Posts by Ordinary Donkey

UK terror law reviewer calls for expanded police powers to imprison people who refuse to hand over passwords

Re: Plausible deniability

My ticket out is booked for mid April. Goodbye, and good luck.

As someone who already left this gives me a curiously fuzzy feeling. Good to see others doing the same thing.

Cryptic US Strategic Command tweet reveals dangers of working from home with kids in the way

Re: So ";l;;gmlxzssaw" is a child, eh?

It makes it being careless when you put your phone down mid-tweet.

But somehow people still talk about it more than three years later.

Wi-Fi devices set to become object sensors by 2024 under planned 802.11bf standard

I hate to break the news to you, but clothes made with silver-infused thread to produce a faraday effect are already widely available.

Underwear too.

Re: Stalker's dream

You won't be able to keep it in the home. There are more than twice as many identifiable wifi networks in my home office than there are apartments in the building.

TikTok no worse than Facebook for privacy, says Citizen Lab (although Chinese TikTok is a horror)

Re: Thanks for the warning.

Just in: Branding no worse than burning for your skin.

GitLab latest to ditch 'master' as default initial branch name: It's now simply called 'main'

Re: RE: Master / slave

It comes from the radial engine and probably the windmill before that.

In truth 'main' is probably going to win out in the end just for saving two characters. So how about we settle the differences and call it the top branch?

Prime suspect: Amazon India apologises for offensive scenes in political thriller

Re: Bad news

That's not about Speech though. Getting in somebody's face is another matter and what the person doing so does or doesn't say doesn't change it.

Claiming the right to inflict harm on someone because you don't like what they're saying is justifying hate crimes, end of.

Re: Bad news

No, just because you don't like the Koran doesn't give you the right to kick people for quoting it. Maybe try again?

Bill Gates on climate change: Planting trees is not the answer, emissions need to be zeroed out to avoid disaster

Man who owns 268,984 acres in the USA alone wants us to know that he doesn't need to plant any trees on that land.

(About a 19th of a Wales thanks for asking)

European Space Agency open to hiring astronauts with a physical disability

What about stomas?

The case has been made many times that people who already shit through mechanical devices are perfect for space exploration.

No joy for Julian Assange as Uncle Sam confirms it will keep pushing for WikiLeaker's extradition to America

Re: IANAL...

What makes you think he wouldn't have been extradited to the USA?

Robinhood plays Sheriff of Nottingham as it pauses GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry etc stock sales, gets sued

They would say that they tried that already. After all, this all exploded immediately after Biden let them down.

They say that politics isn't fixing it because Wall Street owns the politicians. So to effect political change they have to destabilise Wall Street first.

Some would say that the real market manipulation is the government bailing out Wall Street every time it fucks up and proves itself unfit for purpose.

Just summarising the views of the people doing this to hurt wall street there. Remember, American workers didn't get a furlough during covid but Wall Street got trillions. People are angry.

Games Workshop finds that in the grim darkness of the 3rd millennium, there is only ERP

I did the same, then assumed that was deliberate.

Well played, El Reg.

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

Re: So

In other words an anonymous coward wants us to believe him rather than an internationally recognised expert in the field.

Go home, Michael Gove, you're drunk.

Re: So

International experts on torture, including the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, say that he was tortured.

But maybe this time the experts are wrong and you're right, who knows?

We take a look at proposed Big Tech regulations in the UK: Heavy on possible fines, light on enforcement

Re: Online Harms and duty of care

What would such an icon look like? My feeling would be probably the steamroller from his last request.

As for the Tories, they're already weaponising fake news. partial list here.

"Tech giants"

I haven't been able to see any clear definition of what this regulation considers to be a 'tech giant'. Is there such a definition?

The cynic in me expects them to define it so vaguely that they can silence small companies by declaring them to be tech giants and fining them a thousand times their revenue.

Leaked draft EU law reveals tech giants could face huge 6% turnover fines if they don't play by Europe's rules

Re: "legal but harmful"

It seems like it includes spreading doubt about vaccines, if Matt Hancock's troll farm is anything to go by.

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind locked doors... so don't leave your UPS in there

I've worked in a ton of places where only one person has access to the building's fuse box.

I can see the point, but one dodgy kettle and you're offline for hours.

Glastonbury hippy shop Hemp in Avalon rapped for spouting 'plandemic' pseudoscience

Re: overwhelming evidence ?

I think you're touching on the actual issue here.

The problem isn't people who doubt experts, it's the ones who trust them too much and don't get that sometimes they mislead you.

In March there was a global shortage of masks. So a variety of people took it upon themselves to lie to the plebs, probably spontaneously. Now there is no shortage but some of the plebs still believe what those people said when there was.

Having no faith in experts whatsoever, I masked up in March.

Or, let's be fair, in Downing Street.

In the mean time who's up for a barbecue at Barnard Castle? Pangolin steaks are on me.

One does not simply shove elephants on a ballet shoe point and call it an acceptable measure of pressure

Re: Pressure

Since Her Majesty doesn't have an official weight might I suggest substituting her namesake the QE2? Wikipedia gives that a gross tonnage of 70,327

Linux Foundation, IBM, Cisco and others back ‘Inclusive Naming Initiative’ to change nasty tech terms

Re: KISS

We Avoid Verbose Environments.

