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* Posts by Chronos

1247 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2007

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2001 set the standard for the next 50 years of hard (and some soft) sci-fi

Chronos

HAL

HAL wasn't malfunctioning or deliberately psychopathic. It had two sets of conflicting orders and no moral imperatives. It was designed to do what it did, and did it perfectly. The fault lies with the people who fed in those category A directives and didn't think about what an AI with problem-solving heuristics would come up with as a solution, which is why "no harm by action or inaction" is law #1 and MUST be hard-coded.

It redeemed itself in 2010 even without Asimov's law 1, which I think was the stronger of the two films from this perspective as it correctly represented the danger of having unaccountable bodies issuing orders to complex systems that have no hard-wired ethics. Chandra should have seen this coming and given HAL a bullshit detector but, like many intellectuals, he's an innocent child when it comes to political deviousness which leaked into HAL's programming almost by osmosis.

Right now, what we're classing as AIs aren't I; Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Jasper, they're all simple if-this-then-that logic machines with a bit of imperfect voice recognition and TTS tacked on as a UX. If we ever realise true machine intelligence, these issues will need most careful thought.

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Law's changed, now cough up: Uncle Sam serves Microsoft fresh warrant for Irish emails

Chronos
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I wasn't actually suggesting using MIPS.

The RK3399 based Orange Pi is pretty much all I need in a desktop, barring the still-closed Mali GPU and the Spectre-vulnerable A72 cores. The latter is likely to be mitigated fairly soon with retpolines. The former is the bigger issue. I can't be without 3D graphics as I use things like OpenSCAD and gEDA a lot. Come to think of it, a couple more GiB of memory would be nice. The Rock64 fulfils this requirement but it doesn't have a SATA port.

I'd really rather not go down the *book road as, generally, the keyboards are pants and they're compromised to fit into the form factor. Starting with a mainboard you get to choose your storage, cooling, noise levels and no sodding embedded batteries welded to the case. Yes, it acts like a UPS and all that rot, I already have 24VDC to the desk and rack from a big-arsed 2kWh reservoir to cope with outages (I have a pair of Banana Pis on fileserver duties) and it seems silly to convert 230V to DC, store it and then occasionally drag it back up to 230 before converting it down again with a SMPSU. All those inefficiencies must add up and DC-DC buck converters are much more efficient than isolated SMPSUs.

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Chronos
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rms (he's case sensitive) had the right idea running a Longsoon MIPS64 based notebook long before any of this kicked off. Of course, using EMACS for everything just isn't a road I want to go down.

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Chronos
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Re: Cloud Act ?

America Rogering Someone Else, AKA ARSE Act.

MS are between a rock and a hard place. Uncle Sam says they must, Europe and Ireland say they must not. It's not often I feel sorry for the Redmond land sharks but this time? I can't see a way they can obey either without falling foul of the other.

In other news, several imps have perished due to the unusual cold spell in Hades.

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Autonomous vehicle claims are just a load of hot air… and here's why

Chronos
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Hmm...

As members of the public, we are all fair game to the experimental whims of tech billionaires. One by one, we will be beta-tested to death to make another disruptor incrementally richer.

I was under the impression that Dabbsy's column was supposed to be satire, not on-the-nail factual reporting. The only thing missing was "and the powerful another step closer to omniscient and as hard to shift as a floating turd."

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$0.75 – about how much Cambridge Analytica paid per voter in bid to micro-target their minds, internal docs reveal

Chronos

Anyone know a decent french polisher?

That veneer of respectability on democracy is looking awfully tatty. The underlying mandate to govern may just be a little wormy, too.

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What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

Chronos
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Coat

Re: That's Yorkshire fucked then

How will TOWIE carry on?

Every cloud...

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Chronos
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Re: To quote(ish) Monty P

They're all a bunch of One Cares (French taunter accent).

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Chronos
WTF?

Four bloody days...

...too fucking early, dozy bastards.

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World celebrates, cyber-snoops cry as TLS 1.3 internet crypto approved

Chronos
Facepalm

And yet still...

