* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Uber president quits, says company's values inconsistent with his own leadership style

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"The drivers are driving out of their own free will, because it benefits them." etc

Here's the thing.

In pretty much all countries this (ongoing) process is called "running a taxi firm."

Taxi firms are regulated.

BTW that "business pattern" you've described fits quite a lot of "personal service" businesses.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"a sign that even a marketing executive can spot an utterly lost case ..."

In fact that's one of the key skills that a top Marketing person has to have to ensure they become a top Marketing person.

Turning round a really tough marketing pitch is very good for the CV.

Hanging on will the company crashes and burns is not.

Confirmed: TSA bans gear bigger than phones from airplane cabins

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Facepalm

"soon set up special waiver programme for US passported.. first class travellers,"

A company did this handling, taking care of all the pre booking process, took particulars of addresses, preferred CC numbers etc.

Then a laptop with the whole datebase of high value, frequently absent individuals disappeared from a locked office in the air side (not public) part of an airport.

Officials were baffled by the theft.

Visiting America.

What video conferencing was designed for.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Obviously a real bummer for the Theives Support Association

Who will have less opportunities to "inspect" you luggage.

'Sorry, I've forgotten my decryption password' is contempt of court, pal – US appeal judges

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Childcatcher

"the looks of it the guy is a real scumbag if the government is right."

Child pornography cases always guarantee public sympathy for law enforcement.

Which is why it's always best for the government to use them if law is likely to be contentious.

Note BTW this is the case in a United States court, just in case anyone thought this was the position in every other country in the world.

Since we are talking the US Constitution 5th Amendment IE the right to not incriminate yourself, I'd guess the question is what would be the story if (in earlier days) he was a Mafia book keeper and kept the books in his own personal code ?

FCA straps on rubber gloves, eyes Redcentric's accounting mess

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

So PWC audit or are just the accountants?

Because if you've missed this for how many years what sort of auditors are you?

IBM finds Wanda-ful new way to add China to its cloudy Bluemix

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

" re-vamp its economy through automation and digitisation."

And the collection of any and all data by the government.

China.

Where they didn't need THE PATRIOT Act to be put into law.

That's baked in already.

National Audit Office: Brit aircraft carrier project is fine and dandy... for now

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

I'd always thought the nukes were naturally quieter

Which compensated for their enormous cost, and the long delays between the start of contract and actual deployment.

Seems not.

So I guess that just leaves the ability to never surface, and hence have their snorkel seen on satellite, as their major remaining USP.

You do wonder what would happen if Rolls Royce Nuclear could be allowed to supply a reactor for one of these.....

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"a piece-meal basis via a steady stream of Post Design Services contracts, "

This sounds an awful lot like the usual Outsourcing/PFI process of making the profit on "change requests" because the mugs clients either failed to plan ahead for support needs or did not know what they needed to begin with.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"hang every defence minister of the past half century, "

That would probably include most of the 23 000+ who work in MoD "procurement"

Friday security roundup: Secret Service laptop bungle, hackers win prizes, websites leak

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"multiple layers of security including full disk encryption "

So better than any UK government/local authority/NHS laptop then?

Open wide, Node.js! NodeSource will certify you now

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"They wave their magical chicken over your code and proclaim it "safe". "

Then (as Raffles, The Gentleman Thug might put it) I fear I must decline their kind offer as I am not in fact a total f**king imbecile

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"using a certification algorithm from proprietary code." Not sure how to parse that

Does that mean it can check a package without the source code?

Does it means the algorithms it used to check them are proprietary?

The first sounds quite useful.

The second sounds like I wouldn't want to touch it with the end of a very sh***y stick.

US military's latest toy set: Record-breaking laser death star, er, truck

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

OMFG this is an astonishing story.

No not the laser..

LM spends own money on new weapons tech.

This is about as common as (for example) BAe delivering a new warship on time.

My flabber is duly gasted.

Obvious counter measures will be shooting at it with an AA gun (good for about 5Km at ground level) and coating the missile with a multi-layer fabry-perot mirror. These can deliver 99.9% reflectivity and can be made in flexible sheets. Paint over with a burn off camouflage paint and when the laser hits it will look impressive for a few seconds (while the paint spot burns away) then 99.9% of the light reflects in whatever direction the surface is angled at (it's unlikely to be flat on at 90 degrees).

Hell freezes over: We wrote an El Reg chatbot using Microsoft's AI

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

To think in the mid 1960'sthey thought they could build a computerised psychiatrist

They didn't know what they didn't know.

But now they know a lot more about what they don't know.

But they still don't know it.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

So relatively easy to set up basic functionality

But a right b**ger to anything more complex out of it?

