* Posts by John Smith 19

16326 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

What do a meth, coke, molly, heroin stash and Vegas allegedly have in common? Broadcom cofounder Henry Nicolas

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"would regularly spike the drinks of staff and customers with MDMA"

OK doing the staff was wrong but let's be honest I don't think he's the only one who's fed their (potential) customers something.

Come on, how else could you explain some of the f**k brained IT procurements over the years.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

" claim Nicholas would regularly spike the drinks of staff and customers with MDMA,"

Yo' jus jealous cuz you didn't think of it first.

Can, can, can you buy it, CANCOM? Brexit's made it cheap(er), man: Firm inks OCSL deal

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"For me "taking back control" is about holding our own parliament to account,

stopping the lazy bastards being able to blame Brussels for everything and having more local control."

I see.

So you expect Brexit will raise your IQ 10 or 20 points do you?

Yet another fool who blames their misfortunes on anything but their own incompetence.

Brexit. Less a "Coalition of the Willing" and more a "Coalition of the Stupid"

Wondering what to do with that $2,300 burning a hole in your pocket?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Investors = Magic Sheep

Isn't that what every tech startup is looking for a supply of?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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It's a different issue... this is AR with issues of tracking physical objects.

Fair enough.

Well given how much cameras on phones have gone up in resolution and down in price I'd guess a ring of them round the helmet shouldn't be that difficult.

Again, do you need maximum frame rate when the background is moving too fast to follow?

This suggests the key issue is the mapping of the artificial onto the real world.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

This is sounding more and more like General Magic.......

Bu***hit.

You either know nothing about the history of computer tech

or

you're a Magic Leap investor, praying all those $ haven't been p**sed up against a wall.

Or quite possibly both.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

TBH I'd thought they solved this problem decades ago.

For update rates isn't the usual hack to make frame rate inversely proportional to rate of motion? As you move s-l-o-w-l-y it keeps up, then as you swing your head fast it skips them and gives you "motion blur" till your motion slows down and it can stabilize the image.

Presumably these are the results with those tricks included, and they still sound s**t. :-(

I always figured this "augmented reality" stuff would be great for overlaying diagrams of hardware (like engines and gas turbines) on the real hardware and showing how to take them apart ("exploding" them in real time). Or LURP style games?

My other obvious question is this a $3K (with all the rest of the s**t) headset with $2 motion sensors inside?

Still they seemed to have released more hardware than Tharanos and this Unicorn is not dead yet.

But is that much of an achievement?

Can we talk about the little backdoors in data center servers, please?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"s a lot better in terms of security with firmware that follows secure coding best practices."

Like f**k

This stinks of the "Security by obscurity" approach.

Intels IME looked like a direct cut and paste of both the hardware and the software

IHMO this, being (in principle) small but highly critical should be written with the very sharpest methods for righting provably correct software.

It's not running the core load of the processor. Speed is not that vital but minimal vulnerability (I think zero vulnerability is impossible but then again Shuttle software, about 1MB in size, didn't find one during live operation over 30+ years) is.

I don't see any chip designer or mfg having the skills or the commitment to do that.

NHS Digital to fling half a billion quid at new GP procurement framework

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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Set the data transmission standards and let everyone else choose whatever they want

And no central support for any products.

If a company wants to write their own super duper new modules they support it, not dump the support costs on the NHS.

Work at a startup? Think US military isn't good enough at killing? We've got the program for you

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

In campus AI groups didn't these use to be called "Baby killer" contracts?

Not exactly a new phenomenon.

Let's see if any of them work out any better.

Of course it all depends on how scarce the real scarce resource is.

People who can make sense of a 1000+ page USG government procurement contract.

The off-brand 'military-grade' x86 processors, in the library, with the root-granting 'backdoor'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

Yet Another case of "Security by obscurity"

That doesn't work.

And if I'm reading that "Invocation code" right that's 6 hex digits, IE a 24bit binary number.

Shouldn't be too tough to brute force all of the actual wake up codes in that list.

A system that grants nearly unlimited access (potentially remotely) to your processors.

It's not the idea, it's the security chain that should exist around it that prevents the wrong people using it.

