* Posts by John Smith 19

16326 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Put down that iPad! Snoopware RECORDS your EVERY gesture, TAP on iOS, Android

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: "unmodified Androids provided they were connected to a computer."

Which of course raises the question is that because iOS is too tough to get into or that they have not gotten round to doing iOS yet

I don't know.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

"unmodified Androids provided they were connected to a computer."

I parse that as not rooted and not jailbroken.

Just a vanilla Android device connected to a compromised PC.

Still not got your bothered face on ?

HP: Autonomy overstated 2010 profits, cuts them by 81 PER CENT

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

That's about 192 000 average British houshold incomes flushed down the toilet.

using the current exchange rate of about $1.6 -->£1

Impressive.

But not in a good way.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

At that price that's roughly 100 years to double your value on net income.

Idiots bought Fapbook on that kind of P/E.

If I were an HP stockholder who'd watch the senior management p**s away $8Bn I'd be a tad miffed to put it mildly.

How many keys can one keyboard have? Do I hear 200? 300? More?

John Smith 19 Gold badge

fWHoaR! Researcher crack eternal mystery of what women want in a man

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

So that's the root of Call-me-Dave's popularity.

The extraordinarily wide forehead (and in fact rest of head).

Or in the words of another expert

"First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the girl"

First man/machine nerve grafts restore amputee's sense of touch

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Actually the military is about the biggest generator of amputees in Western society.

So yes they do fund a lot of research in this area.

OTOH It's interesting that none of the teams is US based.

As for the rest of the world most of the people who lose limbs are just poor for it to matter.

City bankers survive simulated cyber-war

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

""Attacked" banks were criticised for not calling the police, "

So the police not involved?

You're looking at massive counts under the Computer Misuse Act, potential massive theft and PC Plod is not to be called.

Because a Police response is considered "unnecessary" perhaps?

Personally I doubt these exercises will be realistic enough until there is a real risk of one of the participants going bankrupt and not getting a government bailout.

But that's just me.

Boffin dreams up smart battery gizmo for Raspberry Pi fiddlers

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Re: Where's the incentive

""Reminds me of the Monty Python sketch where a bank manager is trying to get his head around the idea of giving money to charity.""

"Here at Slater Nazi we're quite keen on getting into orphans."

A much more innocent time.

Snowden leak: GCHQ DDoSed Anonymous & LulzSec's chatrooms

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

Nope. Make war on the state and expect war in return; you fuck us and we fuck you back good.

Says the person who cannot even put their own alias on the post.

Q: What's government-owned, designed to kill, and now more transparent? A: DARPA!

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Keep in mind that DARPA's ship stuffing AI project benefits paid off *all* their AI research

Since 1970.

So yes, there may well be some useful kit in there.

Greenland glacier QUADRUPLES speed, swells seas

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

@Pascal Monett

"Sorry, but could you explain just exactly what your third point has to do with climate change ?"

Simply to give perspective.

A very small group of people (that's not a typo it's a figure from the world bank IIRC) control more cash that roughly 3.3 billion That's about 38 million to 1.

Anyone wanting to affect global change should be aware of what their plans mean to those people.

Because if they don't like it you can bet it's very unlikely to happen.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Actual data

Thumbs up for that collection.

Note that we are looking at a possible sea level rise of a few mm.

But before we start panicking let's recall 3 things.

1) There has been a 15 year hiatus in the trend in average global temperature rise.

2) Without reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from China, India and the US nobody's efforts are worth a damm

3) The richest 85 individuals own as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the global population combined.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

Re: I sea swelling

" The world is warming."

Well according to the data over the last 15 years the correct response to your unequivocal statement is no.

And rather more to the point no climate models predict this happening either.

OCP gets Ethernet silicon interface

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

3 little words

Extend, enfold, extinguish.

Optical computing a step closer with SINGLE-MOLECULE LED

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Thumb Up

100 000 --> 1 photon out.

But this is v 0.1 tech at best.

However note that the molecule is much smaller than a wavelength of light.

While very inefficient it is a start of getting some kind of I/O between some kind of molecular electronic logic and the outside world.

So thumbs up for the start of the art.

Dell reveals 'proof-of-concept' ARM microserver

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Might give some of that growth the banksters were unhappy about

Now the question with Google might be have they used chip designers before? We know they've done custom servers and we know Intel will bake in a custom instruction or two.

Might be the start of something big.

Facebook turns 10: Big Brother isn't Mark Zuckerberg. It's YOU

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

I rather liked Saga Noren.

Not someone you'd invite to your birthday party.

But you'd definitely want her investigating your murder.

