* Posts by DavCrav

3894 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007

As Brit cyber-spies drop 'whitelist' and 'blacklist', tech boss says: If you’re thinking about getting in touch saying this is political correctness gone mad, don’t bother

DavCrav

It's much easier to remove 'whitelist' and 'blacklist' than do something hard like, for example, try to reduce racial disparity in parole decisions.

I'm sure if you asked a black person whether they would prefer this linguistic change or, say, less biased policing, I'm sure they'd be ecstatic to find out that the Government has gone with removing 'blacklist'.

Apple and Google tweak key bits of contact-tracing privacy plan

DavCrav

"Which knowing how well government IT project usually go should be ready for rolling out around 2025."

Lots of government IT projects do really badly, but some are actually quite effective. The online car tax form is very quick and efficient, as is the passport application form. The EU settled status app actually worked very well considering what it was doing and the number of applications it received. (These are just the ones I have experience with.)

I don't know in which camp this one will fall. I hope for everyone's sake it's one of the successes.

Australia to make Google and Facebook disclose ranking algorithms and pay for local content

DavCrav

Re: too few Australian eyes

"As for Netflix, they'll simply move out of the country."

OK, well bye bye then. I don't see this idea that we should allow tax avoiding companies to reap vast profits in countries with the threat that they'll leave if we don't allow them to pillage.

DavCrav

Re: too few Australian eyes

"A company that profits from the number of eyes seeing it's product, that was prepared to cut off 47mil Spanish, won't think long before cutting off 28mil Australians."

OK, so GOogle News is shuttered. I actually think that might be a good thing in general. Closing as many of Google's services as one can would be beneficial to everyone (apart from Google). But Facebook is in a rather different position. Either they start some sort of content moderation to stop the ability to share Australian news stories, or they will have to pony up.

And Australia will not be alone in starting to ask very serious questions of Google and Facebook, among others. Netflix will be in the firing line soon.

Facebook's Libra Association tries again at this digi-cash game, with more modest ambitions after global flop

DavCrav

"Blockchain technology leverages decades of experience with distributed and open systems. We are using blockchain technology to bring these innovations in security and operability to a new payment system."

I always go into one of these corporate blockchain bullshit sessions knowing exactly how blockchain works and what it does, and leave it not understanding blockchain at all. It's like some drive-by stupiding.

India allows half of IT services workers back to the office next week

DavCrav

"The Indian Government's rona-response"

Rona? No. Just no.

UK MPs fume after Huawei posts open letter stating: 'Disrupting our involvement in the 5G rollout would do Britain a disservice'

DavCrav

"Last week, it emerged the owners were planning to radically shake up the Imagination's board of directors, prompting the resignation of Steve Evans, chief product officer, and John Rayfield, chief technology officer."

You missed out a couple of key details there though, right? The takeover was only allowed as the company was regulated under US law, and under the condition that China cannot move the technology. The company then moved to the Caymans and then the Chinese government (well, some Chinese government company) tried to overthrow the board and move the company to China. You know, agree to some document with the British government and then rip it up and throw it away.

Kind of like with Hong Kong.

We lost another good one: Mathematician John Conway loses Game of Life, taken by coronavirus at 82

DavCrav

Re: Conway in Cambridge

" I did know one of his graduate students quite well, who was working on what became the Atlas, and he would give us updates on work on the sporadic groups."

Was it one of the Robs? Curtis or Wilson?

DavCrav

Re: Thank you

"I mean, one could play Conway's Life on a board, but one wouldn't generally call it a board game."

I don't know. I think if I tried to play it myself, I'd get bored fairly quickly, to be honest.

DavCrav

I only met John Conway once. His challenge was 6 x 6 dots and boxes. You play against him 10 times, and you 'win' if you win one game. I am rubbish at dots and boxes, but I did know a little about the theory of games. I won after about 6 games, entirely because he also let you choose who goes first.

At the time I knew him mostly because of his Leech lattice work and the Atlas, and I only later found out about all of the other things. I also spoke to his (I don't remember which one) wife. She said that at the end of the month she would collect all of the random bits of paper left lying around the house into a box, write the month on it, and put it in the loft. Occasionally he would ask for a bit of paper from March last year, for example and this filing system made it much easier to find.

