Posts by nojobhopes

If Apple's environmental rhetoric is meaningful, Macs and iPads should converge

If we cared about the environment

... we'd still be using first generation iPads, and the latest software and websites would still work on them.

Only iPhone 15 Pro models will have higher data transfer speeds on USB-C – analyst

Re: Coby > Apple

There's one advantage to USB-C no-one is talking about. The end with the power in it is female!

Lightning is the only modern power cable I know with exposed metal terminals.

People still seem to think their fancy cars are fully self-driving

Absolutely. As several have pointed out, it's reckless for car manufacturers to use terms the suggest it can do more for you. "Auto pilot" is the most stupid name for it. Of course people believe it will drive for them - because the manufacturers told them that with the name of the feature.

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

Slightly disrespectful to the Labrador. Many lovesick human teenagers put on a superb show of deep longing and immense unrequited need but are actually animals of prodigious and insatiable appetite.

Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests

Was it a fair test?

"The cyclist and vehicle targets were both lightweight and designed to be harmless to the test vehicle and driver."

Was the radar able to spot them? Were the cars guilty of crashing into cardboard boxes?

Having said that, we already have TMS - Too Much Software, and AI should only take over when proven to be safer than the average human.

Immediate solution - rename these shoddy AI systems. Why are Tesla allowed to call it AutoPilot? No wonder their owners think it will do everything. Trade descriptions.

Ransomware plows through farm machinery giant AGCO

I was just looking at tractors

Who?

Russia? March 2022 - "AGCO Agriculture Foundation Donates to Ukraine Emergency Relief" - https://www.fendt.com/int/agco-agriculture-foundation-donates-to-ukraine-emergency-rel

And then there's John Deere who have interesting business practices - https://www.freeict.eu/news/john-deere-restrictive-practices-hinder-maintenance-for-farmers - despite calling themselves "one of World's Most Ethical Companies". See some of the comments on https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2022/05/02/ukrainian_tractors_deere/

UK Government? "Tory MP's friend 'can see' how he went from tractors to p*rn site" - https://metro.co.uk/2022/05/01/tory-mps-friend-can-see-how-he-went-from-tractors-to-porn-site-16566918/

Or just some chancers.

What?

I would be very surprised if the outages only impact their production systems.

Star loses $500,000 NFT after crooks exploit Rarible market

Star loses $500,000

Surely star loses $500,000 by purchasing an NFT?

Hooking up to Starlink might be pricier than you thought

No-one likes price increases, but SpaceX have done more to cut launch costs than anyone else. Why are NASA using them to get to the ISS? Because they are reliable and cheap. So instead of being subsidised by tax payers they are actually saving the tax payer money. Of course the biggest saving would be to defund space, but that's a different question.

Starlink has plenty of competition. There's the traditional satellite internet proviers, who are expensive and have restrictive monthly data caps. But the biggest competition is the traditional earth based telecoms providers. They could have provided fast broadband to every person on the planet but decided that excessive profits and asking governments to subsidise their networks was more important. They could have expanded their wire, fibre, or mobile networrks to cover everyone. But apparently it costs more to dig a trench and lay some wires to the nearest town than it does for Elon to concieve, design, manufacture, and launch thousands of satellites which provide amazing connections.

Microsoft brings Jenny, Aria, and more interface tweaks to new Windows 11 Insider build

Landfill

With their installed base it does seem almost evil to stop supporting gazillions of devices which will end up in the ground, instead of working on making your OS more efficient.

You might want to consider the cost of not upgrading legacy tech, UK's Department for Work and Pensions told

Indeed, most of the fault lies with politcians trying to buy votes from an ever more precise segment of the population. Or whatever the Daily Mail printed this morning.

As for new systems being better than old systems, let's just consider a few headlines over the years - see ElRegs passim.

Clearview's selfie-scraping AI facial recognition technology set to be patented

GDPR

“downloading by a web crawler facial images of individuals and personal information associated therewith; and storing the downloaded facial images and associated personal information in the database.”

Sounds a lot like the opening statement in a legal case against a company alleged to have broken Europe's GDPR.

AWS admits cloud ain't always the answer, intros on-prem vid-analysing box

Who doesn't want their data in the cloud?

Governments and other organisations who might be analysing / tracking people they shouldn't.

Got enterprise workstations and hope to run Windows 11? Survey says: You lose. Over half the gear's not fit for it

Re: Environmental homicide

Aww someone gave them a certificate. https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE2Bv1s

Environmental homicide

Microsoft aren't personally trucking millions of machines to landfill, but they are pushing them on their way.

When will their corporate responsibility annual statement start measuring the tonnes of gear which their upgrades obsoleted? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility

And don't get me started on the vast tracts of human time wasted.

