* Posts by Charlie Clark

12110 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007

Have I Been Pwned to go open source – 10bn credentials, not so much, says creator Hunt

Charlie Clark Silver badge

There's no real need to conceal the e-mail addresses as these are already publicy available.

But the database is not the code and there is no need to make it available with it – there is no benefit and it's probably significantly larger.

When it comes to hacking societies, Russia remains the master at sowing discord and disinformation online

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Because they're aren't any. US media is divided enough that it doesn't need any help. Not that the spooks are any good at that sort of thing, but they're normally too busy trying to manufacture terrorist threats: see the background to the film The Day Shall Come for more information.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Priorities

That was just a continuation of the outsourcing of manufacturing to Asia: Japan, Taiwan, Korea, etc.

For some products manual labour in China has become too expensive so it's now either replacing people with robots or moving production to cheaper places like Laos and Cambodia. Or labour camps in Xinjiang or North Korea, difficult to get cheaper than those, largely because the real costs is borne by the state.Good

Economics since Adam Smith has a reasonable history that trade, specialiation and investment tend to offset each other over time. The bigger problem tends to be failing to continue to invest in skills leaving you with less to trade in the future. Hence, Germany and Japan have a much better trading relationship with China than the US does because they still produce capital goods that it wants. But America does well by exporting education and importing investment. This is largely down to the dominance of the US dollar, so you need US assets in order to trade interntionally, but the capital markets are also more liquid and reliable than China's own. Though that my change if exchange in Shanghai becomes less of a casino and they don't fuck up Hong Kong any more.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Priorities

Russia needs the rest of the world for investment and trade (including food), China doesn't China's priorities have always been with the Middle Kingdom, which is why it has such sophisticated social and electronic controls within the country. By and large it doesn't care about international public opinion except when it reflects back to China: invite the Dalai Lama officially and you can expect a response designed to stoke Han nationalism in China. When it wants favourable legislation, it just gets the cheque book out, which Russia can't do to same scale: compare energy deals in Eastern Europe with the "belt and road" initiative.

Call of duty, modem warfare: Taiwanese Qualcomm rival MediaTek teams up with Intel for first stab at 5G laptop chipset

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Cue intervention from Uncle Sam…

I don't want anyone targeted, but if the US does, it doesn't need to worry about Qualcomm, which is essentially part of the DoD.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Cue intervention from Uncle Sam…

He who pays the piper…

All the stuff I've got with MediaTek chips in it is made in China and "no drivers here".

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Cue intervention from Uncle Sam…

Qualcomm will presumably be on this because MediaTek is probably even more ingrained in the Chinese system than Huawei is!

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I must be missing something...

The problem is that it is a manual step that it is easy to avoid so people forget to do it.

I don't know why you think scientists who are experts in their field, should be any better at office software than they are say at plumbing or arc-welding.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I must be missing something...

It's one of the reasons why so many scientists are switching to Python's Jupyter and Pandas, with Excel relegated to the format for reports.

Excel's import of text files has always been miserable, though this isn't helped by the deficiencies of the CSV format. But it really would be useful to be able to disable type inference as a preference and not fiddle with it, file by file.

Mozilla warns more Firefox website breakage to come because devs just aren't checking for SameSite snafus

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: Standards?

Hang on, you’re saying that one big corporation throwing its weight around is bad, but another doing so is OK

No, that's not what i'm saying at all. You can put that strawman down.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Standards?

If you look at the history of the development of web standards, this is the way it's always worked because otherwise you get no movement. This is why WHATWG was founded in the first place – largely because Microsoft was blocking any changes – and how most things like http/2 have been introduced.

TikTok to splurge €420m on Ireland data centre to get Euro-data into Europe by 2022

Charlie Clark Silver badge

The company has not said why it plans to build a data centre rather than just rent racks galore in a co-lo facility or sign a deal like its existing $800m multi-year arrangement with Google Cloud.

Well, seeing as Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield have been found insufficient by EU courts, why would you risk user's personal data on a system which Uncle Sam thinks it can rifle through at any time? And, if the need is big enough, then it is far cheaper to run your own data centre than rent from Google, Microsoft or AWS.

