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* Posts by Dan 55

15445 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

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UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: OMG, the privacy implications are apocalyptic...

The difference is the sender's phone sends the list of device IDs and dates it has met them to the central server and the central server sends this list to all phones because it doesn't itself have a list of device IDs. Finally the list is compared on each phone. Also, device IDs are regenerated each day.

So, unlike the NHS approach, the server doesn't know which phone has which device ID. This, coupled with daily device ID randomization limits the possibilities for tracking and deanonymisation.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Stick to the tech, please

Your questions are answered in the article I linked to.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Stick to the tech, please

Precisely.

No evidence No 10 advisers attended Sage during previous crises

It is a purely scientific committee which produces reports for the government... until now where 13 out of 23 members receive their salary from the government.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Can tell when you're within 6' of an infected person? Skeptical.

I'm pretty sure it's not going to be able to find out that people living in flats or working in office blocks have walls and floors between them.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Stick to the tech, please

There are very few countries who have followed a herd immunity policy and the death stats show it's not been a success.

Also, SAGE has 13 members out of 23 which are paid government advisors in one capacity or another.

If you would like a demonstration close to home, try comparing NI (followed UK Government advice) and Ireland (followed Irish government advice, which was basically following WHO advice).

Slightly further away we have Sweden alone among the Scandinavian countries following a UK-style policy and the stats show this.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Stick to the tech, please

I believe herd immunity via contagion instead of vaccination was originally pushed by one Demonic Cummings, according to the Sunday Times exposé.

Also, NHSX and Faculty were originally designing the app based on a herd immunity policy.

So you'll forgive me if I'm somewhat cynical of the claim that Cummings was pushing for a harder lockdown on SAGE. As a government advisor he shouldn't even have been there.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: It asks for your location?

On Android, you must allow the app's location permission and turn on location services for an app to be able to do Bluetooth scanning.

Also, with those settings, any app can also find out the phone's location if it wanted to because it already has permission to query location services. The NHS contact tracing app may or may not be one of these.

So Google's original flimsy reasoning brought in with Android 6 to get people to turn on location services has now come back to bite us all in the arse.

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Microsoft puts dual-screen devices and Windows 10X in the too-hard basket

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Dual Screen Woes

Windows already does dual monitors, a main monitor, hotpluging monitors, touch screens, and a virtual keyboard. It's all there, it's just not quite right and not linked together right.

It can't be beyond the wit of man to use all that to get the effect they want they achieve for these devices... unless perhaps the dependencies are horrific.

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UK COVID-19 contact-tracing app data may be kept for 'research' after crisis ends, MPs told

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: No chance

Let's cut to the chase:

What is a government department doing sending a mailshot to just one party's members? What do you think that means for data protection? What does that mean for people who aren't paid up members of the ruling party?

Would you agree if, say, the US government only informed Republican party members they can get testing?

It stinks and you know it does.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: No chance

It seems to give first preference to Tory party members as the they're the ones receiving the emails. What happens if you're a member of another party or not a party member? You're not going to get a message from Matt Cockup.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: No chance

Oops, sorry, here's the proper link:

Conservative party members sent tests

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Big Brother

Re: No chance

If I may be permitted to spam a post from another El Reg article earlier today which shows how any semblance of data protection in law has been thrown out the window:

----

Vote Leave AI firm wins seven government contracts in 18 months

Conservative party members sent tests

So in these two stories, we have:

- No data separation between the NHS and Tory party membership lists (sign up for the Tory party if you want a test, if you are in the Tory party you are apparently a key worker).

- No data separation between the government and Faculty, the Vote Leave data mining firm.

- No data separation between the previous things and Palantir.

But, please do install the NHS-government-Faculty-Palantir app.

Icon looks a bit like Cummings with a moustache.

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India makes contact-tracing app compulsory in viral hot zones despite most local phones not being smart

Dan 55 Silver badge
Headmaster

"sounds like a challenge to black hats!"

Nope, it sounds like a challenge to red teams.

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Gmail and Outlook sitting in a tree, not t-a-l-k-i-n-g to me or thee

Dan 55 Silver badge
Flame

OAuth2 lock-out

OAuth2 is a fucking bind to implement on third-party email clients because you've got to crowbar a full browser into the IMAP/POP authentication stage and there are no real standards for authentication, each provider does it is own way and email client developers have to reverse engineer it.

This is what happens when you let huge corporations take control of open standards.

But one piece of software/app per provider protected by its OAuth2 wall is more modern (the author knows what he's doing when he drops that word into the article).

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Singapore to require smartphone check-ins at all businesses and will log visitors' national identity numbers

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Big Brother

Re: In the UK, 1984 will be arriving very shortly.

Also in the UK:

Vote Leave AI firm wins seven government contracts in 18 months

Conservative party members sent tests

So in these two stories, we have:

- No data separation between the NHS and Tory party membership lists (sign up for the Tory party if you want a test, if you are in the Tory party you are apparently a key worker).

- No data separation between the government and Faculty, the Vote Leave data mining firm.

- No data separation between the previous things and Palantir.

