Posts by Pen-y-gors

Space suit design

I was fascinated by the tradition of the intrepid cosmonauts peeing against the wheel of the bus before take-off. Surely having fly-buttons in a spacesuit makes getting an airtight seal a bit tricky?

Data users?

"make that data available to the police, intelligence and security services in certain circumstances, including to help with investigations into acts of terrorism or serious crime."

...or by coppers whose ex-wife you're seeing, or by councils checking on people putting out bins on the wrong day or littering or...

Gross Moral Turpitude?

When I was at Uni, oooh, many years ago...the regulations stated that Professors could only be dismissed for 'Gross Moral Turpitude', which made us wonder exactly how bad something had to be before it became 'Gross'. Perhaps rogering the secretary was mere standard moral turpitude, but rogering a donkey... in the chapel...during the sermon..?

Interesting theology from this 'pastor'

What's his take on Genesis 9?

13 I do set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between Me and the earth.

14 And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the rainbow shall be seen in the cloud.

Did the Great Sky Pilot intend that all who see the rainbow should immediately indulge in rumpy-pumpy with members of their own sex?

What exactly will they teach?

Having worked with a fair number of IT developers from India (my previous employer shipped them in a dozen at a time to boost manpower on several projects) i must say my experience was mixed. Many of them had a Masters degree in some form of IT, and a few of them were excellent, some of the best people I've ever worked with (particularly the guy whose wife used to make fresh pakoras for him to bring in on a Monday morning!). But with many of them there was something missing - flexibility and initiative. What we needed was IT specialists who could do anything - investigate a bug report or enhancement request, discuss it with the users, analyse it and plan the necessary action, code it and test it. Real jacks-of-all-trades. What we got in many cases were good programmers. Give them a detailed specification they would follow it, crank out some decent code, and test it. But that was all.

I hope their new institutes will be helping their students to develop real-life skills and competencies, (like problem solving) and not simply an understanding of Javascript syntax.

I have a cunning plan...

How about registering domains using an email like 'stufficann@gmail.com' and set up a cron job that checks the account once a day and automatically clicks on any links?

Simples(?)

Silly costume?

Presumably they don't have any superwoman or bear costumes for him to wear during the run, as is traditional. Could he perhaps do it in full space-suit?

Ah the irony of it...

a little earlier we had the story of Obama wanting back holes in encryption software to thwart terrorism. Governments are really trying to be the hackers' friend, aren't they.

And does a cyber-ttack on NATO count as terrorism? (Most things do these days - PICK UP THAT LITTER!) If so, can NATO use drones to hit the hacker?

Neat!

That's how real spaceships are meant to land.

Now, if they can only scale it up to something that can make orbit, they'll have a REAL spaceship, not a tinker-toy.

Disappointed.

There was me thinking this was a Scottish story...

The laws of mathematics

The problem is that people who know what they're talking about say that you can't break the laws of mathematics, but that really cuts no ice with a government, as Chancellors have been making 2+2 = 5 or 6 or 1 or 3.5 or whatever for donkeys years. If it works with money, why not encryption?

Welcome back the WORM drive

Whatever happened to WORM drives? I think that writing your logs to write-once media might provide a handy and non-corruptable audit trail. And I'm sure would be really, really useful for NSA/GCHQ/russian hackers - I'm surprised it's not a requirement of the snoopers charter.

Hyperlink != content

This is mild gibberish

A hyperlink to an article is not copyright infringement.

Reproducing a chunk of an article on your own site, with a hyperlink to the full original is a different matter, and seems to be what we're talking about here.

UK customers?

Will this be available to UK customers?

Pay for the privilege?

It's already here...

UK court charges: nick some grub because you're broke and get fined and also hit for hundreds of pounds in "court charges"

Recent news report about USA: people getting charged up to $70 per night to stay in prison. Get released owing thousands of dollars. Probably have to rob a bank to pay it off...

