* Posts by Ken Hagan

8135 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Researchers claim quantum device performs 9,000-year calculation in microseconds

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Cynical but accurate

Except that you get a different answer each time. You'd be quicker just calling rand() directly.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Can a quantum computer predict anything other than its own behaviour? Isn't this what we used to call analogue computing? (Yes, the results are digital, but a quantised phenomenon could hardly be anything else.)

Starlink's success in Ukraine amplifies interest in anti-satellite weapons

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The internet is two way

But there may be a thousand times as many ground stations as satellites. How many drones were you planning on using? How many targets, one at a time, are you planning to throw expensive precision-guided munitions at?

No. I think the chinese analysts have got this one right. Starlink-like systems make existing anti-satellite weapons obsolete.

Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: even more safer to operate?

No. It's not important. It was not an accident. It was an monumentally stupid act of self-harm. It tells us nothing about the safety of nuclear power.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: even more safer to operate?

Re: commie mismanagement,

When you deliberately turn off all the safety guards and then send your reactor into a tailspin, it's not an accident and it tells us nothing about the safety of nuclear power.

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"and is never going to be updated"

This is the point made at the end of the article. If you tell programmers for 40 years that .0 is reserved (and can be used to identify a network) then they will build that into their code. Likewise with 0/8 and 127/8. I've certainly written code that classifies addresses as multicast or node-scope based on the numbering. In fact, I'm not aware of any other way to perform such a classification, so I'm not even sorry.

IBM ordered to pay $1.6b to BMC

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Not commenting on the business practices

From the fine article:

"The decision to remove BMC Software technology from its mainframes rested solely with AT&T, as was recognized by the court and confirmed in testimony from AT&T representatives admitted at trial."

Sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac? Consult our cynic's guide to desktop Linux

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Control Your Own Upgrades

"who's idea of fun is [...] to test a keyboard and mouse-less OS controlled by throwing M&Ms against a charged metal plate..."

But that *was* fun, right up until some bastard upstream recompiled libmetalplate.so to use a conflicting version of libplate.so and I had to mount the root filesystem in a different system in order to pin the package versions.

"Mr Average needs an OS which just works, doesn't get in the way, and is easy (for a normal person) to find support for."

This. Specifically the third requirement, despite the fact that Windows increasingly doesn't actually deliver on that front. No-one is going to make the jump unless they have a promise from an experienced friend that they will hand-hold and fix problems. With a decent distro, that support will not be a burden long-term, but I find it hard to believe that anyone can learn Linux from the interwebs painlessly.

Possibly a fourth requirement is to have a second computer (permanently on hand) that you can use to fix the first one. Most geeks take that for granted and most normal people don't have it.

This Windows malware uses PowerShell to inject malicious extension into Chrome

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: More of the usual

Sounds a lot like you need to run that "game" (that you downloaded from a dodgy web site) as an admin. If so, I hardly think it counts as a hole. I could "inject" malware into crontab on a Linux system if I had the privileges. It's what the damn thing is designed for!

It is fun to see different examples of the mischief that people can get up to once they've taken over your system and it gives us more examples to use to convince our friends that they really shouldn't be running anything as admin if they can possibly avoid it, and certainly not if they've got it from a "helpful" site that meant they didn't have to pay for it. But it is hardly news.

Microsoft Bing censors politically sensitive Chinese terms

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Not different in the EU though

drill rt.com @8.8.8.8 yields 91.215.41.4

drill rt.com @217.169.20.20 yields 0.0.0.0

The former is Google's service. The latter is Andrews & Arnold, an ISP in the UK that has traditionally taken a dim view of censorship (see https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/ and skip down to "An unfiltered Internet connection"). A&A's boss had a few things to say on the subject in this article -> https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/04/russia-sanctions-add-shock-internet-censorship-twist-for-uk-isps.html. That article concludes:

"UPDATE 6th May 2022

Ofcom and the UK Sanctions List appear to have confirmed that the first block list domains are for rt.com, sputniknews.com and rossiyasegodnya.com. Most ISPs will be implementing this via a basic DNS level block, which is usually the simplest approach."

