Posts by Barry Rueger

Chrome on, baby, don't fear The Reaper: Plugin sends CPU-hogging browser processes to hell where they belong

The Great Suspender

A similar product that stops unused tabs after a short period so that they don't consume resources. Works for me.

GitHub: https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender/

Or via the Chrome Extensions page.

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

Re: Can this inform the 5G debate?

Office chair? I relieved a nagging back ache by taking my wallet out of my right-hand back pocket while driving.

Either that, or turning off the bluetooth on my phone....

Re: Can this inform the 5G debate?

In western Canada they couldn't convince politicians that cel radiation was dangerous enough to kill people , so they switched tactics and started claiming that they they had to be accommodated because they had a psychological condition that caused them extreme stress because they believed they were being harmed by WIFI and cel emanations.

Who needs a century of RF research and experience?

Loose tongues and oily seamen: Lost in machine translation yet again

Re: Lost in translation

We took an introductory Mandarin course this year, and I honestly loved the underpinnings of the language, especially the lack of "irregular" verbs. Even the tones were less challenging than I expected.

Sadly the actual content of the course was entirely useless for tourist travel. The sentence that still sticks with me is:

我姐姐会喝杯柠檬茶

Since I lack an older sister, and don't drink lemon tea....

(Huawei phone translation, no guarantee it's accurate.)

Frustrated Brits can dump mobile providers by text as of today

Meanwhile in the Colonies...

Try and put me through any kind of customer retention, lose all possible goodwill that remains.

The prices quoted here will make any Canadian weep with frustration. But more to the point, invariably the super-duper customer retention deal (or even new customer deal) invariably only lasts for X number of months, after which you go back to paying through the nose.

In any other industry this would be called "bait and switch."

Then again there's TV. We eventually dropped Netflix and tried out Amazon.ca Prime. This weekend we tried to watch a guilty pleasure, the new "Will and Grace." We were dumbfounded to find that as well as the $79 a year Amazon charge, we would also need to pay ANOTHER $12.99 a month for something called "Stack TV" which is basically a pared down version of what our cable TV operators are still flogging to the masses. Thankfully there's a one month trial, so we can binge watch the latest series and then cancel it.

Meanwhile our public libraries are getting hammered by price increases and tightened usage restrictions on the e-books that they offer.

The VPL says despite print and digital copies functioning in much the same way, allowing only a single user to read a book at one time and employing seven- or three-week loan periods, perpetual access ebooks can cost up to 300 per cent more. For instance, David Baldacci's The Fallen costs the VPL $22.80 for a physical copy, and $87 for a digital copy.

And of course, Microsoft is just nuking all e-books on a whim.

I honestly think that the whole digital media economy is on the edge of just collapsing into a pile of e-rubble, with most of us reverting to paper books, DVDs, and vinyl records.

It's all in the wrist: Your fitness tracker could be as much about data warfare as your welfare

Re: "data warfare"

It's possible to get some pretty good discounts if you have health insurance that monitors your activity through your fitness tracker.

Let me rephrase that for you:

My health insurer charges me more if I refuse to wear an electronic tracker that tells them what I do.

Those darn users don't know what they're doing (not like us, of course)

To them it's all about clicking on wee pictures and we keep moving them.

That's a perfectly reasonable complaint. I just spent most of a month beating a new smartphone into submission in an effort to make it work the same way as my old one.*

It's ridiculous that every software or hardware upgrade also completely changes the UI and basic operating assumptions. My Mint Linux machines haven't changed the desktop layout or functions in at least five years, but Android or Windows 10 seem to reinvent themselves every ten months.

Users are not "stupid" for wanting consistency in how their tools work.

* after a month we figured out that it was Huawei's insanely aggressive power management that was causing everything from GPS trackers to podcast downloads to operate in inexplicably erratic fashions. Fortunately with it locked down in "Performance" mode there seems to be no difference in actual battery life.

