* Posts by Eddy Ito

4662 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2007

New law would stop Feds from demanding encryption backdoor

Eddy Ito

Re: Fine obstructionist behavoiur it is then

Let me get this straight. Once they get the phone from the dead body of the perpetrator after the shootout, car chase, and pressure cooker event it will make a difference because they won't know to do a week long interrogation on the innocent barber he got a haircut from the day before?

Put another way, when have they ever brought additional charges to possibly connected people with information recovered off the phones they always seem to crack sooner or later? Now AC, you know as well as I that if they were able to stop something with that information they would be shouting it at every opportunity as evidence that they needz da backdoorz.

US border cops told not to search seized devices just for the hell of it

Eddy Ito

Good news about the higher standard but I gotta say that guy certainly seems to be either intellectually challenged or wisely going with a cost/benefit analysis. In other words, was he figuring that the third time would be a charm or is it more a matter of smuggling gun parts every other weekend for six years and he was only busted twice before?

App devs bewildered by last-minute Google GDPR klaxon

Eddy Ito

Yes, I think Google cares very deeply, for their revenue and perhaps their stock price. Yes, that's it, I think that's a fairly exhaustive list.

Equifax reveals full horror of that monstrous cyber-heist of its servers

Eddy Ito

I think that must be a UK only or maybe EU thing. Here in the US I didn't get a letter but still showed up in the online check and I know several others in the US who never got a letter either.

Eddy Ito

Re: And how...

The freeze system we currently have seems to be working nicely for me. I've had a company ask if I would allow them to access my report "for identity check purposes". My response was to say I'd be happy to allow them access to Experian, TransUnion, or Innovis but not Equifax. Oddly they managed without it and I didn't have to unlock any of the reports. I'm thinking this whole credit bureau system is just a way for companies to be lazy but when pressed they really don't need it or find a way around. It's starting to look a bit like the emperor's new clothes to me.

@AC, £7.15, really? I must be out of touch but then I stopped going to such places when the "milkshakes" started to resemble soft pykrete.

Another quarter, another record-breaking Tesla loss: Let's take a question from YouTube, eh, Mr Musk?

Eddy Ito

Re: Targets

I read a piece that basically said that Tesla needs a COO and Musk needs to step aside because he is too easily distracted and I agree. I think his performance really highlights that it is true. He wants to be the vision guy which is fine but he really isn't cut out for the daily grind type stuff. It likely would have saved the drop in the stock price to have a COO answering the questions that Musk finds too mundane to bother with. It would also probably get Tesla rolling along but the question is whether Musk's ego would allow for a COO.

Texas residents start naming adopted drains

Eddy Ito

My Fair Drainy

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the drain

Democrats need just one more senator (and then a miracle) to reverse US net neutrality death

Eddy Ito

Re: Posturing for votes

Perhaps had they done something when they had control many years ago instead of shirking their responsibility by letting pending bills die and allowing it to be done by executive fiat we wouldn't be in this mess. It's just like DACA, "oh we've got executive fiat, good enough".

Worse it continues today and they continue to shirk the war powers clause for well over a decade. "Oh sure, bomb another country here, put combat troops there". It's like the only thing that matters is political football and screw the actual work.

Grab your lamp, you've pulled: Brits punt life-saving gravity-powered light

Eddy Ito

So a bit like those old cuckoo clocks only useful instead of annoying. Nice.

Shocker: Cambridge Analytica scandal touch-paper Aleksandr Kogan tapped Twitter data too

Eddy Ito

Twitter are also purging Tor users. So far I know of three who've been hit with "Account locked - suspected automated activity" and the three of us all used Tor to keep them away from our data. Of course, give them your phone number and they'll be happy to unlock it. I'll pass.

Mannequin Skywalker takes high ground on Bezos-backed rocket

Eddy Ito
Coat

Re: Units

Furlongs per fortnight.

By my calculation that's 3.05 Giga Firkenlongnight.

The real question is whether it can keep it up all firken night long, amirite?

ISO blocks NSA's latest IoT encryption systems amid murky tales of backdoors and bullying

Eddy Ito

Re: "the NSA started attacking the reputations of those experts"

Oh come now. Who has been foolish to trust the NSA in the past decade or three or six and half? They probably know full well that they can't lose what they don't have and figured they might as well be as boorish as they please. Remember, these are the guys who regularly lie to congress with impunity.

Chinese boffins on 3D XPoint: If it works like phase-change memory, it's probably phase-change memory

Eddy Ito

Re: How long ?

Any lawsuit would serve to enhance the Streisand effect so it wouldn't be long before it was everywhere.

Happy having Amazon tiptoe into your house? Why not the car, then? In-trunk delivery – what could go wrong?