So yes, we're being censored.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Not different in the EU though

To be fair, I can't actually connect to rt.com so perhaps the search engine is correct not to list it.

Has it been taken off air?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Not different in the EU though

Just tried it on my phone (using DuckDuckGo). First hit was Al Jazeera. rt.com is nowhere to be seen.

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Indeed, but it doesn't answer my question. The "original translation" is non-idiomatic English, so either it is a bad translation or it is preserving some non-idiomatic quality of the original Italian. I don't speak Italian, so I thought I'd ask someone who does.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Is the original Italian also non-idiomatic, then?

Clearview AI fined millions in the UK: No 'lawful reason' to collect Brits' images

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Contradiction

Assuming that they gave their assistance for free, that doesn't constitute "doing business" in the UK. Then again, even if the statement is true this judgement is still a problem if they ever want to start (*) doing business in the UK.

(* Or restart. I note the phrase "at this time" and wonder if ClearView have done business in the UK in the past.)

Supreme Court urged to halt 'unconstitutional' Texas content-no-moderation law

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Gaping hole

I dunno. How many words do you need? As the article states, the interpretation of that First Amendment has been pretty consistent over the years and the experts seem frankly rather surprised that Texas is trying it on.

Oh, and the 231 years is irrelevant. "Thou shalt not commit murder." is rather older and has simply been translated into almost (?) every human language because we haven't actually changed our minds about this in the last 5,000 years.

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Overinflated sense of self importance

" When I kindly informed him that a new laptop would be with him in just a few hours, he was furious!"

I suspect that if you had delayed the phone call for the few hours and said "It will be with you in a few minutes." then you'd have been more popular. You and I both know that this would have been poorer customer service, but he is a jerk and so probably doesn't see the world the way we do.

Researchers find 134 flaws in the way Word, PDFs, handle scripts

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I don't think it needs to be embedded in the document for most of those tasks. Keeping it out of the document makes the document safer for people who just want to read the answer rather than generate it.

It's time to kick China off social media, says tech governance expert

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Can we?

Aside from the question of whether it is a good idea or not, is it actually possible?

If there is a way of blocking voices from particular geographical regions then I'm sure many people would be interested . For example, they could restrict the unwanted communications to their own country (where they can sue them if they cross the line separating "noise" from "abuse"). While that might be counter-productive for companies that trade internationally, or individuals with foreign friends and relatives, there are an awful lot of businesses and people whose communications are entirely intra-national. With a little bit of allow-listing, nearly everyone would fit into this category.

In practice, however, I suspect that the people we don't want to hear from are *exactly* the ones who would find it fairly easy to circumvent any attempted ban.

Europe proposes tackling child abuse by killing privacy, strong encryption

Ken Hagan Gold badge

It would seem to me, then, that targetting the (relatively small number of) bullet-proof hosts and making them legally liable for their content would be more effective than trying to target the (relatively large number of) law-abiding internet users who just happen to have a valid reason to encrypt their personal finances and private communications.

Funnily enough, this is almost the same as the solution to the problem of "anti-social media". You make the internet companies legally liable for what they publish on their site. If they want to be exempt, they need to say who the original author is and produce credible evidence that they can stop that person from using the service in future under either the same or a different identity.

Right now, so much of the internet is just making cash out of facilitating ... "something, don't know what, don't care, as long as it keeps generating cash for me".

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Impossible

It's also worth noting that, historically, it has always been beyond the capacity of governments to snoop on the conversations of private citizens, even if it was legal. Despite that, they've been trying for centuries and the result is an accumulation of legal (and in some cases constitutional) protection of such conversations.