Not an uncommon experience with new MS products.

Then they mature and are OK.

Then they gradually sink under the ever growing amount of cruft that gets heaped on them.

NASA swerves serious cash cuts – but Earth climate probes, asteroid snatcher face axe

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Depressing but not very surprising.

Eliminate climate monitoring. Done

Continue to bankroll hugely expensive NASA owned launcher without any missions (because NASA is not budgeted for both the launcher and payloads so big they need it). Done

Cancel asteroid capture mission because they are too stupid or short sighted to realize that's the best way to get around the Solar System (not just Mars) with massive (metres thick) radiation shielding. Done.

Are you undermining your web security by checking on it with the wrong tools?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Sounds like a bunch of companies saw a gap in the market and jumped in

With software that does the bare minimum of what is required in what is frankly the laziest way possible.

This is what tends to happen when you start selling products based on you brand names image for quality, rather than actually writing a quality product to do the task.

One cloaks a s**t product the other way enhances your brand and its reputation.

Spammy Google Home spouts audio ads without warning – now throw yours in the trash

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

"I think it would rather fun to put Google Home, Siri and Alexa in a room together "

Me too.

As long as it was a room in someone elses house and they were paying the bill of course.

Cybercriminals getting as good as nation state spies – report

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Yay for free market econmics

Just incentivize those economic work units and see them perform.

Actually if you're talking financial data and power networks I'd wonder if other countries operate a power spot and futures trading market like the UK does.

Those who've seen Casino Royale (Daniel Craig version) will know some of the opportunities for making money if rather than predict the future, you actually know what's going to happen.

I'm sure various scenarios will suggest themselves to readers.

Van Allen surprise: fewer nasty particles than NASA expected

John Smith 19 Gold badge
IT Angle

SpaceX to take note.

SX are planning to launch a 2 layer internet constellation of 12 000 sats in total. The lower density (4425) will be in the inner VA belt. The Very LEO constellation will number 7518

Nominal mass is 384Kg so if this can cut shielding by a couple of Kg on the core electronics (it will have on board inter satellite links as well as significant processing power for the Gb data channels and phased array processing) that will save a massive amount of mass to launch to orbit.

BTW of the 3 sub GEO com constellations (Iridium, Orbcomm and Geostar) all went into Chp 11 bankruptcy. Replacing a full constellation is a multi $Bn investement that will have to be made every 5-7 years.

The stated goal is to generate enough profit to fund SX's Mars programme.

This week's top token gesture: Google Chrome chokes energy-hungry background tabs

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"a few lines of JavaScript code to disable visual updates when the webpage isn't visible"

Sounds an excellent idea for the users.

But

PHB says "You can't do that. It'll spoil the users experience of our latest version of SomeBu***itSite.com. It's so much better if it's all loaded up for them when they open the tab, m'kay "

During dial up days people would disable image loading to speed up page loading. This seems like something that should be allowed on a tab by tab basis. Some tabs you'll want all the pretty pictures. Others they are are unnecessary.

How UK’s GDPR law might not be judged 'adequate'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

So the UK DP laws remain someof the worst implementations of EU directives in Europe.

To the point where the flaws are so serious it is deemed even talking about them in public will FUBAR the UK/EU relationship

And has been so for close to 2 decades at least.

Given that a lot of the UK's economy is based on "intangibles" IE financial services it's not looking like a lot of that will stay in London post Brexit.

Will the UK have to join so many of it's former colonies and protectorates as a tax haven for peoples wealth?

Google's Deepmind NHS deal 'inexcusable', says academic paper

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

We know Google does not view its users as its customers (because they are not)

It seems the Royal Free does not view it's patients as it's "customers" either.

And yes I strongly doubt how anonymized this data can be.

NSA hacking chief's mission impossible: Advising White House on cybersecurity

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"Or does he come as someone who wants to enshrine the hoarding and search for new vulnerabilities,"

Pournelle's law.

There are those who goal is to carry out the stated goals of the organization and there are those whose goal is to expand the organization, regardless of its goals.

Let's see which of these he is.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"NSA hacking crew "

Yes that about sums up how most SysAdmins should view them.

His organization is certainly a data fetishist.

Scott McNealy: Your data is safer with marketers than governments

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"If there's one tech giant who reminds me of Donald Trump, it's Scott McNealy."

McNealy in 2020.

Indeed.

Why vote for the lesser evil?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"There is no privacy - get over it"

Says a man whose business depends on convincing people this has already happened.

He may not have a PPE from Oxford but this guy is another fully paid up data fetishist.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Sounds like McNealy has a bad infection of the Ayn Rand malware."

