Posts by jollyboyspecial

Keir Starmer says facial recognition tech is the answer to far-right riots

Old fashioned police work seems to be much more efficient. After the first day or so of rioting it became clear that the idiots taking part were being identified from videos of the events. So the thugs started wearing balaclavas and (perhaps ironically) surgical masks. In Rotherham the police came up with a simple solution to these measures of obfuscation. They gathered CCTV footage from local shops of people buying balaclavas and masks on the day of the riots with clear shots of their faces. They then studied footage of the riots looking for people wearing those face coverings and the same clothes they were wearing in the shop CCTV. Identification was apparently aided by the fact that some of these people paid by card.

Morons are usually easy to catch.

Like the bloke photographed wearing a balaclava but clearly displaying his distinctive tattoos.

Craig Wright admits he isn't the inventor of Bitcoin after High Court judgment in UK

Re: Reverse crypto scam

"I still find it strange that something virtual can have a percieved value so high."

But that's true of all currency. The only value of any currency lies in what it can be exchanged for. It's a a conceit that only works as long as enough people subscribe to it.

Somebody earlier referred to bitcoin as an invented currency as if all other currencies weren't invented. It's not like they grow on trees you you know. If they did we could burn down the forests and even effectively revalue currencies.

Virgin Media to stand up rival network operator to BT Openreach

Choices

One of the biggest issues with internet connectivity in the UK is choice. Live in an urban area and you've got lots. And here's yet another choice for urban dwellers. Live outside the urban sprawl and you probably only have one choice and that's whatever xDSL service you get from I

Openreach.

Re: IPv6

Wholesale provision is usually at layer 2. The business arm of Virgin have been providing layer 2 connectivity for a long time. What wholesale customers choose to put over those layer 2 connections is their own business.

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

Games

I think one thing that didn't help the QL was the perception of the Sinclair Spectrum as a toy. So people who wanted a SOHO focused machine didn't buy the QL because they considered it a toy. People who bought the QL wanting an upgrade path from their Speccy were disappointed that what they'd got wasn't a games machine.

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

"And I'm pretty certain that Starmer didn't personally authorise every prosecution carried out by the CPS when he was in charge."

Well since the vast majority of prosecutions were brought by the post office and not by the CPS it's pretty obvious that Starmer would not have known about them, let alone have authorised them. The CPS isn't the only prosecuting authority in the country and yes it is a ridiculous situation where an employer can prosecute it's own employees without involvement of any other authority. Hopefully this case will bring an end to that.

Available figures show that ten prosecutions of sub-postmasters were handled by the CPS during Starmer's tenure. Three of those resulted in convictions. It is unlikely that Starmer would have been informed of these cases let alone have been involved. One thing that isn't public knowledge at this time is whether any of these ten prosecutions were in any way related to the Horizon scandal. My immediate thought is that they probably were not. We know that the PO were trying to keep the whole thing under wraps, as such it seems very unlikely that they would pass any such prosecutions to the CPS and this allow external scrutiny.

I'm still hoping for some prosecutions for perverting the course of justice or something similar for some senior staff at both the Post Office and Fujitsu. Both bodies continued with prosecutions long after it must have been clear to them that the software was likely at fault.

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

Re: Pedant? moi?

"Newspapers used to send trained photographers out with reporters to cover stories, now the reporters are told "to just use your phone"

Newspapers used to send trained photographers out with reporters, but these days they don't employ either. Now it's considered enough for a "journalist" to remain in the office (or better still at home) to write up their report from minimal information often gleaned from social media or other news outlets and to use a photograph similarly sourced from social media or even a Google streetview image often of the wrong location.

Ofcom proposes ban on UK telcos making 'inflation-linked' price hikes mid-contract

"Ofcom notes that during 2023, all of the providers increased their charges by at least 12.5 percent, with some going as far as 17.3 percent."

Ofcom must have an interesting definition of "all" since the price of my SIM increased not one jot in 2023

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Printing?

