Posts by rcxb

China trolls Trump with tech export rules changes that could imperil TikTok sale

"aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances" is as clear-cut as possible. I can't imagine why you continue to read something else into it.

Your understanding is misinformed. From my links:

"a declassified report released in January 2017 by several intelligence agencies, which concluded that 'Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.'"

several years of FBI investigations with no evidence of support from Vlad

"F.B.I. Warns of Russian Interference in 2020 Race and Boosts Counterintelligence Operations"

"Intelligence officials have said Russia has kept up its election interference operations under the direction of President Vladimir V. Putin and that they are likely to intensify during the 2020 presidential campaign"

"The F.B.I. director warned anew on Friday about Russia’s continued meddling in American elections"

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/us/politics/fbi-russian-election-interference.html

"The special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election issued an indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers"

The indictment builds on a declassified report released in January 2017 by several intelligence agencies, which concluded that “Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/mueller-indictment-russian-intelligence-hacking.html

Dell: 60% of our people won't be going back into an office regularly after COVID-19

Re: I get I'm in a microscopically small minority, but...

You're a talker, aren't you? Everyone else like WFH because it gets them away from you.

Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate

COVID-19 is enough of an extraordinary event that your losses *may* be covered by your business insurance.

Besides, the downturn in commercial property started decades ago with retail property due to the rise of e-commerce and and oversupply of shopping malls. Only some small fraction of it was successfully converted to office space, and typically at fire-sale prices (see RackSpace's Windsor Park Mall conversion).

Right now private homes are retaining their value, but I fully expect that to drastically change when the mass evictions and foreclosures start, which is certain to be less than a year now.

Ex-Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain loses US appeal bid against fraud convictions and 5-year prison sentence

Re: IOW Guilty. Very.

Nonsense. The US has had the better end of extradition treaties with the UK since long before Blair, as well as most other countries.

Supreme Court rules against Huawei in long-rolling Unwired Planet patent sueball: Take the licence terms we set or else

Re: FRAND?

Non-discriminatory has never meant everybody has to get the exact same terms. It's a foolish argument to make.

Here's what Wikipedia says on: Non-discriminatory:

this commitment requires that licensors treat each individual licensee in a similar manner. This does not mean that the rates and payment terms can’t change dependent on the volume and creditworthiness of the licensee.

"non-discriminatory" can include time-oriented licensing terms such as an "early bird" license offered by a licensor where terms of a RAND license are better for initial licensees

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing

Re: FRAND?

Non discriminatory only means they won't refuse to license their tech to someone they dislike (such as a competitor, or someone that has sued them in court...).

If the court agreed with you, patent holders of FRAND standard patents would be unable to forego their patent license fees for, say, certain non-profit or charitable organizations, during times of disaster, etc. because everyone would insist on getting free license as well.

FRAND sets a ceiling on prices, NOT a floor. Companies can still negotiate discounts, give a license for non-monetary consideration (e.g. patent cross-licensing), etc. The FRAND price was considered acceptable previous to Samsung getting a discount, no reason to consider it unfair, now.

But that ship has sailed for Huawei. No chance of a discount for them, now.

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Re: "plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

I think at the very least we need more than RE: and FW: tags to give us a fighting chance at building new ways to display "multiplayer" mail threads in a more cohesive manner.

They already exist. E-mail has Message-ID, References, and In-Reply-To headers.

Some e-mail clients simply screw-up, badly, which is how you end up with Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: subject lines, which you never should see...

Re: "plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

This may be cultural imperialism, because English speaking countries were so dominant during the development of the basic computing infrastructure.

Unlikely. Baudot code was only 5 bits. Moving up to 7 bit ASCII was a huge improvement. 16-bit Unicode would have been terribly impractical in the days of Z80 processors and a few kilobytes of RAM. ASCII did make allowances for some non-English characters.

Basic English was created back in 1930. English was becoming increasingly the universal language from the start of the industrial revolution through the world wars, and had certainly become the unchallenged de-facto language of science and research (taking over from German) after WW2.

ASCII is good for more than English... Several nationalities can forego accented characters (or use the available diacritics) with little impact and use ASCII just fine. Even some symbols commonly used by English speakers were missing from the original ASCII standard, too... Such as the pound (£).