Proposals like this are NOT an attempt to "fix a problem that has arison recently, with technology". They are an attempt to create a more over-bearing government than has ever existed in human history. We have no prior experience to inform us of how badly this might turn out. The East German experience is one clue. Modern China is another. I find neither encouraging.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: the way we're going...

Yes. Both UK and US politicians are regularly criticised by their own civil servants and security experts for hiding policy discussions in secure channels where historians won't be able to read them, in contravention of existing laws. They are already breaking the law and now they want to pass more draconian ones for the rest of us.

(No idea if any other country has problems with this. I expect they do.)

Email domain for NPM lib with 6m downloads a week grabbed by expert to make a point

Ken Hagan Gold badge

But really, while this /could/ happen, it /would/ only happen if there was some nutter out there who actually had a motive to tank thousands of businesses just for the lols.

We don't know anyone like that, do we?

And certainly not anyone like that with the resources to pull it off, surely?

IBM: Give us three years to solve quantum computing scaling

Ken Hagan Gold badge

133, 1386, 4158...

Is there some reason for these numbers or are they just random? They're not even prime.

Putin threatens supply chains with counter-sanction order

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: You want to play hardball?

Ah, thanks. Intelligence and the Army aren't best of friends right now. (Something about not being welcomed with garlands by nubile virgins on day one of the invasion.) My guess is that this guy is toast if Putin isn't around.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Not sure about "made" but yes. China tried to corner the world market in rare earth's a few years ago. They started with a healthy share of the market and succeeded only in pushing the price up so that a load of new (or old) entrants came in (or back) and stole some of their customers.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: You want to play hardball?

I wouldn't worry too much about a deputy. He (and I assume it is a he) is the deputy because he isn't Putin and has no aptitude for the task of becoming Putin. If Putin goes, the field is clear for just about anyone who is ambitious and ruthless. They don't have to be insane and, if they want the army's support, being sane enough to do a reverse ferret on the Ukrainian debacle might just be the necessary qualification for power.

Windows 11's tablet-friendly taskbar pulled from Insider builds

Ken Hagan Gold badge

If win8 really was "extensively tested" then Microsoft's decision to sack all the testers and just squeeze out win10 as-is starts to make a lot more sense.

Perhaps your "upset" Microsoftie was one of the testers.

Elliott Management to WDC board: Spin out or sell flash biz

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Confused

If splitting the business would allow both parts to grow, what exactly can the two parts do when split that they can't do now?

Or is this just "analyst bollocks"?

Meta materials: Facebook using AI to design green concrete

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Just saw an article yesterday

Looks interesting. Obviously we await confirmation that this works in practice and at scale, but they claim to have a process already so it shouldn't take long to prove it one way or the other.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

It's carbon neutral except for the vast amount of energy you need to drive off the CO2 from the carbonate. The cement doesn't later re-absorb /that/ and until you can invent an electric cement kiln, get used to the fact that it isn't even close to being carbon neutral.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Unhappy

oh dear, that's made things complicated

Does this mean that FB is no longer an unmitigated abomination unto Om?

Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: How friggin' tough could it be to just print the words?

Oh no. It would suffice to have it in just one language. The manufacturer would presumably choose their own, for the benefit of all their testers.

Now, where's all that crap made again?

Don’t expect to get your data back from the Onyx ransomware group

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Backups

It's 8% more than I'd have expected and it raises the question of how do they know that the recovered data wasn't tampered with prior to encryption? Obviously if you had a backup lying around you could do a comparison. Equally obviously, you wouldn't need to.

Algorithm can predict pancreatic cancer from CT scans well before diagnosis

Ken Hagan Gold badge

This does seem to be a general problem with ML. We could do with developing algorithms that can be queried after training. The chances that if we knew what they were picking up on, we could do even better by using other data sources or specific tests.

Apple's grip on iOS browser engines disallowed under latest draft EU rules

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: How have they never

Because they aren't big enough in tbe phone market to count as a monopoly, whereas MS were big enough in the PC market.