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

I have actually tripped a circuit breaker by plugging something into a socket at an awkward angle. Contact was rapidly made and broken 2-3 times and the trip switch went. That was the first time I figured switches had a purpose.

Ruined a few people's mornings until the caretaker arrived to open the breaker box.

Five Eyes nations plus Japan, India call for Big Tech to bake backdoors into everything

Three weeks to the election and impossible demands are being made again.

BOFH: Will the last one out switch off the printer?

Is Simon-land the new name of the office now he's fortified it and reverted to savagery?

What will the first explorers to breach the threshold in eeeeaargh! *Splat* the first explorers found a greased floor and slid into a vacant elevator shaft. Will the next be any <WAAA WAAA> Is that a halon alarm? What can it...

Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles

Oor Wullie is working at Wikipedia now?

US senators: WikiLeaks 'likely knew it was assisting Russian intelligence influence effort' in 2016 Dem email leak

Re: Is this news?

Did you see the line-up at the Democrat convention this week?

Stars of the 1996 Republican convention brought back as Democrat guests of honour were just the beginning.

Almost like there's an election...

... and they're scared Trump will try to pardon Julian in order to suck up to the voters.

Capita: We were juuust about to generate revenue growth and sustainable cash flow – then pandemic stuffed it up

"Covid ate my homework"

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

Re: Was that said with a sarcastic tone?

The Martin Luther King paraphrase rather confirms it.

It's been five years since Windows 10 hit: So... how's that working out for you all?

Pretty good

I've learned so much about virtualization since it became clear my only other choice would be to let 10 touch metal.

Cabinet Office takes over control of UK government data: Mundane machinery or Machiavellian manoeuvrings?

Re: "David Cameron called him a career psychopath."

Hello, Dominic.

Re: A bit lost here...

Cummings is POSSIBLY (legal!!) a sociopath who thinks he's risen to a level where he doesn't need to devote that mental overhead to "acting" pleasant anymore, hence why he's perceived as a nasty little ****.

David Cameron called him a career psychopath.

Purism's quest against Intel's Management Engine black box CPU now comes in 14 inches

Re: If a Chinese chip manufacturer had put one of these on their boards ...

But only think of the children on this private island. Then the blackmail material remains between us.

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

Re: Jedi

I think it's okay for an in-universe slave trader to be un-PC. As long as they fall into a giant space gob at the end of the film.

As Twitter blocks white supremacists posing as anti-fascists, FBI appeal is flooded with images of cop violence

Re: 108,000 killed by Antifa

It's hard not to notice, though, that the American Antifa are overwhelmingly white.

Twitter, Reddit and pals super unhappy US visa hopefuls have to declare their online handles to Uncle Sam

Re: Land of the .....

It is the land of the free, just other people live there too.

Made-up murder claims, threats to kill Twitter, rants about NSA spying – anything but mention 100,000 US virus deaths, right, Mr President?

When you look closely, most of politics resembles chimpanzees flinging shit.

Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate

Re: Sounds to me like ...

Now why would I report that something had been adequately installed months ago and was still working?

They'll have found it when they returned the system to the default spec.

Re: Sounds to me like ...

I did the same thing in the aughts. My research PC needed a second network port, but the university bought me a full height card for a half height machine. The card was small enough, but the backplate required ... modding.

They found out when I left.

Nine million logs of Brits' road journeys spill onto the internet from password-less number-plate camera dashboard

Re: Never ascribe to mailce ...

At some point stupidity needs to stop being a get out of jail card. If you're that stupid you need banning from ever being near anything with edges. Chuck them in an oubliette and oubliez.

Wanted: An exit strategy from the overt surveillance of smartphone contact tracing

Governments need to be explicit...

UK.gov will inevitably include "... or to protect the economic stability of the UK" into the conditions where they may use this technology.

Or in plain English, if it's worth selling they'll slurp it.

BT providing free meals to coax its healthy customer support staff back into office as calls rocket amid pandemic

Used to work at a BT callcenter

You couldn't pay me to eat that food.

Lost in translation and adrift in cloud storage

Re: Dictionary?

It can be hard to find some words in a dutch-english dictionary just because they tend to construct complex concepts from word fragments. In this case the word takes 'person', adds a prefix to turn it into a verb and then adds a suffix to mean someone who performs that verb.

So it's a person who points people at tasks. A manager.

Firefox 74 slams Facebook in solitary confinement: Browser add-on stops social network stalking users across the web

Re: pets

I wonder how many accounts claim to be owned by Corona-chan?

When the world ends – coronavirus plague, WW3, whatever – all that will be left are cockroaches and Larry Ellison trash talking his rivals

Re: "all that will be left are cockroaches and Larry Ellison"

This prompted me to look up the current status of John Legere.

Nope, he's actually going. Larry and Keith outlasted him.

Amazon staffer based just a stone's throw away from Seattle HQ tests positive for COVID-19 coronavirus

Re: "So there is a high number of undiagnosed cases in that region"

Indeed. My point was that Washington State wasn't the only outlier.

Probably different reasons for under-reporting the mild cases, but probably that's what's happenning in both places.

Sadly, the web has brought a whole new meaning to the phrase 'nothing is true; everything is permitted'

Re: What? They've been lying to us?

Actually, Shakespeare wrote about it in Julius Caesar.

That's actually not a joke, he really did. The message boards were made of actual wood but it was the same phenonomon. It's just quicker now.