* Posts by John H Woods

3577 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007

Help! We need to pick a platform for our desert adventure

John H Woods Silver badge

Story of my life ...

Them: "We're starting a new project ... can you help us design a ... "

Me: "Sure, that'll be a fun challenge ..."

Them: "We've already committed to technologies X, Y and Z ..."

Me: *sigh*

A significant amount of technology is 'golfware' --- its role in your new project has been decided on not just before you or any other technical person has been approached, but before the decision makers have reached the 19th hole.

Android gets biometric voice unlocking

John H Woods Silver badge

Pattern unlock (and to some extent PIN) not that secure --- many screens show some residue of the patters. Face unlock is fun gimmick (although I think I need to know why my eldest son can unlock my phone and not my youngest!) but not good enough to secure your phone.

Who's for an implanted RFID chip?

+1 for the Tasker ref. You can do other stuff as well - keep the phone unlocked if it is in certain locations (GPS) or if earphones are plugged. Redirect calls from certain numbers (boss? mistress?) if you are at home ... lots of great stuff, with such a good visual scripting interface that you can use it to get (certain sorts of) kids interested in scripting and programming ...

Soil and sand harden as SPEEDING MISSILES and METEORS SLAM into GROUND – boffins

John H Woods Silver badge

"Sounds like the old experiment you can do with cornflour" -- 1980s_coder

+1 for ooblek reference, but is it really the same? In that liquid, it's the mechanics of the starch chains moving over each other (sliding or jamming) which is causing the behaviour --- seems to me that what is happening here is a sort of piling up of particles in front of a penetrating object, rather than any change in the inter-particle interactions?

The Walton kids are ABSURDLY wealthy – and you're benefitting

John H Woods Silver badge

Wealth redistribution

It seems to me that there are only two strongly justifiable rates for inheritance tax: 0% and 100%; everything in between is a compromise. Corollary: anyone who thinks an intermediate value is more appropriate does believe in some degree of wealth redistribution.

If you are right, Tim, and the money only stays in the family for a few generations, then I suppose it makes little difference that the wealth is temporarily concentrated in such a small area; it does eventually get redistributed by the market when a descendant 'pisses it away'. But what worries me is that the current trend in wealth inequality shows no signs at all of abating.

The problem is when wealth distorts democracy --- big fortunes, whether personal or corporate, are now increasingly used to affect legislation directly (through lobbying and campaign funding) and indirectly (through media ownership used to affect public opinion). This leads to a circle (virtuous for them, vicious for us) which accelerates and buttresses the inequality.

It is also starting to get to the point where you actually have to start with money to make money. Take a particular bugbear of mine: unpaid internships. Even in a society where, by and large, the concept of a minimum wage is accepted. it still seems acceptable for wealthy organisations to place a filter on the workforce to ensure that brains and hard work are not sufficient, you need wealth to start with. I'm not sure I find that acceptable, either on an individual or societal level.

PHYSICS APPLECART UPSET as dark energy disappears, Universe slams on brakes

John H Woods Silver badge

Analogy

I think in the UK you might need a time machine to sample a selection of 100W light bulbs at the hardware store ...

... but it seemed like a misquote, because it's really sampling them and finding they fall into two distinct populations, rather than simply that they 'vary'

Because the server room is certainly no place for pets

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Sustainable push forward

"...doddery old greybeards..." --- AC

... is that twice now you have trotted out that offensive ageist cliché? It's not making you sound as clever as you think it does, possibly quite the opposite. I've met some very bright people in IT, not just in the group 25 years younger than me, but up to 25 years older, too. As you seem to think the solution to all legacy IT is just to spend umpty million I cannot believe you have any real world experience in the industry, otherwise you'd know that all kit is legacy, it's just a matter of degree --- and that management have other priorities than making sure you are happy with your kit.