Eddy Ito

When I was a wee lad our dog knew the milkman and would let him come inside and put the milk in the fridge if nobody was home but would stop him at the stairs if someone was home. Maybe we just need good dogs.

As for the Amazon delivery to the trunk of my car. I commute by car so if my car is there then there is an excellent chance that I'm also there so why not just hand it to me? I'd also hate to order eggs from Amazon's Whole Foods only to find them in the boot of my sedan a week later.

Petty PETA rapped by judges over monkey selfie copyright stunt

Eddy Ito

Re: And on another news item...

Have no fear, the US copyright office will not register elephant paintings.

Eddy Ito

Re: No Slater did not intentionally set it up.

Office practice 503.03 is moot. See the latest compendium.

Feel free to pour through all 1182 pages but here are a few pointers

313.2 Works That Lack Human Authorship

503 Identifying the Original Authorship That the Applicant Intends to Register

Carry on.

Super Cali health inspectors: Tesla blood awoke us

Eddy Ito

It must be true because they don't sell yellow cars. Of course they don't sell cyan, orange, green or even chartreuse cars either so maybe it has something to do with a hypersensitivity to frequencies between 480 THz and 600 THz that is the problem.

Eddy Ito

Re: There's a denominator and we demand to see it.

Typically in the US what is calculated is a Total Recordable Incidence Rate (TRIR) which is based on recordable incidents. For comparison purposes it is normalized to 200,000 hours (100 employees, 40 hours/week, 50 weeks/year).

Pyro-brainiacs set new record with waste-heat-into-electricity study

Eddy Ito

Re: Waste heat below 100oC...?

Let's just have some fun and throw some maths at it. So let's assume we're working with a high temp of 75 °C giving a 50 °C delta to room temperature. Carnot efficiency is right about 14.4% and this film operates at 19% of Carnot so overall efficiency is 2.7%. We can also use the 526 W/cc figure along with an average thickness of 75 nm for the film to arrive at an area of 13.33 m2 giving us 39.45 W/m2 or roughly 2.46 W for a sheet of A4 paper which is about the same output as a typical 5 V 500 mA USB port. Finally, using our overall efficiency of 2.7% that A4 sheet works out to about 90 W of waste heat needed to provide that 2.46 W of electricity. Not too shabby but what's it going to cost?

Huawei CEO sings 'Bye, bye, mister American Pai', trims US C-suite

Eddy Ito

@Edwin Re: "Think of the children" or something

Don't forget that what you're calling the current administration includes both parties and houses of Congress. It's pretty simple, team red has picked the Chinese and team blue has picked the Russians as the - Threats to National Security - du jour. Think of it like the security theater the TSA puts on at our airports. It really is the same thing only it's scare theater, actually it's more like domestic terrorism but nobody likes to use those words unless the media has blood spattered images to show but I digress, designed to make it look like we're doing something and protecting the homeland (our heros!), oh, and so the politicians get reelected.

Let's be real, if they don't keep that storm going in the teacup the people might actually look around and see what's really going on and no politician wants that.

Net neutrality advocates freak out as lobbyists pull rug from California's draft net neutrality law

Eddy Ito

Probably not an issue. It was no doubt headed for a gut and amend into something completely different like a new gun ban, another tax to funnel money into the failing CalPERS, a ban on straws based on three phone calls made by a nine year old, or like Prop 65 a law designed to line the pockets of lawyers. It's the Cali way.

Civil war erupts at top of FCC over Sinclair's creepy grasp on US telly

Eddy Ito

I don't know that they do or don't as I don't watch much TV but I see no reason why they wouldn't. I also can't even check because they don't have a station here in SoCal. It also seems you don't know either so unless you can show they aren't it's mere speculation on your part. Perhaps someone will record it and post it on youtube or similar. They do spell it out clearly at the bottom of the stations websites and I've never seen a corporation not take the opportunity to advertise themselves especially when it's free. I will say I did catch a news show recently while traveling on a Hearst station and they did indeed advertise that they were a part of Hearst Television. Maybe on my next trip I'll check if there's a Sinclair station and find out.

There are also very clear rules as to what goes into station identification breaks. If Sinclair is the license holder then it is absolutely required that it be stated.

It's funny to think that CNN was spewing all kinds of warnings about fake news during the election and now when Sinclair tries to warn about fake news it's CNN throwing shade for doing exactly what they did only a little over a year ago. Maybe CNN is just jealous because Sinclair is using their schtick.

Oh, I did find out that not all Sinclair stations ran the piece, funny that.

Eddy Ito

My bad, Sinclair says they have 11 stations in the Chico-Redding market so almost 17.7%. KRCR, KRCR-2, KRCR-3, KRCR-4, KKTF-LD, KRVU-LD, KRVU-LD-2, KRVU-LD-3, KCVU, KCVU-2, & KUCO-LP.

