance of his wishes that journalists not be targetted. The subsequent ABC Trial underlined the preference of both the government and the courts not to impose overly on the 4th Estate.

Re: pft

He dumps everything he gets his hands on, regardless of the damage it does

IIRC for the War Logs he partnered with several newspapers (Guardian, Der Spiegel & New York Times) who triaged and redacted material pre-release, getting first dibs on the stories for their efforts, making sure relevant militaries had the opportunity for "live" material to be withheld.

The guy is an egotistical dick. But if governments are going to cover up war crimes and run torture black sites then sooner or later someone is going to spill the beans. It's a matter of when, not if. Assange just happened to be in the right place at the right time that he ended up enabling Manning's data (amongst others), and our society is better and more accountable for that.

Brexit trade deal advises governments to use Netscape Communicator and SHA-1. Why? It's all in the DNA

I'm sure there's a reason (besides incompetency), but one has to wonder why it's necessary to include the full text of the Prüm Convention into the annex - meaning the outdated references are now wrong in two places.

Surely:

from EU import PRÜM

I suppose if the EU were to update Prüm in some non-trivial way without reference to the UK (if we were just signed up abide by whatever it says) then Brexiteers might whinge that we're having laws written for us. This means we have our own static copy, however stale it may get. It's terribly untidy though.

What does my neighbour's Tesla have in common with a stairlift?

Re: Battery EVs

There might be a change of direction but I feel we are just replacing one problem with another and as long as the lithium is only dug up in places that nobody in the West cares about,

On that note... Tesla have acquired mining rights over 10,000acres of lithium-rich clays in Nevada, and they're not the only ones investing in the area. They've also signed a deal with a company looking to extract lithium in North Carolina

I shall let the reader decide whether "the West" cares about Nevada, but it's "not China"!

A calculation I saw elsewhere suggested that there's more than enough Lithium in Nevada alone to replace every single vehicle in the USA with a BEV equivalent.

Lithium and the rare earths aren't rare, it's just that only China (and usually-Chinese-backed projects in Africa) has really bothered to go after them on any sort of scale so far.

Re: EVs = bad for planet, bad for poor people, bad for practicality

I'm pretty sure the wind continues to blow at night too. And while lithium is the best option right now, expanding the market for electric vehicles will continue to drive innovation in storage technologies.

Also, recycling isn't very good yet because there haven't been enough batteries cycling out to make large-scale lines viable. But Tesla's plan (along with other car companies, working with partners like Panasonic) are to get their batteries essentially closed loop.

Many people do not realise that a "brand-new" lead-acid car battery will be ~99% recycled materials. At End-of-Life, lead-acid battery components are more or less entirely reclaimed. It's not quite 100% but it rounds that way.

Li-Ion is harder and much more chemically complex - but they're getting there. Tesla can already reclaim >70% of the material in their batteries.

Re: EVs = bad for planet, bad for poor people, bad for practicality

I'm pretty sure that the long-term plan is for lower private car ownership. Since the cost of buying a car is going to go up (fewer second-hand electric cars available than fossil-fuel, etc.) the plan appears to be that people will use public transport more - trains for long distances, buses for short.

This is happening anyway. In the UK there's been a drop in the percentage of young people bothering to take their driving test. It has eventually been realised that private vehicle ownership just doesn't scale very well given that the average supermarket has to give over more square-footage to car parking than to the actual store. The number of cars in Britain has risen 49% in 20 years. That growth, and the reliance on private transport is simply not sustainable.

If the figure of 40% cars parked on the public highway is right, then there is a similar percentage of houses which don't have off-street parking

Be careful with that - a lot of cars are parked on the street voluntarily. I live in a terrace - everyone on the street has a garage. But most of them (mine included) are full of junk and Christmas boxes. People could park off-road. They choose not to.

This is not universal of course, but given that 65% of UK households are detached & semi-detached houses (which invariably have driveways) and a non-trivial chunk of the remainder are low-density terraces with potential for parking, then I'd wager that the number of residences legitimately without parking numbers <25% - and a chunk of them will be in London where car ownership is low and frequently unnecessary anyway.

When it comes to privacy, everyone says America needs a new federal law ASAP. As for mass spying, well, um… huh what’s that over there?