...SNI is done in the clear. You go to all that trouble to stop the ISP redirecting/snooping your DNS queries and then simply hand the latter to them on a plate in the first useful packet.

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PwC: More redundos at HQ of UK 'leccy stuff shop Maplin

Chronos

sed -e 's/tat bazaar/'leccy stuff shop/'

Land shark attack? At this late stage when world+dog+fleas+bacteria in gut of fleas knows that anything of value Maplin brought to the table is long lost in the midst of time?

World's gone mad.

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Prof Stephen Hawking's ashes will be interred alongside Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin

Chronos
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Re: Please Please Please...

The scientific method prescribes exactly the sort of thinking the OP proposes. There are issues with current science, not least of which is grant chasing which leads to making the empirical data fit the sponsor's requirements. It's not always money, either. Who hasn't had a little twinge of doubt about the doom and gloom over climate change being political?

Read Tom Sharpe's Grantchester Grind and tell me Lady Bloody Mary Godber-Evans or Edgar Hartang aren't metaphors, that Dr Osbert or The Bursar aren't typical caricatures of academia or indeed that organised science and organised religion are intimately entwined from birth with the likes of the Chaplain.

People really should read more satire. It encourages critical thinking in ways ordinary study never can.

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Chronos
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Re: There's likely another reason for this...

And contrary to popular belief, Hawking wasn't an arch-atheist at all.

It's the similarity between "Hawking" and "Dawkins" that caused this myth.

Personally, I'm no arch-atheist either. I just take exception to organised religion which, when you drill down deep enough, starts looking like control freakery, justification for exploitation and increasingly less adherence to any of its own rules the further you get up the hierarchy. I'm sure the almighty has more honesty, dignity and compassion than some people would make it appear.

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Chronos

Good

Firstly, nobody will argue that Prof. Hawking deserves to be remembered. We have now found a use for the religionists: Keeping the remains of our notable people undisturbed for posterity.

We may as well get some value for all that tax they're evading.

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More ad-versarial tech: Mozilla to pop limited ad blocker into Firefox

Chronos
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Stop

Re: Adblocking is stealing

Catch is, they'll tell you it's the price of admission, thus payment is demanded in advance or you go without.

Fine, then I'll go without, just as long as they also remove their bloody annoying crap from the search engines too. When I search for, for example, firmware for something, I do not want to buy one of what I'm trying to fix. Odds are that if I'm looking for firmware it's broken in a new and heretofore undiscovered way anyway and they'll be skating on Styx before I ever buy another one.

"A fire broke out today at Alphabet headquarters. Trapped employees searched for fire fighting equipment and got 3,000,000 hits, none relevant or useful. In other news..."

Ad flingers can be indirectly annoying. We're assuming that these ad-supported sites are the only repositories of knowledge when, in reality, the actual fonts of wisdom would likely have a better chance of being found if the commercial crap just sodded off and stopped SEO'ing themselves into your search results.

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Chronos
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Re: Adblocking is stealing

Read his other posts. This one wasn't sarcasm.

Well, from the subtext I got "Ad-blocking is morally wrong but blackholing bad hosts is good security practice? Yeah, right, the two are virtually the same thing."

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Chronos
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Re: Adblocking is stealing

@unwarranted triumphalism: The sarcasm in this post is utterly wasted on at least 11 people.

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Chronos
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Re: Adblocking is stealing

AC wrote: Depriving someone of ad revenue through ad blocking is not 'stealing'.

Similarly, software piracy is not 'theft'... it is just 'copyright infringement'.

Using emotion-laden buzz words will not alter reality.

Whoosh!

That was the OP's point, methinks. Doesn't matter which technical workaround makes the web usable for you, it has to be done to retain a) responsiveness of your desktop and b) sanity.

Revenue from the W³ is a relatively new concept anyway and wasn't foremost in TB-L's mind when he created the thing. Therefore, as a greybeard who remembers hypertext on floppies, I reserve the right to preserve the original intent of the web as a tool for shared knowledge rather than prop up someone else's flawed business model.

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UK.gov to plough £67m into gigabit broadband for all and sundry

Chronos
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Re: Is there an economist in the house?

