Re: No shared CPUs
Errr - thats exactly what the article said. Did you read it?
Posts by Gordon 10
3879 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009
Page:
You can't ignore Spectre. Look, it's pressing its nose against your screen
New Sky thinking: Media giant makes dish-swerving move on Netflix territory
US govt shutdown lobs spanner in SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch
Meltdown/Spectre week three: World still knee-deep in something nasty
Monday 22nd January 2018 13:00 GMT
Re: A tactical mitigation/solution...?
Interesting potential solution, for a which I can see a few potential problems.
1. Modern CPU's already overclock like crazy (aka TurboBoost)
2. Statistical distributions will come into play - some proportion of chips will go unstable at a 1-2% overclock.
3. (Intel) Marketing would see it as "free gear" and kill it with fire.
The Reg visits London Met Police's digital and electronics forensics labs
All aboard the Vomit Comet: Not the last train to Essex, but a modded 727 for weightless flight
NHS: Thanks for the free work, Linux nerds, now face our trademark cops
Thursday 18th January 2018 13:40 GMT
Re: Shameful
Yes, but no.
Trying to do this was hugely laudable but ultimately folly without the backing of someone with a huge amount of clout in Gov or the NHS.
Never bet on your business stakeholders agreeing that your direction (however sensible) is the right direction.
They would have been much better off staying stealthed until they actually had a product. Probably even could have got a VC to stump up the cash to do it properly if they had cloaked in a services play and called it HealthIX or similar. Re-using or even appearing to copy someone else's TM's is always likely to bite you on the butt.
To be clear - I've nothing but respect for these guys - but sometimes nearly all of the time style counts over substance, especially in Business and Gov.
UK.gov slammed for NHS data-sharing deal with Home Office
Wednesday 17th January 2018 16:42 GMT
Definately not the Data Guardians of the Galaxy
I'd never heard of these "Guardians" before so a short googling gives this
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/national-data-guardian/about
TLDR - whilst they *might* be on the side of angels on most things they have no Veto, and it wouldn't take much to distort their charter imo, and they are NHS Only. So Im thinking Quango to re-assure the peasants.
From the Site
Priorities
The NDG wants to build trust in the use of data across health and social care and is guided by these 3 main principles:
•encouraging clinicians and other members of care teams to share information to enable joined-up care, better diagnosis and treatment
•ensuring there are no surprises to the citizen about how their health and care data is being used and that they are given a choice about this
•building a dialogue with the public about how we all wish information to be used, to include a range of voices including commercial companies providing drugs and services to the NHS, researchers discovering new connections that transform treatments, and those managing the services
Intel AMT security locks bypassed on corp laptops – fresh research
Saturday 13th January 2018 08:57 GMT
Re: Why blame Intel?
Every time my ISP sends me a new router they also give me a semi-random sid and wpa key, if those muppets can do it why can't Intel and the laptop manufacturer for the AMT password?
Management Engine was a stupidly complex solution for a fairly minor problem and a classic case of cognitive bias. We have a problem - we're good at making new CPU's - let's use one!
Think tank: Never mind WannaCry, update NHS IT systems for RoboDoc
Thursday 11th January 2018 13:07 GMT
Re: No thanks
I agree - the only reason someone would be writing a report to say that AI is the solution to the NHS's problems is if they are either flogging AI "services" themselves, being paid to shill for someone who does, or delusional "digital strategists" from VC-land or Shoreditch with a whiff of Bong! about them.
1 in 5 STEM bros whinge they can't catch a break in tech world they run
Thursday 11th January 2018 08:31 GMT
Re: This is absolutely true when it comes to gender balance
Except you're quoting made up bollocks statistics to justify maintaining the status quo - try doing some basic research first.
Below is a good start. (Overall female ratio in Stem courses is 39% and none is near 10%).
https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75-006-x/2013001/article/11874-eng.htm
And before you use that ratio to say there isn't much of a problem look at likelyhood of unemployment in females with a Stem degree (hint its much higher).
Watt? You thought the wireless charging war was over? It ain't even begun
FBI says it can't unlock 8,000 encrypted devices, demands backdoors for America's 'public safety'
WikiLeave? Assange tipped for Ecuadorian eviction
Wednesday 10th January 2018 13:29 GMT
Re: hang on a moment...
Its probably more true now than it ever was - but nowhere near a dead cert.
To be fair not even St Julien could have predicted Trump would get in the White House and WikiLeaks interfering in the US election just stirred everything up again.
Once again his desire for self publicity and gratification gets him in trouble - story of his life - muppet needs a hefty wallop with a clue stick. Unfortunately if he's not careful a good clue sticking will be the least of his problems.
Good lord, Kodak's stock is up 120 per cent. How? New film? Oh. It launched a crypto-coin
Tuesday 9th January 2018 23:04 GMT 
Professor of Cunning
I actualy think there is the germ of a good idea here. One of the earliest and unremarked casualties of the Internet was photographic copyright becoming very difficult to enforce and fairly monetise, with even big media organisations like the Beeb using them without permission and compensation.