You get what you pay for

I've been with BT Business for my basic 8Mb broadband for several years (excellent Uk support!), plus BT domestic for the actual phone line with Anytime packages (mobiles don't work round here). Our exchange now has infinity, and our cabinet should be working in a month or so, so I'm looking at options. In terms of reliability and support I'm looking at switching entirely to BT Business, which I reckon will be about £75-80 month for phone line, anytime call package including mobiles, CLI and 1571, and unlimited 76Mb/20Mb broadband on a fixed IP address. Not cheap, but really not that expensive compared to alternatives - and only about £10-15 a month more than I'm paying now.

I suppose I could look at VM cable - oh, I forgot, Branson isn't interested in cabling up rural areas.

Bit of a no-brainer really

I'm sure the vast majority of people would agree that the police should be able to investigate crimes, or (strongly) suspected crimes, and that, in the case of serious crimes (which needs to be clearly defined), would include asking a judge to give them the authority to access various records relating to the activities of known or suspected criminals. So far, so obvious.

Whether people agree that unaccountable 'Security Services' should have any role in domestic law enforcement is another matter.

The job of the police is to investigate crime and criminals, all crimes, including those committed by MI5, therefore they need data about criminals. They have absolutely no need to gather or access data relating to people who are not serious criminals.

It may not be easy for them to work out how to differentiate, but given their general success with addressing serious crime already without draconian data trawling, I would suggest that they have more than adequete data available now, without the need to make us pay for our own surveillance through higher ISP costs.

Serious crims will always find a way to avoid surveillance (El Reg commentards have already suggested many possible options) so only the law-abiding will have their communications tapped. So why bother?

Dear Mrs May, I am not a serious criminal so kindly fec off!

Open a window?

So the cells have windows that can be opened enough to bring a drone inside? Or, to put it another way, big enough for a con to climb out of? What happened to the good old days when they had bars on the windows?

Really handy

UK data centre with everything freely available to the NSA *AND* GCHQ. Who wouldn't want that?

How about an Icelandic region?

web log api?

I look forward to the APIs that allow access to the web access logs stored by all ISPs, and which will presumably be available for sale to russian hackers at a very reasonable price.

Proxy setup?

Does anyone have easy instructions for setting up a proxy server on a nice Icelandic-based cloud provider?

Food of the gods

but, being a bit picky...is Veal really RED meat? I know it's baby cow, but milk-fed and all that. Shouldn't we be going for a slice of real beefsteak

Also, where do I buy the white arsenic these days? (Searching for that online is going to look great in my web history!)

Obfuscation

You can screw things up by installing some software that randomly visits websites ("I'm developing my own search engine to compete with Google"), and then your defence is that it wasn't you, it was the software.

And then have a list of sites you visit regularly:

www.gay-freemasons.co.uk

www.kinky-tory-mps.co.uk

www.police-friends-and-families.com

With that list they should keep well away from you

Politicians, eh...

Remember that every time a politician speaks, a fairy dies.

Keep eating the bacon!

At least they can treat the resulting cancer...

How on earth will this work?

How does a drone press the doorbell on a 15th floor flat? Or does it knock on the window?

Third event?

Given the likely level of fitness of most El Reg commentards, perhaps something like le Tour de Rockall may be more appropriate for distance...nice shirt though!

Real plods?

Given the general level of IT awareness and security shown by our wonderful plods, I'd assume that any e-mail that really came from your 'friendly' local peeler was still quite likely to be infected anyway.

Plods?

"Aria reported the attack on its systems to Greater Manchester Police"

Who have done precisely what about it?

Spaceguard UK

Following the article on El Reg earlier this year (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/06/geeks_guide_spaceguard_center/) I visited the Spaceguard UK centre a few weeks ago, whose purpose is precisely that of spotting these sneaky little buggers before they visit New York, and which, if spotted in good time, means that we may have a chance to do something.

