Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: So MS think...

"If they can discover the bug then so can someone else."

Like, Google ... who wrote the original software and might reasonably be expected to have gone to the trouble of trying the commonly available techniques.

And yet they didn't find it, which kinda suggests that even though futzing is not unknown outside of MS there is still a fair chance that this bug was not widely known. Consequently, splashing the fix all over the internet three days before you splashed the fix almost certainly increases the risk of this bug being widely used.

Re: "Content that must be given away for nothing will ultimately end up being worth nothing."

I'm paying what they're asking, except that I'm blocking the ads because they make my laptop unusable. (No, really, I had them whitelisted for ages but eventually it was taking 30 seconds or more to open each page and I just thought "Fuck this for a game of solidiers!" and de-listed them.)

As soon as advertisers wake up to the fact that people smart enough to have money to spend are people smart enough to use an ad-blocker, the whole bubble will go pop and the internet will die simply move to an alternative funding model.

Re: Cost of doing business

Good luck defending that country against the US. Good luck persuading the majority of UN members (who have plenty of their bolshy citizens) to recognise the country and thereby set a precedent that a bolshy citizen can just up-sticks and declare independence.

Maybe move to Catalonia?

Re: v7 needed

"If what you say is true then there must be some other reason that nobody bothers with it."

There is another reason. In Western Europe and North America there was, until recently, no problem with only offering IPv4, so ISPs did that, so home users didn't have a choice, so equipment vendors had no incentive to switch on the capability in their device stacks (despite it basically being there for free), so anybody who even started to try the new tech quickly ran into the near-brick-wall that no-one else was running it apart from a few geeks.

I believe that in the Far East, the IPv4 address space was so puny that the economic arguments went the other way and, there being no technical problem with IPv6, there are parts of that region with near-universal IPv6 adoption. Of course, they tend not to contribute to English-speaking forums so we rarely ever hear from them.

Re: Actually

"Really? Have you ever given a thought..."

I think your thinking of a different Abrahamic religion. There are several. (In fairness, until recently they were all deeply suspicious of each other. Trump is merely a century or two behind the times.)

Re: I propose another use for 666.

"I suspect Pauline Hanson has D-K"

Hmm ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DK ...

Dorling-Kindersley

Donkey Kong

Denmark

...but nothing seems to fit. (Googles instead for for "psychology D-K" ...) Aha!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

"In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is."

So she's too stupid to realise she's an idiot. OK. That fits.

If we did set up a council, it's first task should be to ban the use of the term AI until at least we have an objective definition of what the "I" actually means and way of measuring it. Only then would it actually be possible to prosecute someone in court for making or using an artificial one improperly.

Android, and the big names were informed privately a few months ago, so the fix should be available today. Whether it is available for your phone, of course, depends on your hardware vendor (and in some cases also on your ISP).

Yes. And if your client is something that can be plugged into the router with a cable then it (the client) will almost certainly be patched this week.

Re: erm isn't this what law enforcement is for?

It's not even the same as arming children. /That/ would ensure that the children can shoot back at the time of the attack. /This/ law would still require you to collect evidence to prove who did it, check with law enforcement and compare notes, and then retaliate after everyone is dead.

If we assume that the police will respond to convincing evidence that one US citizen has committed a crime against another, on US soil, we can conclude that this new law would provide no new tools for the victims. Indeed, the lack of a response by the police could be the basis of a case by the accused that there was *not* sufficient evidence and that the so-called victim is the actual criminal here.

Totally fucking bonkers.

Re: Of course it's pronounced 'Jif'...

Why would anyone want to interchange a giraffe? Is that even legal?

"MS is REALLY getting worse."

Yes. They've been getting worse for a number of years. It's been pointed out to them. At times, they've even accepted it. They haven't been able to change. That's the story here. It will rumble on for another 5-10 years and then it won't matter because MS won't be a significant player in the industry anymore.

I only hope that Bill's managed to philanthropize all his billions before they disappear.

Re: Aircraft? Never get off the ground...

Aircraft were never a seemingly dumb idea. There are these things called birds.

Autonomous coding, on the other hand, is a seemingly dumb idea because we aren't even sure how people do it, and we *are* people.

Re: What about those various employers that demand access to social media accounts

It looks like this ruling allows prospective employees to tell would-be employers to eff off. Even better, anyone who goes along with the request is demonstrating that they can't be trusted, so they shouldn't get the job and any employer who *requires* candidates to give up their passwords is now encouraging candidates to breach their contracts with third parties and those third parties (or their lawyers) might well be interested to know that.

Re: 2XXX

No way will we need that third X. Microsoft have no new products that look capable of sustaining their historic position within the industry. They've given up on "devices" and they've largely lost on servers. They survive on desktops on the strength of their ability to run programs from a decade or so ago, but the result of *that* is that the current version of Windows is almost crushed under its own weight of back-compat crap.