It's a dying business. Businesses just don't print like they used to and the incidence if home printing has fallen off a cliff. Trying to make more money out of a shrinking pool of customers appears to be a ridiculous strategy.

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Reminds me of the engineer who decided to test some circuit resilience during working hours.

We had a process to test resilience on customer sites at least once a year. Resilience testing followed our change process. We needed user approval with a scheduled time window and field engineers on call just in case we somehow managed to completely disconnect the site. But somebody decided that this didn't matter on the grounds that it was going to work.

On this occasion there has been a configuration change and out of the now legendary "abundance of caution" the customer decided they would like a resilience test carrying out in the site in question outside the normal testing schedule. The correct process was for the engineer to raise an RFC for failover testing out of hours. The engineer who had carried out the change decided that they would simply test during working hours.

Now even if the test was successful it wouldn't have gone down well with the customer as the failover was implemented using HSRP. With HSRP there's always going to be a brief interruption to service as everything fails over to the standby connection. But our overconfident change engineer didn't consider that for a moment.

The test was not successful. Or normal test procedure for testing is to drop the primary connection where it hits our core by shutting down the interface. For some reason on this occasion the change engineer decided to log onto the primary router and shut down the WAN interface. Because of some config error there service didn't fail over to the standby, but now our hero couldn't get into the primary to bring the WAN interface back up. No problem, just jump onto the standby and hop across to the primary. Except that the config error that meant that the standby wasn't accessible. The connection was up. You could ping the router. But that was all. It wasn't passing any traffic.

Our hero now went into panic mode. Their first instinct was to try to get a field engineer to site. While they were trying to do this however there customer called in and service desk went thorough the usual checks for a down site one of which is to reboot the router. Luckily as there config hadn't been saved with the WAN interface shut down this restored service.

Batterygate bound for Blighty as UK court approves billion-dollar Apple compensation case

Re: Apple shot themselves in the foot over this.

Yes there is something wrong with throttling to extend the battery life if you don't give the user choices.

Choice one "Your battery is starting to fail we can slow down your phone to extend your battery life but this will give you a phone so slow as to be almost unusable - would you like us to cripple your phone? Y/N"

Choice two "Your battery is likely to fail. It's just a poxy little lithium cell, would you like to get a local shop to replace it for a few quid or would you prefer to take it to your local Apple store and pay a fortune to maintain a warranty that has either expired already or that we probably won't honour anyway?"

Consumer choice is supposed to be enshrined in law, but it isn't really is it?

Re: make it hurt

We're not talking about fines here, we're talking about compensation. What can actually hurt more is legal costs. The legal costs of the other party may be high, but I'll guarantee Apple's own legal costs will be much higher. Companies like Apple don't go to a Claims-R-Us no win no fee firm they will be paying the highest fees for the "best" (as in most expensive) lawyers they can find.

However I do think that this sort of thing should be criminal and as such should attract hefty fines.

Apple Private Wi-Fi hasn't worked for the past three years

Re: See also: regression testing

"Regression wouldn't show the blunder in this case. Per the description, the real MAC address was included in an optional field."

Which makes me wonder if the MAC address might have been stuck in that optional field as part of testing, perhaps so that testers could see which traffic belonged to which device. Then when testing was done maybe somebody just forgot to remove the code that struck the MAC address in that field.

The more I think about this the more plausible it seems. And also the worse it makes the screwup seem.

Re: Nobody apparently cared?

It's not that nobody cared. In a way it's worse than that. It's that customers just trusted Apple. They were selling a feature that didn't work and customers just assumed it worked. Consumers shouldn't have to check that this stuff actually does what it says on the tin.