‘IT professionals increasingly define themselves by capabilities they excel at managing’ says Atlassian chap

Re: Not surprising

I can think of a few IT Professionals: https://addictedtohorrormovies.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/it-vintage.jpg

50%+ of our office seats are going remote, say majority of surveyed Register readers. Hi security, bye on-prem

Re: Not here

Those companies that fully embrace the remote workforce have long since decided there's no reason their employees need to be in the same country at all... Get some Indians doing the job, instead.

Sun welcomes vampire dating website company: Arrgh! No! It burns! It buuurrrrnsss!

Banks are the worst

Ever turned up for a meeting in garb some might consider wildly inappropriate? And then gone on to wipe the floor with them thanks to your technical prowess?

I got contracted to rush in and fix a bank branch's urgent computer/network problem.

I was not at home, but instead out hiking (this was mid-summer) when the call came in. I was much closer to the bank than my apartment and since it was urgent I went directly there, knowing my shabby appearance would require a bit of explanation. What I didn't expect was the agent at the front leading me into an empty room by myself, and waiting there for 15 minutes until a police officer arrived. After providing the name and phone number of the person who had contacted me, the officer left. I proceeded on to fix the problem in about 30 minutes that multiple guys in suits couldn't figure after several hours.

Learn from my mistake... And I don't mean dress codes. Absolutely NEVER say the word "computer" in a bank. It's like saying "bomb" at an airport. Focus on the important part ("I was told to talk to person XYZ") and don't offer any other information, no matter how friendly or insistently they keep asking questions.

The irony is, if I'd actually been trying to social engineer my way in, it seems a suit, a clip-on plastic badge and laptop bag is really all it takes. Banks are the worst.

Qualcomm demos sub-700MHz 5G data calls via Chinese telco upstart

It's all about bandwidth and "spectrum reuse". 700MHz will go over-the-horizon, so you really can't have several towers using those same frequencies in a small area. 60GHz won't even go through your walls, and even oxygen causes quick attenuation, so you can (and need to) have one of them in every room of a home. Higher spectrum reuse means you have have one pico cell on every street that doesn't interfere with the same frequencies being used the next street over. Each pico cell having its own high-speed backhaul, multiplying the aggregate bandwidth.

Plus as you go to higher frequencies, there's much more available bandwidth, and it's much easier to make a tiny antenna in your phone that will cover much more of it, so you could have super-fast, 1GHz wide channels, where that's not practical at lower frequencies.

Bratty Uber throws tantrum, threatens to cut off California unless judge does what it says in driver labor rights row

100% market share for Lyft

So Uber will just suddenly cede it's thriving business in the world's 5th largest economy to Lyft?

Even the quoted threat is so mealy mouthed that it's plainly obvious they have no intention of following through.

Nokia licensor HMD Global scores $230m from Google, Qualcomm, and, er... Nokia

That's a huge chunk of change considering we're in one of the worst periods for the smartphone industry ever.

Where else are you going to invest your money just now? Might as well take a bit of a chance on an industry that won't be shut-down, and a company that might be able to turn a profit on the investment.

Pen Test Partners: Boeing 747s receive critical software updates over 3.5" floppy disks

Re: Cloud

Sounds perfectly covfefe to me.

Search for 'things of value' in a bank: Iowa cops allege this bloke broke into one and decided on ... hand sanitiser

Re: Hand sanitizer chasers

Think about it:

You're seriously ill, and not improving for a an extended time.

Hospitals are overflowing with contagious people.

You are running out of cold medications.

Your condition also happens to clouds your judgment.

Desperate people do desperate things. You don't have to be too challenged to make the next, poorly considered leap.

Intel, VMware collaborate on virtualized RAN platform

This is arguably as a consequence of the turmoil faced by European carriers now forced to strip existing Huawei-made hardware from their networks.

Linked article does not mention Europe once. Only the UK. And we all know the UK isn't part of Europe.

/puts on asbestos suit

Wrap it before you tap it? No, say Linux developers: 'GPL condom' for Nvidia driver is laughed out of the kernel

Re: "It will ensure proprietary stuff will slowly become more and more behind"

people, I'm sorry that you think that a manufacturer has the fundamental requirement to open their proprietary hardware, and any associated software drivers, to the FOSS system.

No they don't... UNLESS they want it to be usable and integrated with FOSS systems, such as Linux. What was this article about again?

Nvidia is desperate to exploit and monetize FOSS (code written by other people) while at the same time keeping their own code proprietary, so they are assured the ability to maximize the money they can squeeze out of their customers. Which is a thing that they do.

