Posts by Loyal Commenter 5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010
Part of the issue is that lithium ion batteries just don't last forever. I've read that as a rule of thumb, a battery loses 1/5 of it's capacity every 1000 charge cycles, and about the same amount every 12 months if left unused.
The fact that most modern phones have batteries that are not designed to be replacable is just a sign that they have designed-in obsolescence. I don't know about you, but if I'm going to spend £1000 on something, I'd want it to not wear out after 3 years.
What sort of graduates will you need in post-brexit Britain?
If you want the economy to be strong, STEM subjects are a must. It's ridiculously short-sighted to suggest that the cost of these should be shouldered by the students alone, especially since this has the effect of precluding, or at the least scaring off, students from lower income backgrounds. Once people graduate, teh increased income they will earn will more thna make up the difference in tax dividends.
If you want society to be healthy, you need the other subjects as well. Again, it's short-sighted to not pay for them from general taxation.
The problem we have now is that the previous government got a dividend from passing on the cost to the students, and to now go back to fully funding students (as they should) would incur that cost in the current budget (with the benefits being in a future one). It's this sort of short-termism (mostly by the Tory government, but the Blairite Labour government is also to blame) that has screwed our country over...
Only math you need, really.
In this country, we call it maths, or more properly, mathematics. It's a broad field, encompassing multiple concepts, so it's a plural. What's next? Calling physics physic?
Assuming the modem supports it, multiple devices attached to it that each support 1Gbps wired ethernet?
Why you'd even need that in a domestic setting is another matter, but I'm sure some bright spark will come along with the latest consumer device and demonstrate how it can actually use that sort of bandwidth (streaming VR perhaps?)
I can still remember the days when 1-2Mbps "broadband" was considered fast, downloads were in the low MBs and disk sizes were in the 10s-100s of MB. Believe it or not, it really wasn't that long ago. These days, storage is in TBs, downloads for games are 10s of GB, and people are streaming 4K video to mutliple devices. As storage capacities go upwards, the data expands to fill the available space, and the rate of expansion goes up to match!
YMMV, but in my experience, all the major telco providers are as bad as each other.
Years ago, I was with Telewest (who later got bought by Virgin). They had a reasonably decent service at an affordable price. Of course, back then, "reasonable" speeds were in the 1Mbps range, and Wi-Fi didn't exist for normal consumers.
When I moved to another property, I couldn't get fibre, and was with BT, then Phorm happened, and I thought "they're expensive, slow, and selling my data".
I moved to Talk-Talk when they were a new-ish company. Faster, cheaper broadband, but it turned out their data security was even worse than BT's (although through incompetence, rather than malice). Reliability also turned out to be poor, and their customer service is a joke.
I've heard horror stories about the other telcos that are basically just BT resellers (or PlusNet, which IIRC is owned by BT) - extremely poor customer service, and being shunted around between your ISP, and OpenRetch when there's a fault that needs fixing.
I'm now living somewhere I can get a coax offering from Virgin. Thier customer service is just as bad as anyone else's, but I do seem to get a solid and reliable 100Mbps connection, and, more importantly for online gaming, with a reasonable latency.
I don't think there is any ideal combination of reliability, price, speed, and good customer service. So far, for me, they seem the most acceptable compromise.
As I said, YMMV...
It's a good thing that there have nver been any exploits that allow data to be treated by a computer as if it is instructructions then. Like, oh I don't know, every buffer overflow exploit ever.
Now, of course I don't want to trivialise the hard work that I'm sure Boeing have put into trying to secure the hardware, however as any securty expert will tell you, security is extremely hard. If you think you've made something perfectly secure, you probably haven't understood it properly.
If the threee networks on the plane are physically connected in any way, then there is the potential for flaws that allow the isolation between them to be broken. This does raise the question of why you would have any connections between an avionics system, a business network, and an entertainment system. Surely the only cast-iron way of securing the avionics is to have that system completely isolated from the others. What are the use cases that require those networks to interact?
Logging stuff isn't an issue. It's where you put logs and who has access to them.
Well, yes and no. If your logs contain sensitive information (such as PID), then you need to be able to know what is in them, where they are, and manage that data, to be compliant with GDPR. You have the potential problem of PID proliferation, where you need, under elgislation, to be able to tell a data subject exactly what data you hold on then, and, if requested, remove all of that information. That includes the data, if it is in a human-readable form in a log file (or can be converted to such).
There's a world of differnece between loggin that patient ID 12345 was brought into surgery with item 522 inserted into their 89347, and replacing those IDs with things that are human-readable. For example, if patient 12345 has their record expunged under GDPR, the log file wouldn't tell you their name, it would just point to a deleted, or redacted record in your database.
