* Posts by Mage

9265 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007

Smart? Don't ThinQ so! Hacked robo-vacuum could spy on your home

Mage Silver badge

Re: LG

I think almost all consumer electrical products are now pretty rubbish.

Bad ergonomics

Insecure

Short life due to too poor capacitors

Short life due to post design cost reduction

Unreliable and poor operation due to cost reduction

Inability to perform / short life due to excessive power saving (Lights, Dishwasher, toaster etc).

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Smart Devices?

Perhaps we should call them stupidly designed gadgets bought by people with more money than sense.

Though it's hard to get things WITHOUT internet built in. The solution is DON'T connect them to your WiFi or ethernet.

Why has "Marketing" and "Media" decided that something connected to Internet makes it "smart". It would be nice if I could use the ethernet on my Sony TV to say, browse and play stuff on the server, in practice the Android TV GUI is a joke, the T&C you must agree to Google/Sony Slurp just to tune aerial is an insult (Is it even legal?), the inability to record on a USB HDD unless it's dedicated, wiped and encrypted, the voice control, monitoring of what the HDMI BD/DVD player does etc means that it's just a crippled version of TV that's not "Smart". No way am I connecting ANY setbox or TV today to the Internet/my LAN.

Rob Scoble's lawyer told him to STFU about sex pest claims. He didn't

Mage Silver badge

Re: This article = manginism, at its best

Trying to justify what can't be excused and digging deeper while you are in a hole isn't defending yourself! It's stupidity. Sometimes the advice to say nothing is best.

WhatsApp? You still don't get EU privacy laws, that's WhatsApp

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Re: Some clubs use WhatsApp

This is why Linkedin, Whatsapp/Facebook Google/Gmail/YouTube, Amazon/Goodreads/IMDB, Twitter etc have to be FORCED to obey the law. With significant fines per user infringed to management. A £1.2M or even £20M fine to the company is merely a cost of doing business.

There needs to be viable 3rd party auditing,

I'm shocked by the amount of MY personal information and photos that OTHER people, whom I thought intelligent and sane have shared on so called "Social Media". They don't seem to realise it can be abusive, it can be illegal and it's certainly immoral. Some are family members that should know better. They don't stop either.

It's worse than them paying to publish it in the local newspaper, or pasting it on the Library/Post Office Community board. Most (all?) have set no privacy settings and use their real names and don't get it that email is acceptable to share something with someone else in the family, but Whats App, Instagram, Facebook etc is not. It's public.

Mage Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Re: tick that box

a) They'd hide it / make it pre ticked / wjhatever

b) They, like MS Linkedin, want ALL you contacts. You have no moral or legal right to give other people's contact details to a 3rd party without permission. Especially to a company.

c) Without audited regulator oversight none of these companies can be trusted to comply with any laws or even pay tax.

Apple vs. Samsung to climb back into rounded rectangle of justice

Mage Silver badge

Lawyers

Recently started reading the John Grisham books. King of Torts was interesting,

VR-bonkers Microsoft yanks plug out of Kinect

Mage Silver badge

Kinect vs headset vs voice

Different use cases.

This is just daft.

Knock, knock? Oh, no one there? No problem, Amazon will let itself in via your IoT smart lock

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: Pickup point?

Yes, some couriers here partner with petrol stations & convenience stores. Amazingly the Irish postal service offers a courier service with UK address and USA address. You can on some services get delivery to local post office. If home delivery fails it's at the local sorting office.

Amazon USA could partner with "7-11" or someone. This scheme is insecure. Watching by phone isn't good enough. Technology for tech's sake when non-technological solutions already exist and are more secure.

At least it's OPTIONAL! Simples DON'T sign up for it!

I wonder what the insurance companies think of it?

Hey, big vendor: Oracle, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook blow even more cash on lobbying

Mage Silver badge

UK Lobbying Register

Also they spend millions on EU lobbying.

Note the USA figures may only be PART of what they spend in USA. Makes you wonder what Apple is at? Don't they make enough already from their magical iPhone?

Twitter is low probably because they don't have the money.

International data watchdogs: Websites don't tell you who sees your privates

Mage Silver badge

fail to offer the necessary specifics

They will continue to do so. They think laws don't apply "because internet"

Bears, Pope* etc.

(* Some people have some doubts about the Pope now, but I've not heard of nappies, potties or even outdoor loos for our hairy friends).

Linux data-sharing licences: So, will big data hogs take the plunge?

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

sharing raw, unorganised data

The proposals are too vague, ambiguous and confusing to data providers. It's unnecessary.

What do they mean by "raw" or "unorganized"? Such a thing hardly exists.