The really important question here is how long did somebody at Apple know about this. I'm not suggesting that senior management knew, but somebody down the line probably knew, but didn't think it was worth mentioning it to somebody more senior.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Mine has only ever worked intermittently for electricity and not at all for gas. I've reported this several times, but nobody has been able to fix it. I had one person at the call centre Tel me she could "see" it working properly when I was standing right in front of it and could see that the display was showing "waiting for current data". It's been swapped which has made no n difference. And an engine came out to fix it but all he did was go through the setup procedure which I'm more than capable of doing myself. I've been told several times it's a signal issue when the display shows clearly it has a good signal.

So do I really care if it stops working when 2G and 3G are switched off? Not really. It's never actually started working in the first place.

Long-term support for Linux kernels is about to get a lot shorter

Re: Stable not in the stable

I remember a guy running an ancient server for which updates were no longer available. He was adamant that it was secure as it wasn't public facing. It sat behind a firewall all of its own on the LAN. It has its very own DMZ. The corporate firewall did not know a route to the server. It was safe. He said.

Now this seemed quite an expensive solution to me. A hefty firewall and it's attendant licensing wasn't cheap and of course the licences were a recurring expense. I asked how much it would cost to update the software to run on a newer OS. He wasn't interested. He had his solution. It was safe. He said.

The firewall rules protected the server he said. Only clients on the LAN could access the server. He said. And that much was actually true.

However one day all hell broke loose. Somebody who took their laptop home suffered a zero day attack. Except it wasn't apparent. Working from home on an ADSL connection the laptop's quest to find and attack other devices on the network was not apparent. In the office however at LAN speeds the laptop's owner experienced a terrible performance hit. As did other people who's laptops and desktops got hit. The LAN switches were lit up like.a Christmas tree. Some smart arse spotted this was likely malware and started to pull the power cables on switches. It wasn't until the IT manager has funished fixing laptops and desktops with some newly updated AV software the following day that he bothered to look at the server. He b didn't bother looking at the server because it was safe. He said.

It wasn't. One of the attack vectors of the malware was a common port that was open on the firewall. The laptops and desktops were up to date as of last month. The IPS signatures on the corporate firewall were up to date so the malware couldn't get out to the internet from that. It couldn't even have got in from the internet, but it's somebody brought an unedited device into the office all bets were off. The software on that server was years out of date. The malware tore it a new one and so on day two of dealing with the infection or hero discovered that the system was no longer accessible. It wouldn't even boot.

There's safe and secure and then there's safe and secure.

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

Re: ...

Except they are not retiring copper. If you're lucky (ish) you'll get an FTTC connection which is fibre to the street cabinet (ie copper to the premises). If you're not lucky at all you won't even got that, you'll get an MPF connection which is ADSL without the PSTN. So in other words the phone will be VOIP over ADSL which will probably be horrible over a long line.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

BAU

This is nothing new. It's what we used to call "The same problems only faster"

Starlink speeds ahead in the satellite race but rivals aren't starstruck just yet

Re: Why I stopped using Starlink

As the only real use for satellite internet connectivity is in areas not served by terrestrial services it must be frustrating to find that Starlink does not provide a reliable service in such an area

Re: You can see why SpaceX doesn't want Starlink to be used by organized military

Does that mean that the internet is a "effectively a military system that's also has civilian uses"?

Speed is only part of the story. What about latency and jitter?

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

I've been in places recently where there is 3G coverage but no 4G or 5G. Does this mean EE customers will be reduced to seeing that little E for Edge logo on their phones? Or have they already switched that off?

No good offering a 4G phone to customers who don't get a 4G service

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

Who?

Who actually prints anymore anyway?

Our office printer was out of action for almost a year. In that time about three people wanted to print.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

On letter difference = thousands of miles

I remember one particular callout somewhere in the southwest of England a couple of years ago. The customer decided to helpfully give our control what three words for the site as they said the postcode would take you to the wrong place. Control helpfully recorded this information and passed it on to the engineer. The engineer dutifully loaded up what three words and entered the three words and got somewhere in Asia - Kazakhstan IIRC. They tried the post code which got them to street level. They then called the customer on arrival and found the entrance to the customer site just round the corner on a side road. As such the postal address was perfectly fine to locate the address. If you don't do field work or indeed deliveries you might be surprised how often you have to call the customer when you arrive as the site entrance isn't immediately obvious from the street. It is however vanishingly rare for the postcode to be several thousand miles out.

