* Posts by John Smith 19

16327 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

SpaceX wows world with a ho-hum launch of a reused rocket, landing it on a tiny boring barge

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"if he's making my childhood dreams come true or just ruining them by making it look easy."

This "easy" of which you speak has taken 15 years and the losses of 5 payloads to get to.

Sputnik 1 launched in 1956. It has taken 61 years to turn what was basically a design for non reusable WMD into a partly reusable design. Incidentally the fairing (which was recovered for the first time ever yesterday) costs about $6m a pop and weighs several tonnes as well. That's important if you want to lower launch costs radically IE 90%, not 30%.

I don't think a reusable TSTO was anybodies childhood dream.It was wings or the squat plug nozzle designs of Philip Bono from "Frontiers of Space."

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"(Either that or he's not joking about the white cat, and super-villain volcano lair)"

Actually the obvious one is Hugo Drax in Moonraker.

No cat, but a nice line in collarless jackets IIRC.

Kremlin-backed APT28 doesn't even bother hiding its attacks, says Finnish secret police

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Or are they....

Russian ISP's have a certain reputation for hosting all sorts of no-questions-asked-as-long-as-the-bills-paid software.

So yes it could be they are just so blatant they don't give a f**k who knows where they come from.

Or maybe they are from somewhere else?

Attribution is tricky. Although it always seems to be more so when it comes from the people on the "official friends" list (Stuxnet anyone?)

How to leak data from an air-gapped PC – using, er, a humble scanner

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Thumb Up

Oh right,

1st April Fool.

Got it.

BDSM sex rocks Drupal world: Top dev banished for sci-fi hanky-panky

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Meh

"Hopefully they can whip him into shape and make him submit to some guidelines, "

I don't think he's on the same side of the debate as Max Mosely on this matter.

although I suspect D.Trump Esq might be quite sympathetic to his PoV.

Europe to push new laws to access encrypted apps data

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"politicians and law enforcement insist they don't care how it's done"

And will go on "not caring" until someone raids their personal message stash and broadcasts their assorted crimes, infidelities and unusual sexual proclivities.

And I think we know there are going to be quite a few of all of the above amongst the assorted pols comms chatter.

This couldn't have anything to do with the idea that a backdoor would allow monitoring of anyone they like without them being aware of it and therefor eliminate the need for a search warrant that a number of European states (UK included) law enforcement agencies find so annoying, could it?

Boffins invent wacky quantum gizmo prototype for secure mobile payments

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

sounds very clever.

Payment systems need better security and this looks interesting.

Obviously needs a bit of work on the hardware.

What a time to be alive: drone pooper-scoopers are a thing now

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

"The Return of Captain Dog Toffee."

Drop that flop!

Boffins give 'D.TRUMP' an AI injection

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Actually sounds like quite a good idea.

So probably doesn't scale up well.

Or some other problem that stops this from working out as well as it seems it should.

Hertfordshire primary school girls prepare for World Robotics Champs

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Coat

"Henrietta Barnet School, "

Now if only it was the "Henrietta Carrot School"

I know.

UK's 'homebrew firmware' Chinooks set to be usable a mere 16 years late

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

The MoD is right up there with the Home Office

In producing, large, mostly unaccountable, highly secret, IT f**kups.

They both appear to be effectively unaccountable in any serious way for their actions.

Home Office accused of blocking UK public's scrutiny of Snoopers' Charter

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"wonder whether or not Amber Fudd actually *knows* what's in that document, "

Of course she does.

Does like the other 8 or 9 previous sock puppets who spouted this line.

After London attack, UK gov lays into Facebook, Google for not killing extremist terror pages

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Speaking as a fellow sad middle aged failure ..."

With one important difference.

His day is done. He killed fewer people than British road do on a daily basis and I can't even remember his name, although no doubt the ISIS PR machine will call him a hero.

