* Posts by Ken Hagan

8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Cloudflare family-friendly DNS service flubs first filtering foray: Vital LGBTQ, sex-ed sites blocked 'by mistake'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: 99.999% of humans are XX or XY.

Ta for the fact-check, but ... could someone explain how we got onto chromosomes?

Internet Archive justifies its vast 'copyright infringing' National Emergency Library of 1.4 million books by pointing out that libraries are closed

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Disengenious

"When did any Government suspend copyright for the emergency?"

The operators of various online book stores are particularly keen to know this, since they are still selling at the full (copyright included) price. Jef Bezos, for one, is not normally left squatting in the starting blocks when it comes to cutting (his) costs.

I understand why people think that IP law needs a comprehensive re-think. I don't get why people think that they can just ignore laws because they don't like them. I bet there are some laws that these people are quite fond of and they'd be outraged if someone else just ignored them. We have a system for changing laws and, yes, that system sometimes feels broken too, but it is *much* better than the alternative.

Sun storm probe OK'd: 'Our motivation is a fascinating signal that we have detected for decades but never been able to make an image of'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Oh my God !

Old news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Little_Toaster

UK Information Commissioner OKs use of phone data to track coronavirus spread

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Big Boris is watching You.

My car is fine, after six months of being ... less fine.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Maybe so, but...

You've forgotten it was actually introduced during the Napoleonic Wars, then?

What happens when the maintainer of a JS library downloaded 26m times a week goes to prison for killing someone with a motorbike? Core-js just found out

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Because morons like you keep using packages like this."

Careful now. You don't know that the person asking the question is a user. In fact, if they are a user then they surely know why they use it themselves and it is a simple matter to assume that others are making a similar judgement. More likely then, that the person posing the question is (like you, I assume) not using this kind of code and merely bewildered that others are.

OR ...the economics favour "shoddy code now" over "decent code later" and packages like this facilitate the former whereas coders like you, dear Irongut, favour the latter. Perhaps the Invisible Hand of the Meerkat needs to deliver a hearty slap.

OR ... the world is full of morons. Yeah. Maybe that.

Internet samurai says he'll sell 14,700,000 IPv4 addresses worth $300m-plus, plow it all into Asia-Pacific connectivity

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: why so cheap?

Whoosh! (Or should I say "Fluuush"?)

Bad news: Coronavirus is spreading rapidly across the world. Good news: Nitrogen dioxide levels are decreasing and the air on Earth is cleaner

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Well, we won't want runway 3 now will we?

I wouldn't, particularly as we head into spring in the northern hemisphere.

I haven't changed my central heating or hot water controls, and we have our main meal in the evening anyway, so the only real difference is that my employer can run the office a little cooler. (Except he can't, because there are some staff still there, each at some safe distance from each other, natch.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"What do you think people do when they can't go out?"

But they've shut all the schools and there is no better contraceptive...

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: May I ask.....

It's probably still there, but the fraction of the atmosphere that is over China is relatively small so once it has diffused over the rest of the planet it doesn't show up as a big orange-red false colour splotch.

An atmospheric chemist (which I'm not) may chip in shortly to tell you that NO2 gets washed out as acid rain fairly rapidly whereas CO2 doesn't. Maybe. Or maybe they won't. Let's leave this assertion here, so that someone who knows better feels obliged to chip in.

Google halts Chrome, Chrome OS releases to avoid shipping flawed code, prioritizes security fixes amid coronavirus crunch

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: ?

It's the whole world, mate. The only difference with China is they've done enough testing to know they're fucked.

Microsoft frees Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 from the shackles of, er, Windows?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: WSL versus running Linux in a VM

Nitpuck: Windows has had multiple workspaces for about 25 years. No-one noticed because you have to be a propellor-head to actually want them.

Broken lab equipment led boffins to solve a 58-year-old physics problem by mistake

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Blood diamonds?

You've duked it out with OS/2 – but how to deal with these troublesome users? Nukem

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Why reinstall Win3.1?

"Microsoft never learned to multitask, they still allow a single executable to hog the entire core it is running on and halt everything else on it, instead of reallocating anything to empty cores."

