* Posts by DavCrav

3894 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007

Brazilians waxed: Uni's Tor relay node booted after harvesting .onions

DavCrav

Re: Self-important little pricks

"Sadly, AC is right. Some researchers need to learn that The Internet Is Not Your Chew-Toy."

TOR's ethical guidelines have no legal force. You can write whatever you want in your terms and conditions, but it doesn't mean that I or anyone else need to give a toss what you write down. Of course this applies to law enforcement in particular, but also to researchers. You don't get to shut all inquiry about your conduct down with a 'don't investigate me' line in your T&Cs.

'Driverless' lorry platoons will soon be on a motorway near you

DavCrav

Re: Versatility

"Including presumably the legal maximum speed for a HGV, which certainly isn't 55.9mpg on a single carriageway in the UK (It's 50 in England and Wales, 40 in Scotland)."

No. 40mph in England and Wales, 50mph for dual carriageways, 60mph on motorways.

Google and its terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week in full

DavCrav

Re: Does this firing thing only work one way?

"I've just finished reading an article in the Guardian entitled ' Salma Hayek is right: compared with women, men are lazy and entitled.' And yes, the rest of the article reads as you might expect after that headline."

That's the article that finally pushed me off the Guardian. I was taking a break from my seven-day-a-week working (so that I can take off several months after my child is born), while my partner is on holiday as her job gives her six months off every year, to be told that I was lazy compared to her.

Go fuck yourself Julie Bindel.

Let's try that statement with some nouns replaced, shall we?

Compared with whites, blacks are lazy and entitled.

Compared with Aryans, Jews are lazy and entitled.

Compared with straights, gays are lazy and entitled.

(Those last two are true if one uses evidence the same way Bindel does.)

Fire and fury in Korea: Samsung burns Note 7 owners in lawsuit

DavCrav

Re: Hmm.

"With the on-going corruption charges levelled at Samsung, cant help but wonder if some currency hasn't changed hands recently..."

It was a stupid suit. You don't get compensation for safety recalls that involve you walking to a shop.

Speaking in Tech: Do I need some weird thing listening to me in my house all the time?

DavCrav

Re: Do I need some weird thing listening to me in my house all the time?

"Do I need some weird thing listening to me in my house all the time?"

A friend of mine has one of these home spying kits. Even though it's in the other room, he said, in a normal voice, "Hey Google, what's the weather tomorrow?" and it answered from two rooms away. Everyone involved considered this disturbing. And yet they still have it.

Corporate criminal tax offences likely to further increase HMRC's use of dawn raids, says expert

DavCrav

"Fill up with £80 of fuel at a petrol station and the card machine is on the blink. If the vendor declines to accept an IOU then all your available options become criminal offences."

I don't believe that's true. The offence is to fill up without any means of payment. A valid credit card is a means of payment, and you could not reasonably have known theirs wasn't working. If, on the other hand, they put a big sign on the frontage saying 'cash only' then you would have known. And anyway, they should have a No Means to Pay form that you fill in and you get 24-48 hours (I think it depends on the garage) to come back with payment.

DavCrav

Re: Time to rein in the use of dawn raids

"Dawn raids were introduced for the purposes of taking down violent criminals who would attempt to defend themselves from arrest"

Surely dawn raids are there so that the person doesn't destroy all the evidence. As an example, see the first episode of Black Books. (No Youtube clip because it's blocked in the UK.) This is even easier in financial crime, as a quick flash drive in the microwave will get rid of many documents.

Assange offers job to sacked Google diversity manifestbro

DavCrav

Re: Not related to article ...

"Is there any appetite amongst commentards for a "Tell us the story about YOUR worst houseguest ..." type thread ?"

One accidentally stabbed me.

You mean like that?

Teen who texted boyfriend to kill himself gets 15 months jail

DavCrav

Re: @DA: "Committed Suicide"

"Indeed, I thought everyone knew not to use that phrase, especially journalists."

I must admit, I always read it not in terms of crime, but in deciding to do something. Like committing to a course of action.

DavCrav

Re: whatever is not forbidden is compulsory ?

"whatever is not compulsory is forbidden ?"

We have a legal system that normally proscribes certain behaviour, and everything else is fine, but in some circumstances there are laws that compel people to act in certain ways. One is a putative law requiring people to help another in danger of death, which exists in some jurisdictions and not in others. If that law is not on the books then you cannot be prosecuted for not helping, because there is no actual law that you have broken.