They could get that woman who took the Xmas HarRy and Meghan photo to promote it as an early adopter, alternatively the PETA monkey photographer might work too.
IBM melts down fixing Meltdown as processes and patches stutter
Memo man Damore is back – with lawyers: Now Google sued for 'punishing' white men
Tuesday 9th January 2018 18:07 GMT
Re: El Reg - FAKE NEWS
Whilst we are on the subject of Bias - try looking up and understanding Confirmation Bias.
Damore's whole post was a sophisticated version of the old "I'm not sexist but....." trope. (insert your -ism as appropriate). The fact that he effectively employment-Darwined himself and still apparently cant accept it only confirms how right Google were.
The fact that so many are people posting and upvoting stuff like the above with a similar tone even on something relatively centrist and rational as El Reg shows you just what an insidious problem this stuff is.
There will always be a large minority of people who don't believe there is a problem because they got to where they are "on merit", and blindly ignoring the fact that the playing field (of whatever kind) was never level in the first place, mainly because everything in their life to that point is predicated on them *not* getting that fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias - read it and every time you react to something without thinking long and hard - check yourself for it.
Mystery surrounds fate of secret satellite slung by SpaceX
UK exam chiefs: About the compsci coursework you've been working on. It means diddly-squat
Tuesday 9th January 2018 12:56 GMT
Re: So it all hinges on exams
I'm sorry I beg to differ. Any examination that is predicated on suggested answers not being posted to the internet is pretty flawed to begin with. Is this just an exam board too lazy to deal with plagarism? Am I the only one where at leat half my degree exam questions were repeated from past papers - how is this any different?
To my mind its rather like punishing a programmer for using something from StackExchange.
(Also an aside - since when is a 10% increase "plateauing" El Reg? Also I thought the idea was to capture the interest of those who might find it useful in the future to have done a Computing course - not frog march all and sundry through it like its french, german or english lit.)
US Senators force vote on Ctrl-Z'ing America's net neutrality death
Monday 8th January 2018 23:05 GMT
Re: Follow the money
They are the case of the lesser evil in this. They want you consuming as much cheap bandwidth as possible to target more ads your way, and Concast and Derizon will charge you and them more for the the distracting kitteh videos.
At least you can ignore or block ads and use privacy filters with the Ad networks. The word Pigopolist that Orlowski used to use was invented for US Big Cable and Telco. Remind me was anyone actually jailed for the bill stuffing debacle?
Although as a RightPondian the whole furore over NN amuses, it's really just a US thing after all.
SpaceX delivers classified 'Zuma' payload into orbit
FCA 'gold-plates' EU rule, hits BYOD across entire UK finance sector
Here come the lawyers! Intel slapped with three Meltdown bug lawsuits
Saturday 6th January 2018 13:39 GMT
Re: Is Intel guilty of negligence?
Except we know that's not true. Both Arm and AMD are vunerable too albeit to a lesser extent. Which means there are at least genuinely novel and unforeseen aspects of these vunerabilities.
Unless Intel did nothing for 6 months I'm not sure they deserve ambulance chasing. I rather suspect the back channels between the chip designers have been running hot for the last 6 months.
These flaws are so severe that a reasonable case for secrecy can be made as long as those who needed to know (OS designers mostly) were kept informed.
UK drone collision study didn't show airliner window penetration
Friday 5th January 2018 17:33 GMT
Re: Missing the point
@DJO
With the greatest of respect you are using hyperbole to grossly inflate the perceived risk. This study suggests at best drone strike damage belongs in a similar category of risk to Bird and Lightning strikes, and in terms of likely frequency is a damn sight lower due to numbers if nothing else. Neither of the latter cost anything like millions to either the airline or the wider economy so there is no reason to suppose that a drone strike will.
If you succumb to the temptation to use hyperbole you are really being no better than the twonks at the DfT. Don’t be fooled into a “won’t somebody think of the children” mode just because this is drone not paedo’s. Homo Sapiens are absolutely terrible at judging relative levels of risk so generally default to an “everything new is going to kill us” mode that was a survival trait on the African Plains but is a near liability now. Worry about the food you eat and the roads you use and a dozen other things before drone strikes.
(source - 8 years working in the Airline business including Engineering and Maintenance - I’ve seen the results of strikes up close and personal and what happens when an aircraft is down checked.
Linux Mint 18.3: A breath of fresh air? Well, it's a step into the unGNOME
ICO slammed for 'unfair' approach to FoI appeal by UK judges
Wednesday 3rd January 2018 22:26 GMT
Re: Testing the security clearance of the ICO
Read the damn article - She had the right to read it - not her office or officers. It would have been trivial to exercise that right in a secure location. In fact you can argue to do her job properly and to maintain public trust in her office she should be exercising that right on a semi regular basis. Something the court of appeal seems to be suggesting.
Wednesday 3rd January 2018 22:23 GMT
Re: It's a very small start.
@AC in your apparent eagerness to make a point you neglected to read the fact that the Judges believed efforts should have been made to disconnect the facts around political decision making from the secret intelligence that informed those decisions. "National Security Guv" is not enough of an excuse.