If his actions question wheather you have done done all with your life that you could have maybe you should do more with it.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

@Tom Dial

"Search monopoly - a service for which they do not charge users."

They charge the advertisers plenty for knowing about what you do.

What Google does (to users) is complementary.

It's not free.

Either you don't know this or it's in your interest to pretend you don't know this.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"more chance of winning the lottery than being murdered by one of these scumbags. "

Exactly.

And how many people here know someone who have actually won the UK Lottery?

I'll note 2 things.

"Sad middle aged failure wants to make a name for himself" isn't nearly as a dramatic headline as

"Terrorist slaughters 24 in terror attack."

And BTW IIRC in London police routinely carry tasers, pepper spray and telescopic batons. Yet this officer is killed by a man with a man stabbing him with, what a 6 inch blade before man is shot by armed officer who happens to be close by.

How very inconvenient for the purposes of interrogating him.

You know, how actual police work gets done.

ICO fines Flybe, Honda for breaking data rules. They were, um, trying to comply with GDPR

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"if you're going to spam, go large "

Actually I'd prefer they didn't go at all.

Although they could say they were following government policy, where you have to opt out of being filtered.

Pure Silicon Valley: Medium asks $5 a month for absolutely nothing

John Smith 19 Gold badge
WTF?

"a website to engineer, a platform to run, infrastructure to manage and so on. But 150?!"

Exactly.

I find it very hard to believe anyone looking at what is being "run" isn't wondering "how" many people is this thing needing? Where's all that money gone?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

So they got $135m for this bo***cks?

This looks like another of those "deals" where the insiders (somehow) persuade a bunch of VC types (WTF were they thinking?) to hand them a big bag of coin for what is basically FA.

Seriously.

what is that? $4m for the devs, $1m for the servers and (oh yes) $130m for the CEO, COO, CFO for "conceptualizing" and "imagineering" this bu***hit.

They may think they are "special" but I'm not seeing it.

So long.

Who were you again?

Carnegie-Mellon Uni emits 'don't be stupid' list for C++ developers

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Smart pointers are for programmers who can't handle memory management correctly."

Whenever you hear "buffer overflow" that's another of those programmers who can't do this.

Of which there seem to be a very large number.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"For absolutely critical performance,..access to the...instruction set that C denies you."

I see, you don't use a profiler so can't spot where the 5% that actually matters is being executed.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"I say be clever enough not to aim at your foot in the first place."

Which suggests you practice these rules (or things with equivalent effect) unconsciously

These rules are not for you.

They are for the people who don't do so, who need to be told this is a bad idea, before they do it.

Of course whether they will bother to read these rules before they make an almighty clusterf**k (is core Windows still written in C++ ?) is another matter.

US Senate votes to let broadband ISPs sell your browser histories

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

""innovative and cost-saving product offerings""

So that's the new BS for "We're going to pimp your browser history to whoever can afford to buy it."

And

"Selling your location and personal information to marketers: this is something that some ISPs do now but are loathe to admit because they fear a consumer backlash. "

Well to slightly restate in the words of Creepy Eric Schmidt perhaps if they fear a consumer backlash that much, maybe they shouldn't be doing it in the first place?

To our US readers, say hello to the "data fetishist," US style, for whom more data (especially yours) is good data and all data (held indefinitely) is best of all.

Boffins reveal how to pour a perfect glass of wine with no drips. First step, take a diamond...

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"My teapot in Japan in the 1970s had a grooved spout to stop the "English Tea syndrome".

Except, it seems, in England.

First the Rise of the Machines, now this: UK military's Exercise Information Warrior

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"from its traditional “prime contractors” "

or prime Cons as I like to think of them.

Error prone, insecure, inevitable: Say hello to today's facial recog tech

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

"The issue is not of following up on leads but the shift of onus."

Correct, hence my suggestion that it only be used on a DB of known criminals.

On the fine old Stalinst view that "We know you've done something, even if it's not what we're charging you with."