It's a wonderful and fascinating place. They're currently putting up a new building to house a very chunky new camera (project DRAX) which will mean they can contribute a lot more to this global network. But unbelievably they get no public funding. The new building is being put up by volunteers, and they still need about £30K to finish the work. Have a look at their website, and think about making a donation...

- pint of beer £3.50; that warm comforting feeling that your generous donation means you are less likely to get splattered by 100 million tons of fast moving space rock - priceless.

Donations to http://spaceguardcentre.com/drax/donate-to-project-drax/

Flawed logic

If the beeb were REALLY serious about stopping piracy, they'd kill iPlayer entirely. Okay, that would mean that licence payers in the UK couldn't watch stuff either, but hey, neither could the pirates, which is the most important thing.

There are many reasons to use a VPN in the UK - e.g. when using a public WiFi connection. Why do the BBC want to insist that we switch off our VPNs and expose our computers to all sorts of hijacking and malware? Next stop ban use of AV software and firewalls?

This is idiotic! I pay my licence fee, why can't I safely watch iPlayer?

Works in Chile too

Similar thing in Chile, where the peso is currently worth about 0.1 p - in the supermarket they ask you if you want the pesos in your change, and if not, they round the change down to 10 pesos, and the balance of odd pesos goes to a charity account.

Can be a bit tricky if your spanish is a bit ropey, as sometimes they ask if you want the odds to go to charity, so a 'no' reply is the reverse of the previous one, and makes you look like a real tightwad!

Things are still priced in exact pesos of course, so you still get the $799 prices.

"However it is no longer proportionate to commit officers to a permanent presence"

A 24/7 physical plod presence hasn't been 'proportionate' for the last three years! What has suddenly changed?

Curiouser and curiouser

Living in the wilds of mid-Wales I actually think I get a fairly good basic broadband service (7.5Mb download). We were told that we would get fibre over a year ago, and every three months since then they've moved the deadline on another three months. It finally seems things are happening (well, maybe) but a couple of months ago we got so irritated by the delays that we got AMs and councillors involved. I then got a nice phone call personally from the boss of the Openreach rollout project in Wales, who assured me it would be over by Xmas. We'll see.

But what was most interesting (and relevant to this thread) is that he said we're actually getting Fibre to the Premises, NOT Fibre to the Cabinet, and that will allow us to have up to 330Mb (same as G.fast). I really can't see them stringing fibre to every house in the village so does this mean we're actually a G.fast trial site that we haven't been told about?

"regardless of potential radiation effects on individual animals"

I've got a great idea for the next Reg SPB activity (while we wait for Lohan)

How about setting up a Ukraine office next door to the reactor, and move the Editor to report from there for a few years. Shouldn't be difficult so long as there's decent broadband available. That we we can prove beyond all doubt that radiation is good for mammals.

Old Nexus 7?

Interesting that they've left out the older Nexus 7s - ever since it 'upgraded' to Lolipop mine has run like a dog, so I think Andoid 6.0 would finally kill it. You'd think that Google could manage to get their software to run efficiently on their own hardware, particularly hardware that's only a few years old, or am I being unreasonably naive again?

Communicating with targets?

"ordinary people — because, for example, those people are communicating with valid foreign intelligence targets"

So, if Ahmed bin Nutjob (ahmed@nutjob.isil.sy) buys a pair of fluffy slippers from amazon, then all the communications of amazon are now a legitimate target of global surveillance by the nutjobs in the NSA? And now that amazon are a legitimnate target, then all the other amazon customers are now communicating with a foreign target...etc.

Same applies if dear old Ahmed has a google account - they can then legitimately monitor all google's communications?

Epic Fail I'm afraid.

Radio?

No mention of "Lines from my Grandfather's Forehead" - a sequential entertainment for radio. Recently repeated on radio 4 Extra, and well worth a listen.

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Garland of flowers?

Plan C (D? E?)

a) buy rocket reload in USA

b) find intrepid US commentard who fancies an attempt at rowing the Atlantic single-handed, taking rocket reloads as cargo

c) divert boat to Rockall

d) LAUNCH!