Apple re-arms the iMac with 10th-gen Intel Core silicon

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I believe....

What would be the upside for Apple for sticking with x86_64?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Their older hardware is good enough (and that's the problem)

Even worse, IMO, was the failure to fix bugs in older OS, simply shrugging shoulders and pointing to the new "free" which fixed it by adding new bugs. I seem to remember a crippling Bluetooth bug in Lion that only Mountain Lion "fixed". Hardware interrupts (like Time Machine waking up) have been a plague since the switch to x86_64.

Plus ça change…

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Chips

But also disappointing because Apple has promised that it will soon offer its own Arm-based silicon across the Mac range

The announcement was "on Apple silicon before the end of the year". I've always interpreted this to mean an announcement of some devices in November or so for delivery in December. Given what's been released this year, something low end might be expected. Many people will be holding off investing in new hardware until it's clear what the strategy will be.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Their older hardware is good enough (and that's the problem)

They definitely do like to pull the rug after about 5 years and often for no good reason. We can expect the list of devices supported by Big Sur to include nothing before 2015, proably even 2016.

Google to pull plug on Play Music, its streaming service that couldn't beat Spotify, in favour of YouTube Music

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Play Music App

Loads of good music apps out there – Apollo is possibly the pick of the free ones.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: I've just uploaded my music collection to...

I just sync (via Dropbox) what I need. I have around 30-40 GB of stuff but it doesnt need synching constantly and then I don't need an internet connection to listen. It's mostly paid for which means the musicians get paid more (not that I really care). 150 GB should be easy enough with an SD card, though I'd cut out the middle man and plug the phone into the computer.

Cabinet Office takes over control of UK government data: Mundane machinery or Machiavellian manoeuvrings?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: You know you're in trouble..

Never suspect a conspiracy when incompetence will do. That said, there was skullduggery involved in the referendum, just not really by the Tory Party which increasingly lost control of proceedings to non-parliamentary groups.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Keep it out of parliamentary scrutiny

That's what you do when you give things to the Cabinet Office. It shouldn't be with the Deparment of Media, Culture and also Sport, but it should still fall under the normal rules of procurement, scrutiny, etc.

Less than six months after original release, Samsung reboots its Galaxy Z Flip pholdable for the 5G age

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Obviously some demand

5G isn't really raising eyebrows outside Asia where it's been available for longer. Presumably these are selling in Korea and elsewhere. It would also suggest that many of the problems with the first implementation have indeed been resolved.

Do I want one? No, because I couldn't use it as a navigation device on my bike. But scale it up a bit and I'd be more interested. Of course, due to higher costs and lower yields that's not going to be happening soon but some day all "convertibles" might be made this way.

Intel's 7nm is busted, chips delayed, may have to use rival foundries to get GPUs out for US govt exascale super

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Interesting

It would have to be either a company with fabbing capacity or the money to pay for it – Samsung maybe. Because the bottleneck isn't chip design but the ability to make the chips. Might have been possible for Softbank to bankroll a couple of fabs before the "Vision Fund" bubble burst.

Otherwise most eyes will be on SMIC, Samsung and the other couple of companies that might want to get involved. And feedback on Apple's own notebbook chips, because if these and the emulation work well there could well be a stampede from x86 to ARM.

New Google rules mandate Android 'Poundland' Edition, Go, for sub-2GB RAM phones once Android 11 is out

Charlie Clark Silver badge

You're describing exactly why it's generally a good thing.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Software always expands to fill the available memory and in general, this is a good thing™.

But modern mobile phone OSes also require more memory because of the high degree of abstraction and containerisation. Rapid development cycles also favour kitchen sink software frameworks.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Depends largely what it's in the channel – these phones are being assembled from existing components – but there definitely were phones with 3GB RAM.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

It presumably disables multitasking entirely and simply suspends everything that isn't currently active. Bound to affect background processing as well.

Absolutely fabless: MediaTek lifts the lid on latest 5G 7nm Dimensity chipset family

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Cheaper?