Facebook should (rightly) be treated as the book-of-lies.

Judging someone by their FB account.

What f**king nappy thinks that's a good idea?

ARM posts sterling revenue growth, but moneymen spank it anyway

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

These are the same guys behind the last banking collapse.

Who would miss a few?

Just saying.

Asus unveils dirt-cheap Chromebox desktops with Haswell chips

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Complete

with Google DataSlurp (Not TM) tech.

Is this Googles version of "Windows everywhere?"

That was s**t too.

London's King of Clamps shuts down numberplate camera site

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Re: Obligatory Steven Wright Quote (1)

That would be the one with "I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a comma at full speed." ?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

All that *without* a 2nd camera or linkup to DVLC or other database?

I smell BS.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

Have we found Matt Bryant's real identity?

There's a certain "quality" to the man's comments that suggests we might.

Spiceworks scoops $57m in 'last funding round before IPO'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

Re: Dell staff?

"DELL! DELL LAYOFFS! ERR ... COME AND WORK FOR US!"

Boris Johnson is their (part time) CEO as well?

Who knew?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Smells like a Computer Associates takeover target to me

1)Buy company

2)Sack development staff

3)Fold it into their steaming pile of businesses

4)Introduce new extortion "licensing" model.

5)Profit*

*Allegedly this is their SOP.

NSA, GCHQ, accused of hacking Belgian smartcard crypto guru

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: And as David Cameron, Tony Blair et al. say...

"We are above the law. The ends justifies the means."

The usual line from the sock puppet Home/Foreign Secretary is "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

Of course he does represent a danger....

A danger to the ability of such organizations to slurp your data whenever and wherever they want to.

Which to the eyes of the average data fetishist makes him a bigger danger to letting them exercise their compulsive behavior than any actual terrorist.

Microsoft to build 'transparency centres' for source code checks

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

Re: Funny I recall an announcement about this *years* ago

"It was back in 2002:"

Wow.

Twelve years

"And it might not seem like it, but every year since then, Windows has had fewer total vulnerabilities that were on average fixed faster than competing OSs."

What an interesting (and very specific) measurement of bugs.

But was not Windows 7 (or 8) meant to be a complete groundup re write? No reused code. So all code written to the new "secure" standards?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Funny I recall an announcement about this *years* ago

Back when MS were saying they'd put all their coders through retraining, remove all bugs from Windows blah blah....

When was that? 2010? Earlier?

US feds want cars conversing by 2017

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"..security and privacy,." "..remains to be addressed.."

Says pretty much all you need to know about this particular "cunning plan."

I suppose we should be grateful they did not feel the need for some kind of central reporting system to give a kind of nationwide radar picture (technically a Plan Position Indicator display) of the whole country.

Still there's always V 2.0.

Cupertino copied processor pipelining claims Wisconsin U

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

A note on instruction set Vs hardware.

AFAIK ARM licenses it's products at various levels.

At the instruction set level they specify a binary pattern and state what that instruction does in some way, like VHDL. You could run that through a design system which would do an implementation. It would be based on what assumptions the design system made (register blocks with single read/multiple read, decoding strategy etc).

You could get a version licensed to one of the big fabs and add your own hardware blocks (or ones from their catalogue)

Or you could go for completely custom implementation of their instruction set, with your own team.

If Apple have gone that route then they are solely to blame for an infringement since it's their designers decision to do this, whereas if they'd imported a component from a design tool it would be the tool vendors problem.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

@Lost all faith...

"Why are they contradicting themselves, how about....they could work around it, but thought it easier / cheaper to just ignore the patent and go ahead anyway and worry about the consequences (if any) later."

Hard to believe?

Well that's pretty much what Kodak did with the Polaroid patents on instant photography.

And Ford over the intermittent windscreen wiper.

Didn't end well for either of them.

Democrats introduce net neutrality legislation in Senate and House

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

A 2 page law which is explicit about what it wants. It's not THE PATRIOT Act is it?

As in people can actually understandwhat this law does.

Anonymous means NO identifying element left behind – EU handbook

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"disproportionate amount of time, expense and effort"

That sounds like a pretty useful definition of how annonymised the data should be.

Or IMHO very f**king annonymised indeed.

Boffins say D-Wave machine could be a classic*

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

So it *appears* to be a *very* expensive conventional computer, might be a bit faster

might not.

The more I read about this thing the less like anything I recognize as a computer.

Is it a scam or have the developers fooled themselves?

Who knows?

Canadian spookhaus says airport Wi-Fi slurp didn't invade privacy

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

I'm calling this "Playing the American" card..