In space, no one can hear cyber security professionals scream

Re: Obscurity

Exactly. After some keen amateur decoded video from SpaceX experimental launches the company decided to encrypt their comms. https://www.redorbit.com/spacex-begins-encrypting-telemetry-data-from-rocket-launches/

More cracks found in Russian annex of the International Space Station

Re: "applied two kilograms of hermetal along all the seams"

"but there's something about a jet of boiling water that I can't put my finger on."

I see what you did there

"He said tank, not boiler, so I'd assume from that it's an unpressurised, insulated storage vessel, not a pressurised boiler."

Yes exactly that. Copper tank, and unpressurised (vented to the attic). Managed to get a pinprick hole while trying to undo the massive thread on the element and folded the thin tank skin slightly. It was a very fine jet of quite hot water. Took a while to notice the wet patch downstairs and realise there was a hole. Was off to a Java training course (those were the days) and didn't want to leave the family without hot water. Water is a demon.

"applied two kilograms of hermetal along all the seams"

I used metal putty on my domestic hot water tank ten years ago and I can report it works great.

I won't leave earth without packing some!

Facebook: Let us tell you WhatsApp – we don't want to pay that €225m GDPR fine

Your data is worth $40

"The WhatsApp acquisition closed at a steep $16 billion; more than $40 per user of the platform"

and they aren't going to run it as a public service. They want our data and reckon it is worth more than $40 each.

'Vast majority of people' are onside with a data grab they know next to nothing about, reckons UK health secretary

Is Hancock out of prison already?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56125462

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/matt-hancock-pandemic-ppe-contracts-good-law-project-881736

He's a born liar

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

Re: Missing the point? - nope

You make a couple of good points.

- A lot of telemetry is used to improve products. Microsoft used usage stats from Office when deciding which icons to put first on the Ribbon (hated because of the way it was rolled out but overall beneficial).

- Google is providing this stuff for free. We should be paying for great maps but don't have to. Quid pro quo.

Maybe if platforms and advertisers were more careful to hide the clear link between what pages we visit on one site and the ads we see the next site, we wouldn't be so suspicious.

Missing the point?

Irrelevant talk about turning off mobile data or the cost of data in the USA. Google should grab only what can be justified as necessary, and tell us what that is, in their privacy policy. It is becoming law in most parts of the world.

$$$? The accusers want more than their $8+ back. They also want the dosh Google made by selling their private data to advertisers. The article says "The lawsuit seeks to recover the fair market value of the co-opted cellular data and the "reasonable value of the cellular data used by Google to extract and deliver information that benefited Google,""

Microsoft? Just you wait until someone does the same with Windows 10. A friend runs his desktop PC with data off!

Coding unit tests is boring. Wouldn't it be cool if an AI could do it for you? That's where Diffblue comes in

If we could express intent in a way that a machine could understand...

If we could express intent in a way that a machine could understand... we wouldn't actually need unit tests. Just get the machine to generate the code to implement the intent. If the intent changes, re-generate.

All we would need then is a system to help us test our intent...

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

Re: I called the cops

I've seen it done, and was there when the police arrived.

Of course even if you stay on the line to explain your innocent mistake, the police in the US are obliged to turn up at the registered premises for the phone number. They need to check all is well.

A lot of private office exchanges are configured to forward "911" from an internal phone to the police, as if you were on a normal landline. There is even a US Patent for it - US20040081290A1.

Some interesting snippets in this Cisco manual:

https://community.cisco.com/t5/collaboration-voice-and-video/911-call-announcement/ta-p/3203809

"If the caller hangs up before talking to a 911 dispatcher, then emergency services will be sent to the site to verify the emergency. Since most of these accidental calls are caused by users misdialing the number or by accidentally entering the long distance access code twice"

"Since many dialplans are based on an access code of 9 followed by a long distance number of 1 or 011 for international calls, accidental calls to 911 happen on a frequent basis."

So remember when you are next allowed into the States and want to call home in UK:

9 - "oh!!" - 11 - 44 - number without the leading zero

Re: I called the cops

And that's the issue - memory. We all know 9 is for an outside line (except on exchanges where it isn't). We all know "1" is the 'national' prefix when in the USA (equivalent to 0 in other countries like the UK). So surely "11" is the international prefix (equivalent to 00 in the UK). And suddenly there are a pair of uniforms in reception wanting to see the person who made the accidental call, just in case... Memory issues mean we forget we should be dialing 9011 before the country code.

Patently dogged: Apple unleashes lawyers to slash $454m patent rip-off bill – even after Supreme Court snub

Central Intelligence Agency

Would the CIA contract quoted in the patent have any bearing on the outcome of the case?

UK snubs Apple-Google coronavirus app API, insists on British control of data, promises to protect privacy

Paranoid Android

Of course "Pushing out updates to Android is notoriously challenging" (https://www.cnet.com/news/how-youll-get-apple-and-googles-contact-tracing-update-for-your-phone/). In reality lots of Android phones don't have the latest security fixes. So how are Google getting this tracking update onto all Android phones? Via Google Play services. Which doesn't work for vendors who produce Google-free AOSP Android phones (like cheap knock-offs and Amazon Fire devices). This proves the Android OS update approach is a bit broken.