IEEE tells contributors with links to Chinese corp: Don't let the door hit you on Huawei out

Re: Presitator for life

But only if he doesn't declare it to be a 'National Emergency' ...

No joke. There are pretty knowledgeable people discussing just this possibility. At issue is a working assumption that a lot of things are just understood to be conditions of the job of President; that there are behaviours and actions that no President would ever consider. Because Trump just refuses to be constrained by anything - even the law in some cases - there's a concern that he might just decide to become President for Life.

And if he just refuses to go? What would they do?

It's the curious case of the vanishing iPhone sales as Huawei grabs second place off Apple in smartmobe stakes

No Google? That's tempting.

I'm actually tempted by the idea of a phone that isn't stuffed with Google. That might be the push needed for me to finally extricate myself from the Googleverse.

More and more I'm favouring a stack of hardware, an OS that's independent of hardware, and applications that I choose to install. If that sounds like Linux, or Windows 95, you're right. Forced integration never works well.

That's just Huawei it goes, shrugs founder as analysts forecast sales slump for embattled biz

Re: Optimistic option!

I wasn't talking about security, especially since I have no control over whether Google, the manufacturer, or my carrier ever delivers another update.

I was talking about a labyrinthIan user interface, that changes significantly with every major update, and from one phone to another, or manufacturer to another. I was talking about Google in particular disabling features or capacities with no concern for users or developers who rely on them. I was talking about the sheer madness of trying to control the torrent of beeps, rings, vibrations, banners, badges and other things that are all turned on by default. I was talking about default settings that disable apps that worked fine a week ago; that are hidden three, four, or five levels down into settings.

It's a mess, and if it weren't for my sheer dislike of Apple OS, and their prices, I would abandon Android in a very short moment.

I've spent two weeks with a new phone (a Huawei running pie) trying to find an app that will reliably record a GPS track while hiking, and allow me to save it to my device, along with a couple notes. This was easy on my last phone, but nearly impossible on this one. Things like this should not happen.

Not should things like Google arbitrarily shutting out any App that will let me record my own phone calls - an entirely legal, and for a writer doing interviews, critical tool.

Android deserves to die.

Optimistic option!

I truly hope that Huawei actually launches a new smartphone OS. It would have to be a significant improvement over the mess that is Android.

A more serious question though is about Huawei's patents. If US companies are barred from doing business with Huawei, does that also prevent them from using those patented ideas in their own designs? Or, in other words, will they be forced to design American 5G from scratch?

I suppose the USians could just revert back to CDMA...

Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence?

Social Credit

what might happen to consumer spending habits if everyone knew they had to dispose of their pay packet before it blinked out of existence.

It''s already been tried by the Social Credit government of Alberta in the 1930s.

Following the 1937 revolt, the government made a serious attempt to implement social credit policies. It passed several pieces of radical populist legislation, such as the issuance of prosperity certificates to Alberta residents (dubbed "funny money" by detractors) in accordance with the theories of Silvio Gesell. Douglas, the main leader of the Social Credit movement, did not like the idea of prosperity certificates, which depreciated in value the longer they were held, and openly criticized Gesell's theories.

WikiLeaks boss Assange acted as a foreign spy, Uncle Sam exclaims in fresh rap sheet

Re: I was fine with the first indictment

If a journalist pays a source for a story, is that normal, or inducement?

Actually it's pretty standard practice in the UK. Your local practices may differ.

Microsoft Windows 10 'Burger King' build 1903: Have it your way... and it may still leave a nasty taste in your mouth

Good old Microsoft

"If Windows detects that your machine cannot start up successfully ... Users can direct the automated repair system to seek permission under the Settings > Update & Security > Troubleshoot settings.

Good luck with that. I've consistently found that Windows troubleshooters are slightly less valuable than Clippy.

Standards group W3C wins support from all major players to get AI working in the browser

No! I don't have enough RAM!

Great. Now the tabs that inexplicably gobble up 250+ megs will demand 500.

Yes Gmail, I'm looking at you.