Not my experience. I've never see a core being left idle when there is a thread ready-to-run. I do often see a thread maxing out a particular core and I also see that thread being migrated around the available cores on a longer timescale. Staying on one core in the short term is actually the only sensible strategy, because switching cores just for the aesthetics will cost you a squillion cache misses. On a longer term, however, hopping to a different core lets the first core cool down. (Modern cores can run for short periods at a clock-rate that generates more heat than can be shifted off the chip on a continuous basis.)

Chips that pass in the night: How risky is RISC-V to Arm, Intel and the others? Very

Ken Hagan Gold badge

x86 is not the monopoly

The monopoly is the whole PC architecture. That's what allows a single OS image to run on just about any "compatible" box you can buy. That's why Intel and AMD can both make good money selling one of the high-value components in that architecture.

That "whole standard architecture" is what doesn't exist for the ARM, which is why AOSP being open source means very little in practice -- you have to have an Android that is provided (and maintained, or not) by whoever built the specific device. If you want to run AOSP (in Lineage, for example) you first have to wait for someone to find a kernel crack to let you load it on your phone (against the wishes of the vendor) and then you have to hope that these same people don't lose interest in your model (which they will, after a few years).

It is interesting that the commercial pressures don't seem to have forced the Android vendors to standardise their architecture.

I suspect it doesn't exist for RISC-V either and the commercial pressures might not be in the right direction there either. We'll see.

Don't be fooled, experts warn, America's anti-child-abuse EARN IT Act could burn encryption to the ground

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I think the sort of content that is always trotted out as an example of what we are trying to eliminate is already illegal in every jurisdiction, so presumably we already *have* a worldwide content moderation regime of the kind you describe.

The trouble is, social media as currently implemented makes it fairly easy for criminals to operate more or less anonymously. This bill attempts to eliminate that anonymity by saying to websites "If you can't give us a better lead as to who published this, then you published it.". That will be a pretty easy idea to sell to the vast majority of voters, so if this bill is technically flawed you had better come up with a better idea, or a better implementation of this idea.

Morrisons puts non-essential tech changes on ice as panic-stricken shoppers strip stores

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "throughput of goods is in excess of the usual Christmas peak"

Apparently this is because: it keeps, you will use it eventually, and it feels like you are taking action.

So that's an almost rational way of offloading an irrational urge. Gotta love the human brain, eh?

After 1.5 million days of computer time, SETI@home heads home to probe potential signs of alien civilizations

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: How Long

10 petaflops (1e16) for one year (3e7), assuming you could get the data in and out fast enough.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

I assume that the analysis will mention what proprtion of the 2.6e23 flops were carried out when. I expect a balancing act between the initial enthusiasm bringing numbers of boxes to the party and later tech bring fewer but vastly more powerful ones.

In fact, I wonder whether it is sensible to run a distributed computing project over such a long period.

It has been 15 years, and we're still reporting homograph attacks – web domains that stealthily use non-Latin characters to appear legit

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Not really. For the font to be usable, it has to make glyphs look recognisable to a native user of the script. Scripts, in turn, have a habit of containing (for example) a letter that looks like a small circle. You can't make that look different from another small circle without making at least one of them look wrong.

On the other hand, a mixture of scripts within the same part of a domain name is almost certainly dodgy, so there does appear to be an easy way for browsers to detect the fraudsters.

Hey, fatso. If you're standing desk-curious, the VariDesk Pro Plus won't break the bank

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: That setup doesn't work for me

@GrumpenKraut: Allow me to add a second datapoint to your collection. I suspect that there is some under-reporting of problems with varifocals simply because the solution is so easy.

Sure, check through my background records… but why are you looking at my record collection?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Strangest job interview technique

I think if you read the specification more carefully you'll find the correct answer is just "Mornington".

Windows 10 Slow Ring update strides confidently into 2020

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Chromium Edge

Do both of those words appear in the user-agent string? If so, are there sites that sniff that string and enable stuff based on the "Edge" which then break because it isn't the (old) Edge rendering engine. (I do hope so. People who sniff user-agent strings deserve pain.)

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"This is why Americans just should not have that power."

Americans don't have that power unless you register under one of the three-letter TLDs. If you use your own country-code TLD then they'd have to deal with your country's legal system. That's not impossible, but I haven't heard of it actually happening. I suspect that if this UK outfit registered under .uk then they'd be pretty safe from American mistakes.