The simplest option is of course, not to have it in the first place.

Space, the final Trump-tier: America to beam up $8bn for Space Force

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Oi, do you mind! I have some very good friends in Kentucky.

Quality line.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"and lead to outcomes never before thought possible,"

Or rather wished not to happen.

You won't believe this but... everyone hates their cable company: Bombshell study lands

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Big Cable understands how to boil a frog

And you can bet Google will follow them right along once they have sufficient market share to get a seat at the "Top Table."

Seriously what is the benefit of going with one of the "Big boys"?

Access to certain sports events? That's a classic tactic to grab a slap of market share.

But what if you just want broadband?

Brain brainiacs figure out what turns folks into El Reg journos, readers

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

""But apparently we are so delicately balanced that just throwing the system off a little bit..

.. can rapidly change behavior.""

Sadly, I can believe that.

America's top maker of cop body cameras says facial-recog AI isn't safe

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"with a "worrying vacuum" in governance and lack of oversight."

Yes that's a pretty good description of all UK efforts in this area.

Facial recognition. Sure it's got a 98% false positive rate. We're rolling it out anyway.

Linking FR to the backend police databases. We're doing it.

Enabling legislation for Automatic Number Plate Recognition? Whatever for?

The last phablet? 6.4in Samsung Galaxy Note 9 leaves you $1k lighter, needs 'water cooling'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Joke

The Bixby assistant, helping Share & Enjoy Your Life (TM)

Yeah, right.

BTW do Samsung S3 tablets have a reputation for trashing the micro SD cards plugged into it.

Surprise, surprise. Here comes Big Cable to slay another rule that helps small ISPs compete

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

What benefits does a "Nationwide" ISP give you?

The days when you had to be on AOL or CompuServe to have a big enough user group to share with are decades gone.

The perceived better service? Is it really?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

People bang on about "creative destruction" and this about the only rule that encourages it

In the UK (where Openreach sets the prices) small ISP's can only dream of the ability to do this.

Wipro hands $75m to National Grid US after botched SAP upgrade

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Lots of people posting AC here.

Looks like a great ERP Marketing opportunity to me.

So all the usual causes of project failure (PHB Hubris, very ambitious timelines, badly defined goals, poor availability of domain experts to point out where they were f**king up etc).

Is SAP big? Yes, as is any suite that offers comparable functions (which are wide and deep).

Perhaps they should have started with a simpler question.

Which ERP system maps the best to our business? Because it looks like they did "Everyone else is using SAP, we should as well." But then they didn't talk to any of the "Everyone else" who'd done it. Which might have told them "Yeah we got it working, but you got to watch XXX (specific implementation area/process) like a hawk if you don't want it to fail."

I think it's only the US litigation and transparency laws that gave us even this level of insight into what happened.

I reckon there was plenty of fail to go round. But you hire cheap con-tractors shouldn't you expect trouble?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Good report. Upper Edge sound an interesting company.

If you're an American.

Sadly.

Bank on it: It's either legal to port-scan someone without consent or it's not, fumes researcher

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

They are running code in my machine without my explicit consent for their own benefit...

Exactly.

It's the lack of consent he's arguing makes this illegal.

OTOH if it's after you logged in to their site (as a customer) then it's "It's in our T&C's you agree to have your ports scanned," which is entirely different.

I think he has a case and it does look like a case of "one law for us, another for them."

Facebook insists it has 'no plans' to exploit your personal banking info for ads – just as we have 'no plans' to trust it

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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The old "there are no plans" to do so. " ploy

Always finished by the (unvoiced) word "yet."

FB knows how to boil a frog.

Unless of course someone knocks over the saucepan.

Imagine Python fan fiction written in C, read with a Lisp: Code lingo Nim gets cash injection

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

It's 2018 and case *is* significant

Are you f**king kidding me?

By all means use case to differentiate words in a variable name (Camelcase) but don't make it actually meaningful. One of C's strengths is the "Constants are UC" convention, not rule.

It's clear this is designed to be supported by an IDE which automatically enforces smart indenting (or even a "folding" editor, which is how Occam did it).