Be wary of emails with links to ... er, Google Drive? Is that right?

Relax, and just wait

It's Google. There's at least an even chance that in a year or two they'll just abandon, then shut down, Google Docs and replace it with The Next Big Thing.

Apple, Samsung feel the pain as smartphone market slumps to lowest shipments in 5 YEARS

Re: Hua-Bois?

My decision last month to go with a Huawei P20 (always one generation behind) reflected both the relativity low price and my desire to poke Trump in the eye.

Have to say I really like the phone, although Android Pie has some serious problems.

Apple hits back at devs of axed kiddie screen-time apps

And Google

To be fair, Google is using the same "privacy" argument to disable any App that allows you to record your phone calls - something that's entirely legal in most places.

The exception to that rule is, you guessed it, Google Voice.

Oh dear. Secret Huawei enterprise router snoop 'backdoor' was Telnet service, sighs Vodafone

Pot, meet kettle

Surely in this post-Snowden age we all have to assume that the American security establishment is hacking into systems world-wide? It's a bit much for Trump et al to be going on about Huawei.

Huawei P30: New No-Pro's cameras are flash ... but there are some curious bits

Pleasant surprise

My old (3 years) LG was showing signs of trouble. After a bit of shopping it turned out that a P20 was the best deal around, plus it's a poke in the eye of Mr Trump.

I'm impressed for the most part, and would happily jump to a P30. It seems to be a very well built item.

My only complaints (aside from the notch, which really is irritating) are related to the bundled Huawei and Google crapware, which take days to disable, and the immediate upgrade to Android Pie which has significantly degraded GPS performance, and more importantly for me has entirely blocked any and all call recording apps.

Thanks Google, for screwing me over yet again.

Android really does get worse with every version. If there was a non-Apple alternative on the market I'd be looking at it closely.

Sophos antivirus tools. Working Windows box. Latest Patch Tuesday fixes. Pick two: 'Puters knackered by bad combo

There simply isn't a Linux version out there that is easy for non-IT types to get up and running. Let alone use

Nonsense. I can stick a Mint USB into pretty much any regular PC and have installed and running in less than twenty minutes. Yes, I've timed it.

Thereafter I'll run the updater from time to time, but otherwise do nothing. It will happily run for months without a reboot, or a problem.

And out of the box it includes pretty much every application that an average person needs.

Enough with the FUD.

Astronomer slams sexists trying to tear down black hole researcher's rep

... and musicals.

Now that's a troll!

Motion detectors: say hello, wave goodbye and… flushhhhhh

Re: Strange Toilets

It's called a pit toilet, or if home made, an outhouse. Probably it gets emptied by a big sucker truck from time to time. Smaller home toilets just kept being used by the family (with scoops of lime to help manage things) until a new pit would be dug, the building moved, and the old hole filled in.

In a large family the bench in the outhouse often had two holes, a big one for adults, and a small one for children.

Re: The non delivery

Surely there is money to be made by offering home delivery in the evening or on weekends for the 75% of the population who are at work from 9 to 5.

Forty years ago, when couriers were strictly for business , and most homes still had a stay at home mom, it was reasonable to only deliver during office hours.. Now it's just archaic.

The Reg takes a trip over the New Edge. Mmmm... New Coke with extra fizz

Memory Use

What I would really like to know is if Microsoft has figured out how to beat memory hogging sites into submission. It's ludicrous that I need to close one or both of Gmail or Facebook every few hours or my not too old laptop grinds to a halt.

Of course that machine has "only" 4 gigs of RAM.

Google pholds! Just kidding. But Android Q Beta 2 drop supports those cool bendy mobes

Re: Please, no!

I'm currently stuck on Android 6, and disabling notifications selectively sends me into a warren of setting menus in many places. Or the stupider apps turn them back on if updated. And of course what I really want to stop are the endless Google Assistant nags.

In theory the type and timing of notifications can be fine tuned. In practice life is far too short.