I would have thought we were all on board with the idea that people can only be put in jail for breaking actual laws.

Snopes.com asks for bailout amid dispute over who runs the site and collects ad dollars

DavCrav

Re: Facts are... hard

"@DavCrav; That's being pedantic; I think it would be clearly understood in this context that the value was intended to be accurate *to the number of digits given*."

What? You are surprised that, when making a mathematical statement, the words you use are important?

DavCrav

Re: Facts are... hard

""because I know, for a fact, that the decimal expansion of pi is infinite and non-repeating."

Prove it!"

I'm a professional mathematician, so that's not that hard, really. More difficult: is pi a normal number?

DavCrav

Re: Facts are... hard

"That is an interesting example. The last time I looked, pi was calculated to about a dozen trillion decimal digits. So, if I hand you a value for pi with 100 trillion digits, and it matches the known first dozen trillion digits, is it fact?"

If you hand me a value for pi that is 100 trillion digits long I tell you you are wrong. I don't need to know what those numbers are, because I know, for a fact, that the decimal expansion of pi is infinite and non-repeating.

Kill something, then hire cleaners to mop up the blood if you want to build a digital business

DavCrav

Re: In other news,

"it's vital to kill something just to prove no app is safe"

"The word is that Microsoft is discontinuing Paint..."

I see Microsoft is taking this advice.

$30 million below Parity: Ethereum wallet bug fingered in mass heist

DavCrav

Re: Those who don't learn from history

"I think it was Tim Worstall, late of this parish, who remarked that cryptocurrencies seem to be heading towards faithfully reproducing every mistake ever made down the centuries by conventional financial systems."

It's almost like the designers of cryptocurrencies never read any history of economics, but that's obviously a ridiculous thing to say.

DavCrav

Re: Who wants anonymous crypto currency to fail

"Who wants anonymous crypto currency to fail

Nobody Seems Aware. Not Sure Actually. No-one's Seen Anything."

So when cars are stolen it's Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth who nicked them, because they're the ones who want cars to fail?

Behave, this is the Internet, it's for serious discussion, not.... Nope, can't get through that sentence.

IETF moves meeting from USA to Canada to dodge Trump travel ban

DavCrav

Re: Sounds good to me

"For that matter, if a full 15% of the attendees are from the list of six countries, it's a great idea to move it out of the USA, excellent."

For the record, I'm a straight white British male, birth and residence, going back many generations, and I'm concerned about US Immigration, enough to reject an invitation to a conference in Berkeley, just down the road from this. However, I am going to Canada in October.

GSM gateway ban U-turn casts doubt on 7.5-year prosecution in Blighty

DavCrav

Re: He broke the law....

"By that logic all gay pensioners should be prosecuted and thrown away, maybe chemically castrated as that was on the table back then too?

Or maybe, just maybe, when the law moves then past allegations should not be pursued in some crazed pedantic prosecution ... Because well, try not to be moronic to a populace"

I thought someone would come up with that line of thought. The ban on homosexuality was a 'morality' law, so the fact that morality changed is what makes it no longer in the public interest.

If someone stole something in the past that is now given away for free, then things look less clear, right? The ban on COMUGs was treated as part security, part economic. It seems to me, although I am not a lawyer, that to claim public interest you would have to show that those weren't true then, not that they aren't true now.

Two-factor FAIL: Chap gets pwned after 'AT&T falls for hacker tricks'

DavCrav

"If there is no way to reclaim accounts without the 2nd factor, you're in a world of hurt if you lose access to the device."

I see this, but one solution would be a third factor, a letter sent to your home address. It'll take a while, but that one is even harder to deal with. Anyone who is up for stealing your phone, e-mail and intercepting your post, well, not every crime can be stopped.

May the excessive force be with you: Chap cuffed after Star Trek v Star Wars row turns bloody

DavCrav

Re: Ewoks.f@$!$ Ewoks

"There should have been The Original Series as well as next generation in the last question of the poll too! :-)"

I don't think including TOS as an option would have altered the results much.

Tick-tick... boom: Germany gives social media giants 24 hours to tear down hate speech

DavCrav

Re: "no one should be above the law"

"I will never accept Hilary Clinton.

I would probably except her though."

Close with the grammar trolling, but you didn't manage to stick the landing, falling over that spare 'l' that you left out of Hillary.