Even if Congress were not deadlocked due to partisanship, reconciling the conflict between the spies and the businesscritters is not exactly a trivial matter.

Whilst it is non-trivial, much of the issue seems to come from the Commerce groups doing an international deal, and then the spies declaring that special rules apply domestically (and in the case of the US, internationally, because they like to think that US rules apply globally) - which ultimately invalidates the terms of the international agreement.

What needs to happen is the US and EU business critters, but also the spies sit down and hash out a commercial data-sharing agreement which also includes explicit provisions governing use of data by intelligence agencies, in much the same way as GDPR includes provisions for data processing by law enforcement and security services.

The NSA undoubtedly won't like the concept of transparency, or writing down something that they might actually be held to - but it has to happen, or we'll just carry on the merry-go-round of successive agreements getting squashed by the courts because the other side's spooks have taken liberties.

And in all probability they'll continue to take the piss and exceed the rules just as GCHQ/MI6 do - periodically getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar and promising to close down that particular programme (just don't mention the new one which looks an awful lot like the old one).

Court orders encrypted email biz Tutanota to build a backdoor in user's mailbox, founder says 'this is absurd'

Re: An idle musing

Simple. They'd issue a secrecy order and then it's your problem: break the contract or break the secrecy order.

And you'd break the contract, because your customer probably isn't paying you enough to go to jail for them.

Moreover, the courts would back you if your client tried to sue for breach of contract. They would happily nullify that clause given that you had been compelled by law.

It's about the same as someone telling a judge "I can't tell you that, Official Secrets" - if you're doing it to be vexatious, the judge will tell you to spill or face Contempt charges.

No court will pass an OSA conviction on someone who was compelled to disclose by another court.

Re: Dear Courts. No. Go away.

Look at the spycops history in the UK, in many cases peaceful idealist protest groups persecuted by the state, infiltrated by the police for decades (& ironically the infiltrators trying to stir up illegal behaviour in true agent provocateur style)

Illegally so, as it transpires. Why on earth would you conflate such Stasi-like infiltrations with the Police quite transparently seeking a warrant through an independent judiciary? Totally different actions. The former is abhorrent, the latter is how investigations should be done.

You have a naïve view that all police / state actions are legitimate

I categorically do not, and you could not possibly infer that from anything I have said. Reading isn't that difficult. I have suggested that a Police application for access to data through the proper judicial process is not something to be up in arms about (compared say, with Police asking for Tutanota's TLS keys and just dragnetting all traffic in and out of the service - which would obviously be disproportionate and indefensible).

The Police can get a search warrant for your home. They can seize your computers, devices and any paperwork they find. They can - with the right paperwork - apply to your bank for records. Given the nature of digital data storage, it is entirely reasonable that (with proper judicial oversight) they be able to access account data from other businesses on a specific and limited per-account basis.

Such access would not include getting a "self-service" backdoor into services, but would include a business (like Tutanota) passing up data about named accounts when served with a lawful court order.

Your email provider is not going to go to prison for you, and it is naive to think they might.

Re: Dear Courts. No. Go away.

But you fail to mention things such as whistle-blowing, revealing state secrets, organising protests, avoiding punitive import duties and many other things that are illegal only because they are inconvenient, embarassing or damaging to the government.

So what, we just won't bother having laws then?

This is why we have courts and an independent judiciary. You can't say "Oh well, companies shouldn't help Police investigate crimes because some laws are unjust/politically motivated".

There is a place for strong encryption, and for whistleblowers (also protected by law in most civilised countries) to be protected. That's why the idea of a company helping Police with a specific warrant signed by a court is not abhorrent. By contrast, providing a datastream for Police/authorities to speculatively poke around or go fishing would be.

Do you believe that you have a moral duty to report your friends, neighbours and/or relatives to the police for breaking lockdown rules?

I'm not subject to a warrant requiring me to. I won't go to prison for not reporting them. But if I were culpable... I"m not going to be a martyr for some tit deciding to have 15 people over at Christmas.

It also assumes that the police will only ever make use of the facility to fight crime, and would never invent a pretext to use the power to go on a "fishing trip" or be abused by a government to learn confidential information about major companies or political opponents.