Please, no!

I am utterly fed up with things popping up every five minutes in Android, none of which I want, and most of which can't be permanently disabled.

It's coooming: Windows 10 October 2018 Update adoption slows ahead of the next release

Oh Joy. Windows.

My only experience with Windows 10 is trying to keep my wife from throwing her HP laptop out the (real) window.

The true frustration is that every update breaks something, but only vaguely. If things would just break completely, stop working entirely, I could usually find and fix the problem.

The problem is the sense that something has changed for the worse, but not consistently, and not in an entirely reproducible pattern. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don't.

Not quite the Bake Off they were expecting: Canadian seniors served weed-infused brownies

Re: As a Canadian

For the majority of the population legalization has long ago ceased to be topic for discussion. It just isn't a big deal, and most towns already have had grey-market "medicinal" pot stores for many years.

While the claim was that pot was being legalized, the Liberal government has more accurately just changed they ways that pot is illegal. The legislation is a real dog's breakfast.

As for the right-wing Conservatives repealing the changes? It won't happen because many of the biggest investors and board members of the new cannabis corporations are card-carrying Tories, including a couple of former "law and order" types who previously were all in favour of mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug offences.

Google sparks online outcry after its currency converter goes haywire for third time this year

Re: Once upon a time...

Throw error messages and cry for help.

The problem being that involving an actual human is seen as failure since the goal is to have all decisions made by algorithm. Unless you mean that Algorithm A will pass the error message to Algorithm B.

This juvenile determination to avoid human supervision is why Google and Facebook fall on their face over and over, and never seem able to see the problem.

New Zealand cops cuff alleged jackasses who shared mosque murder video, messages online

You can always spot the Americans...

They're the ones shouting from the rooftops about CENSORSHIP while their FCC fines radio stations for allowing the word "fuck" to be broadcast. Freedom of speech is an illusion. It's just that some societies have their populations better trained to self-censor.

As was stated somewhere today, it's amazing that Facebook, who have proved positively excellent at blocking any and all images of nipples, are powerless to block video of racist massacres. Or how YouTube can claim that they were powerless to stop the repeated uploads of the same video instead of just deciding to shut down all uploads until they could properly police their service.

These corporations really don't care, and can't be relied on to behave in anything like a responsible manner.

Sign of the times: Mirai botnet strain fine-tunes itself to infect digital signage, projectors

Common Sense for These Times

Of late I find that I assume that any system I use is compromised, or will be soon, and any place with data about me will inevitably be hacked, or the data sold to an outside party.

I assume nothing is secure, and that no corporation will voluntarily admit when their system has been compromised. I have utterly no trust in Google, Facebook, Twitter, or that ilk.

Yes I still use the Internet, and no, I don't like it,

Do Martians dream of electric Nimbys? Selling 5G needs steak, not just sizzle

Nah, I'll wait for 6G!

It has been at least a decade since I actually worried about the specs of anything tech that I've bought. OK, in fact the last time that I built a new desktop PC I did take the time to futureproof it to a reasonable degree, but even then it was a couple of years behind whatever was new and shiny. I'm confident that as long as I can add more RAM, more drive space, or the inevitable power supply it will last me at least a decade. I'm not a gamer so my needs have become fairly stable.

Beyond that though, if I need something I buy what fits the budget and it seems to work just fine. Cel phones, routers, printers... pretty much any mid-range off-the shelf brand name will do a fine job without a lot of time comparing specs.

That's the challenge for the guys flogging 5G: 4G is mostly perfectly fine, and the complaints are seldom about speed or capacity, they're about areas with crappy signal, or about the extortionate prices being charged. (I speak as a Canadian who just got a new, better deal on wireless - $50 a month which includes a whole 4 gigs of data. Woohhoo! I can even update my podcasts once in a while without hitting the data cap!)