Hey, you know what a popular medical record system doesn't need? 23 security vulnerabilities

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"discovered by..seven researchers poring over source code without the use of any

automated testing tools."

How IBM Federal Systems Division did it with writing the Shuttle software. Before they started recording every line change and every error source (and pattern of every error).

So there is an O/S medical records system. Could the NHS use it? HMG spent £15Bn+ on their clusterf**k of a medical records system.

Motorola strap-on packs a 2,000mAh battery to appease the 5G gods

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

Power hungry, low coverage, and heavier.

No doubt plenty of the clueless will be queuing up to buy this latest piece of shiny.

But not me.

Think tank calls for post-Brexit national ID cards: The kids have phones so what's the difference?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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"HO is very, very skilled at brainwashing new Home Secs very quickly."

Damm right.

One sock puppet goes in, one sock puppet comes out but the words remain the same.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

That's all an ID card needs, and that is all it should have.

Did you ever look at the list of s**t the National Identity Register was going to track?

What you say is quite minimal and apparently sensible.

Which pretty much guaranf**kingtees that the data fetishists who dream of this happening wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Israel should stop murdering Palestinians" = OMG YOU ANTI-SEMITE!"

Indeed.

Anti-Jihadi <> anti-Moslem

Likewise

Anti-Zionism <> anti-Semitic.

What's the difference? Israel has a much better PR operation.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

@Charlie Clarke "Contract the work out to Estonia: problem solved"

You wouldn't be the Charlie Clarke?

The former Labour Home Sec charged with convincing people ID Cards were a good thing, would you?

Because he was very fond of Estonia as a case. But.

Estonia has 5 million people and no Welfare State infrastructure to speak of.

It had a long history of Communists disappearing people

Estonian ID cards allow the card holders to see exactly who has accessed their file, something we all know would be unthinkable to British civil servants ("What, members of the general public looking at their own file? The impertinence! Like they had rights or something.").

F**k that idea right off.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"Don't forget that all colours of government love the idea of ID cards,"

No.

A fairly small but very malevolent cabal of senior civil servants (across several govt departments, but I'd say centered on the Home Office) love ID cards (and the planned NIR).

That's why the sock puppets change but the tune remains the same.

Data fetishism. It's not a sane policy, it's a personality disorder.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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UK still think to live in a past

Wrong Mr "I don't have the balls to put my name on this post" AC.

Britain is a common law country where a significant fraction of its laws are established by legal cases generating precedents.

One of which is basically "I am who I say I am and do not have to carry a document (of any sort) to prove it".

IOW an "Identity card" is basically a "license to live" issued by your government. Multiply that by the "National Identity Register" which was planned to give HMG a cradle-to-grave view of everything someone did and where they went to do it and I'd ask "whose living in a democracy?"

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"that doesnt rule out the misuse of that data by some future administration,"

Indeed.

data collected <> policy of use for that data.

--> Minimal collection of any data ever.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

And without those pesky EU data protection laws getting in the way too

Another useful sideffect of the banjos who voted leave.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

evidence suggests..decided to destroy the records..operational choice by clerk level staff

IOW the SOP of the Home Office is to do whatever is f**king expedient to do for them at any given moment.

They are a Centre for Evil in the UK.

Year in, year out these data fetishists attempt to surface this s**t.

tony Blair was the last time (just when the IRA, the only serious sustained home grown UK terrorist threat the country has ever experienced) was disbanding.

Are lawyers turned politicians even worse than Classics/History/English graduates turned politicians?

Probe Brit police phone-peeking plans, privacy peeps plead

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

Police work should only *ever* be easy in a police state

So is this really needed to help PC Plod do their "work"* ?

*I mean the actual catching of real criminals engaged in serious crimes, not harassing anyone they don't like the look of, which is more of a hobby for most of them.

Riddle me this: TypeScript's latest data type is literally unknown

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Extend, enfold, extinguish.

Isn't that how it usually goes?

Javascript is the last standing remnant of Netscape

The bottom line with MS is the bottom line.

Always.

Trump 'not normal' FCC commish reveals amid Sinclair-Tribune mega-media-merger meltdown

John Smith 19 Gold badge
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So Sweet Pai is also Sinclair's b**ch as well Verizon's b**ch

I guess the FCC job is just for pin money.