But, please do install the NHS-government-Faculty-Palantir app.

Icon looks a bit like Cummings with a moustache.

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Android trojan EventBot abuses accessibility services to clear out bank accounts – fortunately, it's 'in preview'

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Assets

I think AC's point is how Google could and should find out something is up. Comparing the file type returned by file (or similar program which determines magic numbers) with the file type from the extension and checking if there's a difference.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: And google/android will get the flack

Perhaps all these dialogs which in the end boil down to:

Do you want the shiny new app to work? Yes/No

aren't an effective security measure. Perhaps it has to be done another way.

Symbian used extended vetting if a developer wanted to use certain permissions and the app had to be signed with a different certificate which gave access to them. I'm not saying that should be the way for Android too, but Yes/No dialog boxes aren't security.

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Bye, Russia: NASA wheels out astronauts, describes plan for first all-American manned launch into orbit since 2011

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Hollywood-real world feedback loop

The future has arrived, we now have cool-looking space suits.

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RetroPie 4.6 brings forth an answer to 'What do I do with this Pi 4 I bought last year?'

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: N64, GCN

N64, PSP, Dreamcast on Retropie on Pi 4 review

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: N64, GCN

This is Dolphin on the Pi 4. Given that there's still no official build for the Pi 4, I think the most Gamecube games known to work on Dolphin could work on the Pi 4 if they decided to put development effort in that area.

As for the N64, again it's a work in progress but this is Lakka and this is Batocera so I can't imagine RetroPie is that far behind. But yes, N64 emulation is a mess.

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Dan 55 Silver badge

N64, GCN

Wouldn't the proof of the pudding* be how well RetroPie 4.6 can emulate the N64 and the GameCube on the Pi 4.

As for the Spectrum ROM I guess you would have to turn off any hooks the emulator has to e.g. speed up tape loading because it's a non-standard ROM and stuff is in different places.

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International space station connects 100Mbps symmetric space laser ethernet using Sony optical disc tech

Dan 55 Silver badge

What's the Wi-Fi speed of a unladen ISS?

If we believe Quora then it could be 128Kbs or 10Mbs so I'm still none the wiser.

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Academics demand answers from NHS over potential data timebomb ticking inside new UK contact-tracing app

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Just Say No

I'll be looking closely at the details when they emerge and will (or not) sign up depending on the data they require.

Make your choice now unless you are under the misapprehension that anything good can come of Palantir.

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Florida man might just stick it to HP for injecting sneaky DRM update into his printers that rejected non-HP ink

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Florida man...

He's the hero we deserve, but not the one we need right now.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: HP printers

This post has got me weighing up the cost of continuing to run my HP printer until it dies (probably not going to happen for a long time as I don't print much at home) or buying a Brother now.

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Happy birthday, ARM1. It is 35 years since Britain's Acorn RISC Machine chip sipped power for the first time

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: My Beloved Electron

It did a while back, as did the first ARM computer.

I think it must be about time to revisit all these 80s machines in another set of articles...

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Thanks for this.

You want a keyboard for that...

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Outages batter UK's Virgin Media into wee hours as broadband failures spike 77% globally

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Same excrement, different operator...

Something up with Google's peering agreement with BT? Probably most well known for YouTube but I guess other services are peered too.

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Keen to go _ExtInt? LLVM Clang compiler adds support for custom width integers

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Ugh!

Thanks for the link. I'm familiar with memalign, htons, and friends but an interesting read nonetheless.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Ugh!

In that case it would be impossible to have bit flags packed together or have a short followed by an int without a two-byte space between them, and you can, and I do. I turn off alignment with #pragma pack.

The resultant code generated by the compiler to access this structure is obviously more complicated, but don't care because I haven't claimed there are going to be performance gains because they aren't any.

It is good for using less memory space (where did you get the idea non-aligned structures doesn't use less memory space?) which is in turn good for reading/writing records from binary files and good for sending binary data across a network yet the source code is kept relatively simple. The object code is more complicated, but as I'm not writing assembly language I don't care about that.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Intel? Excuse me?? INTEL????

The late 60s-early 70s CPUs had all kinds of weird and wonderful bit widths, what goes around comes around.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: What am I missing?

Ok, I'll buy the first one off you (although you can work round it), but I'm not sure about the second one.

Most CPUs generally don't have don't have 128-bit and 256-bit arithmetic operators and passing big integers isn't fully supported by Windows and UNIX function calling conventions, so everything's got to be done by software anyway. That and the article was about saving space on FGPAs, not having big integers. But yes, I guess they would be nice to have.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Ugh!

Extra code for bitshifting is a given, but do you really want to be the one to write it? Personally I think it's the kind of stuff best left to the compiler.

If it's in a structure with alignment turned off via a compiler option, pragma, or what have you, and you string a bunch together, it will save memory. Then again, behaviour is compiler dependent (VC tends to create bigger structures with unused bits between structure elements).