Mostly illegal in EU if any personal data and immoral anyway.

Data sharing is totally unrelated to Open Source.

Obviously certain kinds of specialist data might be part of piece of software (such ISO character maps, national flags, ISO country names). No new licence should be needed.

This is just giving critics of Linux and Open Source a stick to beat us open source supporters.

IETF mulls adding geoblock info to 'Bradbury's code'

Mage Silver badge

Geoblock is evil and dishonest

IPs do not always indicate your location / country accurately.

In the EU, if the service is in the EU it's probably illegal.

Geoblock also DVD regions and BD regions are just greed. Either it's free and it should work anywhere, or you pay and it should work anywhere. Obviously Broadcast on satellite beams, cable networks and Terrestrial transmitters should be exempt.

HDCP on HDMI is a nasty tax and pirates pirate elsewhere.

TVs and setboxes that encrypt external HDD COMPLETELY even for FTA TV is evil. Hello Sony & Humax?

Sky mobe ad featuring beefcake Tom Hardy banned for being 'misleading'

Mage Silver badge

Meanwhile

How is Three allowed to advertise a mobile WiFi point as "High speed family Broadband"

Or Sky allowed to advertise ALL their broadband as Fibre, even though most is delivered on copper?

Or put real monthly cost after special offer period in tiny print.

Forget One Windows, Microsoft says it's time to modernize your apps

Mage Silver badge

Modernization is a journey that we're always on.

The goal appears to be NOT a "modernised" GUI, but post-Modern GUI that looks like laser printed sans-serif with loads of white space, no coherent structure and no clues where to click.

Just scrap UWP / Metro / Fluid Design* and everything like it.

[* I no objection to forms / windows intended to be resized doing it in some sort of "responsive" fashion compatible with screen readers, or GUIs that handle high DPI large screens and 800 x 600 screens properly]

It's time to rebuild the world for robots

Mage Silver badge

Re: A4 99% of the time. Why can a printer not grasp this?

USA and "Letter size" and most SW has USA defaults even though they are < 12% world population. USA doesn't use much metric nor ISO/DIN standards A, B & C series paper system.

Mage Silver badge

autonomous vehicles we redesigned the world around.

Trains have their own "roadway". Why don't we automate them first? Then maybe ships and aircraft (first totally automated flight was in 1970s!). Cars seem like the last transport to automate. Though what are Alphabet/Google's motives?

Mage Silver badge

No, time to design better robots.

Robots ARE stupid. They only carry out predefined actions of the designers.

The whole premise of the article is totally flawed. Ants carrying off leaves, cutting them, farming aphids etc.

We have laid roads in Northern Euorpe since BEFORE the Romans conquered. Roads predate cars by over 3000 years! We have not reshaped the world for them.

There are no general purpose robots and no general AI.

Dishwashing. Not done by imitating humans, but by a special design of machine. The real reasons there is no robot to pickup paper from desks or fold clothes is lack of a viable market at the price point the machines can be made.

Steam Engine and Steam Turbine needed changes to industry and economics to make them viable to spend time developing, for 1000s of years, horses, wind, water & human power was more economic. Pumping water from ever deeper tin mines in Cornwall was a major impetus. Tin was mined in Cornwall and copper in Ireland for Mediterranean bronze nearly 3000 years ago by hand because it was more accessible and labour was cheaper.

The writer needs to research robotics, software and socio-economics that influence industrial development. More things depend on a market than on new inventions. Supersonic passenger aircraft, hovercraft, faster ships to bring tea, spices leading to Suez and Panama. Refrigeration.

Tractors impetus due to loss of labour on land due to Industrial wages and WWI.

Credit insurance tightens for geek shack Maplin Electronics

Mage Silver badge

Re: You cant have it both ways

Maplin is x5 over priced on many cables, electronics parts etc, so this no surprise.

You can't run a retail business based on selling tat for adult boys and emergency sales of overpriced components / cables.

Batteries and lightbulbs are x2 to x4 over priced.

Viasat: We're going to sue Ofcom over EU-wide airline Wi-Fi network

Mage Silver badge

Ofcom

Wasn't the problem that the REST of Europe had already agreed this and it was Ofcom that wasn't compliant?

Ofcom rules only apply in the UK. This is a pan-European system.

Ofcom, the regulator that supported Mobile operators to oppose roaming charge harmonisation.

Sick burn, yo: Google's latest Pixel 2 XL suffers old-skool screen singe

Mage Silver badge

OLED: Prettier but shorter life than LCD

AMOLED / OLED isn't the same technology as regular LEDs, it's more related to Electroluminescent panels (pre-date LED and LCD). Also real LED panels (usually wall sized, but Sony "Crystal" is home display sized) use real Red, Green, Blue LEDs. OLED panels, like CRTs use phosphors (though not the same kind) on each electroluminescent dot. So they have both "phosphor" screen burn and short life compared to LCD.

