* Posts by JonP

229 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Apr 2008

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Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42

JonP

You mean you don't know where it is?!?!!

BOFH: Oh, go on, let's flush all that legacy tech down the toilet

JonP
Pint

Hmmm

Getting a sense of deja vu here. Reminds me of one of M Dabb's articles (not that I'm implying that SFTW is shit or anything...)

Still it's BOFH and it's Friday - can't complain too much!

Photo 'memories' storage biz Ever uses family snaps to train facial recognition AI

JonP

Re: *When* was it in the TOS?

There's probably a line in the TOS about changing the TOS as they see fit. They probably even told everyone they'd changed them e.g. "Please read and accept our new TOS!"... What do you mean which bit changed? that's for us to know and you to meticulously compare the two versions of our TOS that you studied in great detail before accepting...

Two Arkansas dipsticks nicked after allegedly taking turns to shoot each other while wearing bulletproof vests

JonP

Re: It's hard to think of anything more boneheadedly stupid...

Getting your mate to wear the vest and then shoot you...

I guess i'm just proving your point though!

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

JonP

Re: Easy get-out?

(3)It is a defence for a person charged with an offence under this section... by which point you've been arrested and had this hanging over your head for many months, not to mention all the legal fess you'll have incurred...

You: 'Alexa, open Cortana.' Alexa: 'Who?'

JonP

re:what do you find interesting about it?

I can't speak for the OP (obv) - but I'd wager that although the two assistants are supposed to complement each other, there would likely be competition and this might improve the operation of both (from a ML perspective). I doubt it will be interesting, but it could be...

Astronaut took camera on spacewalk, but forgot SD memory card

JonP

Re: shiny!

5. RTFM

yeah yeah - no one RTFM until something goes wrong! ;-)

On yer bike! Boffins teach AI drone to fly itself using cams on bicycles, self-driving car

JonP

Re: If a fly can do it...

As long as they add some way of dealing with (glass) windows!

Now Meltdown patches are making industrial control systems lurch

JonP

Re: One thing to note.

Don't know about the Rockwell software, but for the SCADA package I'm using (Zenon) the fixes are only causing problems with comms drivers. So it's possible RSLogix (all however many versions there are now!) is fine; the article suggests it's RSLinx (comms) that has problems - so fix that and Logix may be OK... wild speculation but hey.

Everyone loves programming in Python! You disagree? But it's the fastest growing, says Stack Overflow

JonP

Re: Extinct

what lack of cleanliness are you trying to point out here?

Heh, if anything it's too clean.

Walkers' Crisps pulls backfiring Tweet campaign that paired Gary Lineker and a bunch of nasties

JonP

Re: And Yet Again - risk analysis

These kind of things happen so frequently that you can't help but think that they do plan for these"negative" outcomes. No such thing as bad publicity...

I don't use Twitter, so I'd likely have never heard about it otherwise (in an ideal world...)

Reg now behind invisible HTML5 Bitcoin paywall

JonP

I clicked the link too, but have java script disabled so ... irony or something.

Thing is it's not a bad idea, if someone lingers on page (possibly even reads it) for 20-30s ... I imagine bit coin mining has got to the point where it probably isn't worth the effort, but there are new 'bit coins' all the time, mine, cash in, move on .. it could work. couldn't it?

After 20 years of Visual Studio, Microsoft unfurls its 2017 edition

JonP

Re: Unimpressed

To be fair the current version (2015) does it too ...!?!

Roses are red, violets are blue, fake-news-detecting AI is fake news, too

JonP

Re: Not just Solr, but Luwak - and all open source

This approach - fact checking - seems to be the most sensible approach to the problem, after all the main issue with fake news is that in general it appears to be true (for a given set of preconceptions), so simply parsing the text and looking for inconsistencies probably wouldn't be enough and would likely throw up a lot of false positives. The only sensible way to counter fake news is to point out how it is wrong (with references), and of course there are 350 million reasons why this won't actually work either.

NASA – get this – just launched 8 satellites from a rocket dropped from a plane at 40,000ft

JonP

hmmmm

So basically one aircraft flies up to a suitable altitude and then launches a rocket powered vehicle to climb the rest of the way... this sounds vaguely familiar for some reason...

Crooks and kids (not scary spies paid by govt overlords) are behind most breaches

JonP

Re: Targeting

This is useful information ...

To criminals maybe, not nation states. I'd seriously doubt that knowing a bunch of Yahoo passwords is of any interest to North Korea or China or $current_bogeyman.

