* Posts by Martin Summers

1503 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Apr 2011

Protip: No, the CIA will not call off a pedophilia probe into your life in exchange for Bitcoin

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Its another variation

It was quite an eye opener at work with the calls to support we got from people worried the scammers could actually have seen them doing naughty things via their web cam.

Amazon Alexa: 'Pre-wakeword' patent application suggests plans to process more of your speech

Martin Summers Silver badge

Star Trek

If it is OK for Federation employees to say 'Computer' to activate their system before giving a command then its OK for us back here in the past too.

Microsoft Bing is 10: That thing you accidentally use to search for Chrome? Still alive and kicking

Martin Summers Silver badge

If you right click on the map you can still get it. Or at least you could when I last tried it a few weeks ago.

Martin Summers Silver badge

I quite like Bing Maps Birds eye view. I'm amazed Google haven't nicked that idea yet.

Ready with the 'welcome neighbour' fruitbasket, retailers? Amazon opens Manchester pop-up shop

Martin Summers Silver badge

Amazon did not kill off the high Street, people shopping at Amazon instead did.

Activist shareholders to target Zuck with giant angry emoji inflatable at Facebook AGM

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: You're missing the point.

It may well be a monopoly, that still doesn't mean people don't have a choice. All it needs is momentum and Facebook could lose its user base as quickly as it gained it. There are alternatives, it's just not convenient for people to move and urge others to do the same.

Martin Summers Silver badge

It's not like anyone is forced to use Facebook. If scandal after scandal and rampant data slurping isn't putting the customers off then all of these activists are just pissing in the wind. It's a rare case of the change needing to come from the bottom. As soon as people start losing patience with Facebook and actually delete their accounts to the point of diminishing their user base significantly, only then will they listen.

Irish data cops are shoving a probe right into Google's ads

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Death To Google!

El Reg appear to be happy to let anyone and their bot splurge all over the comments these days. No doubt amanfrommars and his sidekick will be along shortly.

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: That woulda be a spicy tamale

Taxes could never be lower as a result of fine income as it isn't a guaranteed predictable income. Same way as councils cannot run themselves on the money they receive from selling assets or windfall income, its against the law to do so.

NASA boffins may just carve your name on a chip and send it to Mars if you ask nicely

Martin Summers Silver badge

Don't worry, there's more than likely a tick box to say you don't want your details shared with Martian marketing companies. I don't think they or all of the US have GDPR style controls yet. I'm not quite sure what the Martians could interest me in but I for one welcome extra terrestrial junk mail.

This is a sett-up! Mum catches badger feasting on contents of freezer

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Surely it should be charged with...

I had to Google what 'Brock' was before I gave you an upvote. Which I have now done.

EE switches on 5G: Oi, where are your Mates? Yes, we mean the Huawei phones

Martin Summers Silver badge

Let me be the first to say "Who bloody cares?" and the classic oft repeated (but still correct and relevant) "Sort 2G/3G/4G coverage out first!".

Load of old Bull: French integrator Atos trots out first edge server box

Martin Summers Silver badge

They're just the transmission method. Ever heard of encryption?

Giga-hurts radio: Terrorists build Wi-Fi bombs to dodge cops' cellphone jammers

Martin Summers Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Well that was insightful. If we don't hear from you again Lee we know why...

Quit worrying about killer robots, they are coming whether you like it or not – and they absolutely will not stop

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: I despair

I despair that we as a human race have not stopped breeding 'leaders' who obtain absolute power and are corrupted by it. At the very basic level, until food is free for all and plentiful the world will always be dog eat dog. Never mind anything else.

Hi! It looks like you're working on a marketing strategy for a product nowhere near release! Would you like help?

Martin Summers Silver badge

I worked for a smallish company a few years back and when it was obvious the company was being sold I shared that with my colleagues. Months later when it also became apparent that the company buying us intended to move us a fair way from our current location I shared that too. Only that one resulted in resignations (a couple of years before the move actually happened) of people who didn't want to work in the new location. It also resulted in a "loose lips sink ships" speech (yes literally those words) from a Director to the whole company. Unfortunately the company was always very cloak and dagger and let rumours persist rather than being open and honest.