RAND report finds that, like fusion power and Half Life 3, quantum computing is still 15 years away

DavCrav

Re: Quantum vs COBOL

"The thing is, the really sensitive government stuff is protected by encryption that is not public."

When designing a cryptosystem, you should assume that the enemy knows what it is. Security through obscurity is rarely a good idea.

As Zoom bans spread over privacy concerns, vid-conf biz taps up Stamos as firefighter in totally-not-a-PR-stunt move

DavCrav

Nothing says you are serious about privacy like hiring an ex-Facebook guy.

Tribunal halts all Information Commissioner's Office cases because UK data watchdog can't print or organise PDFs

DavCrav

Re: Now if I were a plaintiff

"I could go in with a workstation airgapped from their network (i.e. mine) and set up the facility for them in the time it takes for them to give me their email address."

Sigh. No you couldn't, because, as was made clear in the article, the office is physically closed. That's the problem.

I don't know if you've heard, but all non-essential government work has been halted.

From Amanda Holden to petrol-filled water guns: It has been a weird week for 5G

DavCrav

Re: What about

It clearly is terrorism.

A weirdo inexplicable leader tells their moronic followers a pack of lies and they go and set critical national infrastructure on fire as a response.

Infosys fires employee who Facebooked 'let's hold hands and share coronavirus'

DavCrav

Re: Ah, that old chestnut.

That's all well and good, but this took place in India, where government ministers encourage police to shoot people, victims of police brutality are usually charged with bruising cops' knuckles, and crowds literally lynch people for doing something they find offensive. In that sort of environment, getting fired for a stupid joke seems a little excessive, no?

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, health secretary Matt Hancock both test positive for COVID-19 coronavirus

DavCrav

Re: One rule for some....

"Now both BigEars and BoJo have been tested after displaying "mild symptoms". Yes, they are important people, but "we're all in this together"? I think not."

Don't talk bollocks. Charles isn't important.

There's no Huawei a virus can stop us! 90% of our staff in China are already back at work, says CEO

DavCrav

Re: Stealing a (long) March

"This has already largely been debunked as the cause of the outbreak."

Has it? Someone should tell the Telegraph, which ran this as the probable cause of the outbreak three hours ago. Oh, and the CDC, which currently blames an animal market in Wuhan. Oh, and tell the Chinese government, which has permanently closed the associated market.

Please, show me a (respected, non-Chinese) source that debunks the wet market hypothesis.

DavCrav

Re: Stealing a (long) March

"Are you mental? or has your supply of tinfoil run out? If so Let me know. There is plenty in my local offy"

Are you just following me on this site calling me names? Which of the points I stated is not what actually occurred?

The conspiracy theories are currently being peddled on various media, e.g., Twitter, by actual ambassadors for China, for example. The crowing about their 'achievements' was done by Xi himself. All this is documented. The destruction of evidence and cover up was also well documented. Which bit of it is tinfoil hat?

DavCrav

Re: Stealing a (long) March

"The the same time, the Chinese government looks more organised and reliable and less capricious than many western governments, which are still swaying between populist impulses, scientific advice and practicability."

That Chinese success story in full.

1) Allow the ridiculous practice of wet markets to continue, despite it being responsible for several outbreaks of novel diseases in the past.

2) When the next outbreak happens, destroy evidence and suppress the story, while gaining information on it.

3) Don't tell anyone so that it gets silently exported to the rest of the world.

4) Institute dystopian lockdowns that are impossible elsewhere unless you are already set up as a dystopian surveillance state.

5) Fling around ridiculous conspiracy theories about it being the US Army that brought it to China, while accusing anyone that points out that this is entirely China's fault of racism.

6) Crow about how your response proves that China is fantastic and the disease you exported to everyone else is somehow proof that your way is better.

Cops charge prankster who 'corona-coughed' on aged officer and had it filmed

DavCrav

Re: Idiot

Charge them with something appropriate, sure. But distorting the law in order to fit up someone you don't like is a serious problem. If you don't have 'assault on an emergency worker' on your statute books, that seems a problem in and of itself.