Logging authentication requests is another area where you would want to not include certain things in the log files as a matter of course, such as user names and passwords, unless you were trying to trouble-shoot a specific issue that required them, and then you would be careful to remove such logging after you were done with it and delete the log files if they contained real credentials. It's akin to people uploading their AWS keys to github and then being surprised when they get a bill for £2k worth of compute time because someone has used them to mine Bitcoins.
Things like NLog can be a minefield, especially since they tend to search quite a wide path for config files. If you can manage to inject a config file with settings that output the logs at a trace level to somewhere under your control, it represents an attack vector for data extraction. Such vulnerabilites tend to be expolited in conjunction with others, so a user may be able to place such a file in a place where they do have access, without having access to the more sensitive locations that may read it and act on it.
What is more, a user with legitimate access to a program's location may be able to craft a config file that will cause software to log things that otherwise would remain secret to them. This could range from trivial information about the structure of the software, to priveliged information about other users' accounts, encyption keys, et al. Best practice suggests that they really shouldn't be able to do so, but I bet you there's plenty of leaky software out there.
Good developers know this - I've met plenty of good developers in my time. I can categorically state that I've also met more of the other type.
This is what happens when you get managers telling developers to log everything for troubleshooting purposes, but not highlight that this shouldn't include unredacted sensitive information.
I wonder how many bits of software there are out there that start spewing out detailed log files if you stick an nlog.config or similar in their program directory (or somewhere in their path).
The triplication system requires a polling system - i.e if Phone C returns a different answer to the other two, you can hazard a guess that C is wrong and A and B are okay.
See also: Minority Report (the short-story, not the awful film).
Yup, Philip K Dick beat you to it by about 60 years...
Microsoft attributed the attacks to a nation-state group it calls STRONTIUM, which largely targets governments, IT, military, defence and engineering organisations – as well as anti-doping agencies, political groups, and the hospitality industry.
Hey, it could be anyone, I mean there's lots of nation states with grudges against anti-doping agencies...
Maybe they should have gone with MOSCOVIUM...
"Bored of" is a neologism, but now in common usage, and generally perfectly acceptable.
Here's a five-year old grammar blog discussing the usage (and how it has changed from five years prior to that):
http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/real-grammar-quiz-question-3-bored-with-it-or-bored-of-it
It's probably fair to assume that "bored of" could well have taken over from "bored with" by now.
There is no confusion of meaning when using it, so go ahead, I say! The preposition is largely moot, you could say "bored of", "bored with", "bored from", "bored by", "bored at", and probably several others, and still be understood (and be syntactically sound, unlike the uterrings of the real grammar criminals who say "should of" rather than "should have").
Language evolves, or we'd all be speaking Middle English like Chaucer.
What about the compiler, have you read the source code of that? Do you know if it compiles only what's in the kernel source code files and does not inject its own code into the final binaries? What did you compile the compiler with?
A proof-of-concept of this attack was done decades ago...
https://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/04/15/strange-loops-dennis-ritchie-a
Essentially, Thompson modified the C compiler to insert a backdoor into the login command. He then modified the compiler to add the code to do that into itself when compiled, compiled the compiler, then removed his extra code from the compiler's source code, so that when you compile the compiler, it adds the code to backdoor the login command on compilation back into the compiler, even though the mechanism to do so is nowhere in the source code.
The only way to get around this is to hand-compile the compiler, and then you have to trust the hardware it runs on anyway. Get your soldering iron out, and start hand-rolling your own capacitors...
It's not sexist, racist, or moronic, to point out that someone is an idiot. If they rise to a position of authority and demonstrate that idiocy publicly, then it's pretty much fair game to take the piss out of them for it too.
Just to be perfectly clear: she's a fucking idiot, and it has nothing to do with her race or gender, and furthermore, pointing out that she is an idiot has nothing to suggest about the poster's level of intelligence. Bitching about it suggests something about yours though.
Or those ones with two people stood at a desk (an asian woman and black man to mee the ethnicity / gender diversity quota for marketing images) in impeccably neat business attire, both pointing at a crayola-level pie chart on a 44" monitor.
It's at the same level as pictures of women laughing whilst eating salad.
Iain Duncan Smith said that 3m people will lose their jobs.
I've just checked up on this, and what IDS actually said was that British people are lazy, and that immigrants would take 3M "new jobs" that he dreamt up from some dodgy statistics. Nothing that remotely backs up what you are claiming.
