* Posts by Christoph

3313 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Dec 2007

Energy companies aren't going to slurp your personal data. Honest

Christoph

We can make money with your data.

Therefore it's OK for us to use your data.

Therefore your data is safe with us.

Boffins decipher manual for 2,000-year-old Ancient Greek computer

Christoph

Re: Does it start with

In that same alternate history the Gauls continued development of their harvesting machine, releasing peasants from the land to help develop the new technologies.

Buggy vote-counting software borks Australian election

Christoph

Re: What, me, do math?

"At least the dead didn't rise from their graves and go vote."

No, this is Australia, not Chicago

Let's Encrypt lets 7,600 users... see each other's email addresses

Christoph

Very common type of error. Go to next user. Add address to email, send email. Loop.

The error being of course to not clear out the existing addresses as the first operation in the loop. Or possibly to loop back to the statement after the clear out.

British Airways slaps 'at risk' sticker on nearly half its app delivery dept

Christoph

"temporary Tier Two visas for TCS staff who were flying across to deliver work in Heathrow airport terminals."

Or possibly "to be trained by the people they will be replacing"?

Brexit threatens Cornish pasty's racial purity

Christoph

And the Oggie man's no more

Hobbits really did exist – and endured erectus shrinkage, say boffins

Christoph

There's plenty of humans who are that short as adults. Some do have diseases or congenital problems that also stunt their brain development, but many of them are healthy, have perfectly good brains and high intelligence. IQ doesn't correlate with size.

Christoph

Have you noticed?

One of the nearest islands to Flores is Komodo.

So any hobbits that went adventuring would have met dragons.

Sysadmin 'fesses up to wrecking his former employer's IT systems

Christoph

It's the American system of justice. Either you plead guilty and get a long sentence, or you plead not guilty and get an enormous sentence and probably never leave prison.

Very efficient, and avoids having to fiddle about with trivial little details like whether you actually committed a crime or not - even if you are totally innocent you can't risk the longer sentence so have to plead guilty.

Christoph

Depends on the particular circumstances of course, but in general a company that has a downturn in business may not be able to justify keeping all its staff. Should they destroy the company and all the jobs rather than lay some off? What if business gets better? In that case they hire more staff - same thing. If a firm isn't allowed to make staff leave, should staff also be forbidden to leave a job to get another?

Oooooklahoma! Where the cops can stop and empty your bank cards – on just a hunch

Christoph

Re: Not visiting the US: the list keeps growing..

"Which could even include INJECTING data for later entrapment."

Or installing spyware. Or some spying hardware. So even when you get back home it's still sending them everything you do,

Christoph

Re: Don't get too excited

"The rest of us don't but we still get the fall-out."

No annihilation without representation

Christoph

The new police motto

To Protect And Serve Stand and Deliver

Christoph

Re: Guilty until...?

Ah, but they can only search your car if they have reasonable suspicion. Such as a drug dog alerting on the car.

When this is studied, it's found that drug dogs give a *lot* of false alerts.

But of course that's in a controlled study. It doesn't include cases where the driver is obviously suspicious due to being Uppity, or Driving While Black, and the police accidentally give the dog the covert signal which it has accidentally been trained to respond to by giving a false alert. Accidentally like.

Aquaboffins sink lost Greek city theory

Christoph
Alert

A Five million year old city?

They've found R'lyeh!

(Where's the Cthulhu icon?)

UK Home Office is creating mega database by stitching together ALL its gov records

Christoph

Re: "I wonder how many degrees of separation there are between any of us and a known terrorist ?"

I've personally known several terrorists. But then so have at least one Tory ex-minister and one Labour peer, who were also at University with them.

Christoph

So every plod in every car can trivially pull up huge amounts of data on you.

Or at least on people with the same name as you (or similar name, for such as Muslim names which can be transliterated in several ways).

Or on people who have at some time lived at the same address as you (or a similar address).

And at least some of that data will have only a few errors in it.

What could possibly go wrong?

Computex 2016: Full of people in cold sweats, retching after VR demos

Christoph

Dual Cameras?

"the 7 will have dual cameras"

Will it run SCORPION STARE?

EU bureaucrats claim credit for making 'illegal online hate speech' even more illegal

Christoph

Re: Illegal hate speech?

Legal hate speech? Yes, of course there is.

"that which publicly incites violence, or denies or trivialises crimes against humanity."

means violence and crimes against us. You can demand the extermination of funny foreigners as much as you like - look at any US fanatic's opinion of Moslems, or of any Moslem country.