** And, not that it matters, but some of the latter camp are so far from "doddery" I wouldn't put any money on you staying upright for 5 seconds if you were brave/stupid enough to say it to their faces outside of the office.

Netflix fail proves copper NBN leaves Australia utterly 4Ked

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Yes, without super high def entertainment there is nothing to do.

"Great for you, I'd like to shift data between my home and my workplace faster than a cyclist with a 32GB USB stick." -- Stuart Longland

I agree - but, to be fair - I cannot remember a time when connected bandwidth, for anything over line-of-sight, was greater than sneakernet. You could carry 20TB of SSDs in a cycle pack without breaking a sweat - you could get a bike to 50Gbps no problem. A van full of LTO5 tape going 100miles is, what, 1000Gbps? A 747 full of Blurays going 3000 miles must be over 200,000Gbps. (Latencies being about 2-3 hours and about 6-7 hours, I'd guess.)

When thinking about, for instance, cloud backup and restore, you have to bear in mind that a 1 Gigabit/sec link is still only about 10TB/day fully soaked.

Why is nobody here?

John H Woods Silver badge

Just wondering the same thing...

... I think they suffer from being overshadowed by the article comments

Bad news everyone: Cybercrime is getting even easier

John H Woods Silver badge

Missing the point ...

I usually get downvoted for this, but I still believe that the existence of "malicious URLs" is nothing more than the existence of unacceptable browser flaws. Visiting a web site is 'opening a document'; and it is my belief that it should not be possible for data to subvert the application used for viewing that data and it should definitely not be be possible to subvert the system beyond that application.

How you supposed to even know if a URL is malicious until you've clicked on it, especially if it is shortened? Or in a QR code? Sure you can say oh, never click on a shortened URL, never scan a QR code, but then you are missing out on large chunks of functionality.

Non-American nerds jam immigration pleading for right to live in the US

John H Woods Silver badge

Looks tricky ...

... if you really want to go, best to marry an American :-)

Popular crypto app uses single-byte XOR and nowt else, hacker says

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: You may laugh

"You may laugh ...

... The bottom line is that this ridiculous tool that everyone is mocking for using an 8 bit key is only slightly less secure than 4096 bit AES, especially when you are streaming data.. after capturing 4K bits you have almost all you need to start breaking down the crypto..."

Believe me, I'm laughing.

Samsung's bend blame blast: We DEMAND a Galaxy S6 Edge do-over

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Glass is not meant to be bendy

"A suit pocket is fine at work, but what happens when you're wearing jeans and a tshirt at the weekend?"

-- P. Lee

Surely bigphone uses are more likely to be wearing cargo pants than skinny jeans?

On a more serious note, it's not entirely impossible to use several devices - both Android and iOS seem to be pretty good at syncing multiple devices (I have no experience of Windows mobile but I suspect it is the same). It would be nice if devices could share numbers, but some judicious call-diverting does most of what is needed.

Light the torches! NSA's BFF Senator Feinstein calls for e-book burning

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: The AC is pretty old

"Keeping a weather eye on downloads of a few 1000 examples across the world would be a far better idea and is almost certainly the approach our Intel services use." --- gerdesj

An approach that the senator has just shot to ribbons. Maybe she's the terrorist?

Is this what Windows XP's death throes look like?

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Oh wow...

I don't understand why you would put a new GPU in a 64 bit machine running a 3 year old version of a 32bit OS that went out of support two years ago. And I really don't understand why you expected it to work seamlessly. And I really don't understand why you would consider the failure of this edge case to allow you to infer very much at all beyond the specific instance you describe.

Met Police in egg/face blunder as shop-a-crim site's SSL cert expires

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: El Reg doesn't even offer https connectivity

"Plenty of people have posted on The Register with information regarding a news story and have gone anonymous because they work for them or used to work for them."

Not only that but The Register has become a focus for those of us who are against the surveillance dragnet. My name's already on the list, obviously (although I strongly support the *targetted* work done by our intelligence services), but as the net closes in, forums like this will need stronger protection.