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: What am I missing?

typedef struct {

unsigned char flag:1;

unsigned int pad1:0;

unsigned char nibble:4;

unsigned int pad2:0;

unsigned char munch:2;

unsigned int pad3:0;

unsigned int mouthful:18;

unsigned int pad4:0;

} someStructure;

Some people want it all on a plate.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Sounds like a good idea

That can be avoided by only ever setting the bit(s) using carefully written macros that mask out the untouchable bits.

Or bit fields, which are easier, nicer, and let the compiler do the hard work.

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Dan 55 Silver badge

What am I missing?

typedef struct {

unsigned char flag:1;

unsigned char nibble:4;

unsigned char munch:2;

unsigned int mouthful:18;

} someStructure;

What's wrong with that?

Edit: By the way, the code tag is a bit broken on El Reg.

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"Something went wrong with the submission. Please try again." ... forever.

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Thanks for fixing the cookie box, I feel dirty after learning AMP has wormed its way into yet another area of the web so I'm going to wash my hands.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
Childcatcher

"Something went wrong with the submission. Please try again." ... forever.

This is the new cookie banner. I submit, it says error, I click try again, and GO TO 10. It won't go away even with uBlock Origin and Disconnect disabled. Dev console tells me this:

Powered by AMP ⚡ HTML – Version 2003262059300 "https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/create"

Powered by AMP ⚡ HTML – Version 2003262059300 "https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/create"

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://www.theregister.co.uk/CBW/all. (Reason: CORS header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' missing).

(AMP in the forums?! It gets everywhere...)

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Your new cookie stuff is broken [aka why you shouldn't roll out changes on a weekend]

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Your new cookie stuff is broken [aka why you shouldn't roll out changes on a weekend]

I'd have thought the weekend would have been the perfect time to roll this out if the readership is lower.

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Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Stop

Re: View from the inside

they only add visual clutter in my opinion

But did you forget about what happens when you stick a couple if calc()s in the parameter list and there's no commas to separate them?

Because if you did forget that would be... unfortunate.

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: WTF

It's Chrome, they do it because they can.

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Android 11 Developer Preview 3 allows your mobe to become a router via USB Ethernet – if you can get a decent signal

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Eh?

I think the difference is that is Ethernet over USB (with a USB plug at the desktop end) whereas this is connecting the phone to a USB to Ethernet dongle and then there's a Ethernet lead running from the dongle to the desktop.

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Why should the UK pensions watchdog be able to spy on your internet activities? Same reason as the Environment Agency and many more

Dan 55 Silver badge
Big Brother

In case anyone was confused as to what this is about, Classic Dom and a mate are on Sage, the science committee that gives advice to the British government, so the government is advising itself (or rather, Classic Dom is pulling strings all over government now), always, as they constantly remind us, "guided by the science".

The mate was a data scientist who worked with him at Vote Leave, and is the brother of a data mining company boss with links to Palantir.

But please do allow your data to get slurped by your ISP and also install that NHS app, it's apparently what people need to do to beat the virus.

Revealed: Cummings is on secret scientific advisory group for Covid-19

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Big Brother Watch

As mentioned in the interview, they were going to move out and they have done, but the point is it's still a Matthew Elliot-funded policy pushing organisation, the same Matthew Elliot who runs a whole load of other policy pushing organisations like TaxPayers Alliance, Business for Britain, Conservative Friends of Russia, IEA, Brexit Central, etc...

Not so fluffy now, are they? (Or maybe you think that's fine in which case go ahead.)

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Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: Big Brother Watch

Are you sure that's a good idea?

55 Tufton Street

Perhaps Liberty might be a better choice.

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We're in a timeline where Dettol maker has to beg folks not to inject cleaning fluid into their veins. Thanks, Trump

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Re: "Orange Man Bad!"

A recording is available for anyone who wants to know, and yes he is an actual fucking idiot. The only thing he didn't suggest was drinking Brawndo.

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Microsoft admits pandemic caused Azure ‘constraints’ and backlog of customer quota requests

Dan 55 Silver badge

Teams is apparently great now, or so the PR spin says

Meetings are apparently supposed to sound like a herd of goats bleating plaintively for help from down the bottom of a well, and that's with the video disabled. (Of course, the video disabled option doesn't work on shared desktops because that would be too useful.)

My ISP doesn't have problems with anything else, just fucking Teams. But, as we all know, marketing have said any problems are now fixed so it's not a problem.

There are, of course, no useful bandwidth or network settings in the client because that might indicate there could be problems.

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Google Cloud CEO says Istio will be handed to a foundation. The Reg: But what about..? Google: That will be all.

Dan 55 Silver badge
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Is it open source or open sourcey?

Open sourcey is read-only for everyone outside Google, Google greatfully receives all code donations and bug fixes but is not obliged to do anything with them, then adds its own binary blobs and spits out a product when it wants to. If you try to build from source yourself you will probably lose compatibility because you don't have the all-important binary blobs.

See also: Android, Chrome, Fuchsia.

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Google says no more shady anonymous web ads – if you want your billboard up, you've got to show us some valid ID

Dan 55 Silver badge

I find it hard to believe Google can run ads on their ad network without knowing who the advertiser is. If this is true, how come Google are allowed to take billions from unknown third parties from probably every country in the world without their door getting kicked down at 3am?

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