For me the killer sales pitch wouldn't be 5G, it would a battery life of more than one slightly short day. It would be OS updates for more than twelve months. And OS updates that don't break what I using now. I'd actually pay a bonus if it could be guaranteed that the basic software on my phone didn't change from year to year.

From an end user standpoint technology is pretty much mature and unchanging. You might be able to sell some bells and whistles, but a laptop or a cel phone or a router has reached the point where it's an appliance like a toaster or kettle. And no-one reads the specs on a toaster - either the bread turns brown, or it doesn't.

Trying to convince people that 5G is superior to 4G is about the same as trying to make them believe that the AC power from your wall socket is better than what comes of of your neighbours'.

How many Reg columnists does it take to turn off a lightbulb?

Significant difference

Surely one of the most powerful examples of getting old is when something you remember as pure sci-fi becomes reality.

Except that the sci-fi versions actually worked, while contemporary technology is usually utter crap.

Skype for Web arrives to bring the world together. As long as the world is on Chrome and... Edge?

Re: Finally

My thoughts exactly. I recall the bad old days of Web sites that only worked with IE or Netscape, but never both, and recall applauding any site that managed to accommodate both.

Have we really gone backwards by twenty years?

Windows 10 1809 looks unlikely to overtake prior build before 19H1 lands

And why the Linux update "just works", while Win 10 breaks stuff.

LG's new gesture UI for mobes, while technically interesting, is still a little hand-wavy at the mo

Re: One to watch ...

This is the first serious development looking at (2)

Unless you're one of those with Essential Tremor, Parkinson's, or other degenerative conditions. Call me old but I will happily abandon voice commands and waving for a couple of good old mechanical buttons.

Chrome ad, content blockers beg Google: Don't execute our code! Wait, no, do execute our code – just don't kill us!

Oh great (:

Just this week I ditched Firefox and moved back to Chrome. FF consistently ground my laptop to a halt if it wasn't restarted once a day.

I was hoping that Chrome would work adequately for at least a year before I had to move back to Firefox.

Seriously browser developers, I got 99 problems, but ad-blockers ain't one of them

U wot, m8? OMG SMS is back from dead

Trust Google? Never.

Aside from the sheer ubiquity of SMS, which Google will never match, the risk in this scheme is Google's track record in crippling or shutting down apps and services.

I actually expect that SMS will survive long after I've logged out, but anything Google will be lucky to last five years.

WWW = Woeful, er, winternet wendering? CERN browser rebuilt after 30 years barely recognizes modern web

Sigh. Those were the days.

I was thinking this weekend about what the web was when I first got onto it - something like twenty+ years ago. Checking out a few familiar sites with this browser reminds me how good it was.

The Internet before advertising, before video, before CSS and javascript, was a pretty special place. Because no-one was trying to monetize it - and lord knows there were long and impassioned debates about that subject -- almost everything on-line was a labour of love. That meant that content trumped style.

Because pages only included HTML and images they were simple, and they loaded fast - even on dial-up, which was all that most people had. More to the point, if any page had half as much useless crap and stuttering delays as we're used to now it would also find that it had no visitors.

And because there was no money to be made, you didn't have Google and Facebook controlling great swathes of the 'net, and you certainly didn't need to worry about being spied on and tracked.

For my money the Internet peaked about ten or twelve years ago when Google was just a very good search engine, when Amazon was just a really good bookstore, and when web pages were about words and stories, not videos and cheap effects. Over the last year or so I'm struggling to understand what the point of the Internet is anymore. Even simple tasks have become way, way too hard, and there seem to be barriers in every direction to things that used to be simple.

Maybe because we actually did write web pages by hand, in notepad, we also felt obliged to really think about what we were creating. All that I know is that using the Internet has become a chore, not the delight that it was two decades ago.

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

What? Me worry?

Relax folks. Surely this new law will only apply to people with brown skin. Most of the people here won't need to worry at all.

Thanks for all those data-flow warnings, UK.gov. Now let's talk about your own Brexit prep. Yep, just as we thought

There is a solution!