Given that just about everyone *finds* stuff with a search engine, I'm surprised that businesses still believe that a ".com" actually matters. It doesn't. It just means that an important part of your business is outside your country's legal system.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: > signing a waiver reneging any claim against the US government for damages

"He who makes the law can break the law"

In the US, it is Congress who makes the law and USG is a distinct entity, very much subject to those laws.

They used to have a different system, with a King who could tell them to eat shit and that was the end of the discussion, except that it turned out that that wasn't the end of the discussion.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: > signing a waiver reneging any claim against the US government for damages

I suspect you can't sign away constitutional rights in the US either and in the context of other stories we have frequently been told that those rights are granted to "persons" and not just "citizens", but they might only apply to "resident persons" (which this UK company isn't) and would in any event require the hiring of a lawyer to actually enforce. Since you are effectively trying the stop the Homeland Security people from doing what they believe is their job, it might need to be quite an expensive lawyer.

How many times do we have to tell you? A Tesla isn't a self-driving car, say investigators after Apple man's fatal crash

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Tesla never said it's driverless

Aww, c'mon you downvoters. They said "sorry".

Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Okay

...which is a reason not to use an iPhone. Maybe not a clincher but certainly a mark against Apple. Once you've factored in the price, you might reckon you are better off with the Swiss cheese of Android.

Oracle staff say Larry Ellison's fundraiser for Trump is against 'company ethics' – Oracle, ethics... what dimension have we fallen into?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "the christian right"

Relax, it's just a label.

Whilst there are christians who are on the right of politics, the group that self-identifies as "the christian right" is not christian in the eyes of pretty much every other adherent of that faith. It is more like the "German Democratic Republic" or the "Chinese Communist Party".

Aw, look. The UK is still trying really hard to be the 'safest place to be online in the world'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Inevitable

Just like my phone (landline or mobile) and probably a zillion other ways in which a commercial provider could invade my privacy. Somehow we survive.

And I'm only giving up my anonymity to each site on a case-by-case basis, which I'm doing to a large extent *already* based on my IP address and (if I permit) first-party cookies.

And, where I live, the ability of those providers to sell onward my personal profile was (until fairly recently) barred by GDPR.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Wrong. They are the UK government. Their budget is finite and shows no signs of increasing in the next few years. Quite the reverse. We've just spaffed over a hundred billion on a train set, Boris is talking about another few dozen billion for a bridge, and I read elsewhere that the City of London (a fair chunk of our economy) is facing an existential threat.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Inevitable

"Make payment for online services obligatory, no more of this freetard ad funded business model."

That, indirectly, is more or less what is being proposed. If it becomes impossible to police the content under the current "ad-finananced, free at point of delivery" business model, then businesses will switch to something that lets them push the legal burden onto those creating the content. As you point out, a follow-the-money apporach would probably be effective.

It mostly works in the Real World, after all. When was the last time you saw images on a public billboard of someone actually being raped? It's unthinkable that anyone would be stupid enough to even try it, let alone that they'd get away with it. And yet, the same thing is possible on the web (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-51391981).

If the internet's freedom fighters spent less time spouting platitudes and more time engaging with their fellow citizens, we could probably figure out a workable way of doing this. As things stand, however, I'm afraid that the likes of Nicky Morgan are going to be given no help and will come up with something that causes a whole lot of colateral damage.

If you're running Windows, I feel bad for you, son. Microsoft's got 99 problems, better fix each one

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"We’ve all enjoyed using sites with it over two decades."

Speak for yourself. In my experience, Flash was used to produce sites that were slow to load and content-free when they arrived. I decided years ago that disabling Flash was actually a smart move because it flagged up all the sites created by that mindset, which I could then avoid.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Sudo apt-get update &&

Arch is like Debian Sid, only more so. Less of a distro and more of a firehose channeling the entire FOSS community. 450 megs probably just means something blocked the hose for a few days but it's all clear now.

Android owners – you'll want to get these latest security patches, especially for this nasty Bluetooth hijack flaw

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "you'll want to get these latest security patches"

My A10 is still sitting at last October, so it is more a case of some (expensive?) models rather than manufacturers.

Hear, hear: The first to invent idiot-cancelling headphones gets my cash

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Wishful thinking

That would be a "No", then. Shame!