It's subject to a court order. This is not Police going on a fishing trip - the independent judiciary have signed off. You cannot ask for better than that.

The police in the UK have the power (RIPA section 47) to force a person to decrypt any data they have access to, with up to 5 years in prison should they refuse. So instead of demanding that the service provider decrypt the emails, the police already have the viable alternative of demanding that the person who sent or received the emails do so. This is more than enough power.

Except this is in Germany. But for an equivalent case here, that won't necessarily get them the emails. A defendant may know that the contents of their emails are worth a damn sight more than 5 years in prison. Police might pursue both avenues - and if they have a court order, then that's entirely fair enough.

I'm in favour of strong encryption and strongly against farcical "backdoors". But I equally don't expect service providers to do time for me if faced with an actual court order backed by a judge (in Europe, none of this nonsense with picking judges and jurisdictions in the US). If it's specific and targetted, such it up. Lavabit did, and so will most orgs.

Re: Dear Courts. No. Go away.

That said, if the UI is a web page, and since the content of a web-page is determined by the server, then the server could alter the decryption code to also leak either the password or the data itself. However, since this leak would also have to run from the client-side, such a "wire-tap" would likely be fairly easily discoverable by the target - which is probably something neither the police nor the service provider (since it would kill their business) would want to be discovered.

ProtonMail certainly do their decryption in the browser, and I understand the Tutanota approach is along the same principles. Whilst it would indeed be possible for the user to analyse the code and observe the behaviour of the client-side JS, most users won't and don't. They won't be aware that there's a payload in the code that's being delivered today compared with yesterday. Your average criminal using "anonymous" email providers won't have that level of technical capability. Police and Provider would have to judge the risk on a case-by-case basis.

The payload could even be especially targetted so that it is only delivered to login attempts for that specific account, meaning that third parties (including security researchers) would not be exposed to the malicious code or be able to discern that a user-specific wiretap was being implemented.

Of course the provenance of evidence would need to be shown in court, so Tutanota's assistance couldn't be hidden. But I suspect a lot of people would have much more sympathy with a company assisting police in a specific and legitimate inquiry compared with allowing Police unfettered access (as the FBI wanted from Lavabit. Ladar of course complied with the court order and turned over the private SSL key, but only after nuking the servers). Notably, Lavabit had complied with at least one routine search warrant in the past, but drew the line at giving up the keys to the kingdom just to get at one user. Users can't expect service providers to be martyrs and do prison time for them.

Re: Dear Courts. No. Go away.

The argument being, put some code in that captures this user's password. There is no need to mathematically break the encryption.

This is entirely within the power of Tutanota. They just don't want to - for very obvious reasons.

I have to say though, that this is one of those cases where you almost have a bit of sympathy for (some of) the Police. They're asking for Tutanota to provide data from for a specific, named account, presumably with the correct paperwork. That's no more objectionable than getting a search warrant for premises (the previous ruling from a Regional Court asking for an actual backdoor notwithstanding, which this Court correctly struck down).

This isn't a self-service backdoor that they can poke into at will, nor a dragnet data feed and it's not entirely unreasonable to expect Tutanota to make reasonable efforts to assist a lawful investigation. Without wishing to invoke "think of the children", if you've got scumbags engaging in serious organised crime - whether that's people trafficking, child abuse, narcotics, or something else then service providers have both a moral and legal obligation to help Police so far as practicably possible, in much the same way as a bank (should) diligently protect your financial data up to the point they're served with a valid warrant.

Pure frustration: What happens when someone uses your email address to sign up for PayPal, car hire, doctors, security systems and more

Within the EU there's actually a standardised return address for unsolicited invoice and financial mail coming from <[e-mail]>:

[e-mail]

Don't arse around with customer "support". If they're sending emails that contain PII (or indeed "manage your account" links) without verifying account control to a third party (you) then just forward it to the compliance department and let them give their developers a shoeing.

If you feel particularly malicious you could also "help" by reporting the data breach to the national regulator. In the case of PayPal, the Financial Conduct Authority could also be fun.

Arecibo Observatory brings forward 'controlled demolition' plans by collapsing all by itself

Re: Very sad, but...

The cost of HS2 maintenance will be 25% of the original price per year.

Source?

Annual Maintenance & Renewals costs of HS2 will not be £16-25Bn.