Police drone fliers' wings clipped to prevent them bumping into real aircraft

Give them an inch

Oh the beautiful agony of double standards.

Fruit and veg = procescuted

- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1010827.stm

- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7692483.stm

Precious metals = allowed

- https://bit.ly/2JzBdQ1

Clothing = allowed

- https://bit.ly/2wTWDoM

Weapons = allowed

- https://bit.ly/2KmFOpC

Height of politicians = allowed

- https://bit.ly/2KnnRra

Pints especially in icon form = swallowed

Australian state will install home surveillance hardware to make sure if you're in virus isolation, you stay there

April fool?

Checks watch

- Well this is a good April fool by The Register. A bit insensitive but funny. Well done y'all.

Checks Australian government bill

- Oh. Ohh. Ohhh.

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

Regtastic Regomatic Randomiser 9000 might be jealous

I am concerned that the Regtastic Regomatic Randomiser 9000 is becoming self-aware... and jealous.

It seems to be obsessed with its competitors. ERNIE is of course the Premium Bonds quantum-powered random number generator - https://www.nsandi.com/ernie. Ernie is quite a beast. "Unlike previous versions which used thermal noise to produce random numbers, ERNIE 5 is powered by quantum technology"

For a bonus point perhaps someone could explain the algorithm which the Government Actuary's Department uses to prove that Ernie is actually random. I had that as an interview question once.

Galileo got it wrong – official: Jupiter actually wet, not super-dry: 'No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet'

Juipter's water is already contaminated by human waste

NASA 'deorbited' the Galileo probe into Jupiter in 2003 at a leisurely 108,000 mph. The probe was powered by two radioisotope thermoelectric generators, each carrying 7.8 kilograms of Plutonium. Apparently NASA polluted Jupiter because they didn't want to pollute its moons. Other missions have similar legacies and risks. The Mars Science Laboratory had a 1 in 420 chance of a failure resulting in a release of plutonium dioxide in the launch area. (https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/news/pdfs/MSL_DEIS_Fact_Sheet_final_1.pdf)

It's official: In May, Microsoft will close the door, lock the vault, brick over the entrance of dreaded Windows 10 1809

Gateway to the underworld?

Nice picture. Reminds me appropriately enough of the register of Entrances to Hell site - http://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/

Clunk, whirr, buzz, whine. Shared office space can be a riot and sounds like one too

The Sound of Silence

"Sounds" like you have just watched the Sound of Silence - if not, it's worth a listen. Directed by Michael Tyburski.

Protestors in Los Angeles force ICANN board out of hiding over .org sale – for a brief moment, at least

Appearance of impropriety

Well this has the appearance of impropriety. If they want to sell, why not accept bids? And exclude any person who may have insider knowledge.

Vulture Central team welcomed to our new nest by crashed Ubuntu that's 3 years out of date

Brave new world

Maybe because the old red telephone boxes didn't need patching every week, or even every three years.

How four rotten packets broke CenturyLink's network for 37 hours, knackering 911 calls, VoIP, broadband

Going Postal?

Reminiscent of parts of Terry Pratchett's 'Going Postal', where a Clacks message is kept 'moving in the Overhead' using the tags G, N, and U.

Xilinx FPGA. Nvidia GPU storage. 56-core Intel Xeons versus AMD next-gen Epyc. It's all kicking off in data-center world

FPGA because von Neumann machines are too easy to hack

Ever since John von Neumann proposed storing data and instructions in the same memory (back in 1945), it has been a recipe for malware. Surely an FPGA can't suffer from buffer overruns? So there's another advantage. Hoping someone with actual knowledge will correct me.

GitHub builds wall round private repos, makes devs in US-sanctioned countries pay for it

No idea! You could also be affected by the Chagos islands dispute: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/27/io_domains_uk_un/

Turning it off and on again IN SPAAACE! ISS animal-tracker kit needs oldest trick in the book

200kg is a lot of kit to take to space. Are we sure it is only tracking? And apparently "The OBC-I [On-Board Computer] is installed inside the Service Module behind a ceiling panel" [https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/i/iss-icarus]. Is someone trying to hide it from the Russians?

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

Fu logo?

The Fuchsia logo is remarkably similar to another Fu... - Fujitsu's 'infinity' logo.

Goddamn the Pusher man: Nominet kicks out domain name hijack bid

IIt appears he is a "domainer", and buys and sells domains.

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/squillions

https://www.acorndomains.co.uk/threads/lee-owen-squillions-minisites-a-warning.87809/

https://www.acorndomains.co.uk/threads/why-am-i-infamous-here.17805/