US Army may be about to 'waste' up to $22b on Microsoft HoloLens

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: It's not wasted

Given the number of Russian nukes, no-one else needs to be on their side for it to result in WW3.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Just what a grunt in a muddy trench, in the rain needs ...

They'll also be radio silent, to pick up on a point mentioned in an earlier comment.

Your AI can't tell you it's lying if it thinks it's telling the truth. That's a problem

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: It's not the AI that needs fixed

You use "sheep" as an insult but how many sheep are there and how many wolves? It seems to me that the sheep are on to something.

Elon Musk says he can get $46.5bn to buy Twitter

Ken Hagan Gold badge

$46.5 billion is just the start

The current asking price is roughly 15-years-worth of profits. Unless he can make Twitter *more* profitable, not less, this is purely a vanity play for him. However, once Elon's "anything goes" policy takes effect, he'll be paying out loads in legal fees and fines just to keep the show on the road, and advertisers will think twice about associating themselves with a toxic brand. If I were a shareholder, I'd be looking to cash out at the top of the market and invest somewhere else.

Brave, DuckDuckGo to unplug Google's AMP where possible

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I have a problem

"Fools trust Google."

Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

Microsoft plans to drop SMB1 binaries from Windows 11

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: That NAS under the stairs

A raspberry pi with a big SD card would probably suffice, but as Ned Pyle is reported in the fine article, the affected users are probably the least able to set that up.

Ryzen Pro CPUs are better for work than Intel's, claims AMD

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Joke

Re: Microsoft's Pluton security processor

Ah, but once support exists, it is only a matter of time before Gobble creates a web API for it (Chrome only, natch) and then only time before your internet banking requires it.

ESET uncovers vulnerabilities in Lenovo laptops

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: worried, moi

I don't think the Lenovo link says that at all. The patch is only available in Windows flavour, but the UEFI bios is as much part of a Linux boot as a Windows one, surely. Whether the patch will be offered by Lenovo to Linux devs for packaging is a different question.

Microsoft details how China-linked crew's malware hides scheduled Windows tasks

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The registry !

Imagine a Linux system where /etc was a mount of a filesystem type optimised for lots of small files. In essence, that's the registry.

Would that be so awful? Clearly not. Would people blame every configuration error on the underlying filesystem, rather than the end-user who wrote the wrong values into a file? Clearly.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Mint Newbie

"Re. Wine... inevitably some stuff will be flaky. Windows in a VM might work out better, if feasible, but I guess that may be a bigger learning curve."

I'd say that Windows in a VM is such a shallow learning curve that you might end up with users doing all of their work in that Windows VM, negating most of the benefits of switcing to Linux.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: One reason to stay with Windows - Outlook

And if your Exchange admin has switched off the IMAP support (*) then you can still use middleware like owl. (https://www.beonex.com/owl/)

(* Do MS say this is a security risk? Is it somehow "best practice" at Redmond to ignore the open standard in favour of a lock-in protocol? Who knows...)

Microsoft's huge Patch Tuesday includes fix for bug under attack

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Ah, the joy of being (fr)agile.

"When MS has more patches than all the other patch sources listed in TFA *combined*, what does that say about their ability to write code that *doesn't* suck sweaty monkey nuts?"

Nothing at all, since the article is about Patch Tuesday, which is a Microsoft-specific thing, even if a handful of other vendors have elected to try to hide their own mistakes under its cover.

Nokia quits Russia over Ukraine invasion

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Western governments have expressed concerns...

Mobiles are probably the only remaining route for facts to penetrate Putin's propoganda machine, so I have no problem with genuinely helping to maintain that network.

EU countries want to pool photos in massive facial recog database

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Algospeak

Teenagers have been doing this for decades. In fact, it is really rather unlikely that the NYT article was not written by someone who did this when *they* were younger. Of course, back then the censors were parents and teachers, not governments or moderation bots.