No, this is just the chipset for the next gen of Chinese phones. Mediatek chips are normally pretty good but the software – essential for SoCs – is another matter.

If China really wants to make it in the chip world, the software quality, reliability and availability is going to have to improve.

Predictably grim Q2 for mobe sales, but iPhone SE proves pretty moreish as gateway drug for Android defectors

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: There are alternatives

We get it: you don't like Google. And there are plenty of reasons not to.

This doesn't mean it isn't an excellent company and can't develop good software. Android really is an excellent smartphone OS and has been leading feature innovation over IOS for about the last five years.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: There are alternatives

Interesting. Probably explains the relative popularity in the US. In Europe, phone and contract have been incomingly increasingly separated and the kind of exclusive bundles that are common in the US are not legal here. Helps explain why ARPU in Europe is about 1/3 that of the US.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Gateway drug

What kind of phone did she have before?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Gateway drug

As a "gateway drug" to the iOS ecosystem, the iPhone SE 2020 is surprisingly effective, with 26 per cent of buyers former Android users, according to Counterpoint North America research director Jeff Fieldhack.

I suspect this is limited to North America, not seen any SE's here in Europe and the Android devices for that price are generally stunning. While Apple and others went bigger and more expensive, Xiaomi and others crammed ever more tech into cheaper models. Apple does have some advantage in both network and Hotel Cupertino effect, which suck family members in and then they find it difficult to leave. But for everyone else, it's increasingly difficult to tell Android and IOS devices apart.

There will also, no doubt, be a pool of users who held off switching phones because they didn't want or need anything bigger.

From Accompli to Microsoft to Google: G Suite chief Javier Soltero chases the 'complete collaborative experience'

Charlie Clark Silver badge

"People told Microsoft the same thing and therefore you have Teams."

I'm sure no one actually asked for Microsoft's unholy marriage of OneNote and Lync…

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Google is more at fault than Microsoft here. While it does fuck around with IMAP and synching for calendar and contacts, there's really no excuse for Microsoft continuing to push a proprietary protocol (MAPI, ActiveSync) apart from lock-in.

But I think you're right, there is an opportunity for anybody prepared to invest in improvements to the various DAV protocols. Running them on the back of IMAP might be a start.

Apple to hand out limited-edition iPhones among 1337 h4x0rs because it wants more bug-hunters

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Joke

We know where you live

Given Apple's historical reticence when it comes to bug submissions, this is presumably just a ruse to find out where the people are before sending round the AET (Apple Enforcement Team)!

Nvidia may be mulling lopping Arm off Softbank: GPU goliath said to have shown interest in acquiring CPU design house

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: What is the point ?

Nvidia's main interest might actually be to get hold of ARM's GPU team and integrate it and close down Mali. But there is a huge risk for any chipmaker thinking about buying ARM because it immediately makes the licence business less attractive for the competitors.

Not sure if Nvidia could afford to keep ARM if Softbank is selling at anything near its purchase price so some kind of strip and flip would be the outcome.

Softbank is probably hoping for a bidding war, but might find itself disappointed.

Networking boffins detect wide abuse of IPv4 addresses bought on secondary market

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Interesting market effects

I think there is a lot of value in taking IPv6 details away from the consumer at least and letting the router handle all the 6to4 stuff. This "just works" in many situations and allows older equipment to be used without any hassle. 6to4 should mean that NAT isn't required (it's similar but it isn't NAT), you should have enough addresses to provide everything that needs the internet to have their own set so mapping can be permanent.

Obviously little sense if your ISP doesn't do IPv6 yet. You could run your own 4to6 setup, but that could get fiddly and involve you doing exactly the kind of configuration you, understandably, want to avoid!

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Interesting market effects

You can normally get ip addresses removed from blacklists pretty quickly, once you can demonstrate that you control it and this is easy for ISPs. Most lists are temporary anyway.

The price differences are now between regions: cheap in the US because they are still plentiful, expensive elsewhee as they run out and you see the same thing as networks switch to IPv6: where the demand is still there, the prices will remain high.