US politicians can brag about drone assassinations of anyone the US dislikes, while denouncing those awful terrorists who might attack the US.

The US can invade any country it wants to, with trivial or no justification.

We've made the rules, so they don't apply to us.

Earth's core is younger than its crust surface

Christoph

Re: Quite a large pachyderm in the room

No. The rocks themselves may be younger, but the material they are made of is not. Those same atoms have been cycled around through various different rocks. Just because they have been melted and re-solidified does not make them physically younger.

Feds raid dental flaws dad

Christoph

We know our software is secure

It must be secure because nobody reports any problems. And if anybody does, we do a dawn raid and threaten them and their family with assault weapons. See? Nobody reports any problems.

Labour asks for more concessions on the UK's Snoopers' Charter

Christoph

For many years now every politician who becomes Home Secretary becomes an insane control freak, despite complaining about exactly the same things while in opposition.

Are EU having a laugh? Europe passes hopeless cyber-commerce rules

Christoph

"the Commission has exempted digital goods from its digital single market"

Have they done anything at all to fix the VAT regulations that make it impossible for small businesses to sell digital goods to other EU countries?

HR botches redundancy so chap scores year-long paid holiday

Christoph

I got paid double time for an hour that didn't exist.

We had to get a machine out to Hanover Fair, so we came in to the factory on Saturday morning to finish it. (I was coding the EPROMS that actually drove it). Sunday morning we'd finished all we could in that time, and it was packed and shipped.

To thank us, they paid us all double time for the hours worked, specifically including the hour skipped when the clocks went forward.

Christoph

Re: January 1st?

Not since the early 70s when they made it a bank holiday. They finally noticed that making people work on the day after new year's eve was a Bad Thing.

More than half of people on UK counter-terror biometrics databases are innocent

Christoph

Cameron has specifically and clearly stated that merely not having committed any crime whatsoever does not mean they won't come after you.

“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'”

US government publishes drone best practices

Christoph

"the ethics rules and standards of their organization"

Paparazzi have ethics? What did they use to find them, a scanning tunnelling microscope?

India roasts as mercury hits 51°C

Christoph

Re: Isn't it obvious?

Those scientists were obviously holding the thermometers upside down to fiddle the results - it's all part of the conspiracy!!!!!!!!!!!!

Would we want to regenerate brains of patients who are clinically dead?

Christoph

Don't forget the chocolate coating

He's only mostly dead.

CIA says it 'accidentally' nuked torture report hard drive

Christoph

The CIA chickened out?

They used to be perfectly open that they destroyed the incriminating documents to get themselves off the hook. See MK Ultra.

US power grid still fragile in the face of EMP threat: GAO

Christoph

Re: This nearly happened in 2012

The problem is that we can fix pretty well anything in our technology, using other bits of our technology.

A Carrington event would take out pretty much everything, leaving sod all to do the fixing.

How do you fix stuff when you don't have the transport to bring the parts from the factory that can't make them? And what transport you do have is desperately trying to distribute food.

Some bits take a long time - I seem to recall that the big transformers needed to get the grid running take many months to make, and they can't make more than a very few at a time.

Spied upon by GCHQ? You'll need proof before a court will hear you...

Christoph

Re: I often make an effort to top myself when faced with the same.

"[1] After many attempts using prescription rubbish it turns out that a ligature around the neck and a twist from a Big Spanner[2] is the best way to go."

Non ex transverso sed deorsum

'Knucklehead' Kansas bloke shoots self in foot

Christoph

What was he thinking?

I'm having trouble working out what he thought he was doing.

A sock is not a very accessible place to keep a gun.What did he think he would use it for? Even in the US fantasy of being a hero and foiling crime, he wouldn't have time to get to it. If directly mugged he could have problems if he asked the mugger to wait while he got the sock off.

So presumably it was to resist searches? Did he expect to be searched coming onto the grounds but wanted to smuggle the gun in anyway? Is he a criminal wanting to get a gun past police? Or did he have a fantasy of being prepared in case he was kidnapped?

Or just the apparently widespread idea in the US that you have to have a gun with you at all times just in case?

Russia faces Ukraine and Georgia in Eurovision deathmatch

Christoph

" the UK and its magnificent musical heritage would be better represented by this slightly less anodyne duo"

The UK should be represented by Fascinating Aida!

United Nations orders plan for tackling online terror propaganda

Christoph

Yes, can we please stop the countries which are terrorising people by continuously flying drones over their homes, and every so often swooping down and killing people at apparent random? And then they wonder why people hate them?