Fortunately I never had to climb poles.

Luckily, nor did I. I was once hoisted aloft on a pallet on a forklift truck to string a cable across a loading-bay door when I was a PFY but Elfin Safety would have a field day with such antics nowadays.

Besides, it would be a couple of grand of point-to-point wireless kit, three experts and a load of standing around drinking Marmoset-arse coffee or some other damned thing that tastes god-awful but is stylish to be seen drinking to do the same job, so no need for the ~£10 worth of cable and slim chance of yoof turned into gibbering crunchy strawberry jam.

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Chronos
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Holmes

Re: Is there an economist in the house?

Yep, d, every single time. Taking a butcher's at the shareholder list only confirms that this is nothing more than a cynical marketing exercise.

I, personally, don't need fibre. Although it seems at first glance to be more idiot-proof than twisted pair, I'm sure they'll employ a better idiot or two who will crimp, bend, stand on or otherwise mangle a perfectly good fibre bundle.

What I really want is the ability to buy the last mile copper from the cab to my house, the right to remove digits from the hands of anyone who breaks it while "working" on installing someone else's line into a line card, get rid of this bloody extortionate line rental crap and simply have a twisted pair from the concentrator to the modem and no copper back to the exchange. I'll do my own landline over battery-backed IP and Asterisk, thanks. At least I then get to flip marketers and people with withheld numbers the tri-tonal bird without having to pay for the privilege.

I would also like the right to shove those jelly crimps¹ that they keep adding to lines up the CEO's arse and force them to replace the cable instead, but that'll never happen while the pole monkeys couldn't learn 25 pair colour codes (CW1308 or even schedule zero for those of us with more years behind than in front) and identify the correct pair if their lives depended on it.

"Oh, balls, wrong binder. Crimp 'em quick and hope nobody notices." There goes another couple of dB off the SNR.

¹ Bridge taps, the bane of anyone expecting a balanced differential pair after OpenWoe have been in there with cutters, silly pliers, fists of boiled bacon and multiple left thumbs. How hard can it be to maintain the twist and at least a nod towards equal and opposite current?

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Toyota to flog 10,000 aaS wagons to Avis Budget rentals

Chronos
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Re: Hello Mr Corfield!

Oh sweet, precious child. Treasure your innocence.

In-bleedin'-deed. Not so long ago I obtained another car while still insured. Apparently, your no-claims can't transfer while you have a policy in force, I couldn't transfer that policy because Mrs Chronos was still on the old motor and policy so I had to start from scratch on the new jalopy. My premiums actually went down. 65%? Of what, the respect for our intelligence?

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Microsoft says 'majority' of Windows 10 use will be 'streamlined S mode'

Chronos
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Re: Win 10 Stupid Edition

probably the best of the 9x series

That was 95 OSR2, in that it was less crap than anything else 95-ME inclusive as long as you didn't install IE4. Active desktop my left testicle. Other notably less-crap code spewed from Redmond are the version of BASIC CBM used, Win2k with later service packs and Win 7. Everything else, everything else was/is a complete dog's breakfast/dingo kidneys/polished turd/pavement pizza/anus explosion*. I was going to try to work the vacuum cleaner joke in here somewhere but I simply can't be arsed.

*delete as appropriate

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Chronos
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Coat

Re: Win 10 Stupid Edition

ugh, now I need more 'pink liquid' so I don't vomit.

One Windolene coming right up.

They should have called it Windows BOHICA. Seems to me that they want to be all the bad things Apple are without any of the good.

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Android P will hear no evil, see no evil, support evil notches

Chronos
Facepalm

Popcorn

It won't be popcorn, that I can guarantee you. With the prevalence of "fully loaded" Android boxes for streaming pirated content, one of which uses that word along with the connotations associated with the consumption of said buttery comestible, if the land sharks at Alphabet let it through with that name they're not doing their bloody jobs properly.

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4G found on Moon

Chronos
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There has to be two: They take it in turns tailgating each other.

