Posts by UCAP

Dutch consumer groups sue Google over its entire business model

Re: Attack the advertisers to get results

My strategy is much simpler - I use an ad blocker, so I don't see any ads.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Re: The report is not completely accurate

... thermal chaff ...

More commonly called a flare. Warships already carry flare launchers to protect against IR homing missiles.

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

The Russians know a gullible idiot when they see one.

Russia has been threatening to use nuclear weapons (mostly tactical, but some strategic) for this last year or so. So far there seems a distinct absence of any mushroom clouds.

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

Putin suggested in the early part of this century that Russia might join NATO.

Re: "If Ukraine wants to fight a war with Russia"

No, it definitely does not have anything to do with the USA and its chums. Putin had publicly stated that he considered Ukraine to be an integral part of Russia and not an independent country, so he decided to enforce that view in way that would have brought tears of joy to Stalin's eyes.

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

Re: Plausible...

Sounds like someone who needs direct connectivity to the mains (now that's power).

Obligatory PTerry corollary

You can build a system that gives a million-to-one chance of a user screwing up, but they will achieve it nine times out of ten.

Scientists turn to mid-20th century tech for low-power underwater comms

Re: Impressive

An electronic book containing the information was actually dropped accidentally by a hitch-hiker from Betelgeuse Seven while he was looking for his towel that he had misplaced. The researchers have only just worked out how to stop the book from reciting it's entire contents.

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

Re: Expertise

If someone submitted wrong data and managed to take down the whole system?

From what has been said so far, I think it is more a case of the system not being able to parse input data submitted by one of airlines and activating what can only be described as an extreme fail-safe strategy (i.e. shut down all automated processing until the problem has been rectified). The question I would like to ask is: was that strategy actually appropriate, or could another strategy (for example, rejecting the dodgy data set and forcing the airline responsible to resubmit a corrected one) have been employed that is more appropriate given the impact that a complete system shutdown will have?

UN cybercrime treaty risks becoming a 'global surveillance pact'

FBI, NSA, CIA, ....

The list goes on.

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

Re: Not holding my breath

I don't think they've reconciled themselves to the private car being able to take people anywhere yet.

Most politicians are still trying to figure out an officially-mandated approval process for fire! Until that process is completed, the use of fire in any form is going to be banned.

If you're Russian to the Moon, expect traffic: Moscow's Putin a lander into orbit

The Vulcans in orbit are probably getting bored

That is not logical, captain.

Don't shoot! DARPA wants to capture future spy balloons in one piece

Re: Prototype High Altitude Recovery Vehicles (HARVEE) exist already.

... Put a prick in the envelope...

Most envelopes are too small to fit a government minister into, but I guess if you squeeze them enough they'll sort-of fit in.

Lock-in to legacy code is a thing. Being locked in by legacy code is another thing entirely

I guess I caused a lock-in once ...

Back in the late 90's I was work as a contractor for a SATCOM company, and I was tasked with travelling out to Japan to one of their suppliers to witness a Factory Acceptance Test on a system that was due to be delivered by the supplier. Everything went fine for the first morning and half of the first afternoon, then suddenly one of the critical test failed significantly. Much panic then occurred with the Japanese supplier's staff; in order to minimise the loss of face to them I took myself off to a safe (and discrete) corner of the factory floor and watched proceedings with considerable interest and a certain amount of amusement.

Come 17:00 and the end-of-day bell occurred. It had previously been explained to me that when this bell rad you had 30 minutes to vacate the site then the doors would be locked and not opened until 08:00 the next day, so I dutifully said my goodbyes to the Japanese supplier's test manager. The next day I was back on site just after 08:00 to find a very frazzled test manager (and equally frazzled team under him); apparently they found the problem at about 02:00 in the morning (a simple case of forgetting to purge a configuration left over from the previous test case) but had then had to camp out of any sofas they could find. Not a pleasant night for them! On they other hand I accrued a lot of brownie points for being understanding and giving them room to sort the problem out.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Re: Spoiler alert - game solution

Have you ever met a H&S person who smokes

I have. But to be fair, I had just set him on fire.

Tesla's Autopilot boasts, safety probed by California AG

Re: EV Version Of Dieselgate?

SpaceX already have a team of people whose sole job is to ensure that Musk is kept from doing any more damage to the company. I believe one of the ways they do that is o ensure that Musk is not allowed to talk to any of the real engineering staff (he is allowed to talk to some "engineers", but has not realised that they are shop dummies dressed up in corporate clothes with old plats of pizza near them).

ESA sees satellite-based air traffic monitoring on near horizon

Re: Is this a breach of ESA's rules ...

ESA is independent of the EU, in fact it pre-dates it by a considerable margin. Brussels has tried a couple of times to take control of ESA (on the basis that it includes the word "European"), but has been firmly told to take a hike.

ESA funding rules are by and large simple to understand - the money a country gets out of an ESA programme is a function of how much money it puts into the programme. Hence the UK gets a lot out of some programmes, but is essentially blocked from bidding for contracts in other programmes (which it does not fund). Also all countries have to contribute something to ESA's general operational costs; I can't remember the formula for that.

Is this a breach of ESA's rules ...

As far as I recall, ESA are not supposed to directly award contracts to companies that are not based in one of its member states, particularly for contacts issued under the ARTES programme. Also, I am amazed that a the German government allowed a US company to win the contract when it is being largely funded by Germany - that bulk of that money should have gone to a German company (e.g. ADS GmBH) as prime contractor (they can then sub-contract, but that is a different matter). Seems like there is something else about this story that El Reg may have missed.

