Posts by Clive Galway

Chatbot lawyer shreds $2.5m in parking tickets

Re: A small omission?

So, by your definition, anything that is legal by the letter of the law is automatically morally and ethically right as well?

Pastejack attack turns your clipboard into a threat

Re: I think I'm safe, buuuut...

It is done in the browser. The exploit is javascript.

https://github.com/dxa4481/Pastejacking/blob/master/index.html

Did Spotify hire Alan Partridge to run its Netflix-style video push?

Queen for a day

Moustachio'd rocker Freddie Mercury and HRH The Queen swap places for a day.

Apple assumes you'll toss the Watch after three years

"[iDevices] are typically used for four years before being Shut Down for the last time"

What part of "Years of use, which are based on first owners" do you not understand?

Three years is the figure they expect the original purchaser to own it, before selling it.

Would you let cops give your phone a textalyzer scan after a road crash?

Surely not possible to get accurate information without seizing the phone

How can they distinguish between you sending a message and an auto-responder sending a message?

The only way would be to have the device and check which apps / rules are running.

Hell, you could have even dictated a message, so fundamentally there would be no difference to holding a conversation.

George Bush naked selfie hacker Guccifer gets his day in US court

"Guccifer is accused of is broadcasting a painted self-portrait by former President George W Bush while naked in a shower and bath"

Naked hacking eh? He wants to watch out he doesn't drop the laptop into the water.

Hands on with Xiaomi's Mi 5: Great smartphone, but when do we get it?

Thin bezels - no thanks!

Apart from the mentioned usability issue, they are just too flimsy.

Pilot posts detailed MS Flight Sim video of how to land Boeing 737

"Use your feet to steer by pushing on the left or right pedal"

Pedantic much?

Foot pedals control yaw, and do basically the same thing as a steering wheel in a car or the handlebars on a bike.

So saying "Use your feet to steer by pushing on the left or right pedal" is putting it in simple terms that anyone familiar with cars or bikes (ie everyone) can understand.

That's cute, Germany – China shows the world how fusion is done

50 Million C?

The photo says 50, 000, 000 K

Is that not Kelvin?

Firing a water rocket to 1km? Piece of cake

Draw a graph of atmospheric pressure over altitude. Is the line straight or curved?

http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-altitude-pressure-d_462.html

It's curved. Ergo, expending all your thrust at launch is not the most efficient way to gain altitude.

According to that graph, at 1km up (Which is how high the vehicle got), there is ~2.3% less pressure than at sea level.

"Using a lower acceleration means that you're wasting impulse lifting the remaining mass of your fuel for a longer time, hence you'll get a lower altitude. Blasting it out all at once means that more of that potential energy stored as pressure is used to push the vehicle alone, getting you to a higher altitude."

If you expend 100% of your fuel in the first 1% of altitude, it means that you have to travel the remaining 99% (Through the least efficient part of the graph) with no power at all, and that you have way less inertia. So expending all the fuel at the start is not all good - there are up-sides and down-sides.

"featherweight record-breaking rocket that is 2.68m tall yet weighs less than 1.5kg"

"The rocket produced 550kg of thrust – enough to lift a small car off the ground – and blasted off to 550km/h in under 0.5 seconds"

I am guessing the 1.5kg weight is without fuel - even so, 0 - 550km/h in 0.5s sounds like way too fast too soon. Wouldn't you be better off distributing that thrust over a longer time? Are they not wasting a lot of DV trying to go too quickly through the atmosphere?

Boffins baffled by record-smashing supernova that shouldn't exist

"570 billion times brighter than our sun's output" ...Our sun's output over what time? 1 second? 1 year? its lifetime?

Oh my, that really needs explaining? If you omit such information from a comparison, the assumption is that you are comparing like for like.

The amount it outputs in x seconds is 570 million times more than our sun's output in x seconds.

Live-streaming paper plane drone takes to the skies

"Hot swap 550 mAh Lipo rechargable battery"

Hot swap??

I fail to see the point in a battery powered aitcraft being able to swap out batteries without turning off.