I look forward to the day they come for you, my only regret will be that I'll have long been carted off myself so I won't hear about it.
Soz, guys. No 'alien megastructure' around Tabby's Star, only cosmic dustbunnies
Wednesday 3rd January 2018 16:57 GMT
Given our current tech can only find earth size exoplanets that kinda puts a *big* lower bound on the size of your blind assuming early 21C Earth tech.
And 80 AU is approx double the average orbital radius of Pluto and only 5 man made objects have passed Pluto (2 Voyagers and Pioneers + New Horizons)
Microsoft Surface Book 2: Electric Boogaloo. Bigger, badder, better
Friday 22nd December 2017 10:36 GMT
Re: 1TB flash
Not sure where you got that price from. A bog standard SATA 1TB will cost you about 250 from Big River, an NVMe one (which I think is in surface) will cost at least £300.
Yes its robbery - just not quite the robbery you are describing.
There were some good black friday deals on surfaces took them from "worse than apple gouging" to "adequate gouging for the shiny" imo
Space.. the fi, er, New Frontiers: NASA to hurl space robot at duck comet – or Saturn moon
This week in 'Bungles in the AWS S3 Privacy Jungles', we present Alteryx – and 123 million households exposed
TalkTalk banbans TeamTeamviewerviewer againagain
Another AI attack, this time against 'black box' machine learning
Monday 18th December 2017 12:48 GMT
Re: let's look at this a little sceptically
You have missed the point entirely. This has nothing to do with physically modifying an image. This is about digitally modifying an image 'on the fly' that is then sent for recognition. Doing physically (i.e. makeup) is essentially hit and miss, whereas a digital process is repeatable.
If it was just physical modification it would old news.
Monday 18th December 2017 09:07 GMT
let's look at this a little sceptically
So looking at this through a commentards cynical gaze all they have managed to do is make a classifier fail to classify something? /slowhandclap
I can do that without trying :)
If read the article correctly (all bullshit bingo no explanations) it works by submitting subtly iffy subjects for classification? Wasn't sure from the explanation if it's just one shot or it needs to be built up over time.
But let's look at workable real world scenarios.
1. Corrupt iPhoneX faceid - requires Physical access - you are screwed anyway.
2. Hijack any ML on a phone - requires at least dodgy App access - ie same as any other malware.
3. Hijack PC ML requires browser or app hijack.
So basically whilst the execution mechanism of the attack is novel the access mechanisms are the usual bog standard ones.
So this is just a novel injection style attack and the usual protections still apply.
Mark as interesting but ultimately low risk.
Critical US mass spying program scrutiny lost amid partisan nonsense
Former ZX Spectrum reboot project man departs
'DJI Mavic' drone seen menacing London City airliner after takeoff
Oregon will let engineer refer to himself as an 'engineer'
European Commission intervenes in Microsoft Irish data centre spat
Friday 8th December 2017 08:41 GMT
I think they'll find the EU disagrees pretty strongly with that first 'creative' assumption on the part of the Department of Jerks.
It's beyond me why they haven't fired the idiot who keeps pushing this. It's clear international data transfers and privacy are matters to be decided at the diplomatic and treaty level. Indeed in this case I believe the mechanism already exists but instead of using it someone at the DoJ has made a decision to waste millions of US tax payers money persuing it.
Time to go and watch Team America: World Police again!
Yes, Britain has an urban-rural 4G schism. This is what it looks like
Thursday 7th December 2017 13:30 GMT
Horses for courses. if you are mostly urban I find 3 better overall than O2, espically M4 corridor/thames valley. Ironic given their respective HQ locations.
Mind you the gaping vortex signal dropout just at the train end of the platforms in Paddington is amusing since you can flick the V's at Voda's HQ from there.
Its so localised I'm almost convinced there is some blocker or alternative transmitter in operation as every network seems to get hit.
Brit bank Barclays' Kaspersky Lab diss: It's cyber balkanisation, hiss infosec bods
French activists storm Paris Apple Store over EU tax dispute
Is Oomi the all-in-one smart home system we've been waiting for?
Sunday 3rd December 2017 22:36 GMT
I’ve been livin the dream with John Lewis/varilight IR dimmers and a harmony remote for years now.
The newer Harmony hub is a thing of joy - it has so many ways of spaffing out EM radiation you can probably use it to self tan. All it’s really missing is a zigbe bridge and it would have the fully monty.
The lovely thing is the state syncronisation I can have the remote and the app open on a phone and an IPad and it all just updates.
Unfit to plead before a US court? You may face 'indefinite detention'
Thursday 30th November 2017 11:24 GMT
Yes. And the habit of the RSPCA in bringing private prosecutions is currently being knocked on the head as an overreach.
Apparently it used to be ok to aggressive about private prosecutions if it was for fluffy animals. Now not so much.
Even the RSPCA have admitted they got overly aggressive.
PS support the aims of the RSPCA but not necessarily the way they decided to execute them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
