* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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Trump gloats, telcos weep, and China is furious: How things stand following UK's decision to rip out Huawei

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A sad day

"Another thought: If U.K. is offering citizenship (or at least the path thereto) to Hong Kongers (which I loudly applaud), is this going to further taint what remains of U.K./China relations?"

It already has. China are not happy about it. China have been pushing the boundaries for quite some while now and finally countries other than their immediate or nearby neighbours are starting to sit up and take notice.

Apple and Google, take note: Newly enacted EU law aims to protect developers from arbitrary decisions of tech giants

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

We have asked Apple

Hahahahahahahahahh!

Gets back up off floor and checks calendar. Nope, still not April 1st. It's only March the 137th.

With another NHS overhaul in the offing, £200m up for grabs in northern England for pretty much anything related to IT

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: We already have all the consultants we need

Have consulted with oner find out? Or were the fees to much for you?

USA ends Hong Kong's special treatment, crimping flow of tech to territory

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"If Winnie The Pooh wanted HK to keep getting special treatment, he shouldn't have broken international law and effectively seized it."

You can't seize or annexe what you already own. "All" he's done is renege on a treaty. It's not good, especially for the people of HK, but it's nothing that another orange tinged Pooh Bear shaped world leader hasn't also done recently (admittedly with less dire consequences). Anyone watching knew this would happen eventually. The only surprise to me is that it's taken this long.

Old-school security hole perfect for worms and remote hijackings found lurking in Windows Server DNS code

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Android bugs aplenty

I wonder how many manufacturers or providers will pass on these bug fixes to phones more than 12 months old?

Pokémon Go players fined for breaking down-under COVID-19 lockdown rules

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Windows

Pokémon Go is still a thing?

Can;t they set up a version that works in Second Life for the die-hard players?

Trump U-turns on foreign student crackdown: F-1, M-1 visa holders allowed to study online mid-pandemic in the US

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Enough with the hysteria.

"This is what you get when you have a CEO in the white house instead of a lawyer. It's unconventional but it shouldn't be."

No, this is what you get when you have a CEO surrounded by "yes" people and throws a strop when he doesn't get his own way. Other CEOs have a board and shareholders to answer to and don't always get to have their own way on a whim without consulting the rest of the board.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: They were getting sued.....

"....by various organizations such as MIT, UC, Havard and so on so I expect there was also a bit of backchannel discussion going on."

Isn't Harvard where most of the USAs best lawyers come from? Probably not a good idea to get into a legal spat with them. Apart from the on staff legal expertise, there's a culture of supporting your Alma Mata in the US. Not only the judge, but your own lawyers might be Harvard grads.

It's handbags at dawn: America to hit France with 25% tariffs on luxuries over digital tax on US tech titans

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: decent enough job

If he's sitting within a 1000 miles of Trump, then it would appear Boris is doing a brilliant job ;-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: When everybody taxes everbody else

That's not what he said.

"exacerbated the recession started in 1929 into The Great Depression. "

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a charred white dwarf star blasted across our galaxy by an ancient semi-supernova

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Mushroom

Boskonians or Galactic Patrol?

Is someone testing out a new weapon?

Cornish drinkers catch a different kind of buzz as pub installs electric fence at bar

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How long...

If it's not already happenedk they are not proper Cornish pub goers.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Great idea

"Would you believe the number of visitors (on holiday from England) who couldn't understand why they couldn't sit inside (it was pissing down). Explained slowly in words of one syllable, but no, they couldn't grasp the concept that Wales is not in England, and has a different government and rules."

Just so you know, not all of us English are that stupid. Sadly, it seems a lot are.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Puntastic

It's a great idea and may well be taken up by pubs Farad wide.

Japanese probe to land asteroid rock sample in Australia on December 6th

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I wonder

"how much thought, peer review and control is actually going into the handling of whatever will be brought back to Earth"

Quite a lot. Mainly because the last thing they want is for the sample to get contaminated before they get a chance to examine it. Anything on the outside is going to get quite hot on the way down.