Unless you mean 25% of the annual construction costs (a weird metric to use), which are £8-10Bn/yr over the construction period, so £2-3Bn/yr. In which case... still no. HS1 has an OMRC <£100m/yr. There is no reason to think that HS2's OMRC will be out of proportion with HS1 (larger obviously, more stations and longer line, but not disproportionately so).

Re: Very sad, but...

And we're already complaining about the £100 bn cost to build HS2 - just wait till the maintenance bill comes in.

Probably lower-per-mile than for the rest of our victorian railways...

Re: Investment budgets versus running costs

e.g., the German government will take debt to "invest" but not to fund running costs.

That's entirely as it should be. Borrowing to build a hospital is fine (it'll pay back over 50years in reduced time off sick, improved health outcomes for the population, etc). Borrowing to pay your nurses is unsustainable. You borrow your payroll for this year and then what... next year you still have a hospital, but you're going to take debt again for another year's worth of payroll?

A bank will lend a company money to build a new factory or tool up a line for their new product but they won't just give you a loan to cover your payroll for a year - because if you can't afford payroll this year, then how will you afford it next year (obviously there are some corner cases - special projects, R&D funding where you might be able to take debt - but not in day-to-day trading).

If research budgets are being oriented to investment rather than maintenance then that's on the shoulders of the governing committee. If maintenance is swallowing up their entire annual budget then either they have too much stuff and need to cast off the lowest ROI projects, or the budget isn't big enough - I suspect we know what's the case in the US.

It's also notable that the US House of representatives passed legislation in 2015 requiring the National Science Foundation to get permission for certain types of spending, reducing autonomy over how their budget is used and introducing political interests - rarely a good thing.

All that being said, it's not inconceivable that the upfront investment should include an endowment to cover some/all of the maintenance costs, available as a restricted fund for the lifetime of the project. But you can't just take debt on an annual, ongoing basis to cover your running & maintenance costs - if you have to do that, you probably can't afford the project to start with.

Re: The Chile's desert is the ideal place, nor hurricane country

You can't see the whole sky from any one place on Earth. You can't simply replace Northern Hemisphere facilities with a new Chilean observatory if it can't see the bits of sky that it needs to.

But also, Chile doesn't have the karst landscape that Puerto Rico and the Guizhou region of China were selected for. Sure, you could dig a big hole in the Chilean desert (for a price), but why not go where nature has done the work for you?

Replacing it with an array of smaller dishes is also impractical thanks to the nature of r². To match the collecting area (~70,685m²) and gain the sensitivity of Arecibo's 300m dish, you'd need ~10 Green-Bank-class 100m dishes. It added huge sensitivity to any array it cooperated with. Adding Arecibo to a Very Long Baseline Array observing campaign improved the sensitivity by a factor of five.

As it stands, there are only two such telescopes anywhere in the world (Green Bank & Effelsburg, Germany). People rarely venture above 12-15m for steerable telescopes, which somewhat of a sweet spot for cost and maintenance using fairly off-the-shelf engineering.

Even the Very Large Array - with it's 27 dishes (each 25m diameter) - "only" manages 13,250m².

Re: Very sad, but...

Well, it's certainly wasn't obsolete, nor even close.

But it is a very visual illustration of the parlous state of US infrastructure and rather vindicates what the ASCE have been banging on about.

Not that we should need such an illustration, but many will have forgotten about the last Green Bank Telescope.

LibreOffice 7.1 beta boasts impressive range of features let down by a lack of polish and poor mobile efforts

Re: Whilst I agree that cloud collaboration is important these days...

In general I agree.

However, I've found myself popping open a GoogleDocs/OneDrive spreadsheet and dropping in meter readings or checking an asset tag.

For financial analysts working across two 27" screens then clearly the screen on a phone or tablet isn't going to cut it, but it can be very handy for brief data entry or checking a figure.

AWS reveals it broke itself by exceeding OS thread limits, sysadmins weren’t familiar with some workarounds

So they're saying the cloud isn't infinitely scalable?

Who knew! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We see what you did there: First-stage booster from Rocket Lab's Return to Sender mission floats back to Earth

Re: The Scottish Solution

I've been wondering about this also.... big blades spinning overhead and something huge falling at it and some how the helicopter has to get above the falling rocket.

