Posts by Number6 2293 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Yeah and I'd rather carry a heavy laptop as it works my biceps and gives me back pain - oh well...
I'd like a machine that is as small and light as my Aspire One netbook but has the screen and CPU grunt (and battery life) of my Dell M4800. I think I'd need the assistance of Dr Who for that though.
Me too. I think his telling argument was the "there are other search engines". If you don't like what one corporation produces, take your business/traffic elsewhere. Imagine the fun you could have suing Fox News or CNN for perceived bias.
Baidu is not officially a government organisation, and the free speech requirements only apply to the state - there is no requirement for me as an individual to allow anyone to use my resources for their own purposes, but I have no right to stop them using their own. A corporation is owned by its shareholders and the decision was made on their behalf[*] that their assets not be used to provide certain search results. That's no different to a media organisation such as Fox or CNN choosing to omit information from a story they cover.
[*] If the shareholders disagree then in theory they can remove the decision-makers and put in replacements.
Times have changed. I remember cursing my bank because it wouldn't let me use a password containing digits and insisted on A-Z only. Now I curse the sites that insist on adding punctuation to my alphanumeric passwords. Once upon a time passwords were limited to 8 or 16 characters, depending on the system, too.
At a former employer, I once logged into the system and was informed that it was time to change my password Right Now. It would reject dictionary words, but it was clearly using a very polite directory because it accepted 'bollocks' as a password.
I would also refer people to https://xkcd.com/936/ for comments on password security.
I don't think I've ever used an on-line supplier who's managed to deduce what I might buy based on previous purchase or viewing history. Amazon are particularly screwed because I use them as a reference source to look things up, as in "it's available on Amazon" as an idea that something is available. I might be encouraging someone else to go buy, but not me. The fact that I delete cookies a lot probably doesn't help them either. One day I'll write an app that lets me modify cookies and screw with them even more.
Given my time in the trenches, I'm not sure an insourced monitoring team would have gotten through any better than the outsourced team.
An insourced team in the same building as the senior people does at least have the ability to go bang on desks in person and look the management in the eye. However,they'd probably be stuck in some other office, and wouldn't have that advantage.
I had the misfortune to use Windows 8 for a week, the highlight of which was to temporarily lend the laptop to someone else whose machine wouldn't drive the projector available for his presentation. I just sat there and smiled knowingly at all the things he tried to do but failed.
Now back to a Win7 machine, which I brought home for the weekend to set up the Linux VM for everything that doesn't insist on Windows. I wish a few more places would port their stuff to Linux, it's chicken and egg at the moment where people stick with Windows because of the software and vendors won't port because they don't see enough people using Linux. If MS insist on continuing with their headlong plunge into the Windows 8 approach, I can see a lot of people would make the switch away from MS if all their favourite programs would run on Linux.
I remember going to the Maplin shop when they only had one, in Southend. We were visiting relatives in the area and I persuaded my father to make a side trip.
They've gone well downhill from those days, now it's mostly overpriced tat and the component business is almost a sideline at the back of the store. Also, back in the day, the likes of RS and Farnell didn't deal with individuals, whereas now they will. I remember the local electronics shop in Bath would order stuff from RS for people.
I was in there this morning. They've been rearranging the local one, so the big signs hanging from the roof aren't necessarily above the items you'd expect. Still, it's a good excuse to wander round even more. Some of them are themed, too, the San Jose one and the Palo Alto ones spring to mind here.
I don't know how available they are in the UK (Amazon.co.uk has them, so probably) but the Neato robot vacs score better than the Roombas in most reviews. They've got a laser scanner that maps their surroundings and run back and forth in an efficient pattern compared to the random walk of other robot vacs.
I really don't understand how your judicial system can have gone so wrong. You have courts which can remove the right to freedom of speech, and the right to a private life. You have law enforcement agencies which can actively instruct officers of other law enforcement agencies to break your own laws. You have laws which allow the words of your police officers to become legally binding orders which citizens must obey under threat of physical force, and imprisonment. Where the fuck is the land of the free?