Amazon agrees to stop selling toxic jewelry, school supplies to kids, coughs up some couch change ($700,000)

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: If I were a betting man...

"Liquid sodium metal poured over you or chlorine gas pumped into your house = worth worrying about."

Is it OK as a dip though?

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: If I were a betting man...

No, Amazon definitely did not used to be like this. I've been a customer of theirs since 1999 when they only sold books. When they first launched Market Place it wasn't so bad, then very soon it started crawling with crap.

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: If I were a betting man...

I too am getting utterly sick of the hundreds of products that are exactly the same bar the brand slapped on it. Something I was exasperated with recently when I was trying to buy a battery charger. Better than that the same product has varying levels of reviews which you cannot trust these days without running them through fakespot. Don't get me started on the "I received this product for free in exchange for an honest review" accompanied by 5 stars every single time.

The argument that "everything is made in China anyway" I can understand being made, that they "make things to the specification of the buyer" I cannot understand as often there is no buyer. The Chinese sellers on Amazon are just selling rebadged stuff that has in a lot of cases been ripped off from a decent quality product that had gone through testing and made with the lowest quality parts down to the cheapest price. Even clothes suffer, buying supposedly decent expensive pyjamas from a Chinese seller on Amazon (you can only guess from the delivery time that's where its coming from) as a gift for someone recently only to find the stitching starts falling apart in weeks.

Amazon never used to be like this, they could and should definitely do more to clear this up or they're going to find people deserting them in droves for a clear and trusted market place where there's quality control in the supply chain.

Veteran vulture Andrew Orlowski is offski after 19 years at The Register

Martin Summers Silver badge

Best of luck Andrew. I've been reading this site for about the same amount of time as your tenure and never understood why people got themselves so worked up about what you wrote. You've been kind enough to reply back to me about my crap news tips a few times which has been a nice touch.

I'd completely forgotten about the Moderatrix. Still actually someone we'd love to have back I'm sure.

Airbnb host thrown in the clink after guest finds hidden camera inside Wi-Fi router

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Airbnb....

To be fair to AirBnB I don't think they can be held responsible for people doing this. What they are responsible for however is acting on reports of nefarious activities such as this and cutting those hosts off their service immediately. There's no reason at all for them to not act swiftly and appropriately.

A day in the life of London seen through spam and weak Wi-Fi

Martin Summers Silver badge

If they've got no Internet access for their own equipment then I concede that you're a bit stuck. However I'd imagine you'd want to check ahead that there are arrangements in place if it is crucial to have access. If they say yes and you turn up to find you don't have what was agreed then and only then does it become their problem.

Martin Summers Silver badge

"Would you similarly complain if they asked to plug their laptop in because the battery is dying?"

No as that's really very different to them connecting to your network segmented or not. In any case, more importantly, making the assumption there will just be WiFi/Internet access when you're going to show something to a client and not being prepared for there being none is just ignorant and shows how much you really care. Either get your own mobile connection, get something working offline or if your demo is online do it on the clients network using one of their machines. If your online product is to be used by them anyway that's just a good real world testing exercise. Don't make your problem someone else's and complain when you've got nothing to show your client.

Martin Summers Silver badge

A pet hate is external partners or even sales people turning up to do a presentation and then expecting to get a WiFi connection when they get here. When in fact they should be prepared and have everything they need offline. They shouldn't even assume that an Internet connection is available (what it if happens to be down that day for whatever reason?).

May Day! PM sacks UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson for Huawei 5G green-light 'leak'

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: "quite a few"

"Name two"

No, because that's a petty argument. You'd no doubt find fault with anyone I named. There are hundreds of them down there and no doubt a fair few self serving as well as the many that are trying to do a good job for their constituents. People keep consistently returning their MP's to parliament and there are MP's who do actually help the people they represent, thats just fact. It's easy to name call and point and get on your high horse about politics and politicians but you try doing the impossible job of keeping everyone happy and see how long you last. People need to grow up about politics in general in this country and have a clue what they're voting for instead of flip flopping around every year from one end of the political spectrum to another on a whim. The centre ground exists only during election time purely for the clueless.