BOFH: There are no wrong answers, just wrong questions. Mmm, really wrong ones

JonP

Re: Spot on

... Also you will gasp when you click the link and it says "page 1/64"...

Ah yes, the link that IT spend the other 99% of the time telling you not to click...

Hollywood offers Daniel Craig $150m to (slash wrists) play James Bond

JonP

Re: The name is Dabbs

With Will.i.am as the villain?

Penetration tech: BAE Systems' new ammo for Our Boys and Girls

JonP
Coat

Presumably this coincides with a new range of bullet proof vests and body armour?

mine's the one with the 9 mm steel plates...

A UK digital driving licence: What could possibly go wrong?

JonP

Re: "People are living increasingly social lives"

No, I don't. Because they are still valid. My mistake -- you're right it's the paper bits that came with the plastic card that are invalid, not the original paper licences...

JonP

Re: "People are living increasingly social lives"

I only have a pink and green paper job that I got for free and have never had to pay to renew it.

You know the paper licences are not longer valid don't you? (Since last year as I recall -- discovered after a snafu trying to hire a car...) -- you might want to check, if you still drive.

Teen tricks leaky Valve into publishing hot new Steam game: Watching Paint Dry

JonP

Re: Sure beats...

"Waiting for Half life 3"

Heh, that could be some DLC for "Watching Paint Dry", for those into extreme waiting...

(9 years...any day now then...)

Schneider Electric building manager bug allows security bypass

JonP

Re: “allow Admin users to circumvent access controls”

Default credentials makes it much easier to install and test equipment like this, especially if you've got a number of different people all needing to tweak things. If you use proper secure credentials too early you end up having to distribute them to more people than you might want to and then have to change them all when you finish, it's not worth the hassle.

Of course when you're done you still need to make sure you've setup proper credentials, but hopefully you'll have a procedure in place to make sure that gets done...

Confused as to WTF is happening with Apple, the FBI and a killer's iPhone? Let's fix that

JonP

I don't see the problem here

The FBI have been to a judge and got a court order for a one off piece of frigged software. I guess Apple need to protest otherwise it would look like they'd cave for anyone, but this seems to me to be how things should work.

The Mad Men's monster is losing the botnet fight: Fewer humans are seeing web ads

JonP

Re: I can't see banner ads

Finally the quality of online ads is awful. Supposedly respectable organisations will accept flashing ads that say, "click on this to win a free iPad." Or ...

This. It's got to the point were clicking on an ad seems about as safe as clicking a link in an email from a Nigerian prince...

Power plants, utilities 'just hanging right off the internet's tubes'

JonP

The commercial guys want the moon on a stick, our engineers (all fully qualified chartered engineers) simply don't have the budget...

FTFY. ;-)

No, Kim Kardashian's plump posterior's pixels did not break the App Store – just this El Reg man's mind

JonP
Mushroom

You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.: Genesis 27 "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Hopefully, maybe, we won't fuck it up so badly.

Doctor Who: Nigel Farage-alike bogey beast terrorises in darkly comic Sleep No More

JonP

Re: Is this the last remaining vestige of El Reg's Weekend Edition?

heh, was just wondering the same ...

Post-pub schnellnosh neckfiller: Currywurst

JonP

? You can go to any chipshop in the UK and buy sausage curry & chips, with no risk of burning the house down....

Not the wrong side of closing time you can't (big cities aside). The only people with the decency to still be open at that time are generally kebab shops...

Doctor Who storms back in fine form with Season 9 opener The Magician's Apprentice

JonP

Tanks and guitars in the 12th century just looked and felt wrong I think it was just supposed to be absurd - it was an entrance, mostly irrelevant. The significant bit (possibly) was when Missy said something about the doctor kidnapping the presidents wife and being a she - one of which was lie (not verbatim obv), maybe building up to the next re-incarnation...

I thought it was good - nothing particularly original, but nicely done all the same.

As McAfee runs for US President – we ask a crucial question: Will Reg readers back him?

JonP

Re: Nah

...and on a similar theme - if you do vote for someone else, don't forget to uncheck your vote for McAfee first!

Spaniard trousers €60,000 bank error, proceeds directly to jail

JonP

If he'd invested the money in property in London that might be a valid defence...

Drum roll, please .... Results are in for the collective noun for security vulns

JonP

Re: The actual collective noun is "Malware".

Yeah, but this is a collective noun for security vulnerabilities; malware is something that might use or cause a vulnerability, but wouldn't be the vulnerability. It's entirely possible for the malware itself to contain vulnerabilities... then it would all gets a bit recursive.

