Posts by Graham Cobb

Re: The distrust I still feel was

After all MS is all about Windows isn't it?

No, not any more. That much is obvious.

Desktop is still about Windows. For now. In Microsoft's world the future of desktop is dumb clients and Web apps (Office apps, Teams, ...). But they are not there yet.

But server - nah. Servers are all about Azure. With Linux kernels. And containers for the services.

Sure: extremism & intolerance is present. But it just doesn't appear in most people's feeds. Ordinary people get a feed of (in my opinion) dull stuff about what their friends and neighbours are doing. They seem to like it. The "bad" stuff that goes by they can ignore - just like they ignore the drunk guy ranting on the street.

I do agree that the media are choosing to try to "compete" by dumbing down. That is unfortunate but hardly the fault of a tool which provides people with easier ways to gossip and chat instead of reading serious media.

Re: The reward for your support

A bit of both.

The story goes that when Ken Clarke arrived a the Home Office, the spooks and police had a private meeting with him at which they showed all the Bad Things that would apparently happen if they didn't have Massively Increased Surveillance powers. He told them to piss off and sd a better job with the powers they already had. Apparently the meeting was very friendly and the spooks said at the end "well we had to try, didn't we?".

Pushing for decreased civil liberties, and a massively surveilled and over-policed society, is nothing new and should always be resisted by the Home Secretary. Nothing particularly bad will happen.

On the other hand, since Ken Clarke we have gone through an era of many Home Secretaries who do not understand what freedom is or why it is important. I understand why Blunkett felt that way - his disability meant he relied on the state for his day-to-day life and he was bound to feel the state was a power for good. However, most Home Secretaries have just cynically seen these powers as ways to damage political opponents or increase their non-democratic power.

Re: Eh what?

The fact of entering the country without paperwork is not usually in dispute. The point is that there are many laws which permit that. One major one is the Human Rights Act which brings the UK's treaty obligations to provide refuge for refugees into law.

Re: I don't understand why this is so hard

No, you have that "right" anyway. I exercise it frequently. for example, I don't do business with Google.

This is about additional rights granted by EU legislation. That is what the various national "data protection" laws around the world are about.

Re: Good news?

They do? I've never met anyone who has asked for more personalized advertising. Just less.

As Northern spring is well underway, and almost over, it is either ambiguous or just wrong. In either case, as El Reg has readers (and, indeed, journalists) in Oz, it is sloppy writing.

Re: It's subversion

So that's why Linus created git!

Re: Word

Yes - they have no direct benefit for us. But they have significant (and potentially almost unbounded) impact on the company - much more than the tiny "fines" our bought-and-paid-for politicians are willing to impose on their corporate friends.

So should start to achieve the changes in behaviour we want to see.

Re: The only reason that WWW ...

I'm not sure that it wasn't the other way around: the creation of full-text searching led to the removal of the "information professional" role.

I remember, in the early days of the web, playing with a side-project of indexing all the internal discussion sites (they were called "Notes" sites) at DEC - initially with a gopher interface. I was fairly quickly told to stop wasting my time by the guys on the West Coast who were busy developing what became AltaVista. I would say that at that time we had started to see the decline of project librarians but there were still a lot of professional technical writers. The ideas of engineers writing web pages, or tools to develop reference manuals from comments in the code, were not yet mainstream.

Re: The chipset

Not quite. The real issue is that it isn't under the control of the user.

I rarely use my phone for location services. I should be able to leave them off and only turn them on if I want them. The 50 bps is fine for me most of the time.

Don't put privacy-impacting services on my phone without telling me and providing on/off switches!

Re: Another Big Bang?

I am not an expert, but I am fairly sure it is well understood now that the universe will continue to expand, with everything getting further apart, and has no chance of collapsing back again.

Of course, new discoveries could change our underlying scientific understanding but, with current science, we will just get further and further apart. Already most of the obversable universe is completely unreachable to us (we cannot send even a speed-of-light signal fast enough that it can ever catch up the objects we observe from the past, which are all moving away from us).

Happy to be corrected when an actual boffin joins the discussion!

Re: 'government-run "fact checking" unit'

A government-run fact-checking unit could be a useful service. As long as its determinations are openly published, with the source ("government fact-checking unit") clearly marked, and free to be ignored.

Those who trust the government (in a particular area of competence) can find them useful. Those who do not should be free to ignore them. Each person's view on their competence may change over time.

No communication platform should pay them much attention (although providing optional filtering for users who wish to either hide or amplify based on the determinations would be useful to some).

Re: Running SIMless

Almost all of my phones have no SIM card. All of them work perfectly well without any SIM card (except for mobile service, of course). Some of them I sometimes put a SIM card in for a while (e.g. a local data card in a foreign country).

Certainly true, but the article is warning about sites which steal stuff in the background, not just the stuff you tell them.

Unfortunately, most people will visit random sites on the web without taking any precautions. They think "private browsing" is for accessing porn, not the setting you should use for access to any new website.

Re: Help! I'm confused.

One thing I do know was on the cards some years ago was passing on the cost of the NHS's increased mental health care costs (for children suffering the consequences of online bullying, grooming, etc) to Facebook, Twitter, etc. I don't think it came to anything, but it was reported in the newspapers at the time.