Sony tells hacked gamer to pay for crooks' abuse of PlayStation account

John H Woods Silver badge

I would choose ...

... remaining locked out, and file a UK small claim to get a refund of all other money ever spent on the account. I bet SONY wouldn't even send a lawyer, and you would win automatically.

Snowden didn't scare many out of US clouds says Forrester

John H Woods Silver badge

Unsound maths

"We're not sure it is sound to do the math on this one and declare that a 34 per cent of 26 per cent means about eight per cent of people pulled data from clouds for fear of spying, because the exact nature of the samples isn't explained."

I can help here: it's not sound at all, especially as "others [sic] reasons for repatriating data or services included local laws, or greater comfort doing business with domestic providers." are supersets of the first reason.

If local laws have been changed to prevent US-based hosting, what are the reasons for that? If CIOs have greater comfort doing business with domestic providers, what are the reasons for that? Certainly if I were a CIO explaining why I had pulled US-based hosting, I'd be a lot more comfortable ticking one of the last two reasons.

What amazes me is that a full third of those respondents explicitly cited fear of spooks. This is almost certainly an underestimate: there's some very good motives for not stating this explicitly and hardly any for using it as an excuse to pull US-based hosting when it is done for some other reason.

The coming of DAB+: Stereo eluded the radio star

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Satellite

"Personally I would love to be able to get our satellite signal to other rooms in the house (over IP?) but I haven't found anything to help. Anybody got any suggestions?" -- Owain 1

Sky Gnome will do it over radio, there's a few knocking about on fleabay. You could probably use a Pi to take in an audio stream from the Sky box and stream it over IP, but there's several devices you can buy ready made to do this, e.g. http://www.amazon.co.uk/WiFi-Audio-Music-Receiver-Adapter/dp/B00IHGMGNI

John H Woods Silver badge

My portable radio of choice ...

It's hard to beat a landfill android or an ancient iPhone in a decent speaker dock.

Use your home WiFi in and around the house, or use 3G elsewhere; in fact my 3G service is better than my landline internet even in the house.

I should think one could make something quite nice with a Pi, a touch screen and a USB freeview dongle. DAB, on the other hand, seems to be a solution in search of a problem.

UK's National Museum of Computing celebrates 10 glorious years

John H Woods Silver badge

Useful resource

My kids, on seeing a 3.5" 1.44 MB* disk in TNMoC: "OMG that's why that funny symbol means 'save', finally it all becomes clear!"

Just told this story to a co-worker. Her response? "OMG, it is! I never realised!"

$DEITY I'm old.

*ok it was actually 1.44 kilokibibytes (1.44 * 1000 * 1024) but that is what we used to call them, unless we were being risqué, then we called them 'stiffies'

Anti-gay Indiana starts backtracking on hated law after tech pressure

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Inconsistent

"It's very inconsistent. If I went to a Jewish delicatessen and insisted (by invoking the current laws) that they had to serve me a pork sandwich because the law said they couldn't discriminate, I'd be literally tar and feathered by both the right and left." -- Mark 85

Read Lysenko's post above. The Jewish delicatessen is perfectly entitled to not have pork in the shop (would you insist on a pair of Levi's from the building supplies store?) but they are not entitled to refuse to sell you a Bagel *because* you are non-white, female, disabled, LGBTI, a marine, etc. They are perfectly entitled to not serve you because they don't want to, but they can't put up a sign saying "no Irish" even though they can, If they feel like it, refuse to serve you when you walk in and say "Top o' d' morning to yer!" A wedding photographer can simply refuse all gay wedding assignments, but it is unacceptable for them to say "no gay weddings" or even, I would contend, to say "no, because you're gay". All they have to do is say "No". It really is that simple.

Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge in Vulture's claws: we find looks AND brains

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Very poor show

+1 for the Z3. I have one - love the camera, love the screen, love it. Most of all I loved showing it to a girl down at the yard and, as I handed it over, causing her to fumble it so it fell into her horse's water.

Getting a smart-looking smartphone out of a bucket full of water* without missing a beat? Well, I won't say it never gets old, but it hasn't yet. Bonus marks for doing it mid call.

You don't think you need waterproofing until you have it - actual submersion is, of course, a rare occurrence but if you spend a lot of time outside in rainy old Blighty, it's really quite nice.

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Storage?

"This is easily used up with a few uploads to the cloud." -- Steve Davies 3

^^THIS^^

I was offered a "MASSIVE ONE GIGABYTE" by a Tesco rep the other day. When I replied that it would last me less than a week he laughed and said he didn't think I knew what exactly how big a gigabyte was. He was right, as it turns out --- when I pulled up my data usage graph I could see that 1GB wouldn't last me a single day.

I should be on commission - two other people in the vicinity immediately asked me which network I was on, I reckon two others were listening in keenly when I told them.

Now, not everyone tethers 0.5GB a day, but nearly 5GB of what I've done in the last fortnight is Google+, i.e. photos and videos up and down to the cloud. But I've listened to nearly 500MB of internet radio in the last two weeks so I'm pretty sure that it's time to stop calling 1GB MASSIVE.

A phone like this, which does not take SD cards, almost always necessitates a huge/unlimited data bundle on a network that doesn't have shameful data provision. Will they tell you that in the shop when you purchase it?

Belgium to the rescue as UK consumers freeze after BST blunder

John H Woods Silver badge

"The wall clock should remain constant, and our routines should change. That would be more logical than trying to falsely adjust a 'constant'."

Do you mean the 'constant' time at which the sun sets?

If BST were abolished, I'm pretty sure my employer would agree to me working 08:00 to 16:30 in the summer. Would yours though? Would everybody else's?

I'm sticking to my guns --- and probably inviting repeats of my earlier downvotes --- I would rather have more daylight hours after work than before work. My ideal job is probably refuse collection: start early, several hours of physical labour, be out of work in time to collect the kids (now sadly grown up) from school.

Yes, almost everything can be done by artificial light, farming, commuting, working --- but some things are nicer in long evening daylight: sitting in the garden; walking in the countryside; messing around with horses, boats, model aircraft, etc. I do realise that some people would rather have daylight for a morning run than an evening one, but it's always going to be like that ...

... unless ... we have alternate months of BST and GMT during the summer. Any takers?

John H Woods Silver badge

UTC and ambiguous times...

To be pedantic, even UTC has discontinuities; TAI should be used on devices that are not expected to handle leap seconds.

More on topic, though, how on earth did this get missed in testing? It has got to be pretty high up on the test strategy for a domestic appliance that uses time to schedule things, surely!

John H Woods Silver badge

"When are we going to do away with BST, it's only a few jock farmers that want to keep it. Note to farmers, either get up an hour earlier or an hour later."

Actually, as someone who likes to spend some time outside when work finishes (17:30 all year round), I rather like it; I'm sure I can't be the only one?

David Cameron's Passport number emailed to footy-head

John H Woods Silver badge

"Microsoft Outlook was the culprit: the sender meant for the mail to go to someone else, but was undone by an unwanted autocomplete"

This should read:

"The sender was the culprit for not ensuring that the recipient field was correct. But fortunately, because only the recipient had the corresponding private key to the public key used for encrypting the material, they weren't able to read it."

There is absolutely *no* excuse for this. It's one thing if you're all at the same organisation and the worst that happens is, for instance, a UK-based worker like myself is sometimes asked to "pop in" to the Sydney office "tomorrow" to do something (my stock answer is that, as long as they clear the travel, I'm on my way, but it may actually be "the day after" when I get there).

