* Posts by TRT

9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009

AI really can't copyright the art it generates – US officials

TRT Silver badge

Re: Slippery slope

Paris icon for "slippery slope".

TRT Silver badge

But it would need to have named directors and submit accounts. Which I suppose he could do.

TRT Silver badge

Exactly.

TRT Silver badge

Re: The tool isn't important; the person wielding the tool matters

Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror.

TRT Silver badge

I see the argument as akin to the works of Schaub for example who produces work by filling a leaky bucket with paint and suspending it by a rope above a canvas. The bucket swings, the paint flows, artist sells the resulting canvas. The copyright exists in the idea to do this coupled with the uniqueness of that piece. Schaub is not the only or the first artist to paint this way though. There is no patent on production of works by this technique.

Neither the bucket nor the rope has been assigned copyright for the art they produced.

Users complain of missing data in UK wills search service

TRT Silver badge

Re: Special characters

Multibyte regex is a thing. Though the W3C spec for regex in the PATTERN attribute doesn't specify if it should be mb aware or not. I think. Unless it's in a definition somewhere.

TRT Silver badge

Re: It's the British way...

I think that's called Sod Murphy's Law.

TRT Silver badge

See my previous comment on the PATTERN attribute, REGEX and hinting for these password generators.

TRT Silver badge

Re: Special characters

That's what they SHOULD be doing of course... but many don't allow "special" characters for some reason, and often you don't know that until it gets sent to a backend process. Sometimes of course the password validity is checked before being submitted. There are some reasons why you wouldn't want to submit some unusual characters, but then one should really be encrypting the password before transmission anyway, just in case! There are also maximum password lengths on many sites.

Anyway, besides all that, password suggestions generated by autofill suggestion tend to be restricted to not include special characters or only the dash and the rest is made up with random upper and lower case letters and numbers. They also limit themselves to e.g. 16 characters only. I suspect this is an attempt to maximise compatibility with websites, but it does restrict the range of passwords again - a sort of composition requirement by default.

If the PATTERN attribute of the password input, for example, was used to indicate acceptable values, then such auto-filled suggestions could better match the coder's requirement at either the back end or client-side. It would be totally possible to have a regex which simply hints to the suggestions composer which special characters are allowed and length, say, between 8 and 64 characters long:

(?=(.*[a-z]){0,})(?=(.*[A-Z]){0,})(?=(.*[0-9]){0,})(?=(.*[@%+\/$^?:,(){}[]~´-_.]){0,}).{8,64}

(escaping removed for clarity)

That is in this example any 8 to 64 character string made up of any number of lowercase, uppercase, numeric or special characters from the list. It would be great of course if this was somehow given a "shorthand" value such as "ISO_27001"

This would allow these random generators to become even more random with some confidence. It doesn't stop the site from additionally parsing the supplied input against a cracking dictionary or compromised list.

TRT Silver badge

Re: Special characters

I've often wondered why sites don't implement some type of form input meta-data that informs e.g. Apple keychain, what are the minimum requirements for a password.

All too often I've found that Apple's rather handy random password generation tool falls foul of password restrictions on a site which means you have to fall back to old school methods of putting it in, which usually ends up as something like catchurchball&N33DC4P52!!!

Dido Harding's appointment to English public health body ruled unlawful

TRT Silver badge

Re: What law?

A philosophy question... Article 7 of the declaration of human rights states that there should be no punishment without law, but is there no law without punishment?

I think that's fairly simple to answer... restorative justice does not seek to impose a punishment, merely the restoration of losses. Is that considered a punishment or penalty, though? The removal of gain.

I think the matter is open to debate really. What are other people's opinions or thoughts on this?

Sheffield Uni cooks up classic IT disaster in £30m student project: Shifting scope, leadership changes, sunk cost fallacy

TRT Silver badge

Financial Quarters

I hear you. The MySQL Quarter function has to be one of the most useless functions around. It returns 1 if the month is between January and March inclusive, 2 for April to June etc...

BUT businesses can select their own accounting reporting period, so Q1 for Apple starts on Sept 26th I think it is, whereas Oracle's is June 1st.

I did suggest an extension to the function whereby the Fiscal Year start date could be passed to it, but for some reason I got bawled out of the forum by a couple of irate developers.

TRT Silver badge

Re: Out of curiosity, here is a question:?

Great idea! Every university should do it!

TRT Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Once Again, My Words of Wisdom

How do I bookmark this?

TRT Silver badge

Re: I'd be tempted

Nah. You're talking about Sheffield here. Their reputation is stainless.

TRT Silver badge
Joke

Re: WTF

Management is made up of transferrable skills.

I don't need to be Geoff Boycott in order to deliver an effective whack to the back of someone's head with a cricket racquet!

TRT Silver badge

Re: "let's just create a spreadsheet online"

Or a less proprietary data management system!

TRT Silver badge

We had a studio and control room / gallery and voice-over booths etc.

It caught fire (well, something outside caught fire and it spread.

We were asked by the insurers to cost a replacement.

The original studio and control room etc had actually been cobbled together by a succession of ex-BBC engineers who had retired and got bored in their early retirement so decided to get part-time jobs at the local technical college.

The cost for replacing it with comparable commercial kit was over 5 million.

Their assessor hadn't done a very good job in setting the premium! Still, they paid up, I'll give them that, and we had a first rate training facility for all of 2 years until the manglement fuzzed up the financial position so badly that the college effectively closed. They stopped offering any courses even remotely useful (they tend to be costlier to teach), sold the building (including the studio), moved into smaller accommodation and from then on it was practically all business studies, management courses and social sciences instead of printing, media production, music production, engineering, photography, ceramics etc.