Sneaky skimmer scam stings several Safeway supermarkets

Trash your magstrip

If you are in a region that is in the process of moving from mag-strip to Chip+PIN, then once you are able to conduct your daily life without the magstrip, then trash the magstrip on your card!!

All the skimmers (AFAIK) clone magstrips. Even if you insert your card into a device that uses C+P, if it has a magstrip skimmer installed, then they have magstrip + PIN, which is enough to withdraw.

Big Brother is born. And we find out 15 years too late to stop him

Re: I have been radicalised.

While this may have been in jest, this may be a good way to hit back,

If everybody started discussing bomb plots with their mates, browsing Jihadist websites and generally trying to generate as many false positives as possible, they would become overwhelmed and may be forced to dial it back a notch or two.

ALLAHU ACKBAR!

British woman loses £1.6 million to romance scam love rats

"Victims of this fraud must understand that they are not foolish"

Getting scammed of a couple of hundred quid, maybe.

If you hand over £1.6m, then frankly you are more of a problem than the scammers. If there weren't twats like this woman around handing out such insane amounts of money, then the incentive wouldn't be as strong for people to become scammers.

Apple's Watch charging pad proves Cupertino still screwing buyers

Like they did with the USB charging standard?

And then Apple just stuck two fingers up at them and made it so that iDevices *could* charge from USB, but only with a proprietary adapter that does not ship with the product?

Hey Cortana, how about you hide my app from the user?

Dumbest idea ever

Have they even considered how this would work when everyone in the office is doing this at the same time?

It would be way too noisy and you can bet that your PC would occasionally pick up someone else's commands.

If it processes the commands without focusing the app, you may not even know that the sensitive spreadsheet you have on your PC was just emailed to all and sundry because the guy at the desk next to you tried to send an email to all users...

BlackBerry Priv: Enterprise Android in a snazzy but functional package

Fail review

"The Priv looks conventional, but unfolds to reveal a QWERTY keyboard"

This is THE main differentiating feature, and you felt the need to include a whole page of pictures taken using the device, which is probably not a huge concern for the target audience.

Is there one pic of the keyboard though? No. Fail.

Tiny Robot Smartphone: Invasion Earth 2016 – prepare to be facially recognised humans

The question "Where the hell has my phone gotten to?" becomes a little more problematic when the bugger has legs!

Anonymous UK 'leader' fined for revealing ID of rape complainant

"Zip ties not long enough to go around wrists" defence

Am I missing something here? As long as you have enough zip ties, no length is too long - you just daisy chain them.

Hardcore creationist finds 60-million-year-old fossils in backyard ... 'No, it hasn’t changed my mind about the Bible'

Re: re: creationism makes perfect sense. As long as you ignore all of creation?

"Ultimately one uses Occam's razor, but the simplicity of one explanation or the other is once again a value judgement that differs acording to personal perspective. I find the idea of a Big Bang simple,. and it has excellent explanatory power. The Creationists found it incomprehensible, whereas the thought of a Divine Being who waved a magic wand and brought a complete world into existence was a lot easier to grasp..."

As long as you don't ask "Where did the creator come from?". Then you realize that the creationist explanation is way more complicated.

Silicon Valley sides with Samsung in anti-Apple patent war

"Samsung's phones really were blatant rip-offs of Apple's, down to the grid of icons and the 'dock' at the bottom of the screen"

You mean like just about every OS in the GUI age ? Even Windows Mobile, which pre-dated iOS, worked in this way.

"Even the number of icons in each row was the same"

Four icons in a row is just common sense. You want a power of 2, so that the available number of pixels can be neatly divided up. 8 is too many, 2 is too few.

So no, nothing about what you said is either innovative or non-obvious - there is significant prior art for both of these concepts, and any suggestion that Apple can lay claim to them is ridiculous.

PEAK PLUTO: Stunning mountain ridge snapped by New Horizons craft

Re: However

Have faith, brother, it's there.

Wotan told me so in a dream.

What do you MEAN, 'Click on the thing which looks like a Mondrian?'

Re: £££s

The mind truly boggles. Either you are a complete moron or you are trolling. Probably you are American and you expect everyone to know where every road is because back home they are all numbered.

Go look at the A-Z of London, and then ask yourself "If I memorized the entire lot, how long would it take me and how much would I expect to earn per hour for driving people around".

