* Posts by Adrian 4

2288 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2009

Venerable text editor GNU Nano reaches version 5.0 and adds the modern frippery that is scrollbars

Adrian 4
Coat

Re: flaws in nano

Colourised text on a light background is also useless. Many common colours in the typical ls -c setup leave you with unreadable filenames.

I always assumed this was because 1334 distro releasers liked dark screens to go with their hoodies, so it's interesting that you find them rubbish on dark, too.

Where do these idiot colour choices come from and why are they default ? GUI applications don't seem to have this problem (ignoring 'cool' websites) but consoles can't seem to get it right.

Is the problem that it's configurable, and therefore MUST be configured - even if it doesn't help ?

OMG I just agreed with bb. Igmc..

A tale of mainframes and students being too clever by far

Adrian 4

Well, duh ..

"When the mainframe recovered, the program request list (including Sam's move of doom) was run again. Again, everything fell over."

They didn't think of running the program _after_ the one that had crashed ?

Seems like the fault was with the college's system programmers, not Sam.

Microsoft confirms pursuit of TikTok after Satya Nadella chats to Donald Trump

Adrian 4

Re: This is excellent news...

Don't care much about whether Tik Tok survives, except that the more competitors facebook has, the better.

Burn baby burn, plastic inferno! Infosec researchers turn 3D printers into self-immolating suicide machines

Adrian 4

Re: Hardware failsafes?

You know the answer to that : it's the old favourite, cost. And, to some extent, practicality. What use would a 270C limit be when paper ignites (famously) at 232C (451F) ?

Adrian 4

Re: Is this really news ?

That's a bizarre argument.

The cheap ones commonly sold at places liker Amazon or Aldi clearly aren't meant for industrial or eductional uses. So if they're not meant for homes, what are they meant for ?

I'll grant you that not every home - by a long way - will have one. But that's purely a function of the homeowners interests, as with any device. You could say the same about home computers, sewing machines, or footballs. To some people they're essential. To others, not so much.

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Adrian 4

What do you expect ?

When they deal with 'dog ate my homework' every lesson, isn't a bit of that going to rub off ?

Someone made an AI that predicted gender from email addresses, usernames. It went about as well as expected

Adrian 4

why even bother ?

So why did they do this ?

The only reason I can think of is that they want to use stereotypes in one form (email addresses etc) to estimate how to use stereotypes in another (the types of advert that is intended to appeal to stereotypical men and women). Seems like it's truncating precision as far as it can by reducing to binary gender, then extrapolating from that to choose an advertising strand.

It difficult to think of a less useful thing to do.

A more useful thing that doesn't pre-assume the results might be to attempt to link the input data with the desired outcome : If prettypolly@gmail.com actually BUYS dresses, that's a useful result that doesn't just throw data away,

Sick of AI engines scraping your pics for facial recognition? Here's a way to Fawkes them right up

Adrian 4

Re: Yabbut...

Exactly.

It's an Expert System with a built-in method of extracting the information needed to train it.

VMware to stop describing hardware as ‘male’ and ‘female’ in new terminology guide

Adrian 4

Re: Here we go

Nice idea. I frankly don't care much about whether I use 'master' and 'slave'. If it truly hurts someone I'm happy to stop. If it's just being offended on behalf of someone who isn't offended I'm less impressed.

The problem is, 'master' and 'slave' describe an architecture. If those aren't acceptable any more, we need a new euphemism for 'entity that gives orders' and 'entity that obeys orders'. It's the nature of euphemisms to propagate offensiveness downstream, so I don't see that they help much.

But on the offchance that a change of words rather than concept makes everybody happy, I really like the idea of calling workers drones. And by extension, the supervisor should be called Queen. There's a certain amount of karma in the replacement for master being female.