All the (slightly seedy) monetisation is done via hardware or firmware.

No, it is not. The driver has a click-thru license that the firmware does not, and it's the perfect place to put other restrictions in-place.

That's how NVidia specifically:

A) Cripples the card if it detects it running under a hypervisor, and

B) Makes it ILLEGAL to use their low-end/consumer cards for GPU compute.

China requires gamers to reveal real names and map them to frag-tastic IDs

It'll work

Prepare for 10 billion John Lee gamer accounts...

Microsoft confirms pursuit of TikTok after Satya Nadella chats to Donald Trump

Re: I Just Don't Get It

Umm... how can Microsoft buy TikTok if ByteDance does not want to sell?

Everyone is willing to sell anything for the right price. The threats from Trump to ban the service have no doubt pushed that price down. Microsoft was already in talks, so it's obvious ByteDance was seriously considering selling.

Pompeo claims TikTok is feeding all user data to the Chinese Communist Party. So fucking what? Which US tech companies give the US government user data?

China is happy to restrict US companies from selling to their domestic market, it doesn't seem unreasonable for the US to turn this tactic back around on them.

How Bude: Google's sole-financed private undersea pipe to make a landing in Cornwall

Re: Hmmm

Hardly. How is the existence of their fast pipe going to stop you from using other services? This is more like an airline buying a refinery...

This just allows more/faster connectivity between Google's various data centers. It will be a real advantage for them only when Europeans want to download something from Google's US servers, or vise versa.

The only ones who should be alarmed are cloud service providers with an international reach. Transferring files to/from US based Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc, users may be slower to Europe than Google Drive/Google Cloud. As Google isn't the biggest player in those markets, and this doesn't provide a drastic advantage, I don't see any cause for panic.

Greenland

Taking a look at the map it seems Greenland's population of 56,000 is entirely reliant on one link in and out, while Guam's population of 168,000 will still be browsing the web for funny cat pictures through World War III. Perhaps not an accident, as 29% of Guam is a US military base.

EU orders Airbus A350 operators to install anti-coffee spillage covers in airliner cockpits

Other liquids

Everyone's having a laugh about the drink spills, but cockpit equipment SHOULD be water-resistant. It's life-or-death equipment and a pilot's drink isn't the only possible source of intrusion. There have been a few passenger jets that had their windscreens destroyed/removed in flight for various reason. If it happened to be raining at the time, you'd have quite a bit more than a coffee-cup worth coming in. The cost of improvements is much less than the cost of one accident.

Raytheon techie who took home radar secrets gets 18 months in the clink in surprise time fraud probe twist

Re: Massachusetts

Don't forget to email [e-mail] if you spot anything wrong.

I would, but I don't need a second, full-time job... Would be easier to make a list of the El Reg article that DON'T have any errors.

In this article alone:

"Some of even ended"

After banning Chinese comms bogeyman, UK asks: Huawei in this mess? It was a failure of capitalism, MPs told

Re: It is capitalism

The Model-T wasn't better than any other cars, it was just cheaper.

The same is true of Hawuai... Lots of bugs, but at least it's cheap.

What about demand?

The failure of capitalism is on the other end.

Why isn't it profitable to make? Because everyone buys the cheapest equipment available, which is always Hawuei, and nobody spends a few extra pounds on home-made kit (with hundreds fewer bugs/exploits).

Why would you expect companies to make kit they know they will have to give away at a loss?

SEC drags Silicon Valley AI upstart to court over claims of made-up revenues, investors swindled out of $11m

He also concocted two financial models; one said YouPlus had made $3.55m from January to April 2019, and another reported $3.97m for the same time period, we're told.

Ah, yes... It's a multi-dimensional quantum-entangled startup. They're simultaneously doing both depending on which timeline you end up in. The uncertainty principle in effect. Nobody lives or dies until they open the box.

We've heard of littering but this is ridiculous: Asteroid dumps up to 50 quadrillion kg of space dirt on Earth, Moon

SI units

50 quadrillion kg

What's that in picograms?

Ah, metric... You're doing it wrong.

After kilograms comes megagram (Mg) then gigagram (Gg), teragram (Tg), petagram (Pg), exagram (Eg), zettagram (Zg), yottagram (Yg).

If you're going to have a multiple of a common prefix you think people are more familiar with, you might as well stick with Imperial units. Doesn't 7873652220888600000000000 stone just sound better?