The engineer asked about the three words and found that one word was missing it's final letter S and that was what resulted in a massive error. And right there is the problem with what three words. It's very easy to hear similar words incorrectly and the only way to ensure errors like this don't happen is to go through the spelling of all three words using the phonetic alphabet. You can get 11 metre accuracy using lat long at 4 decimal places. So generally around 12 digits. That's quicker than going through three words using the phonetic alphabet.

In other words the idea that what three words is easier than lat long or other map references is bogus. If you clearly hear the words then yes great. However how sure can you be that you've heard the words correctly? In a life and death situation you're going to want to be 100% sure and the only way to be sure is to fall back on the phonetic alphabet.

I'll stick with lat long or map references thanks all the same

US Republican party's spam filter lawsuit against Google dimissed

Fund raising emails, whether political or not, are spam. They are the very definition of spam.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

I recall when Chrome OS first appeared there was a lot of talk among Linux fanbois along the lines of "it's not a real OS" and "there will be no uptake" and of course "it will never last". Of course it's not up to those fanbois to define what is and isn't a "real" OS. However the big problem for those fanbois is that now that Chrome OS is not only the most popular desktop Linux OS but it has a bigger installed base than all other Linux desktop distros put together they can't suddenly accept it into the fold without losing face.

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

One issue that should not need an enquiry is that criminal charges need to be brought against those at the post office and fujitsu who pressed ahead with criminal charges against sub postmasters while knowing full well that no criminal offence had been committed.

There also need to be questions asked about how people were found guilty on evidence that was quite clearly false.

Network died, hard, during company Christmas party, leaving lone techie to fix it

To summarize Roy didn't plan properly and performance was piss poor? Pillock!

This AI is better than you at figuring out where a street pic was taken just by looking at it

Nothing this specific could ever be considered intelligence, artificial or otherwise. That is all.

Boris Johnson pleads ignorance, which just might work

Other Phones?

All these messages have a sender and at least one recipient yes? The conversations as far as I understand it were mostly between Johnson and ministers, advisors or civil servants? Can't the enquiry just ask for messages from every other possible participant? Sure it would take longer than just getting their hands on the Liar in Chief's phone but they'd get the messages.

Seems this enquiry is almost determined to ley the government off the hook. Not that I'm surprised by that you understand.

We will find you and we will sue you, Twitter tells 4 mystery alleged data-scrapers

Profits?

When Mush said he would make Twitter profitable nobody realised he meant he was planning to turn a profit simply by suing as many people as possible and cutting staff rather than actually improving the platform or the business.

Samsung’s midrange A54 is lovely, but users won't feel seen

"A confession: I have learned that the iPhone 13's facial recognition facility can successfully identify me while I brush my teeth.

There I stand, brush protruding from a gaping jaw, foam flecked about my lips, and Apple logs me in without a moment's pause. It also identifies me in the dark, in broad daylight, and at all hours of variable brightness in between."

If it recognises you in those conditions how sure are you that it wouldn't also recognise somebody who looks a bit like you? Or somebody wearing a you mask?

Given hope many false positives police use of facial recognition has famously turned up, I wouldn't trust it to unlock my phone.

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

Re: It's either 200 bucks or....

For those who haven't seen Looker (it seems many haven't) the plot is that a corporation scams models into AI with the promise of a salary of 200K pa for as long as their image is used, but the don't actually want to pay the salary so they murder the models after they are scanned.

Don't want to worry any background actors or anything, but if the strike is successful and you subsequently become entitled to a salary for the use of your image...

Re: It's either 200 bucks or....