> It seems the Knowledge only extends to main roads beyond the North Circular and this individual had to resort to his A to Z to find the place.

Go look at what the knowledge is: http://www.the-london-taxi.com/london_taxi_knowledge

It's about ROUTES from one area to another - ie how to get around london, not about memorizing the entire map of london. It is also about MAJOR landmarks (Embassies, restaurants, hotels etc) not some poxy B&B in a back street.

> If you are a visitor who doesn't know the area, you are not going to be much help, are you? Which is why you engage a supposed professional guide

Did he get you there?

Presumably he got you from the airport to the general area by memory alone, then had to look up exactly where the side street was.

Ditch crappy landlines and start reading Twitter, 999 call centres told

WiFi.

Behold the mighty Swiss SPACE JUNK NOSHER PODULE

If you give the junk a nudge, the spacecraft that nudged it would also be in the same orbit as the junk.

To nudge the junk without following it, you would need some way to "fire" it away, but every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so you would still need to expend the same amount of delta-V to correct the orbit of the cleaner ship.

I always wondered if you could use a long cable of something (carbon nanotube?) and attach that to the space junk, then fire the other end of the cable into the earth's atmo, thus aerobraking the junk into the atmo. Maybe some kind of parachute type structure on the end to increase the friction? If the coil and chute were light, you would then minimize the amount of dV required to fire it into the atmo, and also the amount of dV required to correct the orbit of the cleaner ship. Hell, if you attached a little rocket to the chute end of the cable, and didn't fire it until you released the junk, it would mean that the cleaner ship's orbit was not affected at all.

I suppose though, that anything in a lower orbit could get clothes-lined by the cable ;)

DDoSers call 1988 and want its routing protocol hacked

How very last century!

What next? Smurf attacks?

20-yr-old Brazilian births 100 banking trojans

Big wad of cash spelling VIP.

Baseball cap no doubt representin' yo homies or team.

All on a flowery sheet and apparently posted on facebook ?!?

Smooth.

Feds cuffed for allegedly PILFERING Silk Road drug souk's Bitcoins

Do you guys even proofread?

Two typos in the first two sentences.

"guilty guilty", "Mx Gox"

Unlucky, Palmer: Facebook's going to BAN Oculus pr0n apps

Re: What are the advantages of Oculus Rift?

Apart from the visual differences, the head tracking is optical as opposed to gyro based.

Gyro based does not come close to the fidelity of optical - for a start gyros only give relative, not absolute tracking.

TL;DR: You are much less likely to vomit over your PC with optical tracking.

It's curtains for you, copper: IBM boffins push the LIGHT FANTASTIC

That's fine, but...

Will it run Crysis?

Bundestag hack origin still a mystery as DE.gov techies pull out their hair

"Some MPs are concerned about this and are worried that metadata retention of all websites they visit will become a permanent state of affairs."

Now that's an idea - An un-erasable, public browser history for all politicians :)

NASA sending five-metre THERMO-HAMMER to Mars

Re: "See video below"

Me too.

I think they probably mean the video on this page, but I don't think you can stream those, maybe that's why it got omitted.

http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov/videos.cfm?Vid_ID=4

Popular crypto app uses single-byte XOR and nowt else, hacker says

Re: At the end of the day...

Agreed.

Also, as this is a mobile platform, there is some merit in the technique used, as it would chew very little in the way of CPU cycles (And thus battery life).

Re: Turning the company's soiled reputation around 360 degrees!

XOR takes two inputs and has one output.

You cannot use it twice and end up with the input.

For an output of 1, it would be impossible to know which of the following inputs were used:

0 1

1 0

So you would have a 50/50 chance of "guessing" the inputs.

XOR != "Exclusive Operator" ?

AFAIK, Calling XOR the "Exclusive Operator" is technically incorrect and ambiguous. For example, Exclusive NOR is an "Exclusive Operator", but is not XOR (In fact, it is the exact opposite of XOR).

Operator = The operation (OR, AND, NOT etc)

Exclusive = "If both inputs meet the criteria, invert the result".