Search results suddenly missing from Google? Well, BLAME CANADA!

DavCrav

Re: No results for Equustek

"What will happen to Equustek if Google complies with this order by not returning ANY results for a query that includes the word EQUUSTEK ?"

Back in court I guess? The thing is that when you are a monopoly you don't get to do things like that.

America throws down gauntlet: Accept extra security checks or don't carry laptops on flights

DavCrav

Re: Anon: The Day Today are way ahead of you

Bombdogs.

Blunder down under: self-driving Aussie cars still being thwarted by kangaroos

DavCrav

"Somewhere in the Far East it is said pedestrians crossing the street just walk into the multi-stream traffic at a steady rate. It is expected that the drivers will avoid them."

That would be, for example, Vietnam. It is not said that this occurs. It does. I've done it, it's more or less the only way to cross the road. The motorcycles and bicycles move around you like fluid round a cylinder.

Linus Torvalds slams 'pure garbage' from 'clowns' at Grsecurity

DavCrav

Re: Grumble

"You might be able to download an Ubuntu ISO for free, but in a production environment Linux has costs just like Windows or OS X (unless your techies work for free in some kind of medieval serfdom, which I very much doubt).

How much are RHEL support subscriptions these days?"

What has that got to do with Linux not being free? If I get given a free car, I don't get to say "it's not free because I have to pay for the petrol".

DavCrav

Re: Ego Overload

"@John H Woods: An ad-hominem attack is a personal attack full-stop. Nothing to do with the quality of work, the colour of the sky, or the day of the week.

So if I call you a clown, that's an ad-hominem attack. I'm attacking the messenger, not the message."

If I call someone a clown, going on to give a point-by-point refutation of their positions, that's not ad hominem. If I call someone a clown without the second bit, that's an insult, but it's not ad hominem. If I say someone is a clown, so ignore them, that's potentially an ad hominem. But it depends on whether I say that that person is a clown because of many previous experiences with the person where it's become clear that they have no idea what they are talking about. It's still technically ad hominem, but it's much more reasonable to ignore the ramblings of a confirmed idiot than check every single time.

Despite high-profile hires, Apple's TV plans are doomed

DavCrav

Re: Apple

"And then the iSheep should go and do what everyone else has done - get an Android?"

Of course: iSheep dream of Androids.

Numbers war: How Bayesian vs frequentist statistics influence AI

DavCrav

If there is no infection at all then 1% of the population will still test positive.

In mathematics (and statistics), a good way to test your reasoning is to go for the extreme values and see if it still works. So you should test 50/50, no infection and complete infection, and see what happens.

Europe-wide BitTorrent indexer blockade looms after Pirate Bay blow

DavCrav

"Corporate information commodities have zero intrinsic value, so that's the amount I'm willing to pay."

OK, this is obviously bullshit. It has a value to you, however small, otherwise you would not spend the time and electricity cost downloading an unlawful copy of it. And not all goods that we normally think of are physical, for example a repairman doesn't sell you a physical good, or even more esoterically, an insurance policy, especially one you never claim on.

In general, most goods are worth more to people than their scrap value. I assume you won't pay more than about £150 for a car then?

Sharp claims Hisense reverse-ferreted its US telly licence deal

DavCrav

Re: Wow

"I can't see what Hisense have done wrong here."

Well, one would hope that there was some kind of contract that they signed where Hisense agreed not to fuck them over. You would think, anyway.

Ex-MI5 boss: People ask, why didn't you follow all these people ... on your radar?

DavCrav

Re: Says it all

"'What are we going to do to ensure we still are needed and stop all our resources being taken away?'

Not:

"As a publicly funded agency, what should we do for the people?"

Can I rephrase her statement as "this trough is almost empty - quick find another one""

No. She said that they were dealing with terrorism as well, and that was obviously getting big during the 1980s, but people didn't know about it so after the end of the Cold War, there was a danger that MI5 would be defunded and all that expertise in plot disruption would be lost.

When can real-world laws invade augmented reality fantasies? A trial in Milwaukee will decide

DavCrav

Let the fun begin

So this is a park. Should a 'game' that provides a head-up display with pulse rate, breathing, distance travelled, etc., for joggers be banned? Surely not, that's a health app, right? What about one that encourages you to go further with XP and levels, sharing results, and so on? Still a health app, or now a game? Should it be banned?