DavCrav

Re: Idiot

"In the UK it appears such incidents are being treated as GBH which look to me to be proportionate"

I believe the police today said "assault against an emergency service worker" would be the charge, which carries a two-year maximum tariff. This seems an appropriate charge. Stalking, let's be honest, does not.

DavCrav

Re: Idiot

I cannot believe so many people in here are taking this stance. There are two obvious problems with such an... inventive...use of stalking laws to charge someone who coughs.

1) The further erosion of equality in front of the law. Since the charge is obviously ridiculous (unless this 21-year old really is a stalker) if he can afford to hire any half-decent lawyer it will be thrown out and possibly a malicious prosecution countersuit filed. If he's poor, he's going to jail.

2) Normally we are against twisting the law to make someone into a criminal who performs an act that the government doesn't like. If you want to be consistent then you should probably take this approach even when the person does something you don't particularly like either. Cheering the government on when it overreaches on your behalf makes it a lot hard to accuse them when it does it in other circumstances.

India's peak IT body tells outsourcers to check contract cancellation fine print while Coronavirus reigns

DavCrav

Re: Don't most contracts

"The comment on UK law and the lack of force majeure is not strictly true."

I was under the impression we have the concept of 'Act of God', but not 'force majeure'. The two concepts are subtly different, and this distinction might be vitally important in contract law.

Edit: for example, these lawyers seem to think it doesn't exist in English law as a concept.

DavCrav

Re: Don't most contracts

It's up to whichever court's law the contract is written under as to whether a pandemic is force majeure. For example, UK law, which is used in many contracts, has no concept of force majeure. China is almost certain to declare it such as it lets all their companies off the hook. Same with India. If the contract is written under US law, though, you might struggle.

IANAL, this comment is for entertainment purposes only, etc.

UK enters almost-lockdown: Brits urged to keep calm and carry on – as long as it doesn't involve leaving the house

DavCrav

Re: "One form of exercise a day"

"Except that isn't a summary of what he said. There's a lot of ambiguity. What if your employer deems your work to be "absolutely necessary" (like mine)? The same goes for the self employed."

If your job really isn't necessary, then report your employer to the police, who will have a nice chat with them to find out what they are playing at.

Hong Kong makes wearable trackers mandatory for new arrivals, checks in with ‘surprise calls’ too

DavCrav

Re: Coming to a Tin Pot Dictatorship near you soon.

"I do wonder if the way the UK is dealing with it might not turn out to be a good middle path"

With closing schools and childcare, but not closing pubs and restaurants, the UK government is going down the 'stupid' path, which sacrifices the economy and sacrifices the population.

DavCrav

Re: confused re. ACE

"This claim seems odd. Hypertension is a major risk factor for the fatalities. If you have hypertension you're very likely (certainly?) to be on an ACE inhibitor already."

The testing was for ACE inhibitors one healthy animals, not on animals with high blood pressure. The guess is that hypertension is a major risk factor because of the increased ACE2 activity, which the virus uses.

DavCrav

Re: Coming to a Tin Pot Dictatorship near you soon.

"5) Clinical trials to look at the potential of known anti-viral drugs discovers that some are effective."

There are some that are having positive effects, this is definitely true. There's positive noises about some anti-HIV medication (BUT NOT PREP -- emphasis added because this is serious misinformation going around), also some ACE inhibitors have helped in animal testing, but not human testing. There are a few others that will help. This could cut the expected deaths from about 250k down to about 150k, which is obviously good, but these clinical trials will also take several months. Then you need to get 40m doses of drugs that every other country in the world wants.

DavCrav

Re: Coming to a Tin Pot Dictatorship near you soon.

"(If would-be-dictator Boris gets his way with two years' worth of Emergency Powers)."

The measures we are under will be around for a long time.

I have only thought of four ways out of suppression, none good.

1) The population is suppressed, sorry, the virus is suppressed long enough for herd immunity to develop. Suppression down to levels with enough ICU beds would be necessary. Since there are maximum 10k ICU beds, that's maximum 200k new infections a week. (5% needing ICU seems to be rough figures.) That's 10m people a year, so four years for probably enough. There should be a vaccine for it before then.