Caltech takes billion-dollar bite out of Apple, Broadcom for using its patented Wi-Fi tech without paying a penny

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: How were the research funded?

That would depend on the employment contracts of the inventors. I think most universities these days encourage researchers to patent stuff and the legal arrangements make it profitable for all concerned. Otherwise, you just lose your top researchers to universities (or countries) that do.

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: 3 laws for AI

"The one I have trouble with is #2."

You probably ought to be suspicious of #1. Yes,it sounds excellent, but so does the equivalent rule for human beings ... and yet no legal system ever has actually imposed that rule on people. You *are* allowed to hurt people under some circumstances and you are allowed to leave people to get hurt under quite a large number of circumstances. I expect Mr Asimov was aware of this.

El Reg tries – and fails – to get its talons on a Brexit tea towel

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Lesson learned?

" I'm planning on refusing those coins if I see one"

It's legal tender, so if someone owes you 5 quid and offers it in Brexit 50ps and you refuse, the debt is cancelled.

It's been one day since Blighty OK'd Huawei for parts of 5G – and US politicians haven't overreacted at all. Wait, what? Surveillance state commies?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: It isn't like

"or trying to break into government systems"

Sadly, the same politicians who are wringing their hands over Huawei are the ones those think end-to-end encryption should be banned. Perhaps they are now nearly at the point where they will appreciate what the rest of us have been trying to explain to them for several decades.

Protesters backing Huawei's CFO Meng Wanzhou during her US extradition hearings were 'duped paid actors'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: @robidy - Meanwhile in Richmond

Why should we "admit" that? It doesn't sound remotely plausible, unless by "right direction" you meant "towards a fascist dictatorship".

Remember when Netscout got so upset at 'challenger' label in Gartner Magic Quadrant, it sued? Well, top court just ended all those shenanigans

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: meh

"Financial stability isn't part of the magic quadrant scoring afaik."

Surely it comes under "ability to deliver"?

WebAssembly: Key to a high-performance web, or ideal for malware? Reg speaks to co-designer Andreas Rossberg

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: in 55.7 per cent of these cases, it was being used for cryptocurrency mining

From the printing press onwards, pretty much the first things that any new communications technology has been used for have been porn and fraud. Good luck finding a reasonably priced scribe for all your clerical needs.

OTOH, since I browse most of the web with NoScript active, I am probably closer to your basic stance on this than this reply might suggest. :)

The Curse of macOS Catalina strikes again as AccountEdge stays 32-bit

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Confusing.

You are assuming that the changes made year-by-year can be expressed as changes of parameters to a fixed algorithm. I very much doubt whether governments would even understand the sentence I've just written, let alone take the trouble to constrain themselves in that way. It is probably more likely that you change the code but keep the parameters the same!

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Confusing.

Are we talking "vintage" here, or are we still able to buy the 32-bit version? If I buy something new, today, I think I'm entitled to 5 years support as a minimum.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Mixed messages

Libraries can be replaced, perhaps with shim layers. Compilers can be changed. Compiler options can be switched. This is not rocket science, but...

If you have a decent test suite, ideally automated, then you can port gradually and you can be releasing the semi-ported version and the porting work can proceed in parallel with the normal product evolution.

If you don't have a decent test suite then you have to do the port as a Big-Bang change and you have to execute that change quickly enough that Sales and Marketing don't lose patience and insist on "briefly" going back to the old code, making some "minor changes" and releasing a new version. Every time they do that, your goal-posts have moved and it will take longer to complete the porting project. You don't need many such changes, drip-feeding in, before the porting project becomes essentially impossible because the old codebase is evolving faster than the port is progressing.

So my guess is that anyone who says they *can't* do a 64-bit port probably doesn't have a decent test regime.

The dream of a single European patent may die next month – and everyone is in denial about it

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Brexit voters will be happy

My equally extensive research into Brexiteers suggests that they are unable or unwilling to distinguish "European" from "EU", so I'm not sure your observation actually matters.

Why is a 22GB database containing 56 million US folks' personal details sitting on the open internet using a Chinese IP address? Seriously, why?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

14 years destitute and homeless but a 6 year posting history on El Reg?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: And closer to home?

Yes.

H0LiCOW: Cosmoboffins still have no idea why universe seems to be expanding more rapidly than expected

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Differences

So was the AC.