What about one that encourages people to run in small groups, that gave XP to the whole party? Ban now?

And so on.

Break crypto to monitor jihadis in real time? Don't be ridiculous, say experts

DavCrav

Dear The People,

Under our current system of law, we tend to require evidence of wrongdoing before we can imprison someone. There are tens of thousands of extremists in the UK right now, only some of which will actually end up killing people. Precisely how do you intend that we monitor these people without something like bulk surveillance? Or should we just lock all these people up without charge?

Kind Regards,

The Government

The reality is that you know someone is dodgy, and you know he knows dodgy people. Unless you have concrete evidence that he's about to murder a bunch of people, our current innocent-until-proved-guilty system says you cannot just throw him in jail. By the way, according to the police anyway, this is lost 2, won a dozen or so, in that they "disrupted" about a dozen terror plots in the last few years.

And anyway, we are talking tens of thousands of people here. We'd have to build a few prisons just to hold them. And if we start engaging in the habitual internment of Muslims in the UK, how many more extremists do you think that will generate?

I don't know what the solution is, but some kind of automated surveillance is going to be necessary because of the sheer numbers of Islamic extremists involved. If there are 10000 extremists, and each needs a team of five (absolute minimum) to watch them, on £50000 each (salary, pension, equipment, cover, etc.) then that's £2.5bn. And that's to employ 50k people just to follow them round. It's not feasible.

And we cannot deport them because most of them are British citizens.

First-day-on-the-job dev: I accidentally nuked production database, was instantly fired

DavCrav

Re: ehm, one thing

"He didn't follow his instructions. The fact that keys to the safe are laying on the safe doesn't mean that you are allowed to open it and destroy whatever is inside."

This is more like the Big Red Button for a data centre being next to the exit button for the door, as was in another Reg story recently. You cannot blame the hapless person who hit the BRB.

Amazon granted patent to put parachutes inside shipping labels

DavCrav

Re: Ooooh, It Makes Me Wonder...

"Probably far fewer failures than parcels mis-delivered by land going couriers."

Does a mis-delivery have the same kind of, well, impact?

Trident nuke subs are hackable, thunders Wikipedia-based report

DavCrav

"Sounds about as well researched as one of the 'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' books where a hacker was described as being so amazing he'd been able to take control of a RN submarine as it patrolled the deeps."

That's at least physically possible. In an episode of Bones, an ueber-hacker etches a virus on a bone, so that when it's scanned into the system it infects the protagonist's computer.

No H-1B visas? No problem, we'll offshore says Tech Mahindra

DavCrav

Re: Simple government response...

"Simple government response...

Subject all code developed off shore to import and customs duties."

OK. What if other countries do this?

US laptops-on-planes ban may extend to flights from ALL nations

DavCrav

Re: secure storage

"I agree. Who uses a laptop on a plane these days anyway? Too clunky. Tablets and phablets everywhere from what I've been seeing. If they would promise secure passage, I'd be fine with handing it over."

I use a laptop, and fly in economy. But then, I write large quantities of text on a daily basis, rather than watch films and read a report or two.

Your job might be automated within 120 years, AI experts reckon

DavCrav

Re: Natural barrier to runaway

"Silicon (or what ever we do run these on), has a worse power requirement and while in a solid state lasts a long time, is difficult to repair/replace (large fabrication factories take a LONG time to push out those AMD and Intel chips). Well, when compared to a few neurons growing in our skulls."

Yes. Human bodies are easy to repair, that's why there are no people in wheelchairs after breaking their back. Or degenerative brain conditions. What?

DavCrav

Re: Can Machines really learn 'experience' and 'judgement'?

"How much salt is enough when seasoning something? 6.4g or 7.9g?

You taste the food and judge. The strength of other ingredients can affect how much salt you need to add."

That's not what AI is for. You are asking if AI can decide how much salt is too much for you. If you give it some data and some method of testing things then yes, it can. But chefs cannot make things with just the right amount of salt for you either, without some data and some method of testing things either.

DavCrav

Re: Dark days to come

"There is a 4th way...

AI is bollocks and while automation and specific task robots will be built, the AI apocalypse will never happen, well, we may cause an apocalypse with something we have labelled AI, but it won't actually be AI."

That would be the 'humans are special snowflakes, nothing else could possibly have intelligence' way?