I envy how much the Yanks are involved in their politics and actually get it. Whereas here it's as the 'another nobody' comment above demonstrates turning into a talent show.

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: About time too

"Seems like one nobody replaced by another."

It's not Britain's Got Talent. Believe it or not, not everyone gets into politics to be in the public eye or get famous. It's not a job for the faint hearted potentially being splashed all over the news all the time. People forget that they're actually people and quite a few are trying to get on with doing a decent job in spite of the media and constant criticism.

UK comms watchdog mulls 5G tweaks: Operators want moooooar power

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: To get IT for Real Run Novel Future AI Software Simply Following Fab AIDirections

This is just basically spam now. AI or not (and AI it really isn't anymore). Nowhere else would tolerate it so why here?

Wannacry-slayer Marcus Hutchins pleads guilty to two counts of banking malware creation

Martin Summers Silver badge

Well unless you already live there that's your trip to the USA blown if ever you planned to go!

Telly production biz films maternity clinic, doesn't tell patients, gets fined £120,000

Martin Summers Silver badge

@Voyna

The hospital didn't get fined. Its even in the subheading who got fined. Trot the argument out when the ICO fine a hospital or police force and then you'll be on point.

Facebook acknowledges asking you to invite your dead pals to parties is 'painful', plans to fix it

Martin Summers Silver badge

I'm all for bashing Facebook, I'm not on it since 2008 and unlikely ever to be again. However how on earth are they meant to know that you're dead if to the system you're appearing as a regular user. What kind of creepy AI are they going to employ to find out that you've snuffed it? Or if you don't log in for a while, are they going to pop up a question to your 'friends' asking "Is this person dead?". Of course, what's going to happen is people are going to be marked as departed when in fact they are not in some cases, which is going to cause more problems!

If there's 5G connectivity but no 5G devices on it, does it make a sound? Wait, no, that's not right

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Wrong

"5G could actually offer solid competition to landlines in villages, especially on Three as they have the most frequency allocation, but it does mean they will have to actually upgrade the towers."

Or they could just use that nice new fat fibre connection feeding the towers to give you decent fixed broadband to your village at a cheaper price perhaps? Having a connection not affected by environmental factors such as fog is a better option.

Facebook ad platform discriminates all on its own, say boffins

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Ehem...

@Peter Griffin

I didn't bring race into this you did and I was purposely staying away from that. Race is an highly emotive subject and very easy to use to beat someone down with so they shut up and don't argue. It's actually probably just other demographics at play. How do we know for certain that these targeted ads are completely biased towards black people rather than black people make up the most of the demographic that the advertiser wanted to target? It doesn't always have to be about race or gender.

If and only if someone deliberately developed an algorithm that said white people shouldn't be shown janitorial jobs could you say there was definitely a deliberately racist bias. I sincerely hope that hasn't happened here. I personally can't imagine that is a purposeful decision that someone made though. If that was the case then no white people would be shown the ads for janitors at all. How do you even code bias like that in? Genuine question to anyone who may know the answer.

Martin Summers Silver badge

A massage therapist I use had her advert on Facebook flagged up for review because she chose for it only to be seen by women. She took this decision to prevent the many creepy advances she gets from men. They said it could be seen as gender discrimination. Yet it seems they can quite happily let their system distribute ads in a biased fashion of its own accord.

You could scream bias and bigotry or you could just accept facts that the adverts are being shown more than likely to just the people you want them to be shown to and that the system is being effective based on the realities of this world. Society needs to have a grown up conversation with itself about this. Most of the time no harm is intended or is in fact done by anything such as this. What are they trying to achieve with this really? Adverts for makeup and sanitary products shown to everyone male female etc because it's wrong to be biased?Realistically thousands of pounds wasted by advertisers because someone took offence yet again on behalf of someone else that was never offended and didn't realise they should have been in the first place.

Leaky Martin will be livin' la vida lockdown: Ex-NSA bod cops to taking home 'up to 50TB' of hush-hush dossiers

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Re. I recommend

Then surely he'd have stopped after... Say a gig?