Detroit Police make second wrongful facial-recog arrest when another man is misidentified by software

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

That might be a red herring/

All in all it's just another bork on the wall: For pity's sake, begs signage, climb onto the pub's roof and boot me up

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Network related?

Not necessarily, that could also be the next fall through boot device after the hard disk/SSD has failed catastrophically and is no longer recognised by the BIOS. It's not likely there would be a network device that could be booted from in one of these devices other than during on-site maintenance. More likely it's got a 3G dongle plugged in for over the air updates when the OS has booted and the drivers etc are loaded.

Spotted the ISS in the sky yet? How about pulling out some spare kit and giving it a listen?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I watched the Win7 tutorial

"It's just enough information to get the apps installed, and get you viewing a test picture."

Agreed, in this case. I was just expanding on my general perception of so much online training, even from so-called reputable;e sources, but in particular large IT businesses with apparently well funded training and education departments.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I watched the Win7 tutorial

In my job, we get told to do online training a couple of times per year. As someone who used to teach many years ago, 99% of online training makes me cringe. Almost none of them are created by people who know how to teach. Many of them just run through a sequence or machine gun spray a load of facts and you're expected to actually learn something from it. Worse, many seem to bounce around topics and rarely are created with lesson progress and building on experience or the previous lesson.

TomTom bill bomb: Why am I being charged for infotainment? I sold my car last year, rages Reg reader

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Whiz bang cars

"Paper maps for the win."

Luckily for those of us who want and need a SatNav for daily use, you can still buy dedicated units. For the more occasional user, a phone mount is cheaper, so long as the screen is usable from wherever you can safely mount it. That has the plus point of keeping your phone battery topped up while you are in the car but a downside that there may be other apps vying for use of the screen.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Just use a phone

Hire cars, unless you are paying for premium service, will rarely have a connected SatNav with live updates. At best it will have an RDS or local equivalent traffic update service which is almost always at least 15-30 minutes out of date, both from incident start to telling you the obstruction is cleared.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Paper maps ...

I remember using an out of date road atlas (maybe 5 years old?) and planning a route based on the map showing a "proposed" road supposed to open a year after the date of the map. Got there and the new motorway extension still didn't exist! (M60 anyone? Years late and paper maps kept showing the proposed route with ever changing and optimistic opening dates on them for years, in particular the eastern part near Ashton.)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: NEVER put your home address in your GPS!

"such as by insurance cards or registrations which BY LAW must be kept in the car somewhere."

Not here in the UK. There's no legal requirement to carry any documentation of any kind with you in normal day to day life.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I don't know what constitutes a lifetime in TomTom's eyes

"I will NOT be buying a Garmin. SWMBO has one, and I hate the interface."

Maybe it's what you are used to. I had a hire with a built-in TomTom. I hated the interface. But then I've been using Garmin for years.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: NEVER put your home address in your GPS!

Autoroute! I remember when it ran on DOS and you had to upgrade to at least an EGA graphics card to use it. It only showed A roads and motorways, mainly in straight lines and if your town was small, it might not be on it. Villages were just ignored :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: NEVER put your home address in your GPS!

"Do you not know where you live?"

Yeah, I do. But having an ETA, getting out of the town or city I'm currently by the quickest route, avoiding delays that I otherwise don't know about etc. are useful functions. Likewise, getting to places I've never been top before. Pre-SatNav I had a couple of road atlases and numerous town and city maps totalling something like £75, which needed updating at least every few years and, as is well known with paper maps, are at least a year out of date when first printed. A £200 SatNav with lifetime map updates is cheaper and more likely to be up to date.You may have a different use case, or be happy to delay your travel while you stop and ask directions, or be happy to be delayed by taking the wrong turning or getting stuck in a queue, but some us would rather just get where we want to be.

I will add that for a short while between relying on published maps and buying a SatNav, I did use multimap.co.uk for a while, screen grabbing and printing relevant maps at relevant scales to get where I wanted to go. But doing that every night ready for the next day is a bit of a chore when I can put a post code and a door number into a satNav and have to do all the heavy lifting more me. It's kind of the raison d'etre of computers. Making life easier for the user.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: As I read that

"(if it's technically possible to start billing via the in-car screen then it's technically possible to stop billing via the in-car screen)."

