Posts by GioCiampa 149 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2020
No problem with this as a healthy conversation, and is to be encouraged, however the concept is derailed far too often by those four little words:
"Do your own research"
How are you meant to debate anything when the go-to response is not to provide some kind of evidence that might be relevant (and potentially change one's own opinion), but simply parroting whatever fact they claim it's true, and then to tell you to do their work to prove it for them?
I used to work for Dixons Colour Labs (aka Truprint) back in my just-post-student days.
Our bar was only open on Friday evenings - but as 90% of the work was done on the night shifts, we may have... um... taken advantage of the "lunchtime" availability of a pint (or several).
The fact that we were responsible for operating the (not insubstantially-sized) film development machines (and thus also keeping the noxious chemicals contained within under control), you'd think that they'd have spotted that our section was somewhat less than sober most Fridays... but nobody said a word, as far as I recall.
Surely it should have been "a perfect opportunity for us to make a fortune selling 'solutions' that won't work as well as we told them it will, but we'll still tell them that it's a pivotal moment in the fight to make the internet a safer place, particularly for children."
I don't know about iOS (I assume something similar exists), but on Android there's a setting the app can utilise to prevent the screen from being captured (be that a still, or a video stream).
Rooted handsets, of course, can be persuaded to ignore said setting - the cat/mouse game then becomes one of the app spotting root, or the module being used...
Not that this stops someone pulling the file directly from the folder in which it is stored before viewing it.
Turn the mobile network (masts, bandwidth, etc) into a "national grid" in the same way as electricity or gas is supplied - then allow every telco to access every part of it, and charge them for the amount of data they carry over it.
Two benefits as I see it:
1) Coverage is not (for any given location) dependent on who happened to put up the nearest mast.
2) The telcos will have to compete on cost, or (if more expensive than a competitor) value for money.
What... like me? Glad to know my existence pisses off Daily Mail readers...
For the record, I work on an NHS in-house rule-based prescribing system that has, in one form or another, existed since the 90s. It talks happily to other systems using a standard message structure that has its origins even before then, and both have evolved over time as you'd expect.
Is it based on the latest (over-)hyped technology? Of course not, but it works as intended... not that this "minor" detail will prevent the fuckwits on high from pushing some pile of junk on us eventually I'll wager.
It is possible to get bank apps to work, despite only achieving the second of the three security levels in Play Integrity (Basic, Device, Strong). Strong Integrity is nigh-on impossible to achieve after you unlock the device at the moment... there are methods to achieve it, but they involve faking a security keystore, and Google are shit-hot at blocking any such keys when they are discovered.
My old Moto (launched with Android 10, and recently updated to Android 14/LineageOS 21) seems to be OK with my bank apps, after much experimentation to get Device Integrity to stick (for the moment), but the one thing that seemingly *requires* Strong Integrity...? The RCS functionality in Google Messages... and I'll wager that the banking apps will go the same way at some point.
Some things never change - although my first (non-test) post over there was a response to a "our beer is better than your beer" comment, but that's much the same concept.
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.beer/c/dgjOPgQfyjo/m/eR8iiI0jJtcJ
(One Google later...)
"The UK law is based on the EU standard, with some minor changes. A speedo must never show less than the actual speed, and must never show more than 110% of actual speed + 6.25mph. So if your true speed is 40mph, your speedo could legally be reading up to 50.25mph but never less than 40mph."
(My car reads about 5% high, compared to GPS)
Paying for a mission is one thing (and NASA would happily have someone else save them millions of dollars to achieve a positive end result), but having the expertise to actually achieve it is another thing entirely.
"SpaceX have yet to perform a spacewalk from one of their capsules, and have only just developed its spacewalking suits, so NASA has no history on which to base future predictions of success." (paraphrasing Andrew Feustel, who performed three spacewalks to refurbish Hubble in 2009, and part of the NASA feasibility study team).
So, never say never, but it's not something that's going to happen any time soon.
Nothing new there...
Back in the day, I worked for a company that developed photos for Truprint (amongst others), and films with "interesting" photos were regularly being reprinted if spotted early enough in the process (usually by those operating the development machines letting someone in the printroom know what batch/film numbers to look out for). Legend had it there were multiple lockers in one of the corridors that were full of the stuff...
I'd love to know what modern-day GDPR sensibilities would have made of the fact that (during a period where my job was to ensure the printed output matched the negatives) I would, alongside the "holiday photos", also see photos processed for the police (crime scenes) or medics (including close-up gynaecological) - sometimes both (one specific case of a man with a rather large hole where part of his skull ought to have been comes to mind). I imagine that in this digital age that wouldn't happen, but I was surprised that it happened even then.
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