Nothing that a full wipe and re-install cannot cure.

Time crystals really do exist, say physicists*

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"What happened to "When"?"

That's for dessert.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

I'll start with a course of "who?", "what?", "why?", "where?" and "why?"

with a big side order of "how"?

I understand the words, it's just the sentences they make I'm having trouble with.

Someone has learned something potentially quite useful?

National Insurance tax U-turn: Philip Hammond nixes NIC uptick

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"When did that ever stop a government?"

Usually when the group in question turns out to be more articulate, and have a higher percentage of the parties actual voting demographic in it.

The fact it is a fairly gross disparity and is in fact quite a nice little perk is irrelevant.

Zombie webcams? Pah! It's the really BIG 'Things' that scare me

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Possibly an even bigger risk is self delusion

Engineers who know about the tech may well only have average computer security knowledge.

But they may also think they are smarter than the average home user.

A dangerous cocktail.

Manipulating a building control system. Not just part of the plot from MI:2.

NASA finds India's missing lunar orbiter with Earth-bound radar

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

This is pretty amazing.

A target a few metres across has been found in a circle roughly 100Km in diameter after having had been subjected to unknown gravity forces for 8 years.

From a distance of about 1 light second.

Using a bi-static radar system with antennae about 2300 miles apart.

Sadly it looks like they never did deploy the gravity gradiometer Dr Forward invented

Naming computers endangers privacy, say 'Net standards boffins

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Holmes

TL:DR Do not advertise your host names on the internet. Make them annonymous as possible

This is a start to the kind of "defense in depth"

Mr Pink is right "The more they know about you the closer they get to me, and that can't happen."

Brit infosec's greatest threat? Thug malware holding nation's devices to ransom – report

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

This can be dealt with if people can agree a carrot and stick approach

Carrot

Release drop in secure authentication methods for popular processors so no excuse for brain dead hard coded accounts or passwords.

Approval mark confirming you can sell in main stores, has passed basic security tests.

Stick

No mark means liability for developer and mfg. No mark means you buy at owners risk.

Oxford Uni boffins say internet filters probably won't protect teens

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

"there will now be three separate statutory instruments "

I doubt this is any accident.

The favored instrument of the Dark Lord Mandlescum.

Handy for gradually tightening the noose on the information flow.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

", parenting and taking an active role in your kids lives is something you actually need to do."

Probably the crazy Tory MP who thought this bo***cks up in the first place.

Facebook, Instagram: No, you can't auto-slurp our profiles (cough, cough, border officials)

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"With baby hands in the White House, it will be easy to get laws into power to change this."

Not even needed.

THE PATRIOT Act has not been repealed.

Thousands of NHS staff details nicked amid IT contractor server hack

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"and usually you can't outsource the risk either"

Yet curiously that seems to remain part of the pitch for all these PFI type deals

PFI ==> Profit through Ignorance

Is that a phone in your hand – or a gun? This neural network reckons it has it all figured out

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"The "parameters" would probably be 32-bit floats, "

Probably. I just did it as a quick BOTE with 144 being a bit more than 1/8 of 1024 and worst case assumptions. It's not that big a number and there's that new short reals architecture that British company (XMOS?) is working on to cut it down further.

These sorts of problems are usually described as matrices but I wonder what the update pattern is like across 16 layers.

My instinct is not every weight gets updated on every pass so just cycling through every element in the matrix would be very wasteful, as a lot of the time it would A[X] = A[X] x 1. A smarter tracking of what cells really need to be updated could pay big dividends, although I'd be surprised if they haven't already thought of this. The joker would be if the update pattern shifts too frequently to make optimizing it worthwhile over just cycling through all cells.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

So at a little above 5fps it can identify that someone pointing a gun at the camera...

is definitely pointing a gun at the camera.

Good to know.

Let's say I'm doubtful any of the others will do much better. BTW 144 million parameters with 64 bit parameters that's a bit over 1GB of data to (potentially) update per frame.

Now what is the actual quality of the real CCTV these things are meant to be looking through?

There's a scene in one of the Bond books (Man with the Golden Gun?) when he's going through an automated firing range to test his skills and Fleming comments that the range is normally lit to be "Averagely bad" as IRL things are rarely perfectly lit so you can identify who's holding what

'Jarvis' brings AI to the Linux command line, without Iron Man

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

"Jarvis" presumably in reference to Tony Stark automated house system.

Or perhaps something a little more louche

Thank heavens the wrangling over BT's Openreach separation has ended

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"where Openreach’s profits go,.. back to the BT Group. The group's budget..controlled by BT."

So OpenReach will operate like a nationalized industry under BT Group acting as The Treasury.