Emailing sensitive unencrypted material to the wrong person is utterly unacceptable. In fact even emailing it to the right person is pretty much unacceptable, as there should be no expectation of the material remaining private unless it is properly encrypted. It's not even hard: if your recipient is cryptographically naive, send them an encrypted zip and phone them up with with password. If you can't do that, you are not the right person to be sending the email.

Apple's Tim Cook and Salesforce's Marc Benioff DECLARE WAR on anti-gay Indiana

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Indiana, WTF?

"... homosexuality (which they see as a choice) ..." -- Snake Plissken

I've always found this truly weird. I would no more consider having sex with a man than my gay brother would consider having sex with a woman. Surely anyone who thinks there's any kind of element of choice must be at least a little bit bicurious. Is that why they are so hate-filled, because they worry that they might carry this "predilection" within themselves?

Hotel Wi-Fi not only hideously expensive – it's horribly insecure

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: There are precisely three WiFi networks ...

"Well, some business may ask you what you're doing if you're using an unauthorized VPN from inside their networks.. and then show you the door." --LDS

Ok, I was being a little facetious but there are real world situations: for instance, my company, a big consultancy, does, for all its many faults, treat us like grown ups with regard to web access. Many of our clients, given the areas in which they work, have to have very restrictive whitelists. So, if you need to look something up in an ORACLE forum, for instance, and you're at client site as a guest on their network, you VPN into our corporate network (obviously whitelisted) from the client and bob's your uncle. It's all perfectly acceptable. And my strategy for accessing non-work-related websites is just as straightforward - I wait till I'm not at work :-)

John H Woods Silver badge

There are precisely three WiFi networks ...

... where VPN is not always necessary

1. Your own home network

2. Your employer's network

3. Your tethered mobile's network

However, even in these cases there are good reasons to VPN.

1. You don't want your ISP to track your internet usage

2. Both 1 and you may want to go round an e.g. Websense box ("No, boss, I'm not on Stack Overflow being 'social', I am taking self-directed action to learn the stuff I can't get from the company's $0/yr training budget"

3. Both 1 and you may want, $DEITY forbid, to look up the location of a pub on your PAYG mobile without having to take a passport, driving licence or credit card to the mobile store to prove that you are over 18.

To BALDLY GO where few have gone before: NASA 'naut twin to spend YEAR IN SPAACE

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Baldly go?

Come on, it's acceptable to occasionally split infinitives.

Ford: Our latest car gizmo will CHOKE OFF your FUEL if you're speeding

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Is this a lost in translation

@Lusty,

With the greatest respect, this is not "the same crap"; I know many find it surprising, but it is UK Law.

Sources:

1) The Driving Course I've just been on, courtesy of Warwickshire Police :-)

2) Wikipedia

"In the UK Highway Code, a built-up area is a settled area in which the speed limit of a road is automatically 30 mph (48 km/h). These roads are known as 'restricted roads' and are identified by the presence of street lights."

3) Section 125 of the highway code

https://www.gov.uk/general-rules-all-drivers-riders-103-to-158/control-of-the-vehicle-117-to-126

"*The 30 mph limit usually applies to all traffic on all roads with street lighting unless signs show otherwise."

4) Section 82 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act, 1984

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1984/27/section/82

"(1) Subject to the provisions of this section and of section 84(3) of this Act, a road is a restricted road for the purposes of section 81 of this Act[F1if—

(a)in England and Wales, there is provided on it a system of street lighting furnished by means of lamps placed not more than 200 yards apart;"

In conclusion, on a road in a built up area (please tell me where there is one, we'll have a look on StreetView) and there are no signs which say otherwise, then the national speed limit does apply and, if you are driving a driving a normal car (i.e. no trailer etc), that limit is 60mph. UNLESS there is a pattern of streetlights. I think whether they are lit or not is a red herring --- otherwise such roads would not be restricted during the daytime, which would be nonsensical.