AI can be done, no doubt about that. The two questions are: 1) how long will it take, and 2) will we want to do it?

EU pegs quota for 'homegrown' content on Netflix at 30 per cent

DavCrav

Re: Brazil ? Or 1960s Britain ?

"I can just imagine Telly Savalas doing that; "Birmingham! It's the swingingest town in Limey-country!""

An actual quotation from it: "This was the view that nearly took my breath away".

WannaCrypt: Roots, reasons and why scramble patching won't save you now

DavCrav

Re: First, identify the constraint

"There is no reason, other than bribes from MS, that the NHS shouldn't do the same, again with the exception of the specialist custom programs for the expensive equipment which should be on its own network anyway."

I was just in an NHS hospital. The standard PC doesn't run XP. It's the non-standard ones linked to MRI machines and other networks that have XP. Anything that wants that MRI image needs to be on the same network, as you aren't easily transmitting 500GB of data a time through an air gap.

Julian Assange wins at hide-and-seek game against Sweden

DavCrav

Re: Slightly complicated...

"Nice try, but he has never been *charged* with anything, did you miss that part? And the girls are not interested in doing so."

Again, again, again, Swedish legal system not the same as UK/US one. The 'charging' part happens right at the end, when you are taken to trial. Jesus Christ people, these facts are not particularly difficult to remember.

DavCrav

Re: Slightly complicated...

"BUT the charge for which he was on bail has been dropped, so in hindsight there was no reason for him to be on bail in the first place. So is it reasonable, fair and just (as opposed to legal) to continue to pursue him for something he wouldn't have done in the first place if things had moved faster, i.e. the Swedes had decided at the beginning that there didn't seem to be enough evidence?"

Well, of course. Instead of having his day in court he chose to jump bail. And the Swedes, and I think I am going to have to shout at this point, (sorry everybody) DID NOT DROP THE CASE THROUGH LACK OF EVIDENCE. They dropped it because it was clear Assange wasn't leaving the embassy, and since they can't get him, Swedish law says they have to drop it. So he hasn't been vindicated, he's just been enough of a criminal (i.e., a fugitive from the law) that the other side has given up.

UK law doesn't have this requirement, so he's going to be couchsurfing for a while longer if he doesn't want to end up in new digs with the letters 'HMP' at the start.

DavCrav

"6 months failing to surrender have passed and he cannot be arrested for the offense for which he is bailed as that prosecution is dropped. So they are entitled to resource him at EXACTLY ZERO resource as per current law. The law says he should just walk out of the embassy and the police are not entitled to bother him as the original charge has been dropped. So (un)fortunately (un or without un depends on viewpoint), we can no longer even nail him for jumping bail."

I'm not sure that's true. A warrant has already been served for his arrest under the Bail Act, hence his guarantors losing all their money. There is no statute of limitations for the Bail Act.

Comey was loathed by the left, reviled by the right – must have been doing something right

DavCrav

Re: FBI in turmoil -- you know that, I know that--

"The banner headline on the BBC website after the news broke was "Washington in Turmoil" in unusually large typeface. That's the kind of hysterical reportage from a supposedly staid and reliable source which almost makes me understand Trump's antipathy towards the news media. I thought I'd gone to the Daily MIrror by mistake."

Washington is in turmoil though. What do you call the President firing the head of the FBI, who was investigating potential treason by him, allegedly for not investigating the other candidate in the race further, but then later admitting it was because he was investigating the White House? I mean, what has to happen for it to be turmoil in your eyes?

UK hospital meltdown after ransomware worm uses NSA vuln to raid IT

DavCrav

"This is the UK. We don't have the construct of first degree murder. I feel it might be quite challenging to prove that $whatever was released specifically to kill, which is what you'd need for a pre-meditated murder conviction (UK's equivalent of first degree) but causing death by being a silly bugger (AKA manslaughter) would be more likely to succeed."

Don't need the whole murder, manslaughter thing. If anyone gets caught for this, it's committing a terrorist act they'll be done for. Attacking national infrastructure tends to get treated in that way.

DavCrav

"How is some user clicking on an attachment in such an environment an attack?"

Well, it's obviously an attack. Just because the defence wasn't great (assuming that) doesn't mean it isn't an attack.

DavCrav

Re: Ransomware

"Because in warfare you destroy the opponents assets. You don't lock them up and demand a ransom."

Never heard of privateers, have you?