2) The virus is suppressed to low enough levels for people to think that it's worked. If it infects at about 10k/week now, and R0 is 0.5 in lockdown, then in two months you are getting roughly 40 infections a week. You probably won't find them, so you wave the mission complete flag, lift restrictions, and the virus goes back to R0 of 2.5. Probably closer to 3 now because of all the partying people will do. Within 5 weeks we are back to 10k/week, lockdown again.

3) Vaccine developed, tested, distributed, checked to have worked. 12-18 months.

4) So many people have died that maintaining suppression takes a back seat. I would say 100k deaths is enough to convince people that lockdown hasn't worked.

NASA to launch 247 petabytes of data into AWS – but forgot about eye-watering cloudy egress costs before lift-off

DavCrav

Re: What if the Cloud also catches Corona?

"Mutations are not uncommon among viruses/ii"

It's viruses. Viri are men. (Virus in Latin means venom or slimy liquid, and is neuter. It didn't have a plural in Latin, but if it did, it would have been vira.)

BT's Wi-Fi Disc ads banned because there's no evidence the things work

DavCrav

"Implausibly, BT also claimed to have boosted download speeds from 6Mbps to 100Mbps+ on average during testing."

It's fairly, but not entirely, implausible. I just put a mesh network (for that is all that this is) in my house, and 1) it reaches every room of my house now (as I put the disc-shaped objects in good places) and 2) I get massively improved speeds. For example, in my study, far away from my original router, I now get 109.3 Mbps using the network, as tested two minutes ago. Note that disc 1 of the mesh network is plugged directly into the router via cat6, so the (Virgin Media) WiFi is not used at any point.

Philippines sends all workers home, outsourced call centres for Acer and telcos suffer degraded service

DavCrav

Re: A disease for the rich

"That's one serious level of social segregation over there."

It's also false. Without other measures, SARS-CoV-2 will spread through Phillipines like it would any other country. Just because someone in a shantytown doesn't meet a high-flying businessman, they will meet the restaurant workers and cleaners of the places the businessman goes to.

America: We'll send citizens cash checks amid coronavirus financial hardship. UK: We'll offer £330bn in biz loans

DavCrav

Re: Covfefe-19

"Are we really still calling it coronavirus or COVID-19?"

The virus is SARS-CoV-2, the disease is COVID-19. This sounds weird, until you think that this is normally the case that the disease is not the same name as the virus. So SARS-CoV-2 is to HIV as COVID-19 is to AIDS, roughly speaking.

DavCrav

"Not a fan of guns at all but once people don't have food or the basics expect the guns to come out. That's why it's a different policy."

And, of course, the UK already has a benefits and statutory sickness system.

Your data was 'taken without permission', customers told, after personal info accessed in O2 UK partner's database

DavCrav

Re: with assistance from experts

"[...] in the first place [...] these up these databases up in the first place [...] It could also solve replications and duplication issues."

I cannot decide if I prefer that to be intentional or unintentional.

Gaming hot ticket E3 2020 looks like it's the latest tech event fragged by coronavirus

DavCrav

Google to appeal against €7m fine from Swedish watchdog for failing to remove search results under GDPR

DavCrav

Re: legal basis

"I suspect that the law doesn't say that Google can't inform site-owners when search result listings are removed..."

I don't know about Swedish law, but under UK law you definitely would be hauled before the beak for failing to abide by the spirit of the law. Which is a thing.

Now that's what I call a sticky situation: Repairability fiends open up Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G, find the remains of Shergar

DavCrav

Screen and battery for my Samsung for £84.

Fancy that: Hacking airliner systems doesn't make them magically fall out of the sky

DavCrav

Re: TL;DR

"Turns out that the experienced pilots just shut the thing off (pulled the breakers) and then turned in problem report when they landed."

The problem I thought was that, because Boeing were trying to do things on the cheap, they pretended that the MAX was a standard 737, so pilots didn't need a full course on it, including, quite probably, where said breakers were.