Still not impressed.

Eddy Ito

Seriously? I'll tell you what, here's the list. One of the places where they have a fair number of stations is the Chico/Redding, California market where it looks like they have 9 stations/affiliates. That sounds like a lot but it isn't quite so impressive when you realize there are 52 other stations in that area which aren't related to Sinclair in any way. You also might notice that prior to Sinclair buying out Bonten Media Group last year that all of those stations were owned by Bonten yet nobody was screaming doom and gloom for Redding then.

Maybe there are other markets where Sinclair owns almost 15% of the stations but people are free to choose whatever they like from the other 85%. It doesn't make sense to worry about having a 15% footprint in 72% of markets because that only means they have 10.8% of stations and oddly folks are still free to choose any of the remaining 89.2% of broadcasters even though only 9% of people won't be able to choose from all the other cable or internet channels. Unless you consider a monopoly to consist of owning about 1% of the available options. This is much less than a tempest in a teacup, it looks more like a tantrum in a thimble.

As to the "not identify their actual ownership" charge. It doesn't stand up.

Eddy Ito

Except that it's far from control. Their current 39% reach doesn't imply market share neither does the post merger 72%. In each market area there are other sources of news and programming. Consider that only about 9% of people watch TV solely by rabbit ears; it hardly indicates any danger of them controlling anything. Even a simple antenna is capable of picking up well over a dozen stations in my area so even among that 9% they don't have "control" as there are plenty of other local alternatives. This nonsense about them being the only source of news is just that, nonsense.

Haven't we been here before with the whole AOL-Time Warner merger, which isn't a thing anymore, to the ClearChannel now iHeart buy up in the late '90s, now filing Chapter 11. Oh Conan has been doing the creepy mashup thing a lot longer.

Eddy Ito

Re: Red tape is socialist

The problem with self-regulation is that there is incentive to CHEAT. Think Volkswagen.

I don't follow. If you're making the rules, "self-regulating", how do you cheat?

Cryptocoin investors sue Chase Bank for sky-high credit card charges

Eddy Ito

Re: The Bank is RIGHT

Crypto-currency has no legal tender status in any jurisdiction therefore it is property and exchanges made with it are no different from trading hog bellies, soy beans, chickens, or baseball cards. In the US the IRS treats all transactions as property transactions and, as many people realized to their chagrin, are subject to regular capital gains tax rules.

If they treat it as a cash advance then I see no reason why one couldn't pay their credit card bill with the very same crypto-coins.

'Housemate from hell' catches 24 new charges after alleged nightmare cyberstalking spree

Eddy Ito

Matthew Lin, a computer programmer from Newton, Massachusetts, faces seven counts

I didn't see anywhere in the charges or other story that he used the alias Matthew. Is there a link?

Gmail is secure. Netflix is secure. Together they're a phishing threat

Eddy Ito

Re: email verification?

Exactly this. Why is there a difference between someone registering for Netflix using the "actual" email address of say gmailuser@gmail.com and the "spoofed" dotted address g.mail.user@gmail.com if both addresses go to the same mailbox? Years ago I'd received several emails from Sony's Playstation online whatever it is asking about my account so I simply went online, reset the password, and closed the account. Note, the "attacker" didn't actually use dots, they simply signed up with my email address. Having said that, like someone mentioned in another thread, I use the dots to detect when someone is selling my address so I can point it out to them when I end my business relationship with them.

I submit the premise of the headline "Netflix is secure" is false if they aren't validating email addresses at the time someone signs up.

Holy helmets, Batman! Bane-like mask lets you 'talk' to computers without making a sound

Eddy Ito

Damn machines! They're going to put all the Vulcan mind melders out of work.

I say, I say, I say: What's the difference between a king penguin and liquid?

Eddy Ito

Didn't they also discover a similar relationship between a flock of starlings and lava lamps?

Furious gunwoman opens fire at YouTube HQ, three people shot

Eddy Ito

Re: Of all places

And when does it become 'mass' murder?

The FBI definition is here about 20% down the page as contrasted against the definition of serial murder. To save you the time, it states:

"Generally, mass murder was described as a number of murders (four or more) occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders."

Eddy Ito

Re: Of all places

I'm assuming there are a bunch of laws against possession of said weapon in CA, but if they're intending to shoot up people with it, those laws aren't really going to stop them....

Presently reports show she used a 9mm handgun and there is no reason to believe she bought it out of state (that would be illegal after all). Not that any of it really matters when one of the biggest gun banners in Cali got busted for running guns. I've often wondered if the real goal of gun bans was simply to up the racketeer's profit margin.