The Onion Router is being cut up and making security pros cry

JonP

Makes sense

If you're a business, the downside of blocking TOR has got to be vanishingly small compared to the (even alleged) risks of allowing it. Why would a business need to use TOR anyway?

Get whimsical and win a Western Digital Black 6TB hard drive

JonP

That other monolith was much more impressive.

Want Edward Snowden pardoned? You're in the minority, say pollsters

JonP

Re: @Redneck ... @ 6x7=42

...he took a job with the intention of stealing any and all documents he could... [Citation needed].

...is that he's sitting in a city in Russia... He's not in Russia by choice.

Erm what's left... nothing.

He's a hero (IMO) - a proper one, not one of those namby pamby media ones.

Apple and Google are KILLING KIDS with encryption, whine lawyers

JonP

Re: Are you *sure* you fully understand the objective, Reg?

Yeah, I think this is one of those exceptions to Hanlon's razor, where we can safely assume malice rather than incompetence.

Carphone Warehouse coughs to MONSTER data breach – 2.4 MEELLION Brits at risk

JonP

Re: Another week...

...and within the next week or so there'll be another article about how we all use/re-use bad passwords. As if that will make any difference. I try to make an effort with passwords for any site I give my credit card/personal details to, but clearly I might as all well use "password" for all the good it'll do.

X-wings, pirates and a generic Lara: Gamescom 2015

JonP

Re: "The homogenisation of triple-A games continues apace"

Pray tell which are those games of which you speak?

OK, here are some recent ones I rate (no particular order):

Life is Strange (interactive story)

The Talos Principle (Portal-esque puzzle game)

Niko Through the Dream (Surreal 3d puzzle game)

This war of mine (side scrolling adventure game about civilians in a war zone)

Her Story (odd video, interactive 'game' consisting of searching videoed police interviews to work out a story... better than it sounds!)

Wait, STOP: Are you installing Windows 10 or RANSOMWARE?

JonP
Headmaster

@cosymart

So did you! ;-)

Twitter will delete jokes after a DMCA takedown – but NOT my photos, fumes angry snapper

JonP

Re: Who first posted it on Twitter?

From the linked document -

IV. FACTS

A. Pierson created copyrightable photographs and registered them with the

U.S. Copyright Office.

...

B. A Twitter user or users copied and displayed the Infringing Image

without license or permission from Pierson.

Obviously this is from the complaint and hasn't been proved (or whatever the correct term is) - but not looking good for Twitter.

YOW! Pluto STUNS boffins with HAZY, SHRINKY atmosphere

JonP
Pint

Impressive stuff

When New Horizons whizzed past Pluto, two dishes from NASA's Deep Space Network fired a pulse of radio waves at the probe so that their refraction through Pluto's atmosphere could be collected...

Because any other method would be too easy...

Asimov's ghost! Oil and gas rigs could be taken over by robots

JonP

"Then, using artificial intelligence, we want the robots to be able to read and record the values on the instrumentation, and to know autonomously whether they are normal or not. If there is an abnormal situation, the robot has to alert the remote operator,"

Heh, you'd think some could invent some kind of supervisory control program to do that sort of thing, maybe include a bit of data acquisition to remotely read the instruments too, that way the robots wouldn't need to wander around the plant and could lounge around in a specially designed room drinking oil all day...

Natural geothermal heat under Antarctic ice: 'Surprisingly high'

JonP

Re: It puzzles me too

That we live on top of a burning molten mass and have another one above us, yet we are still so focused on man made global warming. Because even considering these things, the temperature has gone up faster than expected, with the cause looking likely to be increased levels of CO2 for which we appear to be responsible for. In this case it's the first time this geothermal heat has been measured, so we don't have any history to spot any trends. It's all interesting, but associating it with climate change doesn't really help.

Attention dunderheads: Taxpayers are NOT giving businesses £93bn

JonP

Re: The point where I concluded this guys an idiot.

Road tax collects 25 billion. Except there's no such thing as road tax. There's vehicle tax, but that's a tax on the, er, vehicle based on its size and emissions and such. Companies that buy lorries, cars etc pay the same tax as everyone else.

As the US realises it's been PWNED, when will OPM heads roll?

JonP

Re: US Federal systems PWNED

More like hubris - they've been hacking everyone else but didn't make sure they (as in the US) couldn't be hacked. Though it's not like it's happened before or anything...

Why is it that women are consistently paid less than men?

JonP
Alien

Re: Politically incorrect

The article was quite careful to mention that it was about the perceived pay/gender discrepancy for mammals, rather than our reptilian overlords.

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