"We do this but not to <home country of data fetishist> citizens."

So what, they cross reference everything to Canadian passport holders and shoot that data over the border for the NSA to scan with their computers?

I'd suggest the first 3 words in such a sentence are honest and accurate.

The rest I think can be filed under "mendacious."

Thundering gas destroys disks during data centre incident

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Facepalm

Holy s**t.

I would not have believed if if I had not seen it.

Note it's not the level it's sudden (and steep) changes in noise level that does it.

BTW. From nozzle theory almost any kind of pipe that has a gas tank with more than about 2 atm pressure difference between it and the exhaust will give an exhaust at the speed of sound.

Low volume (70 psi) pneumatic industrial control systems leak like this.

It's very loud.

Duracell powers into cloud storage market

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

Summing up. It's *probably* a 2TB cloud cache +"unlimited"* cloud storage for $199/month

Firstly 2TB for how much?

"unlimited?" Whose cloud servers?

It's either the bargain of the century (but how could you verify "unlimited") or hugely expensive.

I'll play the odds on bet of it being the latter.

Bangable poster firm Novalia makes printed 'leccy keyboard

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Impressive.

That printable PDA you asked for just might have gotten a little bit closer to reality.

Another one bites the dust: AVG kills its remote access service

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

Did not know it existed.

And now it does not.

So probably not something I could not live without.

Along with quite a lot of other people it seems.

Lenovo Yoga 10: Mediocre tech, yes, but beautifully fondleable

John Smith 19 Gold badge

Note if they have the ergonmics right they can always upgrade the screen, CPU & memory

Charge more for it but that would seem to be a reasonable trade off.

Just saying, It's easier to upgrade the insides than the outsides.

Is modern life possible without a smartphone?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Sounds like you need to use your phone as a MODEM for another device

Probably with a bigger screen and a better keyboard.

I think that's what most people back in the day did.

Chaps propose free global WiFi delivered FROM SPAAAACE

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

"Free" eh?

AFAIK the only "free" things run by businesses on the internet are where you are the product.

Skeptical?

You bet.

Cameron: UK public is fine with domestic spying

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Pint

Re: If there was any doubt@Mike Smith

"Well, we'll have to agree to disagree on that one :-) My view of UKIP is that they combine the worst aspects of President Blair's Politburo with the more invidious policies of the BNP."

So very much a "protest vote" strategy.

But it sounds like an effective protest vote strategy. I salute you (with a beer).

Next question is of course do those generally hacked off non-voters know where to find what the order across the finishing line last time was?

University boffins build snoop-spotting snitch app

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Obvious question. Do *devs* have to take *all* or nothing access to your data?

Sounds stupid (and it sounds like quite a few devs on Android don't) but does Google force that sort of slurping behavior?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

*Finally* something that actually *helps* protect peoples privacy.

Taken a damm long time.

ISS astronauts to grow tomatoes and rice …. IN SPAAAAACE

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: if an astronaut gets a craving for a burger...

"I've tried several varieties of non-meat, simulated burgers and -- all cheap laffs aside -- the one that came closest to a real burger was made from textured protein and hemp."

Umm.

I think right now this is still more of a supplement than a replacement.

So burgers are still on the menu.

But look at the numbers. Today it costs 5Kg/person/day to support a 'naut in orbit.

I'm amazed closed cycle life support work did not start research years ago.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

A useful rule is "First we test, then we trust."

No it should not be dangerous.

But I wonder if anyone's read the short story (by CM Cornbluth IIRC) called "Saffrey amongst the immortals."

College professor at minor school dreams up a series of get rich quick schemes. One is to try mushroom preservation by exposing them to a dental Xray machine.

He gets famous, having created a mutated botulism strain that is much more dangerous than any previously known.

He is it's first victim.

Couldn't happen IRL?

Want to bet your life on that?

Eurocops want to build remote car-stopper, shared sensor network

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Facepalm

@Sweet Anton

"BUT THERE IS A WAY AROUND THIS PROBLEM, rather than using a kill signal, maybe the way to do this is to get the car's computer to periodically request permission to drive from some big brother computer. No permission, car stops**. Make it request every 5 minutes and that should be enough to stop the crims before they can do to much damage. (**Country folk will of course be off the grid, but hey they have horses)"

Oh sweet $deity, are you f**king mad?

The last thing you need to give these ar**wipes are more ideas.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

@Simon B

"The big thing is ensuring the security IS tight so a remote hack in couldn't reverse it and start the worlds car speeding up at random."

Except all evidence on the security of car systems is that there is effectively none.

The best security to restrict this system is to not fit it in the first place.