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Is this a lost in translation

"No, single carriageway roads are 60MPH whether lit or otherwise. Built up areas are 30 whether lit or not, and whether single or multiple carriageway. Street lighting is sometimes an indicator that an area is built up, but not the best one. " -- Lusty

You keep repeating this, but it is not really correct. The presence of street lights* MEANS 30mph UNLESS contra-indicated.

* not single ones - in fact I think they have to be less than 600' apart. Nevertheless, a road with regular lamp-posts has a 30 mph limit unless otherwise stated.

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: My wife's car has automatic headlights.

This is not quite your fault. I have auto headlights too, and whilst they will dip in the presence of streetlighting, they certainly wouldn't go off. There's something wrong with your sensors (possibly their design): the ambient light even on a dull day is massively greater than even fairly bright streetlighting.

700,000 beautiful women do the bidding of one Twitter-scamming man

John H Woods Silver badge

"consume fewer calories than you expend in exercise" -- 1980s_coder

YMMV but I find even this is not necessarily true. Whenever I start exercising properly it makes me eat - vastly more than the calories I expend, but I still lose weight. I must have eaten 750kcal of honey on toast yesterday, for instance, after expending probably what, about 2/3 of that in the gym?

Silent server monitoring: A neat little cure that doesn't kill the patient

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: troll troll troll

Agreed. At one stage the analysis of giant text-based log files was almost my principle skill. There's nothing quite like being able to load a 100MB file into Emacs and use replace regexp to convert all the US format dates to something more sensible ...

CREEPS rejoice: Small biz Cisco phones open to eavesdrop 0-day

John H Woods Silver badge

Many of the attacks are possible due to the heavy feature set the devices contain poor quality design, implementation and testing.

NZ used XKEYSCORE to spy on World Trade Org election emails

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: What a Surprise

Which do you think is more likely: that people who disagree with you can't do simple logic; or that they don't agree with one or both of your premises? Firstly, I would agree that diplomats are supposed to look after their country's interests but I disagree that this should be by any means possible. Secondly, I would contend that the role of intelligence seekers is not primarily to "find out intelligence of use to the diplomats" (isn't there the rather more pressing matter of national security?) but, to the extent that it is, I disagree that this should be any and all such intelligence.

Dear departed Internet Explorer, how I will miss you ... NOT

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Ahh CL

"... that the reason why Adobe InDesign uses faux Latin for its dummy text ..." -- Alastair Dabbs

If you mean lorem ipsum, that's been used as a typographical placeholder for a long time --- fifty years at least.

Another GDS cockup: Rural Payments Agency cans £154m IT system

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Design by committee and this is what you get

"£154M <> £500M" --- jeffdyer

Did you skip the bit (in the subhead) about the potential for a consequent £400M fine?

Fanbois: We paid $2000 for full satisfaction but now we have SPREADING STAINS

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: Rubbish

Mage, stop bragging about your Osborne :-)

NYPD cop in court for allegedly hacking into the FBI

John H Woods Silver badge

point of order...

... as to whether using secret cameras to capture passwords and other information really counts as "hacking"...?

Our 4King benders are so ace we're going full OLED, says LG

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: I want mine on a large sheet of paper

"No, what I want is a screen that's so thin you can buy it as a roll and then just put in a wall like a poster."

Or so thin you can just paint it on, like I did. Although I cheated --- there's a projector on the ceiling :-)

Zuck: Get your FULLY EXPOSED BUTTOCKS off my Facebook

John H Woods Silver badge

Re: not appropriate, reg

john@t410:~$ head -3 /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 localhost

127.0.1.1 t410

0.0.0.0 regmedia.co.uk

john@t410:~$

Bride legs it from wedding after groom proves unable to add up

John H Woods Silver badge

"Mine started nagging at the alter" -- AC.

Nice; I wish I had an alter for SWIMBO to nag.

BTW, wasn't it Benny Hill who said (maybe in a song, IIRC?) that the bride thinks "Aisle altar hymn"