Sadly the UK is not much better. If you're in a public place the police can order you to obey them under threat of arrest. If social services decide they don't like you then your right to privacy is very limited, and then you're banned from talking about issues.
A decent lawyer should have got that "breach of terms" claim thrown out easily. Giving the guy an $80k settlement on the grounds he tell *no one* is impractical at best and would have required the entire immediate family sign the non-disclosure at worst.
The IRS would have to sign too, they tend to want to know about large sums of money because they want their share of it.
"We are more than astonished by the dismissal especially because this court, just like other courts in Germany and the UK, found a myriad of infringements of the 100A patent,"
Translation: "Damn, didn't see that coming, we were sure we were going to win. Clearly the court is wrong because it didn't agree with us"
Nothing like a bit of notice for those who were using it. Or is it like an insurance company, sending the renewal through almost too late for you to shop around and find something cheaper? Trying to push people onto WhatsApp, perhaps?
Not that I ever used their messenger stuff, there's a limit to the number it's sensible to use and I never saw a latecomer like that as worth it on computers.
I wasn't thinking of deleting the originals, merely providing versions in the latest standards. Keeping the original work, and a means of reading them, is important in case of conflict. Very few people read the original Magna Carta, but the text is available in different formats for everyone to view.
Technically you don't need the format to endure that long. What you need is a set of standards that are robust enough that one can run an update program on your current set of documents that will convert them reliably into something reflecting the new standard and maintain the same appearance and formatting and be able to trust that it's done so without needing to visually inspect every document.
There's nothing to stop the government using MS Office to generate the documents, assuming it's capable of producing ODF files that conform to the spec (i.e. MS wrote their plug-in correctly).
All that is being consulted on here is the format to use, not the applications.
In practice, however, once they've specified the open file format, it's not that great a leap to shift to the cheapest (including support costs) option for generating those files, and I guess this is what MS is afraid of. There are costs involved with using Libre/Open/Star Office, but there's likely to be competition for providing that support which should help control costs. If a large user such as the UK government shifts over, expect others to also take the plunge, providing a bigger market for support organisations.
I'd also like to thank Facebook for freeing up a few precious MB on my phone by their actions.
I'd like to free up a few more by removing the pre-installed FB app from my phone but that's not quite so trivial. I haven't given it any data even though I keep finding that it's running and force-kill it, so who knows what information it's already uploaded on the offchance that it can use it? (Interesting question, given that I never gave permission, so I would hope the anwer is 'none'.)
Ironically I would have been less bothered by Google buying it. They already have my phone number because I opted to join the Android ecosystem rather than the iOS or one of the less popular options. I sort of assume they know everything I do with my phone anyway, even though I don't use GMail or any of their other services apart from maps and search.
Yes, WhatsApp account deleted and app removed from phone here too. As mentioned by someone else, there's no way of checking that they have really deleted the information.
I never had Facebook on my phone and I've never bothered giving them my phone number by other means (and most of what I have told them is not entirely accurate anyway...), so it'll be a bit irritating if they acquire it by this means.
If it's something with admin rights then the only way to protect against it is to have an off-line backup that it can't touch.
Perhaps with the large disks available now, we need to go back to the VMS approach of versioning files, so that if I change a file, it keeps a copy of the previous one until I explicitly purge it. If that's built in to the file system then it makes it harder for someone to scramble all the files because it would only create new copies, the old ones would still be there. Provided there are several hoops to jump through to do the purge, it would be hard for the trojan to remove old copies.
As a side benefit, you could have an external audit device attached to which the filesystem would write a log entry time it changed a file so you'd be able to track back and see what changed. Being a write-only device from the perspective of the main system, and not being attached to the network in any other way, it would be helpful in forensic analysis if something bad did turn up. Obviously it can be defeated if a trojan can disturb the filesystem drivers, but even then there's a good chance that it would have to do that by overwriting the driver file on disk (which would create a record) and then forcing the system to reload it.
