Posts by Ordinary Donkey

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

Narrowly beating out the Canadian parliament at this rate...

UK Online Safety Bill to become law – and encryption busting clause is still there

Re: Blighty seems determined to cut itself off from the rest of the world

Just to clarify, does calling the new law an unworkable mess violate the new law? What about calling ofcom underfunded?

It sounds a lot like this law is intended to impose hefty prison sentences for claiming to have seen the emperor's hairy arse cheeks.

Scientists suggest possible solution to space-induced bone loss

Now they've managed to make it 'cool' by giving it a space flight angle, maybe someone will get around to it at last.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: faulty by design

Or else it's all just rich men west of lambeth who want to have total control.

MIT boffins build battery alternative out of cement, carbon black, water

Re: Perhaps I missed something

Those were the days.

Re: Perhaps I missed something

It's in the MIT link.

The material is then soaked in a standard electrolyte material, such as potassium chloride, a kind of salt, which provides the charged particles that accumulate on the carbon structures. Two electrodes made of this material, separated by a thin space or an insulating layer, form a very powerful supercapacitor, the researchers found.

Re: Perhaps I missed something

As I understand it, each concrete block's carbon is one electrode, with huge surface area because it spreads through the concrete in tiny rivulets as it's formed. Then they place the two concrete blocks into some sort of container with electrolyte and an insulator.

The breakthrough here is the huge surface area, because capacitance is a function of electrode surface area.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Almost like it's a distraction.

Is there a Hunter Biden story people need distracting from or something?

Amazon, Bing, Wikipedia make EU's list of 'Very Large' platforms

Re: A challenge?

Amazon Terms and Conditions, by ChatGPT*

• You owe us your soul,
• your daughter and son,
• we'll send you tat late.

(Wasn't intending it to come out as a haiku, but why not?)

*not really

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

In the future all lightning must be cloud based.

Elon Musk's Twitter moves were 'reaffirming' says Reddit boss amid API changes

Dirty Protest

Just to warn people, a lot of subreddits have been forced to re-open and have opted for a minimal moderation approach, citing a lack of third party moderation tools.

If a subreddit is now tagged NSFW and wasn't before then you'll probably see something you don't want to if you look in there.

Just figured people should know.

Elon's own tweet said that the goal was:

1. Do lots of dumb stuff

2. Keep what works

3. Profit.

Reddit does indeed seem to have some confusion about what point 2 was.

EU tells Twitter 'you can run but you can't hide' from disinformation policy

Re: Disinformation vs difference of opinion

But if you post that Boris Johnson is not only not the Messiah, but that he is in fact a Very Naughty Boy that will now be automatic disinformation punishable by a mandatory five hundred nuyen fine and corrective bdsm session with the last politician you voted against.

Perseverance rover shows up Curiosity with discovery of Martian water park

Re: Doctor?

Doesn't "postdoctoral" mean she's earned her doctorate and is entitle to use the title "Doctor"?

Postdoctoral researcher, or postdoc for short, is a job. Usually the person doing that job has a PhD but there are exceptions, I know someone whose thesis defence kept getting delayed and he ended up doing a postdoc while waiting to be allowed to complete his PhD.

4chan and other web sewers scraped up into Google's mega-library for training ML

Post-Sun sun readers?

Is Mumsnet in the library?

That's what would really worry me. Place make 4chan look like fortran.

Wrong time to weaken encryption, UK IT chartered institute tells government

Re: Shut the back door!

Is 27 years long enough to admit that they do understand that they're helping the bad guys?

It sounds like we have bad guys in politics.

They know what the problem is. Your mistake is in thinking the goal is to protect children.

Trust, not tech, is holding back a safer internet

If we could make scanning and email take as long and be as detectable as opening and reading a letter then the postal service comparison would be relevant.

The lack of trust for government content moderation stems in part from the acknowledged fact that government content moderators protected Jimmy Savile in the 1970s. That's a lot of trust to regain.

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure

Re: Call me a Conspiracy Theorist

That's crazy talk. Surely there are no easily bribed...

... sorry bear with me, I'm getting a call from Qatar.

McDonald's pulls plug on Wi-Fi, starts playing classical music to soothe yobs

Re: print car number plates on takeaway bags to discourage customers from littering

I just don't understand the mentality.

Nutritional Influences on Antisocial Behavior

in the past at least they had the decency to pretend otherwise...

Unfortunately that pretending usually involved banning things just to pretend they weren't using the same things at home. Some of us would prefer they'd just admitted they liked some of the same things we do.

I mean the pig's head was a bit over the top, but they didn't even try to ban that.

If your Start menu or apps are freezing up on Windows, Microsoft has a suggestion

Re: It Took One Hour To Solve A Similar Problem....

To be fair, installing Windows doesn't mean you need to let it touch metal. Modern VM software is more than capable of keeping it ensconced in a dreamworld with all the imaginary goodies it's black heart desires while you freeze it and go back to doing real work.

Microsoft seems to prefer that you would only use Microsoft apps.

Didn't they get in trouble for that a long time ago?

UK Online Safety law threatens Big Tech bosses with jail

Re: Are they still using "harmful but legal" content as a measure

They're even counting saying nice things about channel migrants as harmful. (But only in video form, for now at least)

Guardian link

Re: Boo hoo

The telling thing is that American law enforcement basically had the run of Twitter in recent years and chose not to take down the child porn.

I don't see how anyone can seriously make a think of the children defence after that.