But it does demonstrate that when decision making makes no obvious sense follow the money.

Relax, Amazon workers – OpenAI-trained robo hand isn't much use (well, not right now)

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"we don’t have an entirely accurate model of the hand, "

Because the real world is not precise.

Consider however how long a human takes to learn these fine motor skills.

It's called infancy.

but any system that cannot operate without expecting perfection is in big trouble

I predict a riot: Amazon UK chief foresees 'civil unrest' for no-deal Brexit

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"neither of them had a plan or a clue about what Brexit really entails."

Correct

But it seems they also believed (in some ba**hit crazy) way they are "Taking back control."

Given that in fact HMG's problems are mostly down to The Home Offices inability to organize the proverbial drinks party in a brewery in fact they never actually lost control to begin with.

Which makes "taking back control" delusional.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Anyway, so yes, with my postal vote, in a moment of anger

Do you actually live in the UK?

Or did you just decide to drop everyone else down the sh**ter because someone bad mouthed you and your unthinking reflex action was not (as it should have been) blame your local government but "Blame the furriners" ?

Maybe one day your maturity will match your age.*

*But I won't be counting those days. I don't think you have enough left.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

May pushed it forward and people voted for the parties of leave not remain.

And yet the one seat UKIP contested with the highest Leave vote in the UK was utterly destroyed.

Which was what having the Referendum was all about.

Kippers. Smoked.

Capita still squats on top of the UK's software and IT services heap

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"The plan to do "fewer things better" –

How about doing 1 thing well.

That would be a start.

Maybe.

I'm not sure there is one thing they do well (apart from generate the paperwork needed to run government con-tracts).

'Prodigy' chip moonshot gets hand from Arm CPU guru Prof Steve Furber

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

But that kind of thing isn't hard to avoid, it'd be a beginner mistake these days.

You seem to be thinking this is an issue for a developer.

What I was talking about was code mis-shuffling by the compiler. AFAIK the best advice remains "Develop clean code and let the compiler do the optimizations, then measure where it's really running slow, then optimize that." But again, optimizing numerical code can have very nasty consequences.

" I believe that sort of idiocy is fixed these days, "

I'd expect anyone deeply enough into being concerned about this to know if it was still an issue. :-(

FBI boss: We went to the Moon, so why can't we have crypto backdoors? – and more this week

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

He's providing cover for bad legislation, to come.

not even need Cardinal Richelieu's "6 lines from the purest of men"

You have nailed it in one

He may understand this is actually impossible.

But he's a data fetishist.

He simply does not care. Mark him well and watch his social network.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

even if you can survive the heat and radiations, and be able to decelerate enough in such g

The "surface" gravity of the Sun is about 27 Earth g's.

And of course there is no actual "surface" to land on.

But idiot politicians will hike you their diapers and stream at the top of their lungs "We want you to land on the Sun" anyway.

No big deal... Kremlin hackers 'jumped air-gapped networks' to pwn US power utilities

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

sooner or later we will need a body of international law to deal with this $#!+.

True.

All major powers have this capability. Enough of them have f**ked other countries in various ways over the years that they've left a bunch of very angry people.

But this stuff doesn't need the infrastructure of nuclear, biological or even chemical weapons.

IOW it's a game everyone can play.

Cyberwarfare is the equalizer.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

What better time to launch a nuclear attack?

Ummm.

If you've shut down the entire generating capacity for a modern country like the US for a few days you don't need a nuclear attack (miltary systems have backup non grid generators).

A 2 day outage on the US's JIT delivery systems will make it feel like a nuclear attack anyway.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

There is a reason the space shuttles were run by 286s,

Actually they ran a military version of an IBM 360 architecture called the 4Pi (lots of stuff running on it were related to navigation, spheres of Earth, etc). Made of discrete (military grade) TTL chips

Politicians fume after Amazon's face-recog AI fingers dozens of them as suspected crooks

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"except in a police state..where bothering innocents is not really considered to be an issue."

Exactly.

Think of it as the police state version of "Computer says 'yes'."