Wonder no more.

Google is amazing ;)

Re: Parachute.

* Electron has a launch mass of ~12t with the returning first stage weighing less than a tonne.

* F9 has a launch mass of 550t with the returning first stage weighing ~25tonnes.

Let us know when you have a parachute or helicopter capable of catching a booster with an empty mass ~25tonnes.

Adiós Arecibo Observatory: America's largest radio telescope faces explosive end after over 50 years of service

Re: Not too surprised

You can never have too many telescopes. And you are also assuming the SKA will come online when they think it will. Does anyone trust time or cost estimates involving governmental funding?

Indeed, more is always better.

But to be fair, it could also be said that SKA is already online (in part) since various precursor facilities like ASKAP have been online since 2012. The nature of an massive array like SKA is that the "online" date is a bit artificial - the first time a Square-Kilometre worth of component parts start collecting data in unity on a single campaign. But it's really a process of building out (in some cases extant) facilities and then linking them.

Re: Shirley...

If this were true then we wouldn't be having this conversation - they could have repaired/replaced the cables and the dish if they had been given unlimited funding

Bleurgh yes, Trump is at fault for not writing a blank cheque - my kingdom for an edit button (after 10mins!).

Even in the context of the comment about it being a bi-partisan failure and listing the previous three Presidents, blaming Trump is simply blamestorming and does not achieve anything. What about the previous incumbents of the Oval Office since the dish was built?

Trump is the one in the White House. He had the Executive Power to push emergency funding - he didn't.

Fundamentally, this is just the way America does science - build it, cut the ribbon and then forget about it.

America's largest radio telescope is now the 100metre Green Bank Telescope, which started construction in 1990 to replace the previous 100m dish at Green Bank. The old dish needed replacing because... it had collapsed catastrophically (probably due to a lack of maintenance).

Re: Not too surprised

In any case, it would have become obsolescent when the Square Kilometer Array starts observing, which should be in 2027. The SKA, being a modular design, will be far more maintainable and should be more sensitive as well as providing considerably more resolution than either Arecibo or the 500m Chinese dish ever could.

Not true.

* The USA is not part of the SKA Partnership. US Astronomers have no access to SKA (this may change now!)

* SKA is in the Southern Hemisphere. It is incapable of resolving targets that both Arecibo and China's FAST dish can see.

* SKA can do some Planetary Radar, but it's different from Arecibo and obviously - they can see different bits of the sky (n.b. FAST cannot do radar)

* For certain observations you just want a really big dish. Arecibo had a collecting area of 73,000m², which is 7% of SKA - that's huge for a single instrument and gives you superior sensitivity on faint signals, even if SKA's huge synthetic aperture can give you a much larger angular resolution.

* Losing Arecibo (73,000m² of collecting area) from the VLBA is a major loss to all VLBA users.

Re: Shirley...

There must be an option to just partially clear the existing site and then rebuild using the latest materials and technology?

I imagine that might happen - but right now the plan is just to safely decommission before it falls in on itself. They can probably get emergency funding for that, whereas a new build will require a new grant application through NSF (which would/will almost certainly pass but hasn't gone through a funding request yet).

It's appalling that a lack of maintenance has allowed this to happen (Trump, Obama & Bush are all equally culpable. US science seems to involve building stuff and funding OpEx until it's derelict with little cash available for maintenance). Trump is at fault for writing them a blank cheque after the first cable break, but this is a bi-partisan failure.

Under the circumstances, demolition is reasonable because hey, it's a telescope and we don't want anyone killed by it. They can rebuild. But it will be a stain on the reputation of the US if replacement isn't announced in fairly short order.

Apple Arm Macs ship, don't expect all open-source apps to work without emulation – here's what you need to know

Whether the ARM scales to higher performance levels is another matter. More parallel units obviously possible; but what about out-and-out raw performance that the Mac Pro brigade will demand?

A fair point, and I suspect the Pro will be the last Mac to lose Intel (Xeon) options. The ARM USP is power, so no surprise that it's predominantly focussed on laptops at launch.

That being said the single-thread performance seems to be up there with AMD & Intel, which implies that a TDP-no-object desktop die packed with just high-performance cores (as opposed to the 4+4 bigLITTLE architecture of the M1) could be quite the thing to behold.