My life as a criminal cookie clearer: Register vulture writes Chrome extension, realizes it probably breaks US law

False and misleading

But claiming cookie cleaning was carried out due to privacy or security concerns doesn't guarantee immunity under the DMCA. As Troupson's article notes, the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision lacks any intent requirement.

This is false, or at best playing word games... The term in US law is "substantial noninfringing use". If you write an extension that refuses cookies, or accepts and deletes them after a short amount of time (I use "Cookie AutoDelete"), then the fact it works-around restrictions on some sites is only incidental, there are lots of other users of your extension that never use it for that purpose, and you are quite safe. You can even HINT that is makes certain sites more usable/private/etc, as long as you're not dumb enough to come out and admit you're trying to break digital access controls.

The same intent issue is true for many other areas of criminal law... You can carry a sword around legally, as long as you have an excuse that has not the faintest whiff of even potentially using it against someone. Meanwhile, any mundane object, like a pencil, can be illegal if you're dumb enough to admit you're carrying it because you think you might possibly have a need to stab someone... (self defense or not does not matter).

Computer misuse crimes down 9% on last year in England and Wales, says Office of National Statistics

Drug possession is a crime for the same reason gay sex used to be a crime

Because it destroys brain-cells and make you vastly more likely to commit myriad other crimes?

You sound homophobic.

And how is that a computer misuse crime? Is it your laptop that is in "possession" of the drugs?

Teardown nerds delve into Dell's new XPS 15 laptop to find – fancy that – screws and user-serviceable parts

Re: Cans of Compressed Air, how quaint!

Shop-air. An endless, 200psi supply of shop air.

After removing all the dust and debris, it kindly also spins your fans fast than their failure speed making interesting noises you've never hear before, and quite effectively eliminates any other pesky protrusions, such as capacitors...

Why so few size options?

If it's any bigger than a Sony Vaio C1 Picturebook, I'm not interested...

Who really LIKES resting their palms on the touchpad and causing all kinds of spurious changes of focus in the middle of typing?

Has anyone EVER built a desk with a recess for the keyboard so it would be flush with the area they're resting their hands on? Why do ALL notebooks force you to type like that?

Wish I could find good notebooks these days, instead of the lowest-common denominator generic junk they all peddle.

Bad news: Your Cisco switch is a fake and an update borked it. Good news: It wasn't designed to spy on you

Re: Too expensive

Cisco can amortize the cost of their software across a huge number of devices, and several generations of their products. Counterfeiters have a much smaller pool of sales to work with. And it's not all that difficult to write software for networking gear. Many networking devices are just computers running Linux these days... Cisco's ASAs for instance.

Re: Impressed?

It's amazing that doing this at all is worth the investment of both time and funds

You apparently haven't seen the mark-up on Cisco gear.

Fancy some fishy-chips? Just order one of these sensors: Research shines light on suspect component sources

Re: Not counterfeit, not stolen

No Amazon or eBay seller will miss the opportunity to flip a clone or used chip as "new and from original manufacturer" if it bumps the price by a dozen quid or so. There is no real punishment from doing so.

When a buyer flags you for it, you end up refunding the full amount, and losing the merchandise. And after a few rounds of that, you'll be delisted from the site. Not a massive penalty, but long-term it's more profitable to be honest and only mention that it's similar to or compatible with Name Brand X.

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Likely explanation: H1-B via fraud

In order to get an H1-B visa and bring in a foreign worker, you first have to prove there are no qualified applicants in the USA. This is done by job-listing fraud. "Accidentally" post the job in the wrong geographic area, inflate the years of experience to ridiculous levels, require unnecessary levels of education (entry-level code monkey with a Ph.D) include typos that make it impossible for anyone to get through the HR keyword matching filtering, etc.

So, it's very likely IBM has an India devops engineer they want to bring over. No surprise, as IBM has a huge presence in India.

South Korea joins the ‘we’re going to be self-sufficient in more tech and then export bucketloads’ club

Re: Every country cannot be self-sufficient in everything

Here in the U.S., I heard that something like 70% of our aluminum production is now imported. You can certainly argue that a key basic ingredient like aluminum should have a larger domestic capacity.

No, you can't. You don't WANT to make basic ingredients domestically. They are extremely low-profit. What you want is a reliable supply of it, and while it's "imported" to the US, it's not coming from one or two nations, but all over the world. Why would the US be concerned that aluminum is being imported from Canada, Iceland, etc? There's no reason to care.