Brit MPs, US senators ramp up pressure on UK.gov to switch off that green-light for Huawei 5G gear

DavCrav

Re: Dear US protectionists

"Speaking of protectionism, thats a nice NHS you've got there..."

That's not protectionist. I know Americans are usually completely ignorant about foreign systems, but there is private healthcare in the UK. And it is used. We have a free, basic system, and a paid-for (or through insurance) extra system.

Nothing is stopping US healthcare companies setting up shop in the UK. And indeed some have. But their price-gouging won't work here because we have another option.

GCHQ's infosec arm has 3 simple tips to secure those insecure smart home gadgets

DavCrav

Create strong password, write it on the monitor

For a baby monitor, physical access isn't an issue. (If you are able to get to the monitor, you can probably get to the baby.) So you don't have to remember a ludicrous password, you can write it on the thing.

This actually applies to most household gadgets; the threat is online hackers, not offline thieves, who will just steal it and factory reset it anyway.

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

DavCrav

It's like nobody in any of the comments has heard of 'sovereign immunity'.

Edit: except perhaps phogan.

Review of IR35 is in: Quelle surprise, UK.gov will forge ahead with controversial tax reforms in the private sector

DavCrav

"So, investigations just get opened to fuck with people sometimes?"

Or an investigation is opened if they think someone is inadvertantly paying too little tax?

What they are saying is that they won't open an investigation just because you were found inside IR35.

Revolut-won: British banking app gets half a billion bucks in backing, seeks to subvert today's market incumbents

DavCrav

Re: I was with them from the start, and it was amazing except for the catastrophes

"so they were doing you a favour"

Lucky they aren't so altruistic then. If they did him many more favours, he'd be bankrupt.

DavCrav

"Revolut, the British-based mobile banking app"

I think you misspelled 'Lithuanian'. That's where the banking licence is from, that's who you have to deal with should everything go sideways.

Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this

DavCrav

Re: One question is who is more trustworthy?

"One question is who is more trustworthy?"

That isn't one question, that's a multitude of questions. Because some entity I would trust with regards A I would not necessarily trust with regards B.

Some examples:

Whom do I trust more not to immediately give all of my data to the US government? US ISP or UK ISP? I would go with the UK ISP on that one.

Whom do I trust not toi immediately give all of my data to the Chinese government? Whichever one has the better security, which isn't easy to tell.

Whom do I trust not to immediately sell my data to anyone who flashes their wallet? I would trust the UK ISP more in this regards, as there is both a customer relationship there and they are, at least in theory, regulated by some pretty powerful laws.

Whom do I trust not to screw everything up massively? Well, not Virgin, for example.

etc.

London's Metropolitan Police flip the switch: Smile, fellow citizens... you're undergoing Live Facial Recognition

DavCrav

I'm saying that the average copper will see a photo of a 'young black lad' and then go around accosting young black lads.

This method might be a bit less racist (but only a bit, as the algorithms have more trouble with black people apparently).

DavCrav

"The 93 per cent misidentification rate poses a serious threat to innocent members of the public."

Out of interest, what's the mis-identification rate when in the morning briefing a bunch of constables are shown a picture of someone the Met are after then told to keep an eye out for them? I suspect that it's comparable.

Assange lawyer: Trump offered WikiLeaker a pardon in exchange for denying Russia hacked Democrats' email

DavCrav

Re: How?

"How do you pardon somebody who hasn't been found guilty, or has that been pre-decided?"

I did wonder that, but Ford pardoned Nixon without him being found guilty, so it's not without precedent. You get a pardon for the crimes you might have committed.

DavCrav

"The President barely knows Dana Rohrabacher other than he’s an ex-congressman. He’s never spoken to him on this subject or almost any subject. It is is a complete fabrication and a total lie."

This is what Trump says when he knows the person very well and definitely colluded with him. So, on that basis, Assange is telling the truth.

"The court declaration is a stunning about-face for Assange and WikiLeaks, which have to this point vehemently denied any coordination between its public release of the stolen DNC emails and the Russian government or its agents[...]"

This isn't an about-face from Assange. He said that Trump wanted him to say that Russia wasn't involved. He didn't say it was.