They aren't dead yet, but in 2025 we may look back at 2017 and say "Yeah, the signs were already there.".

And to the naysayers who point to the cash pile I say just that it is all virtual money and another company (probably not Apple, Google or Amazon, although they are probably big enough) will eventually have a big enough pile of its own to *buy* Microsoft for its IP and promptly shut down the day-to-day operation as an act of mercy.

Re: Francis Walsingham

So from a two-sentence summary of the case against back-dooring encryption we have now progressed to a two-word summary. (Our friend FW may actually be the only case in history of this sort of thing and the resulting society is a text-book example of what the Founding Fathers didn't want for the US.)

Re: Typos

Wee all ready has won to cheque spelling, butt its crap.

Re: You think that's bad?

Um, no, even *that* has now died. From https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/18581/lifecycle-faq-windows-products ...

"Windows XP Embedded is a modular form of Windows XP, with additional functionality to support the needs of industry devices. It was released separately from Windows XP and provides a separate support lifecycle to address the unique needs of industry devices. Devices running Windows XP Embedded will be supported through 2016."

"I wonder if somebody could add this "functionality" to the websites of the conservative party?"

That would depend on whether they have control over anything that the website displays. Then again, if you included such unpleasantness in adverts, you could presumably pollute the browsing history of anyone who doesn't use an ad-blocker.

Re: Design-by-committee languages suck

"Somewhat like JavaScript, but I digress."

You don't, actually. Both languages were designed for quick-and-dirty executable content on the client side. Once they had been adopted by the great unwashed of hobbyist programmers and lame educators (because they were free and available everywhere) they started to get used on the server side and for larger projects.

Re: "bleeding edge" is overrated

Since this is Android we're talking about, the whole of user-space still lives on the bleeding edge. If phone makers really wanted to support their devices properly, they'd put something like Debian Stable on them and publish enough detail about their dodgy hardware to let someone else write the software.

But the hardware guys are quite happy for you to upgrade your phone every two years. This announcement is about Google's embarrassment that Apple support devices more or less for as long as they last. Whether Big G is actually big enough to push this one through is something we still have to discover. Since even *they* can't extend the life of their own branded kit beyond two years, I won't hold my breath.

"I don't know anyone with any relevant experience who thought BYOD was anything other than stupid."

Also, interestingly, nearly everyone *did* have relevant experience because, let's be honest, how many IT staff have not at some point been asked by "the boss" to hook their latest shiny to the company network.

Apparently Gartner are the only people on the planet who didn't know this. Colour me surprised.

Re: Help

"a map not too dissimilar to this."

Excellent, ta!

"Makes no difference to me of course, suckiing data down my 200 Mbps VM pipe."

And that is another fair point, since FTTP isn't the only way to get connected and it would be a shame to burn boat-loads of government cash bringing technology to everyone only to find that it is the previous decade's technology and all the money was wasted.

Re: VOIP over VPN?

"How are you going to monitor that?"

Well that's rather the point. They can't monitor these COMUG thingies either, but they've banned them so now they don't need to solve that problem.

Just because it is easy to break the law doesn't mean the law is futile. Quite the reverse, in fact. The law becomes the preferred mechanism for enforcement when technical means break down. (Of course, there is also the option of "not trying to enforce" state-sponsored voyeurism, but that option doesn't appear to have occurred to them.)

Re: Amazing

"You're saying this as if a human who's never seen the Rubik's Cube before can come across a scrambled cube and, completely unprompted, can figure out the purpose AND solve it. As most things go, even humans need directions."

My memory of the original cube craze is rather dim, but I'm pretty sure that 99% of the population *did* immediately figure out the purpose. Obviously only a far smaller number actually solved it, but *some* did and I see no reason to let the machines have a lower bar.

Re: rpmbuild -ba --sign slack.spec

Really? Is that it?

I've come to expect some pretty slap-dash, corner-cutting gobshite from web-based startups, but if it is that easy to sort out then their failure to do it right in the first place is hideously embarrassing incompetence and their subsequent failure to fix it in August is wilful negligence.

Re: OPC

Er, whoosh?

(In fairness, had I been serious then you would have made excellent points. It is a pity that the numpty who wrote OpcEnum.exe didn't know all this. Last I looked, it was still calling CoInitializeSecurity in a way that is appropriate for DOS-based Windows and which, on NT, actually makes it *harder* to get stuff to work without using DCOMCNFG to drop everyone's trousers.)

Re: Couldn't she....

I think that was an aberration. Her usual formula is less impressive:

"I am Prime Minister"

"Boris is Foreign Secretary"

"Strong and stable"