Who needs data transfer and fancy IT? I'll sell you a truck load of fax machines.

A truly 1980s solution, which should make Brexiters happy.

Oh cool, the Bluetooth 5.1 specification is out. Nice. *control-F* master-slave... 2,000 results

Multiple cars, multiple Bluetooth phones, headsets, etc. I've yet to find one that works consistently and reliably. Sometimes it connects immediately, sometimes I wade through menus. I've yet to discern a pattern, aside from phases of the moon.

At this point if there's an option to using Bluetooth that's what I'll choose.

Q. What do you call an IT admin for 20-plus young children? A. A teacher

Re: "Young students, for example, cannot be expected to remember and enter a password. "

teachers, usually from the generation before computers were commonplace

Wow. you must have some significantly old teachers.

Guess what? Pretty much anyone under sixty years old, or even seventy to be honest, has been using computers for several decades. IBM PCs began to be commonplace 30+ years ago, and were becoming ubiquitous a decade later. Apples, Commodores, and Ataris were well known too.

And of course the entire computer industry and the Internet was developed by people now nearing their allotted four score and seven years.

It really is time that we discarded the cliche that old people can't understand computers. It's insulting and inaccurate.

Fine, we'll do it the Huawei, says Uncle Sam: CFO charged with fraud, faces extradition to US over Iran trade claims

Possible Positive Outcome

Maybe on his next trip to China Mark Zuckerberg will be locked up for some real or imagined illegal activity?

The Apple Mac is 35 years old. Behold the beige box of the future

Apple? Never again.

Sometime around the turn of the millennium I had become fed up with the endless hassle of beating Windows into submission. It was upgrade time so I decided to treat myself to an Apple computer because of promises that it would offer me a carefree existence. What I discovered was that it was now me being beaten into submission by Apple.

I know that there are many people who utterly love the Mac operating system. I'm not among them. Finder alone drove me mad when it refused to do things that were standard practice in Windows. I found it endlessly frustrating and not at all intuitive. Or, more to the point, I found out that in Apple land "intuitive" meant "I've only ever used Apple machines and have become trained to do things the Apple way."

Over and over I found that simple tasks were needlessly complicated or just couldn't be done, not for any good reason, but because Apple in their wisdom had decreed that it was a Bad Thing. It was that arrogant attitude that eventually drove me away, although the relative lack of freeware and shareware software were part of it too. The problem with the Mac was that everything cost money, and usually a rather larger amount than seemed reasonable. I remember shopping for a new AC adapter and being shocked that the price on the Apple product was somewhere in the neighbourhood of $100. The claim was that an adapter made by anyone else would destroy the computer and probably burn down the house. Needless to say, the factory Apple adapter was well known for having a short life span.

iTunes? Dear god. Has there ever been a worse music program? If so I haven't seen it. And again, the attitude was "take it or leave it," but if you don't like it it's your fault, not ours.

Ultimately I struggled along with a G4 Powerbook for three or four years, so you can't say I didn't give it a chance. When it died I very happily jumped back to PC architecture, and Linux, where I've been happily ensconced ever since. I am very happy that I can pick and choose my distro, and desktop, and have a plethora of tools and applications at my fingertips for almost any task - Photoshop being the one significant missing item of course. It's more than a little ironic that the thing that I hoped for with an Apple - that things would "Just Work" - is actually easier with Linux. I can take any reasonably modern box and have Mint installed and tweaked to suit me in fifteen or twenty minutes. Once that is done I can ignore it entirely for months or even years and it will just let me get on with my work.

If you're one of the Cult of Mac, be happy. If you find that the one Apple approved way of doing things works for you, that's a good thing. But don't get all high and mighty because for some of us it just doesn't work.

And oh yeah, "Apple will sell you an expensive extended warranty" is not the same as "reliability."

DNAaaahahaha: Twins' 23andMe, Ancestry, etc genetic tests vary wildly, surprising no one

Insurance?