UK.gov admits it has not performed legally required data protection checks for COVID-19 tracing system

Adrian 4

Re: But of course

Given that Boris & Dom's (or Doris', given the liking for portmanteau couple names) idea seems to have been to do a Trump and deny there's any sort of problem (for fear of hurting the economy) until forced to do otherwise by events, then yes, I think someone without a banker's hand up their arse might well have done better.

They could, after all, have hardly done worse.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/

Adrian 4

Re: what charges...

Dear Coward,

The very last thing this government can be held up as a shining example of is decision-making.

About the only valid thing Corbyn can be accused of is not pandering to the media.

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users. It's meant to work like that, right?

Adrian 4

'Relevant' ads

Meanwhile, ads that are targeted at you based on your web history and failing dismally at their job - flinging washing machine ads after you've bought a washing machine - have become such a cliche that comedians are using them. Perhaps the targeting just doesn't work very well.

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Adrian 4

Well, it wouldn't log temperatures when they were too high for it to run, now would it ?

Rental electric scooters to clutter UK street scenes after Department of Transport gives year-long trial the thumbs-up

Adrian 4

Re: Logic

And why explicitly require them to have 'wheels arranged in line, one behind the other' ? I don't see anything more dangerous about the Segway concept, and it's a good deal more interesting and flexible.

Adrian 4

Re: Rental sucks.

I might use one when I go (as I often do) into london by train. Maybe that makes me a tourist.

One does not simply repurpose an entire internet constellation for sat-nav, but UK might have a go anyway

Adrian 4

Re: A face-saving solution...

So, spend £500M buying a share. Spend another couple of £B making it work. Then, because running broadband services is a job for corporations, not the public purse, flog it off to $friend for a few £M.

Tory all the way.

Here's a headline we'll run this century, mark our words: Alien invaders' AI found on Mars searching for signs of life

Adrian 4

Re: So

It's not quite like that. According the the article, the AI looks for things it knows about. Presumably it sends the oddities in full.

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

Adrian 4

Re: Strings

We'll leave it to our readers to debate the pros and cons of writing a script that depends on the format of a copyright string in order to keep a production line ticking over.

But that would require a spec for the string, stating which parts are guaranteed to unchangable and which might vary in different editions.

Supply me that spec and I'll ensure I parse it safely.

And that spec is where ?

The problem lies not with the programmer but with the vendor.

OnePlus to disable camera colour feature with pervy tendencies in latest flagship smartphone

Adrian 4

Sounds like the Sony camera bug of several years ago : in that case it was iirc the disabling of the camera's IR filter (usually only done when used with IR illumination) in daylight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpWBIt2gjzY

Podcast Addict banned from Google Play Store because heaven forbid app somehow references COVID-19

Adrian 4

Re: normalising censorship?

Lots of downvotes but sabroni is right.

If you're part of google's ecosystem, you're there because it benefits you commercially. If google says jump and you don't ask how high, tough.

It may be difficult to exist outside the dominant culture but plenty of people have been pointing out the problems with monocultures forever. If you want to make use of google, facebook or microsoft, play by their rules or play somewhere else.

Better yet, do your best to bring down monocultures. In the end, they only benefit themselves.

NHS contact tracing app isn't really anonymous, is riddled with bugs, and is open to abuse. Good thing we're not in the middle of a pandemic, eh?

Adrian 4

Re: One would have throught...

But this is on a phone.

Yes, UK people have been known to object to government monitoring, though usually only after long campaigns. But it seems they'll load any old crapp on their phones.

Firefox 74 slams Facebook in solitary confinement: Browser add-on stops social network stalking users across the web

Adrian 4

It's a start

Why don't all sites get this treatment ? FB is only the worst.

Duped into running bogus virus scans at Office Depot? Dry your eyes with a small check from $35m settlement

Adrian 4

Re: And what about the others?

People are also inclined to trust a bricks and mortar store more. Many fewer people trust a popup ad.

Office Depot were trading on this trust when they told customers in their store that they had a problem.