Another direct quote from IDS:
I believe not a single job will be lost, I think this is all complete nonsense
So, not only does the man himself directly contradict your claim, everything he says is bollocks anyway, and by deduction, not only is what you are saying total bollocks, but it is even moreso than something spouted by a man who is arguably one of the most repellant political figures in modern British history.
In short - nothing to do with lies made during the referendum campaign, total bollocks to boot, and if you did find a quote where IDS is lying, he's a fucking brexiter, so you're arguing against the wrong side.
0/10 for effort.
One looked like a bank statement, or letter from a bank. I perhaps have a bad habit of looking at the return address before opening 'my' mail, and also almost opened that one because it was from my bank.
Well, in that case, I'd suggest that either the former occupant of your address is an idiot for not informing their bank of a change of address (presumably more than 3 months ago, or however long it is you can get your post redirected), or the bank has failed to update thier data, in which case it's probably a matter for the ICO. Either way, since this is already a problem, I can hardly see that adding more wood to the fire will help, by requiring data controllers to try and contact the data subjects. They'll end up doing so at the lowest possible cost, which won't include doing it securely.
Alan Johnson, former shadow chancellor, claimed two thirds of manufacturing jobs were dependent on Europe. The figure is actually 15%
15% are directly dependent, 2/3 sounds like a reasonable figure to me, when you factor in supply chains and all the jobs that are indirectly dependent.
Anna Soubry claimed a recession would occur simply by a vote to Leave. In fact UK was the third fastest growing G7 economy during 2018
Hardly printed on the side of a bus, and a quote from a single not-particularly-high-profile politician, but I don't think our economy is exactly booming at the moment; manufacturing is in recession and growth has flatlined.
Foreign investment into the UK would collapse. In fact in the first half of 2018, direct foreign investment into the UK was higher than anywhere else in the world bar China.
We haven't left yet. Lots of financial institutions have already moved offices to mainland Europe. I don't see large foreign companies investing in the UK (but I stand to be corrected) - car manuafacturers, for instance are de-investing. It all turns on what you mean by foreign investment as well. If you count Russian oligarchs and oil sheikhs buying up property in Belgravia, then it's not like it's actually great for the country.
Iain Duncan Smith said that 3m people will lose their jobs. In fact UK currently has the lowest unemployment in over 40 years, and the lowest in the EU.
If you believe a word that comes from IDS's mouth, then you're a bigger fool than him. He's a brexiter himself. That aside, most of the jobs "created" seem to be in the "gig economy" where people are living hand-to-mouth. In-work poverty has sky-rocketed, especially when those in work depend on benefits that suddenly get delayed for 4 weeks because of Universal Credit (another of IDS's brainchildren). Not all jobs are equal, and employment figures issued by the government are notoriously dodgy when it comes to true unemployment. They count only those out of work and claiming unemployment benefits, so successive governments fiddle the figures by reclassifying who gets what benefits.
Also, David Cameron said he wouldn't resign if there were a no vote. he bailed out the next day.
And this was part of the remain campaign was it? Lets not confuse the idiocy and slipperiness of the man who started the whole fiasco with anbything other than his own duplicity.
Farage's claims about an EU army were ridiculed by remainers, yet Macron has now proposed exactly that.
Absolute bollocks. As far as I am aware, Fartage was claiming people would be conscripted into a central European army. No such thing has been proposed. The EU constituion actually bans conscription. What has actually been proposed is closer cooperation between the military forces of member nations (you know, like that NATO thing we're already part of), and things like cost-saving through common procurement. Arguing against that sort of thing seems like the real Project Fear to me. You need to stop reading the Daily Mail et al
That's without all the trivial scaremongering about no more holidays in Spain, all the EU citizens in the UK being deported, and the rest of the nonsense.
I don't think anyone claimed "no more holidays in Spain". Holidays in Spain will be more expensive (they already are, if you read the current shouty headlines in the red-tops). EU citizens in the UK have legitimate fears about their future status. First they were forced to register (at cost), then the cost was removed, but they were still forced to register. Nobody knows what their status will be. I know EU citizens working in the UK who have been reduced to tears because they can't plan for the future. Add to this the difficulties people are having in renting accommodation, or getting jobs, because they can't guarantee to their prospective landlords or employers that they will be legally allowed to stay here, and your charge of "the rest of the nonsense" seems a bit thin. Lets not forget, of course, the recruitment crisis the NHS is having because a large part of the highly qualified workforce comes from the continent, and nobody in their right mind is moving here just to work hard for not much money and get shouted at by racists before facing the chance of being deported again.
The one the courts ruled wasn't a lie, you mean?
I think you have a strange idea of "not a lie" here. The courts actually essentially ruled that there wasn't a case for Boris to answer for Misconduct in Public Office, because it isn't illegal for politicians to lie. They made no judgement about the truthfulness, or otherwise of the claim. I'm sure you know this, and you are just lying yourself.