What have the drone campaigns done to the ordinary people trying to go about their business?

What have they done to the children who have lived their entire lives with lethal demons flying over them every day, killing their friends and neighbours at whim, and nothing whatever can be done about them? Because some politician thousands of miles away thinks it will boost his ratings. Can you imagine what effect that has on those children? We might find out decades from now - Oh gosh, why can they possibly hate us so?

UK.gov pays four fellows £35k to do nothing for three months

Christoph

My father worked on a national newspaper in the heyday of the print unions. There was one machine that needed two people on print union wages (*not* small) to work it.

One of them came in every morning and pushed the button to turn it on.

The other one came in every evening ...

Christoph

Re: So much this

It's accountancy. It makes it nice and easy for the accountants, and everybody else has to do what they say or they don't get any money.

The accountants have all sorts of rules and systems for controlling the money flow, and if the real world clashes with the accounting system, the accounting system wins. Even when this ends up costing lots more real world money.

It should be a crime to install spyware on phones, thunders Plaid Cymru MP

Christoph

Re: Multiple photos

That's fine if you are a top professional photographer who spends their career developing that skill.

The enormous majority of photos are taken by amateur photographers, or by people with a camera on their mobile who don't even consider themselves any kind of photographer.

They don't conceivably have time or need to develop that kind of expertise. Why should they?

Do you really think that even a top expert can stroll out and get a perfect shot every time?

Christoph

Multiple photos

"outlaw the taking of “multiple [two or more] images of an individual unless it is in the public interest to do so”"

The way to get a good photo of someone is to take lots of photos and delete the duff ones. This applied even with film cameras. With digital photos it's ridiculous to only take a single photo of a subject.

Transfer techies at SWIFT tell Bangladesh Bank: Don't shift blame for $81m cyberheist

Christoph

"wider use of two factor-authentication, among other security controls, is needed."

Naah - two factor authentication has been used for years for things like personal bank accounts and social media accounts - surely they don't need to do all that work for something as trivial as the central bank of an entire country.

Tabby's Star's twinkle probably the boring business of calibration

Christoph
FAIL

Re: And this is why there is no global warming

"It's just variations in measurement accuracy over time."

"One lot of very old measurements by a few people in a particular field may not have been interpreted accurately - so that proves that a completely different set of measurements, vastly larger, by far more people, checked and tested and re-checked in every possible way, using multiple different techniques and instruments, agreeing very well with past and current actual events, must also be inaccurate - because I don't want it to be true and I'll stick my fingers in my ears and shout "I can't hear you!" until it goes away."

DARPA wants god-mode attribution platform to pin and predict crime

Christoph

"It should also sport algorithms to predict criminal campaign behaviour."

So they will be able to identify precrime and send a drone in to eliminate someone who hasn't even realised that he's going to commit a crime later - because he has no intention whatever of doing so.

NASA, USGS publish topographical map of Mercury

Christoph

But now we want ...

Street View!

'Apple ate my music!' Streaming jukebox wipes 122GB – including muso's original tracks

Christoph
Facepalm

But it saves space on your drive!

It's so kind of them to want to save a few hundred Gigabytes of my local storage by deleting files without telling me. After all I only have 9 Terabytes on this machine.

Christoph

Re: A: he is not a real musician

Yes, from a report elsewhere it seems it deleted his WAVs, and then only made MP3s available. This included his own original tracks - so without the backup he would have lost the high quality version permanently.

It's also possible (the report I saw was unclear) that Apple would then offer those original tracks to other people for download, without his permission or knowledge.

And some of the music he had was unusual, rare special versions of particular tracks which got deleted and replaced with generic versions.

Woman charged with blowing AU$4.6m overdraft on 'a lot of handbags'

Christoph

Bank Error In Your Favour

Collect 4.6 million dollars.

Then go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Auto erotic: Self-driving cars will let occupants bonk on the go

Christoph

Small cars

"Disrobing in a smart car isn't easy - have you tried?"

-- Fascinating Aida, "Dogging"

NSFW! https://youtu.be/MXzaVOk_Ydk

US govt quietly tweaks rules to let cops, Feds hack computers anywhere, anytime

Christoph

Re: Here we go again

Can a magistrate in the victim's country issue a warrant authorising hacking into the computers that the FBI criminals are using for the attack?

Ten years in the clink, file-sharing monsters! (If UK govt gets its way)

Christoph

Will these penalties apply to executives of large companies using material copyrighted by individuals, without permission or payment?

No? Imagine my surprise.