Which was always a bloody stupid idea. FB etc would just point out that, in fact, well over 99% of participants (including kids) have a better quality of life and better consequences due to the existence of social media. Many, many more child suicides have been prevented than induced by the wider access to information, help, views and diverse experiences created by Internet services. I wouldn't want to go back to the days of school bullying with no access to online friends, help and other outlets.

And I say all this as someone who chooses not to participate in social media myself, except El Reg comments!

Re: Free VT240 terminal...

And, by the way, I still have a Gold key on my keyboard!

Well, my keyboard manufacturer seems to have written "Pause --- Break" on the keycap, and forgotten to colour the key properly, but to me it is the Gold key. I bind many of my emacs keybindings to Gold sequences (for example - Gold-l is goto-line, which is what I used in 1980).

If I remember correctly, my VT52 in 1980 actually had a key coloured gold.

Re: Close (but no cigar)

This is engineered for particular requirements. It is when you need 5-nines availability (less than a few minutes a year) meeting the committed response times, No opportunity for failover or retries.

Two examples back from my day:

1) Banking transaction processing.

2) Mobile network number portability lookups (needed to allow call requests and other transactions to be sent to the right destination network once it was no longer possible to use the first few digits of the number to know where to send it).

Both required response times measured in milliseconds, with 99.999% availability. Particularly important when the transactions are designed such that no retries are allowed - it either succeeds or fails and the end customer is pissed off if it fails.

Except that downvoting here has absolutely no effect so the spooks aren't going to waste time on that.

On some platforms (Twitter in the old days, I think), downvoting might affect the visibility of comments, which is a different matter altogether.

Frankly we all just think you are a right-wing-nut. WTF has Biden got to do with this??? Take your trivial US politics antics somewhere else.

Oh, and if you want anyone to engage with your political discussion seriously, put your name to it.

Re: "coming ahead of concerns even such as security"

I strongly suspect that the people who actually answered 451's questionnaire (very rarely actual engineers) assume security is a solved problem. They trust their suppliers (they have to - if their suppliers have not solved the security problem then they might get fired for selecting them).

Power, on the other hand, is a visible, and increasing, operational cost. It is probably very high up their list of concerns because the telco knows user prices are going down and they have to find a way to make their costs go down.

Re: Definition

SA is mostly about software - the various network subsystems running as software that can be moved between central servers, cloud servers, or near the end-user. It gives the network more flexibility in what services it deploys where, including the ability to provide service for different users in one place from different servers in different locations.

It won't have much impact on consumers though. Possibly some improvement in download speed, reliability and, maybe, latency for some city-centre locations (yuppie gamers in their Docklands lofts). And maybe, one day, the fabled interactive phone features in sports stadia (although why you are watching your phone instead of the winger running down the pitch about to score beats me).

SA mostly enables the business advantages. Industrial automation (if we had any factories left), maybe some transport and distribution services.

It isn't 1 in 6000 times you/me/whomever pass a camera. It is 1 in 6000 people who pass a camera at all.

So, 1 in 6000 people will be stopped every time they go out because they "look a bit like" someone on a list?

The whole concept of using public surveillance in policing is abhorrent and appalling.

Re: Extreme Right or Left Politicians...

No, it is authoritarians who feel the need to ban stuff.

Authoritarianism/LIberty is an orthogonal dimension to political left/right. It exists just as much in the centre (which is what we are actually seeing with Italy banning ChatGPT) as it does in extreme left and right.

Of course, very few people go into politics unless they feel the need to tell other people what to do. For examples of non-authoritarian-ism across the political spectrum consider gun-rights right-wingers in the US, trans-rights left wingers in Europe and laissez-faire capitalists roughly in the centre.

Re: Somebody did not get the memo

I assumed ElReg is running a non-cooperation campaign. I fully expect that the instructions have gone out to all Reg staff to make sure the word "boffin" appears somewhere in each article.

Re: The Last One

Hey - I liked APL! My first professional programming job was using APL.

But I guess I will admit it is pretty write-only...

Well, arguably, that is what some of the large consultancies do: they have Government practices, which have staff who work on these projects long term and their knowledge has the chance to be reused on other projects. They do have some very good people, with masses of relevant experience. Effectively they are the government IT dept.

But, of course, they charge much, *much* higher rates than anyone actually working in the Civil Service can be paid.

Re: Never Gnome

Ah! I see what you are doing there... when the police come and claim you have been using Tails as a hacking tool, you can say loudly "Don't be silly, my man! It uses Gnome. Maybe good for those who like that sort of thing, but I would never use it." Then you can point them to your long history of public statements to that effect.

Ooops... maybe I've just spoiled it...

Re: The IA have themselves to blame

...but libraries have to buy their books and for digital have a licence for each simultaneous loan.

Which is what they do. They buy the book and they make sure they only lend one copy at a time. They don't offer straight downloads.

Re: One rule for them, another for the rest of us.

Not quite. There are two, separate, issues with using one-time pads correctly.

1) They must be used one-time only. If two messages are encrypted using the same OTP then you are completely lost. Just subtract one message from the other and the pad has been removed completely! You now have a text which is message A minus message B. Which is much easier to decrypt.

2) The pad must be random. If there are any biases in the pad (like using a book, or even just readable text) the codebreaker can make use of those biases.

These two mean that the distribution problem is really hard (you can't disguise the pad as something else, like a letter) and it is massive (you need hundreds of pads so you can keep communicating with several people).