Of course, Pro buyers really won't tolerate soldered RAM or SSDs and are probably going to want PCIe slots, so the question is whether their blinding performance is just down to CPU design (which is undoubtedly very good) or if it's riding off things like blistering unified memory speeds - can they maintain their performance advantage on a more traditional/modular motherboard with conventional DIMMs and PCIe memory & expansion cards?

Max Schrems is back... and he's challenging Apple's 'secret iPhone advertising tracking cookies' in Europe

Re: They just don't get it.

Let me have a go - it's beneficial (to the advertiser) because it allows them to make more money by using personal data to profile individuals and target advertising at them.

No, as it turns out, it's not even beneficial for the advertisers (much less the content providers).

NPO (the Dutch BBC) ditched targetted advertising in 2018 and went back to contextual advertising where you bid for ad space based on page content (e.g. a story about food or cars), the same as you would place an ad in a relevant paper or magazine. By not advertising to a user ("bid to advertise to this 20-30yo male user who likes cars") they cut out a whole swathe of middle-men data brokers.

Advertisers swarmed to them. The advertiser pays less per impression whilst NPO keeps more of that money. Their site loads faster and doesn't track users.

Everybody who matters wins.

Re: They just don't get it.

not beneficial at all for those who are tracked

Worse yet, it's not even beneficial for the advertisers or the content providers.

NPO (the Dutch BBC) ditched targetted advertising in 2018 and went back to contextual advertising where you bid for ad space based on page content (e.g. a story about food or cars), the same as you would place an ad in a relevant paper or magazine. By not advertising to a user ("this person likes cars") they cut out a whole swathe of middle-men data brokers.

The advertiser pays less per impression and NPO keeps more of that money. Their site loads faster and doesn't track users.

Everybody who matters wins.

Re: They just don't get it.

My experience of targeted advertising is throwing ads at me to buy more of the long lasting consumer durable I have just purchased. It’s witless.

I get that from Amazon, which is bizarre, because they're not even trying to guess what I'm up to from arbitrary web trackers - they literally know what I've bought. A couple of years ago I acquired a Linx tablet, case and some styluses. The next two months of amazon emails were offering me... more tablets and cases. Because obviously having bought a tablet I'm immediately going to buy another, or a collection of cases for every occasion.

Bizarre.

GitHub restores DMCA-hit youtube-dl code repo after source patched to counter RIAA's takedown demand

You can always count on Microsoft to do the right thing, eventually

I think it actually speaks rather well of MS/Github that no less than the CEO went on IRC to proactively reach out to the repo's owner. It doesn't seem like they really wanted to pull the repo, but the inclusion of unit tests and tutorial examples pointing at copyrighted material was a smoking gun that made it difficult for them to ignore the RIAA.

When you have no less than the CEO effectively saying "point the tests at something that isn't a music video and we'll give the RIAA the finger for you", it does feel like they're batting for the developers. Which is good.

Mr President? Donald?! Any chance you can actually decide if Oracle can buy us or do we have to leave?

Re: Tik tok vs Sing Sing

What I was shocked by was hearing the other day that when he goes to his golf course, which is regularly, obviously the Secret Service have to go with him. So? What's the problem with that? Well the fact that the Orange tit charges them for the rooms they are forced to stay in.

It's not just the rooms. Every golfing President has availed themselves of the (three, 18-hole Championship-grade) golf courses at Andrews AFB, because they're pre-secure and a short chopper ride from the White House. Trump of course wants to play at his own golf course, which is not on a military base, which the Secret Service had to built out a security plan for and outfit with appropriate surveillance and security and then rent golf carts to follow him around...

That's when he doesn't get the itch for some Florida sun and take AF1 for a jaunt down to Mar-A-Lago at a cost to the US taxpayer of >$1m each way.

And yes, Trump did very well out of the Secret Service by deciding he wanted to do a lot of work from his NY residence. Which required the Secret Service to rent the neighbouring apartment(s) for their agents to use. This is not uncommon, Secret Service often acquires a property adjacent to the President's private residence since they provide security for life once they leave office. But in this case of course... Trump Org owns the building, so they were renting from him.