LCD uses coloured filters on the front of a monchrome LCD that is back or edge lit. The dyes can fade if the backlight is very bright or there is direct sunlight, so an image can be burnt in on an LCD panel used say as a Call Centre wall status display, though not as fast as on CRTs and OLED panels.

OLED panels have short life due to the unequal ageing of the phosphors. The colour though is naturally much better than an LCD, just like LCD struggles to beat CRT and Plasma for colour saturation and true contrast.

Phone crypto shut FBI out of 7,000 devices, complains chief g-man

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Let them have the password

Micro SD card fitted inside a fake CR2032 coin cell (with a smaller coin cell inside connected to casing), inside the key-fob.

No point in being anonymous...

Let's make the coppers wear cameras! That'll make the ba... Oh. No sodding difference

Mage Silver badge

solely from the deployment

Unless miscreants (and supervisors) suffer due to fines, dismissals, prosecutions, demotions etc it will effect no change.

Arm isn't saying IoT firmware sucks but it's writing a free secure BIOS for device makers

Mage Silver badge

latest smart home kit from big names

Really!

I've a bridge for sale. More use too. The big names want to illegally store all your private info. Security is so their competitors don't and so users can't prevent it?

Anyway, great ARM project.

New phishing campaign uses 30-year-old Microsoft mess as bait

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Stupid MS Techs

These are related stupidities. None should have been used, only ODBC and Named Pipes.

Active X, esp in webrowser (IE only). (Much crazier than Java in Browser, which is crazy compared to Javascript or Actionscript). Active X should only be in native local programs

Really stupid designs:

DDE

COM

OLE

DCOM

Macros and VBA in Office documents are a different class of problem.

There are loads of other stupid things easily disabled that should never have existed such as Autorun (Imagine my horror when I discovered basic CD disabling left it active on Network shares and USB sticks!). Or the way USB HID works (not MS's fault, committee included Apple and Intel). Or uPNP/SSID services. Why also have Server service, Telnet, HTTP server, Remote Registry and Remote desktop on by default in most versions of Windows?

History of windows is some good ideas, bad implementation, NT security model made useless by applications only really designed badly for Win9x (no security) and totally STUPID installation defaults for 30 years.

National Audit Office: We'll be in a world of pain with '90s border tech post-Brexit

Mage Silver badge
FAIL

Re: tedious theatricals to delay holidaymakers

There seems to have been inability when T.May was H.S. and now as PM to control NON-EU people arriving, which the EU has no say in and UK ALREADY has "Total Control" over.

Instead the H.O. picks the easy targets of documented spouses of UK citizens, EU citizens, spouses of EU citizens and valid asylum seekers and deports or bullies them into leaving, even when they are legally here (currently).

Hence scepticism about T.May assertions about EU citizen rights post Brextit.

Is it even functional 90s tech?

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: no deal over visa free travel

No controls needed if you aren't letting goods or people in or out. That seems to be what the extremists want. They only want to offer Financial services [= tax havens and money laundering].

MEPs vote to update 'cookie law' despite ad industry pressure

Mage Silver badge

Re: Session cookies

I 100% block 3rd party cookies. That breaks nothing*. Only cookies for login or stateful use of forms are valid uses.

I'm baffled that 3rd party blocking is off by default on Firefox.

I block 3rd party javascript that isn't needed for site operation.

I don't run an adblocker. So simple images with a link are not blocked.

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Adverts

Adverts DO work without malicious javascript, unique tracking pixels and cookies.

Malicious privacy invading advertising is immoral.

Also the Ad giants (Google, Facebook) etc lie and they don't care when the "system" is gamed by bots. The payment model (clicks / views) is open to abuse and encourages abuse of privacy as well as privacy invading analytics.

There needs to be a more honest charging model for advertisers and total privacy for users.

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Wrong argument

"He argued that the new rules will stop companies gathering as much data on people, which is a large chunk of funding, especially for startups."

Yes, well making phones useless when they are stolen reduces mugging.

Startups, nor anyone else have ANY right to dishonesty exploit people. If your entire financing depends on evil actions you are a criminal and need to find an honest way to make money!

Your data will get hacked anyway so you might as well give up protecting it

Mage Silver badge

Re: Technically, Jesus.

Passover (later renamed Easter, for reasons forgotten and not written down,), about 6 months later than Halloween.