One solution to wreck privacy-hating websites: Flood them with bogus info using browser tools

Eddy Ito

Precisely and I'm not so sure they care whether it's accurate data.

Super Cali goes ballistic, Starbucks is on notice: Expensive milky coffee is something quite cancerous

Eddy Ito

Re: Remember MacDonald's Coffee?

Rats and mice get cancer when given amounts 1,000 to 100,000 times greater than a normal human would be exposed to in their diet. Putting this silliness into perspective, you'd have to drink somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 cubic meters (0.0016 Olympic-sized swimming pool) of coffee every day for two weeks to match the same dose given the rodents.

Eddy Ito

Re: They should put...

https://repository.uchastings.edu/ca_ballot_props/970/

The vote went 4,400,471 for and 2,632,617 against. According to PPIC (PDF warning) the turnout was about 45%.

Eddy Ito
Facepalm

HA! You almost got me with it being April Fools! Hahahahaha!!!

What? Wait, really? OH FFS!!

Eddy Ito

Re: the judge who cried wolf?

It's not the acrylamide, it's what it reacts with assuming we consume 10,000 times the amount found in a cup of coffee every single day. Of course the reactive thing being human tissue means that we'll need to label every person with a Prop 65 warning.

Eddy Ito

Re: Partial Burn

Why would anyone do anything with hemp other than make ropes and such? It's not like it has THC like pot (marijuana). The fact that growing hemp is illegal because it looks too much like marijuana to uneducated law enforcement is why it's illegal to grow in the US. Fortunately if the Hemp Farming Act of 2018 is passed that won't be an issue any longer and LEOs will actually have to think before they shoot people.

Uber self-driving car death riddle: Was LIDAR blind spot to blame?

Eddy Ito

Re: "...a [Lidar] blind spot low to the ground all around the car."

Low is a relative term. Keep in mind a xc90 is 1766 mm or a couple inches shy of 6 feet tall and the LIDAR is roof mounted so it's likely easily over 6 feet. Depending on the vertical scan angle of the LIDAR there will be a blind spot created by a superposition of the roof of the car creating a largely rectangular cone the size of which is determined by how high the LIDAR unit is mounted and by the lowest angle it can scan.

If we assume the LIDAR is at 2 meters high and is mounted 1 meter from the edge of the roof (as the car is ~2 meters wide and I'm modelling it as a brick) this gives a maximum angle of 12.6 degrees below horizontal before the LIDAR beam is blocked by the roof outline. That puts the closest point on the ground the LIDAR unit can see at 8.9 meters (29.3 ft) away directly ahead and to the sides and 12.6 meters (41.4 ft) over the corner. If we move the LIDAR to 2.5 meters high these numbers drop to 3.5 meters (11.3 ft) and 4.9 meters (16 ft) respectively. The distance will be considerably greater toward the rear as the assumption here is that it is mounted 1 meter from the front edge of the roof and that would potentially place the rear edge considerably farther away decreasing the downward angle visible.

Tesla crash investigation causes dip in 'leccycar firm's share price

Eddy Ito

Re: Clickbait headlines... (elsewhere)

From the video clip posted on twitter it looks like there was a gap in the barrier and it looks to have taken much of the nose of the car clean off. The fire isn't very impressive but it's hard to know if it was knocked down earlier. Here's the clip.

https://twitter.com/NBCian/status/977406284260495360

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

Eddy Ito

Re: Could this form of censorship be applied retrospectively?

I wonder when they'll start editing content. It kinda gives 'autocorrect' a whole new meaning.

Microsoft's Windows 7 Meltdown fixes from January, February made PCs MORE INSECURE

Eddy Ito
FAIL

Huh, I have mixed emotions. I'll count myself as lucky(?) as the January and February patches failed to install. The unlucky part is that the March hack job succeeded. The truly pitiful part is that I actually download and install this crap by hand via the command line on my personal machines. Maybe it's time to stay a month behind to see what shit stirs up, maybe six months.

Dear MS,

Epic -->

Students: Duh, of course we're blowing our loan bucks on crypto coins

Eddy Ito

Have no fear, I'm sure that of all the kids whinging to Senators Warren and Sanders about getting a gov't bailout for their student loans not a single one spent so much as a penny on any form of cryptocoins.

Corking story: Idiotic smart wine bottle idea falls over, passes out

Eddy Ito
Facepalm

Re: "Apparently beer keeps better in tins as it blocks out the light."

Wine in a can?! Yes, sadly you can.

YouTube banned many gun vids, so some moved to smut site

Eddy Ito

Perhaps. Of course the most common use of the sword is to censor the pen which is why Liu Xiaobo was more widely know outside of China than inside.

Eddy Ito

Re: Youtube's anti-freespeech stance is sad

Actually in a sense SCOTUS did say you have a right to FB.