Now if BTG treats it like a real part of its business and rewards growing business (not necessarily it's own) by funding them so OpenReach gets even bigger all will be well.

But historically the Treasury took whatever it could get from Coal, Steel, Cars and Rail and (very grudgingly) handed them some of their money back. Analysis suggest the Treasury never seemed to acknowledge that some of these businesses would always be in loss and were operated for (perceived) strategic reasons.

Time will tell if BTG accept this is an arm length company run for the good of the industry or if they use their budget control to keep it under their control.

My instinct is they going forward OR needs to start making new assets that it owns outright and the pension situation needs to be slowly separated out.

Personally I suspect BT have played OffComm yet again.

Royal Navy's newest ship formally named in Glasgow yard

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"The entire Falklands campaign was one Exocet away from being an utter catastrophe"

Not entirely.

Unlike the Harpoon AFAIK the Exocet could not execute a ballistic attack and I think most ASM's move slowly enough to be hit by point defense guns. Although it would be an excellent application for the "metal storm" barrelless concept. AFAIK it's blowing out the whole keel (due to the massive KE) that would kill a carrier.

The DF21 does indeed sound threatening but we'll see if it delivers.

It comes down to this. It's been known since the 60's that runways for M2 jets (which everyone seems to have been obsessed with back them) made for large vulnerable targets and everyone had everybody else's map coordinates dialed into either their (nuclear) missiles or their aircraft cluster bomb dispenser.

Only the Harrier bucked this trend. A triumph of French conceptual design, US funding of the NATO R&D operation and Hawkers insistence it was a good idea. Yes the engine concept set limits on aircraft size and maintenance was a nightmare but it could have gone bigger and the latter could have been engineered out.

Everyone else said "No we'll just build a floating runway and then we can just buy land aircraft and have a few mods. Just a few % more expensive and we'll have so much more choice."

Only they aren't "just a few % more expensive" they are a lot more expensive. IIRC Naval JSF''s are 2x as expensive as their land based version (IIRC a GAO report says the 3 core versions are now about 25% the same. IOW they are basically 3 separate aircraft, with supply chains to match and dis-economies of scale).

But so far AFAIK all the carrier operators have been cruise missile operators and it seems no one wants to be the first to use the latter to demolish the advantages of having the former.

But what happens when you face a technological opponent who does not have carriers and won't "play the game" ? Who sees sinking you carrier as a complete win for them?

The Netherlands is an advanced country with a strong naval tradition and no aircraft carriers. From their PoV sending a multi $Bn investment to the bottom would not be a problem for them as they don't have any.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

"GCU Pure Big Mad Boat Man"

Or as I like to think of them, the Crew.

If fast radio bursts really are revving up interstellar sailcraft, here's the maths

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"with large "sails" driven by solar wind "

IIRC the short story was called "The Wind from the Sun" but I've seen it re-titled as "Sunjammer," which I liked better.

Solar sailing both within a solar system and outside has been suggested. In principle it works best if you set up a "pipeline" of payloads going from A to B. It's slow but once you've mastered how to build large light sails (which IIRC was KE Drexlers Graduate thesis) it's relatively cheap in materials (10s of Kg of system pushes tonnes of payloads).

It's been suggested that sneaking up to a Sun behind an asteroid, then coming of it's shadow close in to the sun would give substantial (g's ) of acceleration which would bring it up to solar escape velocity.

Pennsylvania sues IBM for fraud over $170m IT upgrade shambles

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Management or Marketing have made promises for..requirements that are impossible to meet?

Blame where blame is due.

Con-sultancy management certainly but it's usually the Sales (or pre-Sales) guys in those slick Powerpoint presentations in exotic locations that usually promise the world for $0.02 to the potential marks clients

This sort of s**t always starts with unrealistic expectations.

Usually on both sides.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

A few points. Ian Michael Gumby

"In many cases IBM could be helping to write the RFIs RFPs such that they become the obvious choice."

True. Which is why any smart customer should be very wary if they let this happen.

"Not many companies have the stomach to go through a 3 year process."

I'd say all of "The Usual Suspects" in UK government f**kups would be there.

"When you consider that the state probably has both mainframe and Unix/Linux with some AS400 tossed in, it will end up being IBM or an IBM partner. "

Except that's a problem in Extraction Translation and Loading.

The idea that only IBM has a database that can do what they asked smells like the rankest BS to me.

"Its not a fault of due diligence, but a desire for a single vendor to do it all thus a single throat to choke."

But IRL no vendor can do it all and IRL they farm it out to a bunch of no-name contractors on condition they don't let on they don't really work for IBM/CSC/SAIC/SVC/Crapita/Atoss etc.