Mage Silver badge
Pirate

even if the chance of cryonics working is only 1%

No, it's 0%, because they only freeze dead people AND the process destroys the integrity of almost all the cells.

To work at all, you'd need to have induced hibernation via chemicals & genetic manipulation. WHILE ALIVE. Then ALL your blood & other fluids quickly replaced with an oxygenated non-water fluid that would permeate all the cells and not kill you. Then you can be gradually frozen. Being already absolutely dead is too late.

1) Preserving dead people or heads is never going to work.

2) Cryogenics of mammals without modification and basically hibernation destroys too many cells. Even if they are alive.

Only people mostly dead* can be revived.

[*i.e. they may have stopped breathing and pumping blood, but otherwise enough intact to be revived, being not quite frozen may extend the period of being a little alive]

Mage Silver badge

Re: It's an 'underworld' festival

Maybe for neo-pagans.

Not so much for Celts, who don't seem to have had the Greek concept of an underworld, but many "Otherworlds" only maybe some or one associated with the dead.

Certainly it was more important than the equinox.

All the (four) Celtic fire festivals were originally about 1/2 way between Solstices and Equinoxes. Various theories.

Yes, America imported Halloween and corrupted it. Turnip lanterns were fine, there are different kinds, the largest are near football sized and there are others that are no use for lanterns being only a bit bigger than a sliotar (a little like a cricket ball used for Irish ice hockey, which doesn't bother with ice). Harder to dig out turnips, but at least the waste goes in stew. Pumpkin has little flavour in comparison. The important thing was the bonfires, the apple ducking etc, not shop bought "candy" nor going round the houses begging.

In the 1960s the fireworks were still legal in N.I. (made for England's Guy Fawkes) but illegal in Ireland (Republic). England seemed to do Guy Fawkes rather than Halloween (Celtic) or All Saints Eve (the too Catholic appropriation of it) then.

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Zombies

Cutting off the head and freezing it is nothing to do with resuscitation as the subject is already dead.

Obviously it's to make sure the subject is really dead and also security if subject was really a werewolf / vampire / zombie etc that would have shortly run amoke.

It also ensures that fresh frozen brains can be sold at huge profit if there is a shortage. Like if there is a successful zombie apocalypse.

As a side note, why Zombies at Halloween. No connection to Celtic Samhain or Christian All Saints.

Vampires do have a slight Celtic connection (see where Bram Stoker is from and also "lennan shee" is female (fairy) Celtic vampire with human lover, hence the two earlier Victorian books than Dracula had female vampires. One was Lilith. I forget the other.

Survey: Tech workers are terrified they will be sacked for being too old

Mage Silver badge

Re: Wrinklies

Missing all the top HW gurus, I was only listing SW/Computer people and it's a random list.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Wrinklies

Or in some cases Grandparents, great uncles, great aunts etc born in 1930s or earlier

John von Neumann (Hungarian: Neumann János Lajos, December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957)

C. A. R. Hoare (born 1934), British computer scientist.

Grace Hopper (Cobol) Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (née Murray; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) computer scientist

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra ( 11 May 1930 – 6 August 2002)

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – c. October 12, 2011 computer scientist.C programming language

Niklaus Emil Wirth (born 15 February 1934) computer scientist. Pascal, Modula-2 and Lilith. Cause of Logitech selling mice.

Donald Ervin Knuth born January 10, 1938, computer scientist. He is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming.

David Neil "Dave" Cutler, Sr. (born March 13, 1942) software engineer, a designer, and a developer of several operating systems in the computer industry. These operating systems are Microsoft Windows NT, and Digital Equipment Corporation: RSX-11M, VAXELN, VMS (now OpenVMS).

Gary Arlen Kildall (May 19, 1942 – July 11, 1994) computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur who created the CP/M operating system and founded Digital Research, Inc.

Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil ( born February 12, 1948) computer scientist. Practically invented optical character recognition (OCR) and machine to read out loud printed books for Blind.

Konrad Zuse (22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, inventor and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941.

CRT and radio are Victorian

Batteries 1800 by Volta

Fax 1851

Many of the people that invented what we use are retired or dead.

There are 1000s more people.

Transistors envisaged in 1930s, 1948 was when Germanium was pure enough.

Most of what we have is simply commercialisation, improvement and miniaturising what was known by 1950s, developed by people born 1850s to 1930s.

Mage Silver badge

Re: any grad born after '66

Or possibly 1950

But a pity I can only morally upvote once. So true.

They want cheap "yes men".

Review: Magic Leap and Fantasy Funding Fiasco

Mage Silver badge

I'm baffled.

Why are people funding this?