DXC Security exec: Yes, I'd have thought we'd spend more on certs and laptop kit for staff, too

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: DXC layoff strategy

I'm glad you followed up. I've been checking to see if you would. I'm so glad you're taking positive action mate. Best of luck.

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: DXC layoff strategy

Please OP, don't let them get the better of you to the point you feel like suicide, something has got to give but not you. Please speak to your family and friends, confide in them, let it out, don't keep it bottled up. I've been in a toxic work situation that made me ill and run down and I didn't think I'd ever get out, a friend got me another job where he worked. Use your contacts if you can and keep applying, you will interview well, you owe it to yourself and you have nothing further to lose. Blimey, if anyone here can offer the guy a job please offer it and get in touch with eachother somehow. Best of luck OP, I hope everything works out in the end. Stay strong.

Security storm brewing for Oracle Java-powered smart cards: More than a dirty dozen flaws found, fixes... er, any fixes?

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: All Above and what to do with IT and AI

Oh crumbs, I think we've got two of them...

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: All Above and what to do with IT and AI

Cliff, you've got a history of replying to our resident bot. Are you his partner in crime now or are you genuinely not picking up the obvious none human in the room?

O2 brings forth a Friday fail for some unlucky UK customers

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Emergency

More to the point, how would she have coped pre mobile networks? My kids school have my work department landline numbers. It's an outage, it's inconvenient, it happens. Suck it up!

Altered carbon: Boffins automate DNA storage with decent density – but lousy latency

Martin Summers Silver badge

You can just imagine the marketing slogan now.

AWS: Data Storage is in our DNA.

I presume Gene therapy is required for any corruption?

Let's spin Facebook's Wheel of Misfortune! Clack-clack-clack... clack... You've won '100s of millions of passwords stored in plaintext'

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: wash. rinse. repeat.

Some years ago I tipped off my former boss (whilst I was working for him) that our hallowed Web developer was storing passwords in plain text for our customers website customers and emailed passwords in plaintext as reminders. He wasn't interested either. Our Web developer even lied directly to him in a meeting and said that even Facebook sent out password reminders in plaintext. Or at least I believed he was lying, seems he was half right!

Dead LAN's hand: IT staff 'locked out' of data center's core switch after the only bloke who could log into it dies

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: The system is still working...

Read the article mate, also don't work in IT please. Thanks.

From MySpace to MyFreeDiskSpace: 12 years of music – 50m songs – blackholed amid mystery server move

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: MySpace

They found that the storage invoices didn't bring them joy.

Do Martians dream of electric Nimbys? Selling 5G needs steak, not just sizzle

Martin Summers Silver badge

Let's be honest here. Not many people, mostly here give a flying f*** about 5G. It's pure marketing bull and people are getting sick of the shite they're touting. We have reached peak smart phone and now we've reached peak 'G'.

Raiding party! UK's ICO drops in unannounced on couple of dodgy-dialling dirtbag outfits

Martin Summers Silver badge

They probably aren't from there at all, like most they will be spoofing their number usual using VOIP and an allocation of many geographical numbers. What once would most likely have been a legitimate call with a UK number, everyone eyes with suspicion now and that's a shit situation to be in. I let those calls go to voicemail and inevitably they're crud. Unfortunately these kinds of companies can operate outside of the UK so the ICO has no effect on them. Its nice to see the ICO being as effective as they can be though, just time for the telcos to step up.

One-time Mars InSight Lander engineer scores $1.5m redress over whistleblower sacking

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: RE: I'd be a lot less emotionally distressed after than before

Cliff, I hate to break it to you mate...

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Costs?

He actually used to make some sense at one point but stopped around a year or more ago. If you Google him you'll see this is not the only place he has frequented.

Silent Merc, holy e-car... Mflllwhmmmp! What is that terrible sound?

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Problem already solved

Playing cards? How posh! Discarded crushed drinks cans or those plastic cheap cordial drink containers where I grew up!

Cheap as chips: There's no such thing as a free lunch any Moore

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Confused...

Point missed methinks.

Martin Summers Silver badge

I'm confused. Why on earth are you comparing a Surface Go to an iPad Pro? Trolling or ignorance of Surface Go's market?