Call us immediately if your child uses Kali Linux, squawks West Mids Police

Adrian 4

Re: Be fair

Talk to him. Like a proper parent would.

Oh, and keep him away from immoral influences such as lawyers.

Adrian 4

The vast majority of the computers that are 'hacked' are running Windows.

So if your teen has Windows on their machine, the chances are they're practising exploits on it.

Outlook more like 'look out!' as Microsoft email decides everything is spam today

Adrian 4

Re: Windows Search is down, too.

Are you suggesting that there are installs of Win 10 that aren't buggy ?

How do you get them ?

What is WebAssembly? And can you really compile C/C++ to it? And it'll run in browsers? Allow us to explain in this gentle introduction

Adrian 4

Re: Wasm is evolving extremely rapidly, and new information and changes occur weekly

It'll be like Python : extended every month and the devs writing for public consumption use all the latest features. So we'll end up installing a new wasm byte-code interpreter every time we load a web page.

In deepest darkest Surrey, an on-prem SAP system running 17-year-old software is about to die....

Adrian 4

You wish

The business case warns the new system would potentially "reduce back-office staff costs" and "reduce the number of business support staff required to support a SaaS-based technology".

'potentially' is the key. This is standard boilerplate for proposals and means nothing. When did you ever see a government system that required less civil servants than the one that preceded it ? In fact it will take three times as many staff for the 5-year transition and twice as many thereafter.

A Notepad nightmare leaves sysadmin with something totally unprintable

Adrian 4

Re: three decades

The 90s were just a few days ago.

And some of my colleagues weren't born yet :(.

Snakes on a wane: Python 2 development is finally frozen in time, version 3 slithers on

Adrian 4

Re: Apple's walled garden

"The problem comes when Red Hat want to pin the version the system uses at say 3.5 but the user wants 3.8 for applications and both versions are known as "python3". This change lets two versions of 3.x coexist without conflicts."

And so it continues ...

You know something is broken when the fix for it is 'give it it's own private environment with all its dependencies packaged in so it doesn't break everything else'

Remember the Dutch kid who stuck his finger in a dam to save the village? Here's the IT equivalent

Adrian 4

And in the Fens.

Devils must have been common in watery places.

Adrian 4

Re: Once upon a time in Brighton...

I had an upper-case only terminal at one time. Wasn't it possible to enter lower-case by escaping with a backslash ?

Buy Amazon's tiny $99 keyboard so you can make terrible AI music for all your friends

Adrian 4

Oh, good

Like we need more plastic music.

I often wonder, when passing a TV playing 'drama' what it must be like to have a job where you compose or play those meaningless, content-free sequences of notes that fill in the gaps in the dialogue. Soul-destroying, I would think. If they even had a soul in the first place.

Didn't Julia in '1984' work on the novel-writing machines ? Orwell saw a lot further into the future than mere politics.

Vote rigging, election fixing, ballot stuffing: Just another day in the life of a Register reader

Adrian 4

Re: side issue of green beer

TIL ..

Thanks. I was under the impression that the Weisse part was a conventional weissebeer.

Adrian 4

Re: side issue of green beer

Weissbeer coloured green with Waldmeister (as served in Berlin) is a lot nicer than it should be.

Open-source Windows Terminal does the splits: There ain't no party like a multi-pane party

Adrian 4

Because MS love to prove that 'those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly' -Henry Spencer, 1987.

Bose customers beg for firmware ceasefire after headphones fall victim to another crap update

Adrian 4

Re: Just bought a set of QC 35 II's ...

That's what I was told by a developer. I would love to get a definitive answer.

As I understand it, the argument goes like this :

If you want to search for and connect to your bluetooth device, you can search for arbitrary bluetooth devices.

If you can search for arbitrary bluetooth devices then you can see beacons.

Beacons provide location information.

Therefore if you want to search for bluetooth devices you must have been given permission to obtain location.