There are LOADS of more likely things.

This is like someone selling cold fusion or a perpetual motion machine.

GE goes with Apple: Not the Transformation you were looking for, Satya?

Mage Silver badge

Mac and iPhone

It's not that it's good value, but Windows has become a sick joke that damages productivity, to the point were buying Mac is really cheaper and even Linux as a desktop, not just as a server, is being considered.

Problem is not Adobe or even MS Office, but SOHO and SME using Sage, payroll, CRM etc that is only on Windows. One "cloud" based CRM stupidly needs "Silverlight". At least they plan to migrate to HTML5.

ARM chip OG Steve Furber: Turing missed the mark on human intelligence

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

72 ARM cores, which equates to the brain of a pond snail

No, it doesn't.

Maybe it's as many connections, but it's not at all like a brain.

Even in 1970s we knew the "future" of computers is parallelism. Programming rather than hardware has been the problem.

It's very interesting research and I hope the "real" work is more about how to program parallel systems than chasing unicorns.

Windows Fall Creators Update is here: What do you want first – bad news or good news?

Mage Silver badge

Google analytics

NoScript also cookies

I have all analytic and other tracking ware explictly blocked

I only enable enough for a site to be usable, and only non-temporary on non-slurping regular sites I use

3 party cookies NEVER allowed

Noscript also blocking some other stuff by default.

Firefox 52 ESR on Windows and Linux.

Mage Silver badge

still a must-have upgrade

No.

Not till they make it back to being a GUI instead of a monochrome laser printed page

Not till they stop basing GUI on worst aspects of "modern" web pages.

Not till there is no slurping

Not till updates play as nice as Linux.

Turn off Windows Store, or switch to kill it and all its stupid phone centric apps

Kill Cortana

Make using alternates to Edge & IE less fussy.

Fix settings

Allow win7 and earlier level of customisation

Stop crippling entry level versions.

I've left. I have two machines (a PC and keyboard/tablet) so as to track how MS is going. They still have not got it yet.

They need to go back to Win9x/NT4/Win2K/XP era GUI with explorer bugs fixed

Look, look, we've done a driverless AI hype paper thingy, says Mobileye

Mage Silver badge

Sensitive Safety model will magic away all the thorny problems

Only in the minds of Silly Valley Execs. Not in the real world!

The Google Home Mini: Great, right up until you want to smash it in fury

Mage Silver badge

Re: av receiver has a bluetooth in

But direct 3.5mm cable is actually better quality and lower latency than Bluetooth, which is an extra pair of codecs.

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Re: According to a presentation

Why would I believe a marketing presentation, EVER. Especially one from a Tech Giant.

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Therapy

"Our house has a range of smart home devices: Nest and Ecobee thermostats, August smart locks, Ring doorbells, several smart cameras, and smart power sockets and light switches and so on."

I think you have a much bigger problem than trying to review Google Mini.

Aviation industry hits turbulence as Airbus buys into Bombardier’s new jetplanes

Mage Silver badge

Re: NI Jobs

La la land / Cloud cuckoo. Airbus won't preserve the NI jobs. Airbus has paid zero and the Canadian Government must be relieved. Canada unlike UK is moving toward Europe and EU. They have done an EU trade deal and are an associate in the ESA (the EU help funds it, but not all members of ESA are in EU and not all EU members are in ESA).

ESA and Canada is important to Airbus. Not NI. Besides Airbus has a plant in Seattle (?), not N.I.?

Release the KRACKen patches: The good, the bad, and the ugly on this WPA2 Wi-Fi drama

Mage Silver badge

Re: HTTPS Everywhere' in Chrome

Except Chrome is Google spyware. No thanks.

Anyway, that's a pointless plugin.

Mage Silver badge

IoT, old consoles

Old Android, old iOS, old Windows and embedded / IoT gadgets will never get patches. Old Nintendo handhelds etc already could not be used on properly set up WiFi as they didn't do WPA2 / AES, only TKIP etc.

My linux laptop WiFi is patched already, last night. Need to check everything else.

WPA2 KRACK attack smacks Wi-Fi security: Fundamental crypto crapto

Mage Silver badge
Pirate

Only possible comment

Arrrgggh!

Well, I recommended to business last month to only use ethernet cables, though it was for performance. Sigh.

Xperia XZ1: Sony spies with its MotionEye something beginning...

Mage Silver badge

Re: Ah memories...

Sony was only not called Sony for a short while. They decided to market transistor sets to USA in 1950s and adopted Sony name.

I'd like their portable transistor reel to reel portable of about 1960. Spring driven wind up tape transport (an idea first on a late 1940s German battery valve reel to reel).