But personally a system that 14% that can't match someone who's in the database but will throw out a bunch of total strangers is in fact a machine for wasting police man power or generating wrongful convictions.

Both of which should be grounds for extreme concern in a civilized society but probably aren't in a police state.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

And then there are the "identical" strangers.

Two people who are mistaken for each other but are in fact not genetically related.

Interestingly some matched on FR, some did not.

Obviously someone who matched on both but you were not related to, and who committed a crime you have no alibi for would drop you right in it, unless they left DNA which was not yours, but then the police would say you were just careful.

Given the plods fondness for Occams Razor you're chances of getting out of this would be quite slim unless they committed more crimes.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

""We do not need to choose between safety and privacy. Americans deserve both,""

Should read

"We do not need to choose between safety and privacy. People deserve both,"

FTFY,

Just to be clear

"with one in seven FBI facial recognition searches incorrectly returning a list of innocent people as matches, despite the presence of the actual matching image in the database. "

means the software is producing both a false negative (in DB but not listed as a result) and

multiple false positives (in DB but not the correct person).

Which sounds like an epic fail level of result.

On that basis a file of only known criminals should be used.

TRAPPIST-1's planets are quiet. Quiet as the grave, in fact

John Smith 19 Gold badge

"Earth has a one in a million combination of life supporting conditions."

The fact we can now spot extra solar planets and can count (sort of) the number of stars and galaxies in the sky means we are in a position (just) to start to put some actual numbers on the Drake Equation.

The crude way would be take the number of planets found around a particular class of star and divide by our estimate of how many of that type of star we can see, keeping in mind it's easier to find gas giants than anything even reasonably (EG 3-5x bigger) Earth sized.

We now know for a fact that the Solar System is not unique in the galaxy for having planets (and even more bizarrely that old SF trope of a planet drifting through space without a sun is not that uncommon) so the real question remains the Fermi Paradox. If the odds on bet is there is a planet for most suns, where is the alien comm chatter from a million billion inhabited worlds?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"tidal locking" seems like a pretty big problem if you want to live there.

The spinning of the planet seems to be quite important if you want the atmosphere to be pulled round fast enough that it can't be frozen out on the permanent night side.

I think it's pretty clear no one will be visiting any of these places without an uncrewed probe first.

Spotted: Bizarre SpaceX rocket-snatching machine that looks like it belongs on Robot Wars

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Happy

"Luckily, where humans fear to tread, a robot is ready to rush in "

Of course, having the survival instincts of a depressed lemming helps here.

Happy because I'm not one of the meatsacks involved.

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

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Oxfam etc could do wonders with rugged mobile 200 kW generators."

You do realize that's about a269 Hp engine, right?

Like a pickup truck.

Now a 200 MW engine that size would be very impressive.

Wanted: Bot mechanic. New nerds, apply within

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"We cannot use technology to solve social problems. "

We shouldn't use technology to solve social problems.

But we do.

I think the ongoing brisk business at US ER's demonstrates some societies unwillingness to confront the root causes of problems and use technology (IE medicine) to temporarily deal with them.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Go

Yes, on that basis the future is going to be quite exciting.

Lot's of new skills to learn and new problems to deal with.

Although I suspect the successful players will start with things that are really RPV with remote operators "driving" an adequately strong, adequately agile unit that for so many hours a day, or in emergencies. Otherwise it sits on the wall charger.

Over time it will develop better "reflexes" and acquire more canned sequences for known tasks until it only calls home when needed, or for a (secure and authorized) software upgrade.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Isn't there a danger of effectively creating a ponzi scheme?"

Are you aware of how the British "National Insurance" scheme actually works?

Look up the term "rollover fraud"

Bloke, 48, accused of whaling two US tech leviathans out of $100m

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"the secretary kept the cash and school funds paid out the coach firm."

Note that's £35K over 7 years

What you have here is the classic "single person of trust" in a small firm story.

