Posts by Martin Gregorie

Why? A cross made with a pencil, black biro or felt-tip will do just as well and, indeed, is much better if the ballots are counted by humans.

For machine-counted ballots a black mark in a box read by an Optical Mark Reader (OMR) is also better because it will not be subject to the 'hanging chad' problem.

OMR is old, tested and reliable technology: I was writing systems to use it back in 1971/2. With reasonably well designed forms it provides an easily used offline interface that works in places where online access isn't usually available, such as a polling station. When polling closes, the marked-up ballots from each polling station would be securely transported to the counting centre and fed through its OMR reader. Security is good because there's no need to connect any part of the voting system to a network.

The first example I saw of a live OMR system belonged to a magazine distributor. This is the middle man between the publishers and newsagents. The distributor's delivery van driver delivered magazines to the newsagent and collected last week's unsold copies. Both were recorded on an OMR form in front of the shop owner and passed to the distributor's computer dept to be read into the stock control and accounting system. The OMR forms had been printed with the retailer's code and the list of magazines he sold before being handed to the van driver, sorted into delivery round order - a very slick operation. Using then-traditional data prep methods took 3-4 weeks to produce invoices etc: the use of OMR reduced this to 3-4 days.

The OMR system I worked on used a set of forms to record case histories for a hospital cardiovascular unit: there were forms, designed by medical staff, to record pre-op examinations, details of the operation, post-op examinations and outcomes. We developed a system that read the OMR documents and stored the details in a database. As well as generating outcome statistics (its main purpose), it printed easily readable case histories that went back to the surgeons for checking/correction and to be added to the patient's case notes.

Re: Staging computer A23567-D

What class of a computer was it that could be compromised for at least eight months without anyone noticing?

One used by several developers for a variety of tasks? I can well imagine that, in a somewhat chaotic environment, nobody would know exactly what should be on it or what anybody else may have installed.

Re: Plumes

Good write-up - thanks.

I notice you didn't mention the much hyped Yellowstone supervolcano and wonder why not. Is it simply not that much of a potential threat?

Re: Height measurement precision

I see the satellite's orbit is being measured by star-tracker and GPS. Thats fine for Lat/lon determination to about a metre, but vertical GPS resolution is a lot worse, somewhere in the 3-5m range, so either there's another scheme thats not being talked about for measuring the orbital altitude, correcting for gravitational variation etc., or the +/- 3cm height resolution calculated from photon flight time and mentioned in the referenced graphic is somewhat irrelevant.

Re: How 'bout no

I don't and won't have a TV in my house, so like you I don't and won't waste time watching it, but I DO listen to BBC radio and, more selectively, to internet streamed radio, not least because I can do something else while listening.

So, I would be happy to pay for a BBC radio license if one existed.

One other thing I want to see is the likes of Drooble, Farcebook and Amazon pay their fair share of UK taxes.

Re: "no redundancy in the internet link"

One thing nobody seems to have forgotten - BT and other wonderful network providers currently operating in the UK have been known to engineer their own single point of failure. It happens this way:

• The system design team specifies a disaster recovery site and a high speed connection to it
• Their network design requires separate dual redundant links from the operations centre (LGW in this case) to the main ops site and to the disaster recovery site via at least two paths which are required to leave the building via separate ducts and then follow different routes.
• These specs get handed to the network provider, whose contractors promptly ignore all the fancy separate routing details and put all the cables through a single duct so they can trouser all the money they saved by skipping all that costly separate routing nonsense.
• The local council puts a digger through the cable duct....

Re: I think...

Better yet, each time a Government department's IT project fails, fire those responsible for its management, starting from the head of department and working down until signs of competence is found. That should only need to happen once, though history suggests it may need to happen at least once per department.

Re: Costs?

While part of me agrees with your sentiments the problem is that ICANN doesn't have any money of it's own.

Are you sure? IIRC there have been several stories in El Reg about the millions ICANN made by selling rights over newly invented TLDs to various registrars. For some reason TLD name auctions starting at $185,000 a pop spring to mind. IIRC quite a lot of it is said to be still in the ICANN bank account despite what they've spent on running conferences in exotic places.

Um hire more? In particular, hire more greybeards.

Never going to happen as long as companies are run by MBAs, accountants and so-called 'activist investors'[1]. who wouldn't recognise talent or experience if it walked up and kicked them in the nuts.

[1] back around 1900 these 'gentry' were known as robber barons and corporate raiders - much better names for anybody whose main aim is to syphon off money made by the hard work of other people.

Re: Use commercial flights instead.

Commercial aircraft don't cover a lot of surface area.

Indeed. Take a look at Flight Radar 24 http://www.flightradar24.com/.