Twitter 2.0 signal boosts Taliban 2.0 through Blue subscriptions

Re: Yes, you DO have freedom of speech

If that really bothers you so much your solution is simple: do what Donald Trump did and start your own web site, and post whatever your heart desires.

Or do what Elon did and buy someone else's?

Re: Kudos to the BBC for self-labelling its state affiliation

Fair point, but the Saudis were bought out with the rest. This is all Elon's shit now.

Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry

Funny, I always suspected the regomiser already had hands.

Twitter starts auction to flip the bird, furniture, pizza ovens, gadgets galore

It's all change at El Reg. Elon is the new Paris in case you missed it.

Stolen info on 400m+ Twitter accounts seemingly up for sale

News?

We knew from the twitter whistleblower that thousands of twitter staffers had root access. Everyone getting leaked should not be a surprise, more so would be people not having changed their password since the news hit.

Elon Musk starts poll with one question: Should I step down as head of Twitter?

Re: Dubious governance/process?

It's not valid at all. Elon literally has the power to add votes at a whim.

But for some reason people are acting like it's extremely serious.

Didn't Musk already say he wasn't going to stay as head of twitter long-term?

Twitter dismantles its Trust and Safety Council moments before meeting

If you follow any child protection charities you know this stuff.

I'm guessing the council was dismantled mostly because of the leader's publication that talked about children and grindr. However you interpret it, it was way outside most people's comfort zone.

Twitter, Musk, and a week of bad decisions

Re: Fair play to the impostor

Yeah, that's what happens to your stock price when people think you're being undercut.

Fair play to the people who made people think that.

Fair play to the impostor

One insulin producer lost 16 billion in value because people thought it was possible that they would stop gouging money out of diabetics.

Given that there are a million American diabetics who cannot afford insulin, well done on bringing the mess into the media.

(source)

The boss worked in a fishbowl, so office tricks were a treat

Re: Does this count?

Perhaps, but tell me do you think you were the only one in the office that she went with?

Re: Does this count?

All I see is a woman who knows how to get what she wants.

Twitter's most valuable users are ghosting the platform

You mean...

Just like all the big names who left Spotify and ended up on Spotify?

I follow a lot of tweeters who have left Twitter at least twice.

India's – and Infosys's – favorite son-in-law Rishi Sunak is next UK PM

Can't be right.

Biden clearly said that Rashid Sanook had won.

Interesting how the algorithm is picking stories to link below this comment section though.

New measurement alert: Liz Truss inspires new Register standard

Re: Delighted ...

Good catch, I don't have a citation, it was claimed by I think an MEP during discussions on how Europe was going to handle the energy crisis. Could be wrong though, you're correct.

The idea that the tories plan to use it to blackmail ... I mean influence the EU is entirely my own guesswork.

Re: Delighted ...

Tory MPs wanted Sunak from day one. That's why they gave members the choice of either him or the Queen of Turnips. Unfortunately he was in charge of the economy going to shit and people weren't going to forgive him for that so Liz got it instead.

Now it looks for all the world like it will be him and Boris as the final two, which would be a literal "vote Rishi or the party gets it.". I'd expect that Boris will step down at the last minute Leadsom-style allowing Rishi to be appointed by the party elites instead,

As for the plan beyond that, Britain has a surfeit of gas and Europe is expected to run out this winter. I'm guessing someone behind the scenes thinks they can gain some post-Brexit concessions if they have that as a bargaining chip. Not saying it'll work but I can't see anything else that might save the party.

Or maybe they just want to add the first non-white PM to the party's portfolio before they crash out of politics for another decade. Wouldn't bet either way.

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

Re: General Election

To be fair, Tim Farron's twitter is a goldmine for satirists right now.

Re: Online Leadership Election

That's why I support Kemi.

Not that she has a chance, at this rate Boris will come back on Halloween and it won't even be funny.

NSA super-leaker Edward Snowden granted Russian citizenship

Been a while.

Good to see El Reg giving Betteridge's law a workout again.

School chat app Seesaw abused to send 'inappropriate image' to parents, teachers

Re: Living in fear of a 2nd wave.

My suspicion is that there's some kind of uncanny arsehole effect going on here, caused by the owner being smaller than people assume in other ways which makes parts that don't scale that way look unnatural.

Mandiant ‘highly confident’ foreign cyberspies will target US midterm elections

They're only Russians if they get caught.

Google, YouTube ban election trolls ahead of US midterms

Re: Try a little critical thinking

Politifact has a good breakdown of the relevant laws from 2017 and includes legal and constitutional experts arguing that the procedures don't and shouldn't apply to the president.

Stupid if true, so probably true since in politics stupid is the default.

Fortunately self-pardon is unconstitutional. Nobody can take an official role in their own trial.

Re: Try a little critical thinking

Sorry, maybe I worded that a little confusingly.

Presidents can seemingly declassify documents without following any procedure at all. If a president wants a document to stop being classified then it just stops being. I agree with you that this is stupid but so are a lot of rules that apply to politicians.

Unless Trump changed these rules (which I doubt because why give up power) then the rules about presidents keeping classified material have no teeth. "But I declassified it!" becomes a perfect defence because you can never prove he didn't.

Which, of course, makes this all nonsense political theater, of the type you see in the run up to any election.

Re: Try a little critical thinking

PS retaining classified docs was made a felony in 2018 by one president trump.......

Did he change the rules on declassifying documents that allow a president to declassify them on a whim with no records needing kept?

This smells like a media game, Trump gets himself raided for documents he already declassified in order to push the narrative that law enforcement is interfering with elections.