That was only because CGI simply want up to the job back then. Or at least not at the prices channel 4 could afford

It's either 200 bucks or....

...have you ever seen Looker?

Over 40 years old but seems quite prescient really

Methane-spotting satellite that gives true readings of industry emissions hits skies in 2024

The usual misinformation and obfuscation

The climate emergency is big news these days, but by and large the great unwashed aren't being treated to many actual facts.

It's long been known that methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. However if you listen to most politicians, campaigners and self appointed "experts" in the media then you'd be forgiven for believing that carbon dioxide is the only greenhouse gas. Indeed according to most of what you read it's not carbon dioxide that's the problem, it's just plain carbon.

So what this satellite is going to do is give a lot of politicians, campaigners and "experts" a headache. They can't even differentiate between carbon dioxide and carbon so adding methane into the mix is going to make them look pretty stupid. As such I suspect they will report that the fact that methane is a greenhouse gas is a recent discovery.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Back in the eighties I worked for multinational that had it's European offices in both the UK and Germany. IT support was largely based in the UK. We supported some interesting desktops which had touch screens - well you didn't even have to touch the screen as such just put your finger near the screen. The boxes did however have keyboards, these weren't used very much, their main use was for logging on and a few other minor tasks. The rest of the time the users input data via the "touch" screens. As you may be aware Germany has it's own keyboard layout. The Y and Z are swapped from the QWERTY keyboard that is English speakers are used to.

When setting up boxes we had to set them up with the right keyboard setting for the office they were going to be deployed to. I kept German spec keyboards around for testing purposes and became fluent in using either. Some staff however forgot.

It was always fun talking a German end user through logging in with QWERTY keyboard, entering setup and changing over to a German keyboard using my long forgotten O level German.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

I have no problem as such with batteries that is can only be replaced in a workshop. What I have a problem with is manufacturers who try to prevent third party workshops replacing batteries, and of course manufacturers who charge ridiculous amounts to replace batteries.

Not so long ago I was told the useful life of a lithium ion battery should be ten years. In that basis I don't think it unreasonable to say that a failed battery within 10 years is actually a fault and while I don't mind paying for the battery I do mind paying a fortune for the labour to replace it.

The excuse from one manufacturer is that if they had to fit replaceable batteries their phones wouldn't be quite so ridiculously slim and worked cost ever so slightly more. In no other product would this be considered a reasonable excuse. Can you imagine a car manufacturer saying "if we made your tyres replacable it would make the car slightly bigger and ever so slightly more expensive. As such you'll need to buy a new car every year or two"?

Multi-tasking blunder leaves UK tax digitization plans 3 years late, 5 times over budget

There are so many problems with the meters that is be interested to know how many of those 58% work satisfactorily.

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

So you've tried one pair of ear buds against one pair of "old and tatty" cans and reached a conclusion of which type is better from that.

On the same basis I can confirm that the UK is always warmer than the south of France because it is warmer today. I can also confirm that all Vauxhalls drive nicer than Fords because my Vauxhall is nicer to drive than my wife's (admittedly old and tatty) Ford.

Waymo robo-car slays dog in San Francisco

Re: This is pretty terrible news

Under English law there's an interesting little wrinkle here. If you have a choice between hitting a dog or a cat which to you go for? Well apparently the law is such that hitting a dog must be reported, hitting a cat on the other hand does not. Apparently this is something to do with the fact that if you are involved in an RTI that results in damage to property you must report it. Dogs count as property, cats do not.

This presumably means that if a dog causes you to have an accident then the owner could be found liable, if on the other hand a cat causes an accident then the owner would not be liable.

So imagine a dog and cat run into the road and you have to choose between hitting one or the other. Do you choose the cat because it's not property and therefore legally hiring the dog would be worse. Or do you choose to hit the dog because the owner could then be found liable for the damage to your vehicle.

It seems that the law (in the US at least) allows the operators of autonomous vehicles do their own RTI investigation. Unsurprisingly they always seem to find that their software wasn't too blame.