That shows that using commercial air transport planes as radio relay points won't add anything useful.

Daytime tracking shows they'd give good coverage over Europe, the band from the Middle East through India, SE Asia and up to Japan, and across the continental USA, but that area is already well provided with internet and other comms connectivity.

On the other hand, much of Africa, Northern Canada, and South America, which is where cheap connectivity would help a lot, are rather short of commercial overflights. The same applies to both polar regions, the island chains in Pacific and Indian oceans and to the few islands in the South Atlantic.

So, nice idea but not gonna fly.

Re: Does anyone else worry about this?

Does anybody know just who invented the concept of Secondary Legislation and promoted it as a way of bypassing Parliamentary scrutiny?

Whoever it was, one thing is certain: they were not a democrat.

I'll probably get downvoted for this, but...

I think an automated solution, based at least partly on the methods behind security systems might work like this:

• Require all copyright assertions to be registered in a distributed register. If a work isn't registered it isn't protected. Have the register maintained by one of the international copyright institutions, e.g. WIPO
• Let anybody who publishes copyrightable material for public access have either free or low cost access to the register and connect it up to their upload process so that attempts to upload copyrighted material will be rejected unless the uploader is registered as the copyright owner and indicates he's waiving copyright on that platform. This prevents the freetards from ripping off copyright owners while providing immunity to the publisher.
• If the publisher doesn't want to sign up, that's fine, but he will be liable for copyright infringement if he doesn't.
• In return, copyright owners will agree to copyright expiring no more than ten years after the author's death.
• Those selling copyrighted material can continue as normal provide they pay royalties - this could be an automated process via the online register.

Of course, the upload blocker needs to be smart enough to see through attempts to disguise copyrighted material, but isn't that what all these wonderful AI systems (cough! pattern matchers, cough!) are supposed to do infallibly and reliably?

I think something like this is fair to everybody. Authors get recompensed for their work. Co-operating publishers get immunity from copyright hassles. Ordinary punters can still get access to (paid-for) copyrighted material and to material that's now out of copyright. Freetards get their well-deserved black eye.

Re: "From my experience (Emirates), I'd rather fly A380 than B777"

I flew Emirates A380 and 777 back to back:

Gatwick--A380-->Dubai--777-->Delhi

and

Kolkatta--777-->Dubai--A380-->Heathrow

That was in late 2016, cattle class for all four legs. There was no equality in terms of comfort and facilities between the two aircraft. The A380 felt modern, with excellent seating and seat-back systems while the 777 experience felt like the previous generation it is.

Re: What will happen during a war?

...if the F-35 logistics and maintenance management system in the US of A gets taken down with ransomware or a bot? Answer: F-35s will refuse to fly. Worldwide. Bugs in that system have already stopped them being flown while the bug was fixed.

Re: Mixed Feelings

So, AC, what would you suggest we replace Firefox with?

Chrome? No thanks. The last thing I want is to be data-slurped by Alphabet.

Opera? Pretty much dead.

Vivaldi? Nope - its at best a pale reflection of what Opera was when that was still a Thing. I tried it, didn't like it and the folks at Fedora must agree with me because it vanished from their package repository some time ago.

PaleMoon? Its the best I've found so far, but judging by the rate at which updates appear, its supported by one man and his dog, with minor bugs taking months to fix: I've had an outstanding bug about handling high res screens registered with them for over six months without fix or acknowledgement. Nonetheless, that's where I'll go if Firefox implodes or tries to bypass my adblocker.

Re: Think of it as a donation, not a purchase

I think they need to tighten up the rules so that companies cannot use these crowdfunding sites as pre-order mechanisms.

I've also only backed two projects:

• LOHAN, and I got a very nice tankard out of that, which is pretty much what I expected. Pity LOHAN has never flown, but that never looked likely once the FAA bureaucracy stuck its oar in.
• The Glide Britain project, from which I got a book of photos. Some good videos got made and have been published on YouTube, so the team did what they had promised.

Both of these projects did pretty much what they said on the tin, so I'm happy to have been involved with both.

Re: How large of a tide would that have been?

And for an impression of what the incoming high tide might look like, just watch 'Interstellar' again.

The scene on the water world where their spacecraft lands in a vast area of shallow water and only just gets away before the tidal wave swamps it may be pretty close to what you'd see on Earth when the moon was still in a close orbit. Except, that is, that both Earth and Moon were rather hot at the time: think glowing lava rather than blue water.

Re: Two more childhood heroes gone

And sports seems to be retain its emphasis on performance, else why are players released and coaches fired?

That's not sport: that's just hiring paid performers while everybody else sits on their fat arses and watches them.