Shhhhh. Don't mention the foreign aid budget, the kippers hate that too! Lets ignore for a moment the intangible benefits we get from trying to make the rest of the world a little less unstable and the goodwill it engenders. It's not like we need goodwill from other nations when we've got to rengotiate a metric shit-ton of trade agreements is it?
You have a sadly limited imagination, I fear.
I have a very good imagination. I can imagine lots of things. Sadly, imagining, no matter how hard you try, doesn't make things real. Because of this, I tend to rely on facts, rather than magical thinking.
The facts here, being that in the EU, we have a whole set of benefits which we will cease to have when we leave. We could do various deals with our closest neighbours to replace those benefits, but because they would be able to dictate the terms, the replacement benefits would be at an inherently higher cost. The EU have repeatedly said (and it makes perfect common sense) that any deals with the UK would not be on more favourable terms to us than the equivalent arrangements between member states. The days of gunship diplomacy where we might try to sway their opinions through what might be euphemistically termed a side-channel negotiaion, are long gone. We are a small country of ~65M people trying to strong-arm the world's largest trading bloc of 500M (plus some other countries who are i the common market / customs union but not the EU, like Norway)
So, in short, the economic / trading benefits are moot. We also lose the benefit of regulatory harmonisation for things ike medicine, electronics, food safety, etc. All those useful things that people harp on about being "the EU telling us what to do" but actually make everyone's life easier. We could replicate those things here (at the cost of duplicating all the agencies involved, rather than splitting the cost 28 ways). That's hardly going to free up £350M a week, because, oddly, that money (although it is in fact about 40% less than that) actually pays for things that we need, and use, as well as being able to, through economies of scale, have some left over to help the less well off in Europe. Like the Welsh, and the North-East. (8 out of the 10 areas in Northern Europe that receive/received EU aid are in the UK)
So, go ahead, if imagination is so great when it comes to making things work, tell me what your imaginary benefits are, and how they can be achieved by tunring that imagination into actual reality? Aspirational waffle aside, I'd love to hear some cold, hard, plans for what we're getting instead.
Nope. That would be an incorrect assumption
I was replying to another post, not yours.
However, I'm not sure any of your comment relates in any way to what I posted. US politics is something I'd rather not get bogged down in - as far as I can see, the electoral system is even more rigged towards unrepresentative two-party politics than ours, and the politicians there are even worse than our lot.
My point was that whilst some people see the word "Indians" as a pejorative term, others simply see it as "someone from India". As such, it's probably better to not go around making assumptions about what someone means when they use a word lest you show up your own inherent biases.
So recently I moved. So now I'm getting post delivered for 2 previous occupiers. So I could open that, and start phishing.
One would hope that:
1) The previous occupant has forwarded on anything important, so the mailings you are getting are only junk mail
2) They don't contain anything you could use for phishing (given that the previous occupany will have updated their address with their bank, etc.)
3) You wouldn't take the risk of a social-engineering attack that can easily be traced back to your home address
It's not like the Royal mail provide a service where you can have your post forwarded on to your new address for several months after you move, just so that you can make sure everyone important has your new address.
I got a bit of post this morning for someone who hasn't lived at my address for what is probably over ten years. I didn't open it, as it looks like junk mail from a car dealership, but if I did, how useful do you think the information inside would be for phishing? On the other hand, if I got something in the post addresed to a previous occupant that says somethin like, "here is all the personal information we hold about you: name, address, date of birth, email address, etc.", that is going to be a goldmine for a social-engineering attack, and those aren't even the hard-core PID items like ethnicity, sexual orientation, uniquely identifying IDs (NI number, passport number), trade union membership, etc.
We need a Europe of good neighbours, co-operating together. for what we agree is the common good. Not a dysfunctional family with Daddy telling us what's good for us.
I believe that is called the European Parliament. We'd get a lot more out of it if we stopped electing people like Fartage and Widdecombe to it, and actually engaged in that cooperation, rather than making childish gestures like standing backwards when Ode to Joy is played and then only turning up to collect the salary.
As for Daddy - European politics is much more based on cooperation and decentralisation than politics here in the UK, where we currently have a "Daddy" in charge who was elected by fewer than 100k people.
Which were all as evident on the Remain side as on the Leave one.
I hear this trotted out again and again, but have yet to see any evidence of such lies, on the scale of the "Lie On The Bus", Farage's overtly racist "queue of brown-skinned migrants" poster, or suggestions that the entire population of Turkey was suddenly coming here.