It may be that if you only use generic bluetooth services negotiated by the OS (such as bluetooth audio connections) or use a connection that has been paired through the OS's settings, there is no need for the location permission.

So it may be that the problem occurs because developers like to connect in-app rather than push users to the pairing setting. That's a reasonable requirement given the knowledge of the typical user, and google could support it in a useful way, which is why I blame google rather than the developers.

Actual explanation from a knowledgable developer welcome.

Adrian 4

Re: Just bought a set of QC 35 II's ...

You can't have a bluetooth connection without agreeing to location services.

Because google.

Adrian 4

Google trashed the early Nexus 7 tablets (2011 ? 2012?) with a software update that ruined performance and battery life.

As far as I'm aware they never apologised or fixed it. They just completley ignored it and supported only the later version until everyone got fed up complaining.

A big problem with using consumer protection law is that it will usually have expired for the hardware purchase and isn't relevant for the 'free' software update. So it's probably better to tackle it as theft of service or wanton damage.

We are absolutely, definitively, completely and utterly out of IPv4 addresses, warns RIPE

Adrian 4

Maybe they could bulldoze him into a ditch. That's two promises fulfilled - a record for Boris.

Amnesty slams Facebook, Google over 'pervasive surveillance' business model

Adrian 4

Re: Amnesty International's own privacy commitment

As does el reg.

But since I delete the cookies once they're no longer useful to me anyway, I prefer this approach to a huge in-your-face 'cookie policy' popup that wants me to read pages of crap and confirm three times that no, I really don't want their tracking cookies to improve my experience, thank you, and have a cookie set to say so.

UK public sector IT chiefs shrug off breach threats: The data we hold isn't that important

Adrian 4

Re: wrong question perhaps?

Perhaps they meant 'It won't cost us out business if we lose this data because we don't actually HAVE a business, and fines for government departments, if they exist at all, are just a paper exercise'.

Losing your civil service pension, on the other hand, might be seen as a reasonable deterrent.

Second time lucky: Sweden drops Julian Assange rape investigation

Adrian 4

Re: Stating the obvious

'given the nature of what he did'

Except no adult outside of a trolly astroturfer would say that now a swedish court have decided that there is far too little reliable evidence to be sure of any such thing. Because it would be libel.

Microsoft joins Google and Mozilla in adopting DNS over HTTPS data security protocol

Adrian 4

Re: ISPs complain that they use the ability to see DNS queries to

Why would governments care ? They'll just get logs from google etc. on pain of allowing them to continue to exist.

Pack your bags, you're going to America, Lord Chief Justice tells accused Brit hacker

Adrian 4

Re: Odd thought

Wouldn't the proportions operate the other way round, with the more-populous country sending a larger number (but still small proportion) of its residents to the less-populous country ?

HP to Xerox: Nope, your $33.5bn bid falls short of our valuation

Adrian 4

Re: Hp inc real value What it is ?

I think we all know how good HP is at valuing companies.

Ex-Capita accountant who claimed £10k bung to leave was blackmail has appeal thrown out

Adrian 4

Re: Who cares?

As an accoutant, too.

The only profession in which 'creative' is synonymous with 'criminal'.

Like a BAT outta hell, Brave browser hits 1.0 with crypto-coin rewards for your fave websites

Adrian 4

worth trying

Stunningly fast on ebay, without the clunky gaps on every scroll. But gmail is pathetically addicted to its cookies and won't go past the moan page.

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

Adrian 4

Re: About this single point of failure business

Read any account of a technical disaster, such as a plane crash. The problem is never one failure - nearly all systems, except perhaps cheap IoT, can handle that. It's a chain of disasters that spiral down to the point where there is nothing left keeping you alive except Lady Luck.

Adrian 4

Re: Well that was a waste...

He's in France.

He was lucky the installer made a vague mention that he might have a problem some time in the future (RTFA) but actually insisting on fitting something else would be right out.

Your property. Your decision. Your problem. <shrug>