Try telling that to almost every business that operated any form of subscription service. It's ALWAYS easy to sign up or even to upgrade, but try to downgrade or cancel and 99% of them will make you phone them.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: As I read that

I thought that too. If it comes built into the car, then Mazda have some reasonability for it too. It was their decision to install it. They don't send you off to a subcontractor when a non-Mazda built part such an exhaust or manifold fails, let alone an ECU. Who know just what is in a car that the manufacturer didn't actually build.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: I don't know what constitutes a lifetime in TomTom's eyes

"So I bought a Garmin."

And from past experience, if the base unit doesn't have enough space to store the latest maps, you just add an SD card and it splits the data across the internal and external storage. I wonder why TomTom don't do that? My current Garmin SatNav is about 10 years old and still gets updates. The only issue is that thanks to the GPS rollover it no longer knows which part of the year it's in so the automatic switch between day and night modes doesn't work at the right times and the clock needs to be set manually because it no longer knows when to switch from BST to GMT.

The world's nonsense keeping you awake in middle of the night? Good news. Go outside and see this two-tail comet

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "For the UK, the comet is circumpolar"

"If nobody wants it then maybe the comet could swing by and pick it up before making that return trip to the outer Solar System?"

D'ya think that will get it cold enough to take away the taste?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "For the UK, the comet is circumpolar"

"You won't see it where you are (the UK) because it will be raining."

The weather has been quite nice recently. This explains why it's now cloudy with intermittent rain and likely to remain so for a while. I wonder if the newly BREXITed Britain can get a nice trade deal with Oz? We could export rain and buy lamb.

An email banning our staff from using TikTok? Haha, funny story about that, we didn't mean it – Amazon

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Viva La Revolution @AC

"You've written three very similar posts on this topic now. Please provide a valid reference to this backdoor."

According to the Reddit link in the article, TikTok has the ability to download a zip file from the mothership, extract it and execute an extract binary file. I didn't read thr9ough the links to confirm with any further evidence that might have been presented though. So either the person you are speaking to has done so, or maybe is just basing it on that statement in the initial Reddit post.

China’s preferred Linux distro trumpets Arm benchmark results

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Remind me

"Arm don't design chips"

Don't they? I thought that was the point of ARM. They design the chips then license the designs out.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"So... China goes Capitalist, we go Communist. Interesting plan :)"

Not sure where they are heading, but watching US news and seeing Govt officials, Reps and Sens defending Trumps U turns and contradictions has been fun viewing recently. In particular the way they will defend the party at all costs, logic be damned. Likewise the voxpops with the "common people" attacking or defending Trump. (It goers both ways, but Trump is the incumbent) It's horrifically and stringently partisan that the party members will support and defend the party even when it goes against all common sense and logic.

I'm not sure if the Dems are as bad, but it's become more and more obvious over the last 3.5 years that anyone who disagrees with the party and more specifically, in the case of the GOP, disagrees with Trump, that's pretty much a job if not career ending stance to take. It's all very reminiscent of communist or fascist party methods.

A volt from the blue: Samsung reportedly ditches wall-wart from future phones

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"If the EU really wants to fix "e-waste" this is how you do it. Making the charger comply with a standard doesn't reduce waste in the long run - someday you're going to decide to throw away some of the extra chargers in your junk drawer. Better if you don't accumulate any more than you already have."

Unless, of course, this is the long term result of standardising phone charging connectors. Most people now no longer need a new one so now the e-waste "mountain" of chargers will reduce.

Never mind rail and ports, let's help DPD... and, er, Amazon: UK gov and ESA call for ways to slap logistics with 5G stick

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Did you miss the link in paragraph 5?

Hungry? Please enjoy this delicious NaN, courtesy of British Gas and Sainsbury's

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

The current state of education?

"We realise this message isn’t very customer friendly, so while we fix, we ask that if any of our customers receive to please get in contact so we can check to why it has happened and provide the correct balance."