I guess it comes down to how paranoid you are, what performance penalty you'll accept (AV scanners do load Windows machines quite a bit) and how much you're prepared to pay for a bit more security.
I did that once, accidentally dragged a folder into another one and realised afterwards that I shouldn't have been able to do it at that level in the directory tree. Ironically, that was at the company with the most locked-down network I've ever experienced.
One gets careless if the network protects you against your mistakes, I've picked up most of my better habits from painful experience of losing data because I did something stupid (I go back to CP/M, so plenty of opportunities) and then modifying how I did things.
It is possible to move from the US to the UK and vice versa, just a bit harder. The important thing is to find a company willing to pay the right wages, which is not so easy because both countries expect higher wages than some immigrants. Plan B is to marry a citizen, but that comes with its own set of problems and expenses.
I still remember from the late 70s in one of the computing magazines of the day, an interview with one of the Captains of Industry who noted that if his life every became complicated enough that he needed a computer to manage it, he'd chuck it all in and take up goat farming.
I wonder where he is now?
You give one to every human, and get yourself an in house spy in every home, so you can really accurately target your advertising. We've all seen the films, we know the plot.
I think you're missing the point. If the work is being done by the robots, where are the humans going to get the money to pay for the products? Or do we all get given a robot so we can send it out to work to earn us money?
On the eighth day a machine just got upset...
Remote bricking should require a PIN which can be set by the owner. The default is that no PIN = no remote brick. That makes it entirely opt-in by the owner and (if you trust the manufacturers/government) means that the owner has to consent to the bricking.
I'm still not convinced it's the best way to achieve the result though, I can see the hackers having a field day.
"How can I go back to my electorate and persuade them this is a functioning system?" Amelia Amersdotter, the Swedish MEP for the Pirate Party told The Register. "There's no trust in European institutions - nobody likes us."
Well, the first bit always was a hopeless task. The second bit, I don't think it was caused by the Google settlement, and when trust is already at the bottom, it can't go any lower. (This is not a challenge, BTW.)
I see no need to use cloud services for what I do, half the fun is playing with it and learning how the stuff works. I've got another little ARM platformm running a 6to4 tunnel so my home network can do IPv6. I get to pay the electricity bill too, so a couple of little 5W boxes easily beats 100W+ of server ticking over, although I'll admit the room is a lot colder in winter now than it used to be when I had several big x86 machines running. As for handcrafting, that's all part of the learning process, and having done it once, the second one didn't take much time at all.
I would not use the little ARM platforms as-is for serious professional deployment - the lifetime of the SD cards used to boot is not good enough and they suffer bit rot. I've had to rebuild a few times, although once the base image is built, it's easy enough to create a new bootable SD card.
When it comes to using Windows servers, I'd have to pay for those, with Linux I can just throw together a new system to play with fairly qickly, no licence or activation hassles and no multiple reboots as it's patched from install state to latest release. It was hard at first, but now I'm up the learning curve and it's relatively straightforward. Perhaps if I was paid to do it I'd think differently.
I have a couple of little ARM machines handling DNS and DHCP, as a master/slave pair so that there's a bit of resilience. They'll stay up longer than anything else due to the light load on their battery backup, and come up before anything else. They also do local NTP services, polling a different set of servers out on the internet. Far more robust than using a large server, and more configurable than a typical consumer router.
In one survey with an admittedly small sample size, 31 per cent of people admitted to entering false data into their social network account.
I find it depressing that only 31% are savvy enough to obfuscate their data. I do have a standard internet birthday (so I can remember it if I need to repeat it), but it's not my real one. I'm similarly vague about location and I don't hand over my phone number (or use social networking apps) on my phone.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