Twitter ad revenue has halved since Elon Musk took over

It's exceedingly useful, so I'm sure Space Karen will get round to deleting it soon

If there is anyone left in Twitter who can figure out how to remove that functionality without taking down the rest of the system.

Re: What about censorship?

Or woke up after having one to many over the weekend.

Microsoft's 10,000 job cuts didn't quite do the trick

Re: Massively profitable company

AI will make up the difference, and won't need paying. AI has magic powers and can do anything.

EU gives its blessing to reopen data pipelines to the US

As the pot of petunias once said ...

... "oh no, here we go again"

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

Re: PC Engineers...

A DEC engineer once used a thunderstorm as his reason for not continuing to fix a fault

Well trying to fix faults when there is a thunderstorm lurking about can be pretty shocking.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

Lived there for 8 years. Left when I got married. Best decision I ever made [1].

[1] Leaving [2].

[2] As well as getting married!

Artificial General Intelligence remains a distant dream despite LLM boom

Re: Don't underestimate the power of predictions

They can be both right and wrong

... and sometimes both at the same time.

Hacking a Foosball table scored an own goal for naughty engineers

I did. They fitted perfectly!

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: Paris...

So long as it's not your own.

I used to work for a Swedish company, although in their UK offices. My laptop originally had a Swedish keyboard on it which made finding certain keys (my locale was UK English) an interesting exercise of memory. I ended up working with a standard QWERTY keyboard next to me for the times when my memory failed (I was not allowed to connect this to the laptop - they took security seriously). Took months to convince IT (based in Sweden of course) that a Swedish keyboard for an English speaker who writes all of his documents in English is generally A Bad Idea.

Mummy and Daddy Musk think Elon's cage fight against Zuck is a terrible idea

Thanks for putting that image in my head, now I'm going to have to bleach my brain.

California man jailed after manure-to-methane scheme revealed as bull

Manure-to-methane?

Surely anyone could have seen that it is a crap investment.

Way out in deep space, astronomers spot precursor of carbon based life

The James Webb wouldn't have been possible without the Hubble

I'm not so sure I would agree with that statement. The JWST operates in the near- and mid-infrared bands with a limited capability of seeing red and orange visual light (since red and orange frequencies are adjacent to infrared), while the HST primarily operates in visual bands; based on that I would argue that JWST is descended more from IRAS, ISO (which I actually worked on as a part of the ground system team) and Spitzer lines than HST.

The James Web Space Telescope is certainly producing a huge scientific return for the investment that went into it; it is well on track to match and even exceed the achievements of the Hubble Space Telescope.

You may have heard about AI defeating voice authentication. This research kinda proves it

Re: "need to have access to their target's voice"

While I cannot say from first-hand knowledge, I suspect that the bigger the sample you have, the more accurately the AI system can reproduce it. A few seconds of sampling is unlikely to be enough since most (if not all) of us have idiosyncrasies in our speech patterns that tend to only come out with certain words (in my case, traces of a Canadian accent from when I lived there as a child, even though I came back to Blighty 50-odd years ago).

BOFH: Cough up half a grand and we'll protect you from AI

Hmmm ...

That reminds me, I'm sure we are overdue for a Boss RUD (Rapid Unplanned[1] Defenestration) event.

[1] At least to the Boss.

Existential dread time: One day Earth's oceans will boil. This exoplanet might reveal when

Venus is on the extreme inner edge, Mars is on the extreme outer edge, Earth is nicely in the centre. If Venus was at the distance of Mars, it could resemble a somewhat cooler Earth (inhabitable with thermal underwear).

What it actually meant is the cooler the star, the closer the inhabitable zone is to the star.

Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine

Having mentioned Apollo 1, can we just take a moment to reflect on the the truly awful fate of Guy Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. What we are seeing now is simply a modern replay of a tragic accident that could have been avoided.

With the right design you can use the pressure to seal the hatch even more tightly. Keep in mind that there is only one situation when you would want to open the hatch, and that is when you are on the surface.

Re: Jerry-riggedness?

BBC has also reported that the manufacturer of the submersible's view port only rated it to a depth of 1,300 m; the Titanic lies in 3,800 m.

Aircraft black boxes are capable of handling those sort of depths, and they have a sonar transponder that will generate a "ping" for about a month (on a full battery charge). Developing something like that to for a submersible is should be possible, and should be mandated for submersibles being used to carry tourists. It would also give an independent way of continuously tracking the position of the submersible relative to its mother-ship.

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

Can we put a brake on this, sounds like we are clutch'ing at straws with these puns.

Phosphates on Enceladus could mean sub-surface oceans teeming with aliens

Re: Hmmmm ...

"It's life, Jim, but not as we know it"

A toast to being in the right place at the right time

Re: What to do in case of a real fire...or other alarm

Sadly, common sense is not very common.

Re: He's toast

Yum, yum. I love the taste of burnt toast. My wife is, sadly, less keen.

Can noise-cancelling buds beat headphones? We spent 20 hours flying to find out

Re: I'm curious

Well me for one. I have noise cancelling earphones that come out for flights and (most recently) a week-long stay in hospital. Other than that I never feel the need for them.

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

They probably are old enough, but lost the battle with the office plants.

Cry-pto: Feds bury Bitcoin exchange giant Binance in 13-count fraud lawsuit

The compliance officer definitely was not Machiavellian.

Re: The smart money

In 2022, Zhao invested $500 million through Binance to finance the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk.

Possibly not the smartest of investments, given how the market value of Twitter seems to be free-fall.

UK launches SKYNET – not a doomsday plot, just shopping for improved satellite comms

Re: About 24 years too late

Ah-ha - your the person who kept me very busy for quite a few years back in the noughties.

Have a beer =====>

In fact - have two!