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Vaping on the NHS? Don't hold your breath

Chronos
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Re: Not cool

Superficial nonsense and nothing to do with the topic at hand. This is El Reg, not Heat.

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Chronos
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Re: what you never hear talked about...

There is absolutely no risk to bystanders from exhaled vapour. You just don't like it. I don't like heavy perfumes on ladies who brunch, but I don't whinge about it.

What makes me laugh is all the people who moan about sidestream vapour yet will willingly stand in front of a massive fryer in a fish and chip shop, which is putting out about a lifetime's worth of a vaper's output of acrolein every five minutes or so.

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Chronos
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Re: Tobacco is a carcinogen whether or not you burn it

In a sane world we'd be doing research on the addictiveness and harmfulness of those other alkaloids and, if the research warranted it, authorizing formulations including them. And it's almost guaranteed that it would be safer to get nicotine+alkaloids by vaping than by smoking (where you get nicotine+alkaloids+tar+carbon monoxide+witch's brew of other crap).

Agreed. However, you're confusing politicians with people who give a shit about anything other than their share portfolio, be that big 'baccy or pharmaceuticals. Also, most "studies" these days are using an arse-backwards variant of the scientific method, i.e. start with a premise and scrabble around madly to make the empirical data fit, with one eye always on getting more funding from whatever special interest group this round came from.

If you get the chance, try either El Toro or Hangsen's Golden Tobacco/RY6. I suspect both of these use extracted flavourings (I know El Toro is a steep) and I have yet to come across more satisfying liquids. The HoL stuff isn't cheap but it's worth it. FWIW, I'm on Golden Tobacco permanently and it has kept me off the ciggies completely. You do wade through some crap before you find something suitable, though.

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Chronos
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Re: Tobacco is a carcinogen whether or not you burn it

Aye, but that comment was aimed at HNB products where the tobacco is heated, not vaping. I suspect big 'baccy likes HNB because there's still the opportunity to tweak the balance of nicotine, MAOIs¹ and enhancers to make them even more addictive using methods they've tweaked to perfection over many years, whereas vaping is pure, pharmaceutical grade nicotine, albeit with some trace TSNAs² due to the extraction process being much cheaper than synthesis.

Of note on that last point is the pharma products such as patches, gum, inhalators and such also use the same nicotine extracted from leaf. The sprays such as "quickmist" also contain nitric acid to simulate "throat hit." I kid you not.

Nobody is saying vaping is 100% safe. It isn't. It's a damned sight better than smoking, though, and it would appear to be safer than certain pharmaceuticals as well. Lumping HNB and vaping together would be a mistake as people are likely to confuse sound bites aimed at one with the other, as you just did there.

¹ Mono Amine Oxidase Inhibitors, a form of anti-depressant and now thought to be a contributor to tobacco's addictiveness

² Tobacco Specific Nitrosamines, a key group of carcinogens found in tobacco leaf

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IPv6 and 5G will make life hell for spooks and cops say Australia's spooks and cops

Chronos
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Re: I am a bear of very little brain.

IPv6 address can be assigned per application flow. the reason why your unix like os is only showing 3 addresses in use is because unix is relatively quiet vs windows.

Good point, well made.

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Chronos
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Re: I am a bear of very little brain.

Link local: fe80::/64, suffix usually from MAC(octet-octet:octet-ff:fe-octet:octet-octet), used for NDP SLAAC and such.

Global: Static or local LAN prefix advertised by rtadvd and/or DHCP6. One will have the suffix based on your MAC, same schema as the link local and the other will be an "IPv6 privacy" based address. Which one gets preferred is down to your settings.

Temporary: $DEITY knows. Could be crap from Teredo, old "privacy" suffix assignments (most likely if they're all the same /64 as your globals) and so on. What MS does in their network stack can be, frankly, baffling although there is a case to be made for answering on old assignments.

There should also be a local loopback on ::1, which is just 127.0.0.1 in IPv6-speak.

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Chronos
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Re: Legislation if necessary ?

They'll be too busy running around like blue-arsed flies trying to stop the storm of MITM hacks on all the financial services when their backdoor keys leak to do anything else.