"We've never had a problem, we trust him/her implicitly."

Proper accounting systems don't need trust.

They need separation of authority from request generation and regular oversight. Good systems cannot be gamed without significant collusion, not just one person inside the company.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

The "hi tech" version of the old "pro forma invoice" scam?2

"Hello, yes there's been a terrible mixup. You've sent your payments to the wrong account. It needs to go to...."

Possible 20yrs of Jail.

IE $5m/year.

Anyone else wondering what happened to the money?

Calling your redundancy programme Baccarat? Immense Bummer, Management

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

The board game invented by John Nash comes to find.

His original name for it was "F**k you buddy," but the mfg found that unacceptable for some reason.

Coppers 'persistently' breach data protection laws with police tech

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"Seems there are damn few trustworthy individuals out there in trusted positions, given the data."

And I think you'd be right.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"they were fitting up the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four for the right reasons."

In the words of "Truscott of the Yard" "We always arrest someone, it's bad form if we don't."*

*One of Richard Attenborough's finest performances, back to back with his portrayal of John Christie, who was also only caught after they'd hanged the wrong man first.

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"majority of cases, the officer thinks that they are doing it for the right reasons"

New flash. Police always think they are doing whatever they have been caught doing for the right reasons.

If this is so useful why can't everyone do it?

Malware 'disguised as Siemens software drills into 10 industrial plants'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

The ineritors of Stuxnet

so how does one make money out of ICS mallware?

Uber bans 'brilliant jerks', will train staff on Why Diversity Matters

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Big Brother

Ah but she has a secret weapon

Persistent offenders will report here for "retraining"

Be seeing you.

UK vuln 'fessing pilot's great but who's going to give a FoI?

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Let's see how this works in practice.

The UK government and disclosure.

Not the happiest of bedfellows.

Airplane bomb fears spark America's laptop, tablet carry-on ban

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

"I wonder if this is a "security" measure - or a masked commercial one."

Given what's come out of Mogul's mouth what's the difference?

DNS lookups can reveal every web page you visit, says German boffin

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"Put simply, because of all these side requests, just one page can create a fingerprint "

I'd guess the pix in particular may well be near unique to each Wiki page.

2 good rules of thumb are

a) If Google supplies it how does it allow them to extract more knowledge about you (because if Google supplies it it always will)?

b) Don't use Google.

Nuclear subs seek virtual SAN, says VMware

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

Let's hope it's not like the F35's logistics system.

Mostly written in C/C++ and needing to call home (IE the Pentagon) to get an authorization to do something.

This AI stuff is all talk! Bots invent their own language to natter away behind humans' backs

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Unhappy

So getting agents to evolve a language is possible but tricky.

Obviously needs some kind of counter incentive to make the "language" more flexible.

1 message per complete sentence is bandwidth efficient but not memory efficient.

Which suggests some kind of "penalty" function to encourage them to evolve a balance between verbosity and uniqueness (IE "words") might work.

Home Office admits it's preparing to accept EU ruling on surveillance

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Gimp

"putting forward robust arguments"

So another couple of £m of taxpayers money ending up in some briefs pockets.

And I will be most surprised if this new approvals body is as much a rubber-stamping-n-cheerleading operation as the "Interception Commissioners" office seemed to be.

Plans to force ISPs to filter content branded 'disproportionate'

John Smith 19 Gold badge
Childcatcher

mass surveillance of the UK public. No probs. But OMFG the kiddy of some Tory MP might see..sees...

whatever and SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

By all means provide such filtering.

By all means let customers know it's available (and make it simple to manage)

Because if it's not some other SEL Tory MP will tell you her little ones have seen something on the interwebs again.

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

John Smith 19 Gold badge
FAIL

"The SJW mob never let the facts get in the way of a good lynchin'."

And the person who uses "Social Justice Warrior" is usually either running a business that treats human beings like cattle or looking to set one up to do so.

But that's just my personal experience.