But more and more people are being moved to IPv6 for WAN and dualstack locally – once a network supports IPv6 it makes a lot of sense to push IPv4 to the edge.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Not really, the blocks just work slightly differently.

But this isn't really about IPv6 versus IPv4, it's about the historically unjust allocation of addresses and the lack of a reliable international organisation able to reallocate them and adjudicate. Unfortunately, this is a difficult nut to crack: when it was all run by the international post union, national governments nearly always asserted national security as the reason for doing nothing and now we have ICANN prepared to do anything to make money.

And we have the same problem with all of our other finite resources. :-(

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Unfortunate but not unexpected

Indeed, yet another reason why these shouldn't really be tradeable.

Apple was the only Fortune 50 company to foresee COVID-19 pandemic risk and properly insure against it – Forrester

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Things we can prevent and things we can't

Yes, but governements tend to prefer big problems that require big solutions, because they make for much better photo ops.

The West's obsession with COVID-19 had handily pushed a couple of other catastrophes off the radar: famine in east Africa, measles and ebola in Congo, floods in Asia…

Twitter admits 130 A-lister accounts compromised to promote Bitcoin scam after 'social engineering' attack

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Follow the money?

Doesn't have to be a country and who knows if pushing the scam was all the were interested in?

But, as long as it's just Twitter, who really cares?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Complete this sentence: Twitter is for tw*ts.

Oh sure, we'll just make a tiny little change in every source file without letting anyone know. What could go wrong?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Most Dangerous

Exchange makes it easy to do this and difficult to prevent abuse.

This week of never-ending security updates continue. Now Apple emits dozens of fixes for iOS, macOS, etc

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Xiaomi have a chance to take more market share, given how buggy Apple has become.

Or, inasmuch as Xiaomi's phones run Android, Xiaomi doesn't actually do a lot of software development.

When it comes to fixing vulnerabilities Android is now timelier than IOS, at least for devices running on Android ≥ 8.

Charlie Clark Silver badge
Stop

Re: Flaky Catalina

No, it crashed as it proudly told me "something went wrong". It really has done this a lot recently.

I don't have updates set to install automatically, not least because of Apple's terrible record when it releases new versions of MacOS: usually wait 6 months or more of other people playing guinea pig before I do.

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Flaky Catalina

Came back yesterday to find my Mac had restarted itself. Again. Haven't seen MacOS this flaky for a while. Guess it's too much to expect this patchfest to resolve this particular BSOD because I'm probably holding it wrong or the machine is too old.

Chips for Huawei are fried: TSMC stops shipping parts to Middle Kingdom mega-maker this September

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: He who laughs last ...

They're placing all their hopes on SMIC, though they're probably several years behind everyone else. Otherwise, there are still other fabs in other countries where the US has less leverage: it's not as if the Chinese haven't evaded sanctions in the past.

The real problem for the US is the loss of reputation: countries and companies will now actively have to develop strategies to avoid getting caught up in what are pretty petty sanctions.

Aggrieved ad tech types decry Google dominance in W3C standards – who writes the rules and for whom?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Boohoo

The W3C has always been a pay-to-play club, as is common for many industry bodies. It was because of Microsoft's dominance of it that Opera and Mozilla founded the WHATWG to get web standards development started again. The advertisers are welcome to do the same again. Or pony up enough to get seats on the W3C board.

Privacy Shield binned after EU court rules transatlantic data protection arrangements 'inadequate'

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Re: Not quite the world

US rules usually distinguish between US citizens and aliens (the rest of the world). As spying on US citizens is bad but spying on the rest of the world is good, having companies that collect private, personal data from the rest of the world is good™. It's what keeps you safe at night. Well, apart from RTAs, muggings, shootings, corporate rent-seeking, etc.

Google: OK, OK, we pinky promise not to suck Fitbit health data into the borg. Now will you approve the sale?

Charlie Clark Silver badge

Yes, see my previous posts. I'm not a fitness freak so I only have digital scales from Soehnle that work fine without an internet connection and I think that's true of their other products.

GDPR mandates privacy by default and privacy by design but most customers prefer shiny over secure.