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Chronos
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FAIL

Someone in the AussiePlod looked at the RFC and saw IPSec mandatory. It was then a leap from mandatory ability to mandatory use in interpretation and they ran with the idea.

There's a lesson here: Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you have to. Such as, I dunno, exchanging freedom for the temporary illusion of security, maybe?

Also, regarding the article's title: Oh dear, what a shame. My heart bleeds. Or it may be ketchup from the sausage and bacon bin lid I just had...

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Huawei guns for Apple with Mac-alike Matebook X

Chronos
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Flame

needs an ugly USB thing stuck in the side due to BIOS whitelists

Whoever thought this was a good idea and justified it by saying "but the FCC..." outside of the US needs shooting with their own excrement. I'm yet to see a laptop running any wireless NIC that can exceed 20dBm ERP with the stock damp string in the lid, yet their "approved" Broadcom 43xxx thing can be fitted with a yagi on a pigtail quite easily and will then end up non-compliant.

No, it's nothing to do with wanting to restrict spares to overpriced OEM crap, is it? Bastards.

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US state legal supremos show lots of love for proposed CLOUD Act (a law to snoop on citizens' info stored abroad)

Chronos
Facepalm

The legislation, introduced earlier this month, has the support of [...] the British Prime Minister Theresa May

"What a surprise," said nobody at all. I suppose Amber Rudd had "a crisis," as Clarkson would say.

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Bloke sues Microsoft: Give me $600m – or my copy of Windows 7 back

Chronos
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Re: the emotional distress of dealing with Windows 10.

sabroni wrote: Fucking snowflakes.

If you can do so before it melts, not to mention the scale issue, you have my sympathy, sir. I would refrain from openly declaring your peccadilloes in public forum, though.

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Despite the headlines, Rudd's online terror takedown tool is only part of the solution

Chronos
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Ah yes, the age-old "my god has a bigger dick than your god" issue. For all the rhetoric about separation of church and state, the disorganised religion mob do still tend to sway the decision-making process quite a bit while, it must be pointed out, paying none of the tax to actually implement those decisions.

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Chronos
Flame

Aren't we forgetting something?

It was this rabble's predecessors and their mates abroad who started the whole thing in the first place. Listen to We Didn't Start The Fire by Billy Joel for some examples of what a foreign policy which has a Geordie Saturday Night attitude to someone spilling their allies' pint does to the world.

Yet, somehow, it's the ordinary people who must sacrifice any illusion of privacy and free speech while having their genitals inspected at airports by an ape with a three digit salary and an IQ that begins with a decimal point to clean up the mess they made and are probably going to continue making with impunity. Bastards.

The "how they're going to tackle this" isn't quite as important as the "why they now have to" which should, all things being equal, add a little perspective to the debate. Of course, it won't.

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We already give up our privacy to use phones, why not with cars too?

Chronos
FAIL

Your initial premise is flawed

We already give up our privacy to use phones

No we don't. You might, but then you're part of the problem in that you don't care exactly what you're giving up and how that affects your life before the bill drops on the doormat.

Yet another slowly boiling frog, oblivious to the gentle rise in temperature.

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UK Home Sec Amber Rudd unveils extremism blocking tool

Chronos
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Re: Different Configuration

NONE OF THE ABOVE would be nice. If that wins, all of the candidates are barred from future elections and the parties have to go away with an "F-, try harder" for a big rethink.

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Chronos
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Stop

Re: Different Configuration

Genuinely terrifying to see such incompetence and alarming speeches. It'd be great to have these people filtered out of society!

No. If anything, it needs to be preserved for posterity. When they look back on the early 21st Century and find that "patronising" became a euphemism for smarter people telling the clueless they're wrong, we need as much evidence as we can muster. Covering up history never did anyone any good.

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What did we say about Tesla's self-driving tech? SpaceX Roadster skips Mars, steers to asteroids

Chronos
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Re: Maybe coming back

It probably would have been better to launch a few old Trabants. Those things are notoriously difficult¹ to get rid of and Elon would finally be doing something useful. It would also give the aliens a good laugh...