Presumably these vehicles are bristling with cameras and other sensors and log absolutely everything, otherwise how would they learn and improve their software? As such it would make sense if after each and every RTI involving an autonomous vehicle all of those logs were handed over to law enforcement and indeed insurance companies.

It's a real shame that every vehicle doesn't have the same cameras and sensors and that it doesn't log all those inputs and control inputs too. It would be incredibly useful in both determining if any laws had been broken and who was liable for insurance purposes.

With the rise of autonomous vehicles I think it's important that legislators should get on this straight away and ensure that it is a legal requirement that all such evidence must be handed over complete and untampered. I suspect that would do a lot more to improve road safety than the operators and/or manufacturers carrying out their own investigations. After all if manufacturers and operators knew that they could end up being found liable then I'm sure they would make sure their software was infallible.

New York City latest to sue Hyundai and Kia claiming their cars are too easy to steal

All cars are ready to steal with the right equipment. Sometimes that equipment is a tow truck.

If a thief wants your car then they will take it. It's unfortunately as simple as that. The solution for every car owner is simply make your car less easy to steal than somebody else's similar model. That doesn't usually mean enhanced security, it's simple things like choosing your parking place.

The point being that improving security does not reduce car theft overall, if the thieves want a particular model of car they'll keep looking until they find an easy one to lift. The majority of car theft is to make money either by selling the whole car or more likely breaking the car and selling the high value parts which can't be traced.

Sometimes thieves don't even bother talking the car, they just strip it right there of high value parts likely to be damaged in a low speed shunt. And this is where manufacturers can do their bit. Maybe don't charge over a grand for a headlight unit. Firstly there is no way those units cost even nearly that much to make, secondly they could be more modular. Why force buyers to replace a complete unit to resolve a cracked cover? It's not even a lens any more just a plastic cover. A cheap plastic cover. Simple answer is to maximise profit.

Of course manufacturers aren't going to change without legislation. Individual lawsuits like this won't solve the problem.

Starlink's rocket speeds hit a 50 megabit wall for large downloads

Caveat Emptor and all that

The problem with people who whine about the service they get is that they never seem to bother to find out what they pay for.*

All of this is no different than people whining about not getting up to 8Mbps on their ADSL1 service all those years ago. Advertising "up to 8Mbps" didn't make any difference. People just saw 8Mbps and thought that's what they should be getting. Line lengths and contention ratios didn't mean squat to these people. They saw 8Mbps on the advertising and no amount of terms and conditions would convince them they shouldn't get 8Mbps all the time.

So if your service is described as "25 to 100Mb" you have no room to complain if you get 50Mbps throughput. That's very definitely somewhere between 25 and 100Mbps

*This is probably why the users of free services are always the ones whining the loudest

WTF is solid state active cooling? We’ve just seen it working on a mini PC

Solid State

I always assumed that "solid state" meant that the the component was monolithic with no separate component parts or particularly moving parts. That being the case I would thing anything with vibrating membranes (ie moving parts) doesn't qualify as solid state.

Virgin Galactic flies final test before opening for business

Astronaut?

Why do they keep using the word astronaut? A brief suborbital flight as a passenger is surely not enough to qualify you as an astronaut

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

Re: DO NOT go on the Internet with XP

The article already said that

Lightning just as frightening on Jupiter as it is on Earth

How did you not work Galileo into that headline?

Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity

Odd thing to do

I don't understand why you'd respond by hiding the hard copy (oooerrr, obviously)

In that situation there is surely only one thing to do. March up to the CFOs office with the printouts and dump them on his desk with a cheery "here are your printouts". I suspect that might have resulted in a pay rise.

Phones' facial recog tech 'fooled' by low-res 2D photo

We all know facial recognition is crap

Given how crap facial recognition software has proved to be in frankly amazed that anybody would use facial recognition to unlock their phone, letaline using it to allow access to any payment method