File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did

TRT Silver badge

Re: file extensions

I remember the days when TLAs actually were TLAs.

Massive cyberattack takes Ukraine military, big bank websites offline

TRT Silver badge

Re: Is this the False False Flag Operation

Well unless the NSA wanted to demonstrate how effective cyber warfare could be by staging a false flag attack at a time of heightened tension with a believable scape goat ready to blame solely in order to increase cyber defence and therefore their own budget allocation..,

Hang on...

Isn't that the plot of Swordfish?

TRT Silver badge

Re: US intelligence is really good

Military Intelligence?

Sounds like a good idea! Let's implement it.

TRT Silver badge

Re: Is this the False False Flag Operation

That Ukraine hacked its own websites and blamed it on Russia? Given that report from the west this week that however many percent of cyber-crime proceeds goes to Russian hacking crews, this is clearly slanderous and we must invade to silence them!

That kind of False Flag Operation?

TRT Silver badge

Re: Preparedness vs Lassitude

What I hear whenever I see the word "Oligarch":-

Well isn't this another fine mess you got us into?

I'm sorry Oli...

Microsoft Teams unable to send and receive calls for some after update

TRT Silver badge

Re: Running normally?

I'm (half) hearing you buddy!

Beware the big bang in the network room

TRT Silver badge

Re: Had he never seen Star Trek?

How many years???!!!

It's dice. Die is singular.

But I always believed the railway running each day was determined by a modified version of Owzat! With minutes delay on one bar and if you scored an Owzat! Roll the other bar marked with Bridge Strike, Persons on the Line, Derailment, Signalling Problem, Trackside Fire and "Leave 'em Guessing"

TRT Silver badge

Or use one of those spring loaded patch bays.

TRT Silver badge

Re: Had he never seen Star Trek?

If we did it by the book like Lt Savik, hours could seem like days.

Apple tweaks AirTags to be less useful for stalkers, thieves

TRT Silver badge

Re: Fun ways to kill one.

Downvoted for not realising that the smaller the dog, the bigger the shit.

TRT Silver badge

Re: Fun ways to kill one.

Oh I'm sure that users HAVE consented. I'd try and find where they agreed but you know, hundreds of pages to go through and only a limited amount of time before work tomorrow.

TRT Silver badge

Re: Fun ways to kill one.

This. Second time today I've referred to this movie, oddly.

TRT Silver badge

Purse for our American viewers... And if Apple know you have a purse (or wallet) they'll try to empty it. OK, for some they try to empty it by making cool stuff that you want, for others they try to empty it by rinsing you - it depends on your view of Apple!

TRT Silver badge

Well I guess if it's been placed to track people then it require gathering information about people. If it's been placed to track your dog or your cat or your handbag then it'll be gathering information on those things too.

TRT Silver badge

Re: What the hell ?

By ejecting tagged covid particles?

TRT Silver badge

That's just a big old aerial for a tracking device.

TRT Silver badge

Re: Fun ways to kill one.

Insert it into the caramel bit of a mars bar and toss it to the rats that are living in the old cement works. Then put on your Apple Watch and project a holo-image of yourself whilst hiding behind a pillar ready to jump out and ambush your stalker.

BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store

TRT Silver badge

Re: sooo, is this story about Newegg's warranty service?

Ouch! I thought the wound under the NewEgg scab had healed but no... you just picked at it.

TRT Silver badge

Re: Electronics shop

I used to work for Tandy. Overpriced but very handy for the electronics hobbyist. I can still recall most of the range codes.

TRT Silver badge

Re: Electronics shop

Last night I watched Linus having a moodle through a box containing the entire shelf-stock of a bankrupt High Street / mail order IT bits supplier. Quite a trek through the useless tat these shops held.

'Boombox' function sparks Tesla recall

TRT Silver badge

Re: Could be good uses for this.....

It even sounds like a car horn in there doesn't it?

:)

TRT Silver badge

Re: Could be good uses for this.....

Big Six by Judge Dread.

Little Boy Blue come blow up you horn Ay Ay Ay!

TRT Silver badge

Re: not really a recall?

Recall?

TRT Silver badge

Re: Could be good uses for this.....

No, no, no.... No, no, no!*

*This isn't the clip half of you are thinking it is!

TRT Silver badge

Re: The press has really gone all in on these headlines

I believe Mazda owners are currently experiencing bricked radios because of a bug involving un-suffixed Album Art media files broadcast OTA by some radio stations.

Add to this the Bad Clock bug affecting Honda and Acura and we are starting to get a nice little catalogue of examples.

Users sound off as new Google Workspace for Education storage limits near

TRT Silver badge

Re: A lot of research data will never be read again

Argh! I want to downvote you for saying data are worthless. But I can't because you speak the truth!

Jeff Bezos adds some more overheads to his $485m yacht by taking down historic bridge

TRT Silver badge

I believe it's revealed in his last episode...

TRT Silver badge

Re: Can't they remove the masts, simply?

I'm sure some sort of inflatable mast would be possible... pump in sea water at high pressure until the desired level of turgidity is achieved. And you could still have a bulbous end if required. Though if it sprung a leak right at the top...

TRT Silver badge

Re: Can't they remove the masts, simply?

You mean perform a triple mastectomy?

TRT Silver badge

Re: Picture or it didn't happen

But highly advanced, technically. It even has a auto-pilot mode... software supplied by some company called alseT that popped a glossy brochure through his door very late one evening.

TRT Silver badge

Re: Meh

BOAT = Bung On Another Thousand.