Please provide some examples. (I bet you can't)
We just need the UK to step and and make the best deal they can.
But, but, but... the UK voted against the best deal we could possibly have (remaining in the EU) in favour of some undefined "better".
That "better", that 3 years later still appears to be as undefined and fuzzy as ever, as if it is in some quantum superposition of all possible worlds. We're still in the situation where anyone who points this out is derided as "project fear". (Yes, idiots like Mark François still trot this out).
Shame really, that that superposition seems to be slowly collapsing to the worst-possible world of that "best deal" being no deal at all and massive economic damage (for anyone who hasn't bet against the pound in any case, like all those hedge-fund managers who seem so keen on the whole undertaking in the first place). Still, that's what happens when you strip away the massive heap of lies and bullshit, and find there is nothing underneath. So much for "project fantasy".
Indian (Native) or Indian (Immigrant)???
Or, perhaps, as most people would read that, Indian (person from India).
I can only assume you are from the US, where the incumbent racists still refer to the native people their ancestors displaced as "Indians" because some explorers though they'd gone all the way around the world and got to "the East Indes", as they then called parts of Southeast Asia...
Ironic really, that a good number of their descendants now think there is no such thing as "all the way around the world", yet no doubt still refer to people in their own country as "Indians".
So rather than me asking what they hold, anyone holding my personal data is legally required to automatically send me a copy
Yeah, because the very best way of making your personal data more secure is relying on third parties to make copies of it and send it to people they think are you. I can't forsee any security holes in that...
At least the system where you have to request the data this is held about you restricts the splurging of such data outwards to people who actually ask for it, who, most of the time, will be the actual subject and not someone phishing for the data...
I suppose it all comes down to whether you can find a convincing use case for it that isn't already covered by other technologies (e.g. Wi-Fi, or a length of good ol' fashioned CAT6e). I'm struggling to think of one, possibly some environments where you need to keep the RF noise really low, or you don't want signals leaking through walls (but don't want wires, or a faraday cage). It's certainly goig to be niche, but might find military or covert uses.
To be fair, if you want people to draw up decent standards for things, you have to pay them in more than magic beans, and if you want a reference architecture, then you're going to need hardware prototypes, and such things don't come cheap.
The whole point of innovation is that sometimes it goes nowhere. That money isn't wasted though, because lessons are learned, knowledge is gained, and the dead-ends are made up for by the other things that do go somewhere. It's pretty much the definition of research - if you already knew what the result would be, it wouldn't be research...
Presumably not all insurmountable, but off the top of my head:
Limited by line-of sight (or reflection)
No interference from EM radiation? What about the fact that light is EM radiation? Will receivers be 'blinded' by oversaturation from things like camera flashes, lightning strikes, or other rapid changes in ambient light levels? What about moths and other flying insects?
Eavesdropping - better have your blackout blinds and curtains shut if you don't want your neighbours across the street eavesdropping (okay, I know this is no worse than Wi-Fi, but still...)
Backhaul? How will this work? Will it need special light sockets with wired network, or will it use Wi-Fi for backhaul? If Wi-Fi, what is the point - you're already using the Wi-Fi bandwidth, so why not use Wi-Fi directly? If wired, then will I need to rip all the wiring out from my lighting circuit and replace it? You could use IP over powerline, but that is pretty useless when lighting is on a separate circuit to your power sockets (with a breaker that has a different current limit).
What is the expected lifespan of one of these special bulbs? I know LED bulbs last a lot longer than incandescent ones, but I'm willing to bet they'll still burn out - either the LEDs or the control circuitry.
Even back in the day, everything in the bench-top bottles was pre-diluted (0.1M IIRC). Not all the students were to be trusted not to put their fingers in things, and 14M H2SO4 wasn't (and still isn't) something anyone needs to be near in normal circumstances.
That didn't stop us from doing all sorts of dangerous things, such as nicking the roll of magnesium ribbon and setting fire to it (in one go) behind the bike sheds, or mixing our own thermite (very easy if you know how). Nitrogoen tri-iodide? pffft, an acquantaince of mine had a large saucerful of it drying in his garage and almost blew his foot off when he came home drunk from the pub one night... It's great stuff and perfectly stable if damp, so you can paint it onto the surface of things for comedy effect, such as the bottoms of chair legs. The most dangerous thing about it is probably breathing in the decomposition products, and a healthy liver will probably sort you out fine...
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
I think they're referring to the debate had in The House before the voting on the bill, not the content of the Bill itself. In other words, the reasoning (and actions) of The House is immaterial in a court of law, the only thing that can be judged by the courts is the lawfulness, or otherwise, of the Act once passed.
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