What's more, one of the big three suppliers of al is Alcoa... The last A stands for "America". The US might have a little bit of influence on them.

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

A modest proposal

Instead of using non-inclusive binary words like he/she, all kernel developers shall be referred to as "that rat bastard".

Instead of offensive terms like Master/Slave, such devices will now be named Grand Wizard and Clansman.

And more importantly:

A 2014 article in the Journal of Consumer Research titled "The Nature of Slacktivism: How the Social Observability of an Initial Act of Token Support Affects Subsequent Prosocial Action" found that such acts tend to satisfy a person's desire to help, and that those people are then far less likely to take more effective action than are people who avoided taking token actions.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4665

MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs

Re: Copyright?

Can they use your medical data

It's not copyright that protects your medical data. In fact you have no copyright rights to your own medical data.

Re: Copyright?

they downloaded 80 million images without any check on copyright and have been redistributing that data-set.

They're an educational institution, distributing the data for free, it's only for training purposes, and in a form where any other usage would be impossible, and it wouldn't possibly reduce their commercial value. This is a no-brainer justifiable fail-use case.

Living on a prayer? Netgear not quite halfway there with patches for 28 out of 79 vulnerable router models

Re: Don't forget Layer 2...

Try eBay. Cisco gear that's slightly out-of-date (not many 10G ports) goes very cheap.

Beijing's tightening grip on Hong Kong could put region's future as an up-and-coming tech hub in jeopardy

Typo

Such a move makes it more difficult for Hong Kong companies to important American hardware and software

Might make it difficult to import, too.

Oracle opens second Indian cloud region in bid to keep pace in make-or-break market

Re: Is Big Red on its way out?

Mainframes went from a massive business with multiple vendors down to being just a small fraction of one company's business.

And IBM only kept them going despite the immense cost because they like the propritary lock-in, to ensure companies have to keep buying their overpriced software and service contracts. IBM could easily pull an Apple and port their software, include a binary translator, and change their entire mainframe business to x86 commodity servers.

It's now safe to turn off your computer shop: Microsoft to shutter its bricks-and-mortar retail locations worldwide

Back in the day Microsoft were fairly good at Embrace Extend and Extinguish. Now they seem to even fsck(8) that up.

Back in the day they had an entrenched monopoly they could use to good effect. Today, they have to give Win10 away for free, and many people still won't take it...

Linux ate away the server business. iDevices and Android chipped away the user-facing side.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses... but not your H-1B geeks, L-1 staffers nor J-1 students

Re: H-1B visas [ ... ] Silicon Valley to fill engineering departments with top international talent

Silicon Valley has been abusing the H-1B visa program for far too long, with enthusiastic Democratic [ neo-liberal economics ] support.

Can't imagine why you're singling-out Democrats. Republicans love the program, too. GWBush was in there between Clinton and Obama, and did nothing to fix/eliminate the program.

Trump is doing something NOT because he's Republican (he isn't, really) but because it just happens to appeal to his extremely right-wing xenophobic base. Hard to cheer for that. And his one-off executive orders will only temporarily change things, and get rolled-back completely as soon as he's replaced. An actual fix would be to have congress vote to end the program, but that won't happen. because it's popular with the corporate donors behind congressional representitives in both parties.

We were already secure enough for mass remote working before COVID-19, boast IT pros

Three-quarters claim pandemic didn't trigger big changes to corporate security settings

While the other 99% are too busy struggling to keep their systems secure to be arsed to complete a survey...

Hey is trying a new take on email – but maker complains of 'outrageous' demands after Apple rejects iOS app

Not very smart

Apple will not allow the iOS client into its app store unless the maker pays Cupertino "15-30 per cent of our revenue."

So spin-off a subsidiary which earns very little money and publishes a cheap/free app. The app only happens to be compatible with the more expensive paid service from another company by a similar name, if you change a setting in the app. It works well enough to sheild Apple from paying taxes, so...

Or maybe offer in-app purchases with a 100% mark-up. People who know better will go to the website and buy the service at a discount. People who have no sense will pay both you and Apple for their cluelessness.

Hey requires a dedicated app, rather than working with any email client, and users pay a subscription of $99 per year. "That makes our business work without having to sell your data, advertise to you, or otherwise engage in unscrupulous marketing tactics," its makers claim.

You can find a plain vanilla email service with no advertising and a strong privacy policy for far less than $99. ProtonMail comes to mind, and is less than half the price.