¹ The body is made from cotton and resin, the same phenolic resin that used to be used for PCBs that gave off that distinctive old electronics smell. It never rots, it's toxic and it doesn't biodegrade, hence it hangs around for longer than Keith Richards. This is what happens when you get too "clever" and mix tech with transport.

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Wileyfox goes TITSUP*: Smartmobe maker calls in the administrators

Chronos
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Re: Russian money

Nothing to do with their cashflow being frozen or them not selling the number of phones they expected to in the face of increased competition.

Not forgetting their shit customer service and priority on posting to social media rather than doing what they should be doing.

This does not come as a surprise.

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Beware the looming Google Chrome HTTPS certificate apocalypse!

Chronos
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Re: Well done Google....

@katrinab many thanks for that heads-up. Seems I have my good ideas just after everyone else :)

Edit gawd, I'm getting old. I must have come across the docs in the wee small hours one day because it seems I already have CAA records set up on my main domain. The master DNS is right in front of me, so nobody else did it. Is that a sign of imminent Alzheimer's or is it just one more example of JIT learning not sticking?

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Chronos
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Re: Well done Google....

How exactly does promoting TLS connections for web traffic benefit Google, especially now letsencrypt is a thing? They're not a CA.

What we really need is a DNS extension which tells the browser which CA root it can expect hosts in its domain to use. A simple TXT record with the fingerprint of the root CA certificate would do, or even the OpenSSL style hash, e.g.:

$ORIGIN @

_tlsca IN TXT "4042bcee,6187b673"

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Chronos
Coat

Indeed.

Symantec wasn't very happy, of course, and used a whole range of angry words in a blog post about it: words like irresponsible, exaggerated, and misleading.

And that was just a plug for one of its own products...

Mine's the one with the decrapifier USB stick in the pocket.

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Driverless cars will lead to data-sharing – of the electrical kind

Chronos
Holmes

First they came for the meter readings...

AEV Bill A new amendment to the UK's Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill aims to make it mandatory for electric car charging point operators to transmit power consumption data to Britain's National Grid.

Hate to say I told you so but, as the harbinger of bad news, I'm doing my job correctly. Now they have a data slurping tentacle in there. Next up, mandatory odometer readings, GPS tracks and timestamps for road pricing. From there it's a free-for-all on in car entertainment listening habits, Bluetooth connectivity, occupancy (so that you can be charged a higher rate at peak times for not sharing your car with that one smelly co-worker who never washes), places visited and shopping habits extrapolated from that. The charging point operators will become µGoogles, selling your metadata to the highest bidder. Oh, and let's not forget insurance companies examining your telemetry data with a squad of becardiganned¹ adenoidal navel-gazers critiquing your driving style.

Icon. It was utterly bloody inevitable.

¹Yes, it is a word. I just made it up, the same as marketing are wont to do.

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Microsoft whips out tool so you can measure Windows 10's data-slurping creepiness

Chronos
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Holmes

Re: No brainer

Many of us have taken this road - or never had to because we were already on the Free-way. What we're moaning about is the "slowly boiling frog" element where they exploit the clueless to generate a critical mass of people who "aren't bothered" by the intrusiveness. We can see what they're doing to people who know no better and are concerned about it. Once it becomes established, like any virus it then infects other areas, just as it originally cross-contaminated Microsoft from Google.

If you recall, many of us were just as vociferous when Google started it. This isn't a case of looking after numero uno. As professionals, we have to deal with the fallout from this bollocks. It is a widely accepted tenet that prevention is better than cure.

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Chronos
FAIL

Here's an idea, MS...

Stop bloody doing it! It's an operating system. It should abstract the hardware, provide APIs and a UI and then stay the hell out of the way. Many of us just want to use our computers. We don't need to have a "relationship" with you or anyone else in order to do so.

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Europe slaps €997m antitrust fine on Qualcomm

Chronos
Flame

Great.

Guess who pays that. Don't you just love backdoor taxation? It's a double-win for them, too, because spreading the OpEx of punitive fines knows no borders...

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