The real problem here is the inevitability that insurance companies, especially American health insurers, will start buying DNA info from these companies, or will start demanding that customers provide it ("10% discount for your DNA profile").

3) Profit!

Facebooker swatted, Kaspersky snares an NSA thief, NASA server exposed, and more

Take down the power grid? Old News.

Don't panic, but Russia might be able to kill the US power grid

From David Sanger's "Perfect Weapon."

As the lights went out in western Ukraine the day before Christmas Eve 2015, Andy Ozment had a queasy feeling.

The giant screens in the war room just down the hall from his office—in an unmarked Department of Homeland Security building a quick drive over the Potomac River from the White House—indicated that something more nefarious than a winter storm or a blown-up substation had triggered the sudden darkness across a remote corner of the embattled former Soviet republic. The event had all the markings of a sophisticated cyberattack, remote-controlled from someplace far from Ukraine. ...

The more data that flowed in about what was happening that winter day in Ukraine, the deeper Ozment’s stomach sank. “This was the kind of nightmare we’ve talked about and tried to head off for years,” he recalled later. It was a holiday week, a rare break from the daily string of crises, and Ozment had a few minutes to dwell on a chilling cell-phone video that his colleagues were passing around. Taken in the midst of the Ukraine attack by one of the operators at the beleaguered electricity provider, Kyivoblenergo, it captured the bewilderment and chaos among electric-grid operators as they frantically tried to regain control of their computer systems.

As the video showed, they were helpless. Nothing they clicked had any effect. It was as if their own keyboards and mice were disconnected, and paranormal powers had taken over their controls. Cursors began jumping across the screens at the master control center in Ukraine, driven by a hidden hand. By remote control, the attackers systematically disconnected circuits, deleted backup systems, and shut down substations. Neighborhood by neighborhood, the lights clicked off. “It was jaw-dropping for us,” said Ozment. “The exact scenario we were worried about wasn’t paranoia. It was playing out before our eyes.”

And the hackers had more in store. They had planted a cheap program—malware named “KillDisk”—to wipe out the systems that would otherwise allow the operators to regain control. Then the hackers delivered their finishing touch: they disconnected the backup electrical system in the control room, so that not only were the operators now helpless but they were sitting in darkness. All the Kyivoblenergo workers could do was sit there and curse.

For two decades—since before Ozment began his career in cyber defense—experts had warned that hackers might switch off a nation’s power grid, the first step in taking down an entire country. And for most of that time, everyone seemed certain that when the big strike came, it would take out the power from Boston to Washington, or San Francisco to Los Angeles. “For twenty years we were paranoid about it, but it had never happened,” Ozment recalled.

“Now,” he said, “it was happening.

Huawei and Intel hype up AI hardware, TensorFlow tidbits, and more

Seperated at Birth?

Suddenly it struck me: Donald Trump : Max Headroom.

Reddit locks out users with poor password hygiene after spotting 'unusual activity'

Death to passwords

I cannot say how many passwords and IDs are floating around for me, but it's at least in the dozens. The likelihood that I'll use a different password for every single one of them is zero. Even with Chrome of Firefox saving passwords, or one of the password manager things, it just isn't going to happen.

People have lives, and aren't going to do backflips to try and create multiple passwords to multiple sites, each of which wants some specific format and combination of letters, numbers, and emojis. It's just way to much hassle. Besides which invariably it's the junk sites that I likely will never visit again, or where I would never think of posting anything remotely valuable that want superduper, two factor authenticated passwords, while my friggin BANK only accepted uppercase letters starting late last year.

Yes, the truly important things in my life have big, complex passwords, but stuff like user forums don't because honestly it's just not that important to me. And besides, I'm a hardcore user of the "Forgot password" link.

The time has long since passed when we should have come up with something to replace passwords. They made sense thirty years ago when you might have one or two log-ins, but it's insane to try and use them today. Lecturing users about "hygiene" does nothing of value - it just irritates people who already know at least vaguely that passwords matter.