Certainly, the sentence "and said it used only XOR (exclusive operator) to safeguard files" implies that XOR is THE "exclusive operator", when it is not, it is ONE OF the exclusive operators.

If you said to an engineer "Use an exclusive operator" when meaning "Use a XOR", then the statement would be ambiguous.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in this field, so I could be wrong about accepted terminology.

</pedant>

Windows 10 build 10041: 99 bugs on the wall, fix a bug, add a feature, 114 bugs on the wall

Multi-Monitor taskbars?

So does Win10 finally add a taskbar for each monitor?

It beggars belief that such a basic usability feature was not included in Win7. Thank god for 7+TT

PIRATES and THIEVES to get Windows 10 as BOOTY

Re: What kind of free is this?

Except that the windows license is included in the price of the device, so they are not getting it for free at all.

They sort of do?

As in heroin addicts getting methadone?

Nvidia waves 4King big Android Shield at games console warzone

I am quite surprised they didn't go with SteamOS.

Could you maybe put SteamOS on there instead? I doubt nVidia care that much about the OS to lock it down?

A desktop-class machine in a console form-factor for $200 that runs SteamOS would be a very different proposition methinks.

Beam me up, Scotty, And VAPORIZE me in the process

The whole idea is fundamentally flawed

It in no way guarantees that the object will be printed only one time.

All it does is cost you extra, as you have to print a copy to send (instead of just squirting the schematics down the wire), introduces a margin of error, then it destroys YOUR copy? What use is that for people wanting to sell one-time prints?

ROBOT-ON-DRAGON GRABHAND ACTION: SpaceX supply podule arrives at ISS

If you can attach it to something. Good luck getting it stable unless your camera has RCS.

Elon Musk: Wanna see a multimillion-dollar rocket EXPLODE? WATCH THIS

That's a "Revert to VAB" moment if ever I saw one.

Hats off once again Mr Musk - many companies would see this as negative publicity, but he knows all the geeks just see it as porn.

Your data: Stolen through PIXELS

Re: Most of my clients

You need to specify where a device that plugs into your video output is located?

Take a wild guess.

And if the mac only has a displayport adapter, just use a DP -> HDMI converter dongle.

Not Undetectable

There are systems out there that can detect a machine requesting lots of files over the network and flag it as suspicious.

Also, running in a non-1920x1080p resolution would cause big problems for this hack - most of these game capture boxes pretend to be a 1920x1080p monitor, so you could just check for device change of the monitor, or watch for resolution change.

Also, you would not need a game capture card for many nvidia GPU machines - just record the desktop with Shadowplay.

Which raises more of a security risk IMHO.

Just make ShadowPlay is enabled in "Shadow Mode", wait for the CEO to leave his PC unlocked, then hit the record button and have his last half hour of screen activity dumped to a video.

Dead Steve Jobs to give iPod MP3 evidence from beyond the grave

Re: "Thousands of iPod owners re-bought their existing collections..."

See the original article for your citation.

Why do you think the class action suit was brought? For exactly this reason.

Re: You seem to have forgotten

You seem to forget that it was Apple who were about the only ones enforcing DRM on their hardware up until that point.

The creative players, for example, did not enforce DRM - you could load any old MP3 on there and it would play.

Thousands of iPod owners re-bought their existing collections on iTunes just so they could play the music they already legally owned.

IIRC the first person to make a regular MP3 playable on the iPod was not Apple, but DVD Jon.

Tough Banana Pi: a Raspberry Pi for colour-blind diehards

Re: "Gigabit Ethernet is also a very welcome edition"

"Feel like shit"?

A bit strong.

More like a bit of shaming.

El Reg's proof-reading is very sloppy, pretty much every article has typos or grammatical errors of some kind.

From a publication that would not hesitate to rip the piss out of other organizations for similar transgressions, I call this fair game - how could any self-respecting journalist justify anything less than perfect command of the language they write in on a daily basis?

Sony employees face 'weeks of pen and paper' after crippling network hack

Re: Not even close

"The rootkit was in fact a commercial product".

Which illegally used open source code written by Jon Johansen, AKA "DVD Jon", whom they sued for reverse-engineering DeCSS.

But let's not let that get in the way of a good shilling, eh?