My English teach would be turning in his grave if he read that piece of poorly constructed word-smithing. Clearly this problem extends to their devs too.

Heir-to-Concorde demo model to debut in October

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Lost Opportunities

"it turns out that supersonic airliners are not actually that interesting."

There was also an element of "Not Invented Here" no-fly bans too.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Starship?

Did you mean New York USA or New York UK?

NASA trusted 'traditional' Boeing to program its Starliner without close supervision... It failed to dock due to bugs

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Devil

Re: A calculation

I said OS/Desktop specifically to differentiate between Windows (an OS) and Desktop, which here on FreeBSD in my case is either KDE or XFCE - The only penguins here are running on RasPis for Kodi. All the rest are Daemons, which eat penguins for lunch :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: A calculation

"Damn getting older, and Damn small fonts :-) Looks like I need to change the handle to 'Magoo'..."

CTRL-+ is your friend, at least in the browser. Going through the settings for your OS/Desktop and increasing all the font sizes is a little more involved.

GCHQ's cyber arm report on Huawei said to be burning hole through UK.gov desks

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: WTF ....... Is the service demented and infiltrated?

"whenever any controversial former MI6 spy such as a Christopher Steele is wheeled out of confinement/quarantine/therapy/shady shadows to share his formerly anonymised ramblings?"

It appears he managed to elude the large bouncy beach balls.

Shopped recently in a small online store? Check this list to see if it was one of 570 websites infected with card-skimming Magecart

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Upscalestripper was hacked!!

I thought it was Upscales Trippers. Holidays or drugs, not sure which :-)

Another anti-immigrant rant goes viral in America – and this time it's by a British, er, immigrant tech CEO

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "popular justice" is no justice at all

My feeling on the use of the word lynching is that it brings back memories of old Westerns. No Western was complete without the lynching of a horse thief, murderer or sheep farmer. It's just american for hanging. It's become more racially charged since even the US outlawed hanging as an official means of execution and become linked to racist rednecks and the KKK in certain states.

Sometimes words or symbols get hijacked and sometimes you have to fight to take it back and stop it being associated with "bad" things. eg the hijacking of the English flag some years ago by the far right. We fought and took it back. Whether "lynching" is one of those words or symbols that needs to be taken back is another matter. There's less use for it nowadays other than in old Westerns and history.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "I was taught to respect people of all races"

"Alcohol has the peculiar effect of revealing who you actually are. If you're a nice guy to be with when sober, and a misogynist asshole when drunk, then you are a misogynist asshole but, when sober, you listen to that little voice in your head telling you not to do that."

Isn't this why it's called "The Demon Drink"? ie when sober, you listen to the angle on your shoulder and when drunk, the demon ion the other shoulder wins out.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: mad internet

"Mob justice looks rather like a lynching."

That still happens every now and then in some southern US states.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: He's not an imigrant

"If you are white some people won't see you as an immigrant and won't say "fuck off back to your own country"."

Unless you are Polish or Romanian in the UK. Spanish, French, German, Italian, and of the Scandi countries etc are ok of course, most of the time. It's odd, because you can't tell by looking but for some reason Poles and Romanians in particular often get discriminated against while other Europeans don't.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: We hear these stories all the time

Yep, humans are herd animals or, as it's more commonly known amongst allegedly thinking creatures, tribal. How that tribe is defined varies from situation to situation. Sports fans, political party members, neighbouring towns, neighbouring countries, and so on from the micro to the macro. People will always identify with one group more than others so "others" become the "enemy" at some level.

We'll pay £400k for a depth charge-proof robot submarine, says UK's Ministry of Defence

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Thats our whole navy ...................

"Apparently they can be heard 30 nautical miles away. "

Since you mention the Chinese, is the sound of the engines relevant when they have live sat coverage of the area?

Psst: Want to know who else has their snout in the Copernicus trough? (spoiler: it's not the UK)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: ESA is not EU

And for that matter, we still paying full EU membership fees until the end of the transition period so yes, UK tax payers are most definitely contributing to these missions.

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