Sport is something you get out and do yourself. It includes some competitive element: either challenging yourself to do better or trying to be better than your mates at doing it. This definition covers a lot of activities, ranging from playing team sports or individual games like tennis. It also includes activities like hill walking, bike riding, sailing, flying light aircraft, gliders, etc. It doesn't matter what you do as long as it requires some degree of physical and intellectual effort, and may involve some degree of risk. You get to choose what sort of sporting activity you do, but you have to do it yourself.

Watching somebody else doing it is never sport.

Re: Time to re-read Brian Aldiss' Earthworks...

I did just that fairly recently, but his autonomous ships were not uncrewed - I'm thinking "Earthworks" here, which I'm guessing you also remembered. The crews in that book were just one or two persons plus a few assorted passengers.

Re: "Disable HTML"

That's a bug in my books, because setting 'disable' should mean that the feature is disabled. Always. No exceptions.

Re: Can't have it both ways, guys.

...but don't forget that there are, and have been since I was old enough to notice, news outlets that simply take stories off newswire services like Reuters, Associated Press, UPI, etc, and print them.

Back in the late '70s that was where almost all the foreign news on BBC radio came from: at that time their test of whether a story was true was "has it been reported by more than one newswire". I have no idea whether this is still the case.

Is there no degree of indirect homicide, like the UK manslaughter, to cover such a case where the outcome was likely to be foreseen?

Yes, there is. For a full explanation and description of regional differences, see the Wikipedia article on "manslaughter".

IANAL but I don't think a manslaughter charge should apply in this case because, in all jurisdictions where the crime of manslaughter is recognised, the distinction between it and murder is that there was no intention of killing the victim. OTOH, its quite possible that when a SWAT team is set up to target somebody, the target will be killed. Especially if the SWATters are led to believe that he is an armed killer and this is happening in the USA: elsewhere the cops are less trigger-happy. If the target is killed in these circumstances, it seems to me that the person who made the call is guilty of murder and anybody else associated with the crime is guilty of being an accessory to murder or of incitement to murder.

Re: Autonomous vehicle safety ignored

It was only Uber that decided not to use expensive LIDAR sensors that other manufacturers use as part of their redundancy design.

I'm a bit worried about the reliance on LIDAR for many of these vehicles.

• For starters, LIDAR is an optical system, so subject to similar problems with airborne dust, smoke and fog as a human driver, yet I've seen no discussion about this or information about what backup systems the cars use when seeing is poor.
• Secondly, how powerful are the lasers they use? At what distance can they harm pedestrian's and pet's eyes? What about the effect of a street packed with a LIDAR-equipped traffic jam?
• Thirdly, how is LIDAR affected by reflective surfaces?

Re: PC Updated itself last night

On the RaspberryPi use the standard OS - Raspbian (Debian Linux ported to the RPi). Get it from the RaspberryPi Foundation unless you buy a package that includes it.

I gave up using Windows around 2003 - all my computers (Lenovo laptops and an AMD Athlon whitebox desktop) apart from the RPi run Redhat Fedora. I'd started running RedHat Linux 6.2 in 1999, liked it and so stuck with Redhat thru RedHat Linux 7.2 and into Fedora. Fedora is fairly close to the bleeding edge - CentOS is a RedHat clone and gives more stability. Both now have a stable and painless procedure for doing in situ upgrades to the next OS version.

I've now moved a fair bit of my own C code from Intel and AMD (Fedora Linux) to ARM (Raspbian on the RPi) using a shared CVS source repository and in all cases the code has compiled and run on the RPi without any problems.

Re: Email is fundamental to modern life

I've been using Evolution for some years now. It does everything I need, has remarkably few downsides and, by and large, 'just works'.

Of course, you'll need Linux with a Gnome or XFCE desktop to use it, but jump right in: the water is fine.

Re: Energy

I had this sort-of demonstrated long ago and far away - 1977 in Kandahar. I vividly recall seeing a pump attendant filling my Landrover's tank one rather hot, very still afternoon, so it was easy to see the petrol vapour pouring out of the filler, down the vehicle side and dissipating on the pavement. Said pump attendant had a lighted cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Nothing bad happened, but regardless of that I wasn't about to make a fuss because (a) he was armed, (b) I didn't speak Afghani and (c) things may have got interesting if he'd gotten agitated enough to drop the fag.

Re: Typical ICANN

It seems to me that, as the information that whois systems run by registries within GDPR countries must provide is specified by binding ICANN contract terms, it follows that fines levied on the registries for GDPR violations can be passed on to ICANN since its their contract terms that forced the violation and doing anything else leaves the registries in double jeopardy - itself a legal offence committed by ICANN.

If this isn't the case, what did I miss?

I'll probably get Epsom.

The salt or the racetrack?

Several centuries of experience with solid fuelled rockets?

How can FB ensure researchers don't sell the information on?

... or know how many of those claiming to be researchers are actually advertising shills, political party research assistants and similar lowlife?

Another thing that's totally absent from this discussion of "APIs for legitimate researchers" is the idea of providing an API that will only supply anonymous data. Any reputable academic researcher should, almost by definition, insist on handling ONLY properly anonymised data, especially if they want to make the data available to their referees, PhD supervisors, etc.

OTOH, if the data is anonymous, then it will be shunned by anybody in the political, advertising or brainwashing classes because, if properly anonymised, it can't be used to identify any targets for 'gentle persuasion'.

Re: 10,000 pixels?

Seems a reasonable enough resolution for what appears to be the first DARKNESS sensor to be fitted to a telescope. Besides, its a good idea to keep the physical size down if you're going to make it very, very cold because this saves on the refrigeration bill as well as making the package easier to install in the limited space around the focus of even a big telescope.

The detector is 80x125 pixels, which, with each pixel being 150 micrometers across, makes the sensor about 18 x 12 mm - thats very comparable with the sensor in a modern bridge camera, though with a resolution that's 1200 times less. That looks bad until you realise that DARKNESS is meant to work in the 700nm - 1um wavelength band, which is about 5.6 times longer wavelength than the bridge camera's sensor has to cope with and so needs a correspondingly larger pixel - roughly 30 times larger for reasonable sensitivity. IOW this is comparing an optical sensor with over 20 years development behind it to the first DARKNESS sensor that's expected to do real work, so I reckon its actually pretty damn good.

Re: Watch-out

FarceBoob have been doing this, or something like it, for longer than you might think.

The domain fbcdn.net in that URL belongs to them. Scanning URIs in my e-mail archive shows that it started to appear in 2009. Whois shows that the domain was registered to FB in 2007.

The examples I've found in e-mails have all been part of a URL pointing to an image somewhere in the depths of the FB-plex and so, by implication, can be used to connect you to the FB user who sent the e-mail. This linkage presumably will be added to the data they sell whether you're a FB user or not and does not depend on you appearing in the image. Bastards.

Blanketing ATC screens with drone details is unlikely

The feed to ATC screens tends to be filtered as a matter of course. Originally this was done to remove stationary ground clutter from radar displays, but was quickly extended to allow removal of returns from anything travelling slower than a user-selected speed, e.g. flocks of gulls. I think you'll find this type of filter is pretty much standard in secondary radar as well. Secondary radar only shows the result of interrogating transponders carried by aircraft and is a direct development from the IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) systems developed during WW2 to let radar operators to distinguish their aircraft from enemy ones.

Drones carrying the French system won't show up on existing ATC screens because these don't monitor the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi band. At present ATC doesn't monitor FLARM or Pilot-Aware transmissions either, though this is starting to change.

ATC is quite likely to start monitoring a drone conspicuity band if its use becomes mandatory and airspace incursions continue to happen, so whether they do this is probably dependent on the good behaviour of the drone-flying community and their ability to control maverick operators. However, its very likely that any such monitor system would only display details of drones that violate controlled airspace or are in class G airspace and above 120m.

@JLV

That this was the US ISP/cable/broadband service providers reminding the FCC commissioners that they control their retirement benefits seems obvious, but I don't think the Swarm bothers them so much as Musk's much more ambitious high-speed satellite network. If this gets off the ground all the low-speed US broadband and TV networks will be toast.

Re: Hello Concorde!

I was working in NYC in the mid '70s - about the time there was a twofer on offer: one way on QE2 and the other way on Concorde.

I could probably have afforded it, but decided instead to spend somewhat less on driving a Landrover from London to Kathmandhu and back. As that took 10 months and included driving right round India plus a train ride to Darjeeling and an Annapurna trek it was the certainly the better choice.

Re: An even better question

OF COURSE the original Star Wars was space fantasy, or as we used to say, Space Opera. Very carefully written too, with no cliche left unturned - everything from the lone space-travelling youth from a backwoods farm planet who makes good, through fights in a space bar while the band plays on, to spaceships that go WOOOSH past you in space (where nobody can hear you scream) and space fighters dogfighting like WW1 aces. You had to have read lots of pulp SF to fully appreciate the original film. It was a truly wonderful piss-take of the whole guns 'n BEMs 'n galactic empires 'n fearless spacemen genre. Unfortunately, the usual Hollywood drones got loose on the sequels and degraded them into the usual hohum product.

Medical use

Pity this didn't appear a year or two back. It would have been interesting to see if it could have helped Stephen Hawking.