Posts by Ken Hagan

Re: Reg readership

Those who didn't vote don't care and so be safely ignored. (Top tip for next time: if you care, vote.)

"How can people's data be anonymised enough that they can stay private, but still be useful for research?"

Probably they can't. Whilst there may be things you can discover about broad swathes of the population, the majority of discoveries (especially as we get down to genetic medicine) probably are useful precisely because they identify a small subset of the population. There's a whole class of serendipitous findings that are particularly likely to be based on data that clearly identifies individuals, found by going on a fishing expedition in the national dataset.

On the other hand, any such discoveries are likely to be biased towards the people whose records were used in the research and the youngsters don't seem to give a toss about living their entire lives on social media. Perhaps *they* could be persuaded to opt-in.

It's a cultural thing, though. Iceland is a centre for this kind of research because they've chosen to allow it and deal with the consequences. Likewise, outside of the health sphere, some countries publish full tax records for the population whereas I'm fairly sure that the older generation in the UK think that's only one step away from publishing nude selfies.

Re: World to UN:

"Putin's going to be quaking in his boots now."

I think the general opinion of Putin's predecessors and like-minded dictators elsewhere since 1945 is that the answer to "whose army" has always been Uncle Sam and his NATO friends. That's why they don't take too kindly to NATO expanding its membership in their general direction.

With reference to the topic of the article, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights) is *far* more than many countries have been willing to grant and it is hardly a modern creation. This latest vote looks like no more than a natural extension into the web domain of previously declared rights.

So it probably won't change much in the short term, but it is nice to have the principle explicitly re-stated.

Re: It's those nasty penguin people

"they can have good stuff FOR FREE"

Sorry to get all foss-tard on you, but I find it hard to parse that except in the sense of free-as-in-beer, but I'm pretty sure the revolt against Microsoft's dickery is largely based in a (long overdue) realisation by ordinary people that what they want is "free as in speech". That is, even if Linux cost a small amount and Windows was free, people would pay for the OS that behaved as though *you* owned the computer.

So, yes, it is those nasty penguin people but, no, giving Windows away won't help.

I think "serve" probably comes to English either directly from Latin or through French. Online dictionaries mention "servo" as a Latin root and Modern French has "servir". Both are obvious cognates.

The same online sources suggest that "browse" is Germanic (the roots apparently something like "brout" and our "sprout" may have come the same way). With this being a linguistic discussion, Germanic may actually mean Scandanavian once you start to consider the route by which it passed into English.

Bootnote: the Normans were Vikings, so one could mischievously claim that pretty much all of English came into the language via Scandanavians. :)

Re: 10% ?

My initial reaction was that if the figure was 10% then "FORMAT C: must have been counted as a secure data erasure method.

On the other hand, perhaps the only people who think it is worth trying to sell old (and therefore slow, small and knackered) hard drives on eBay are bean-counters and *they* actually do have access to people with the necessary skills. Perhaps 10% is really true.

Edit: And if bean-counters are the only people selling then (for the same reasons) perhaps data thieves (and researchers) are the only people buying them.

Re: In truth they haven't a clue ...

I can't remember any they've ever got right, but I expect that's selective reporting. I'm *assuming* that the ones we read about here are wild and wacky ones they issue to keep their profile up (a case of "there's no such thing as bad publicity"), and that the more boring reports that make their money (and which are only released to the people who paid for them) are sane.

Re: Threading model is the biggest difference

Upvoted for managing to stay on-topic despite the splendid trolling.

Re: Hardware

"Both Intel and AMD current x86 chipsets are backdoored"

Let's assume that is true. Does it matter? If the chips continue to give the right answers to numerical problems, they can still be used to break your encryption, and they can still be used offline to encrypt stuff without you ever knowing. (Yes, you don't *have* to be connected to the internet to perform arithmetic.) IOW, that back-door opens out onto a brick wall built by your enemy.

Back-dooring a chip to the extent that it gives all the right answers *except* when fed problems that you don't want your enemies solving sounds like it will take more transistors than Intel have ever manufactured -- and I don't mean on a single die.

Re: Amsterdam...

"I can hear Nigel Farage now "We'll build a wall and make the Scots pay for it""

Why would it just be the Scots paying for a wall round the Home Counties? I'm sure the rest of England and Wales would want to chip in.

Re: Not translaed into English

"the UK does not own the English language."

But ... but ... but ... we nicked it fair and square from a whole shed-load of other people.

Re: Does it start with

"However I'm still at a loss to discover why he was called 'Top Thinker' from birth!"

He invented a time machine, came back once to change his own name, and came back a second time as a Roman soldier to dispose of the evidence.

Re: Testing?

"Their argument is that the latter introduces too many unknowns."

Is it? Surely the killer argument is the combinatorial explosion. Win7 had hundreds of patches over its lifetime (perhaps over a thousand, I don't know). Factorial 1000 is a *very* big number, implying a prohibitively extensive/expensive testing program.

As the other guy said, eventually you have to start relying on structure within your software to isolate things that *shouldn't* depend on one another, so that you can cut corners in your test cases.

Re: ASN.1 and PADS

The experience with parser generators in the 60s/70s was that languages that were originally designed in the "hand-crafted era" were a real bitch to write a grammar for and the real power and convenience of these tools was only seen with languages where the convenience of the grammar was influential in the language design. I imagine you'd see something similar with PADS, so you'll find that most of your existing protocols are a nightmare to specify.

But interesting, nonetheless. In the long run, these more declarative approaches to programming are usually far less buggy, far easier to write in the first place, and amenable to formal analysis in the long run. (I wonder how many of the security holes found in SSH over the years could actually have been found by an automated tool if you could have described the protocol to it.)

Re: It's a stupid idea

"Anybody running "apps" from untrusted sources probably deserve whatever mess they end up in."

Yes ... but no. Snap makes it more likely that the app will work, so it lets the (clearly naive) user get further into trouble before the symptoms start showing.

Re: Just closed

I'm sure they will reckon that the list of people who closed their accounts after the take-over was announced is a particularly interesting dataset.

Re: How much !!!

"I can't even remember how many times I created throw away accounts because I wanted to look at someone."

Conversely, there are certainly people out there whose "links" have been accumulated purely because their real job is the sort of public-facing activity where it is helpful to have a significant presence in social media. It's not *used* for anything. It's just something that people in certain professions need (apparently) to have these days.

Like all social media, the data in LinkedIn is worth what the people who contributed it have spent gathering it.

Re: Patient? What patient?

That might be partly because it is almost infinitely easier to get the opinions of the clinical staff than it is to get the opinions of patients. I'd also take issue with the 9/10ths estimate, since (echoing a previous comment) there does also appear to be a significant problem with "assuming that all will go well, all the time".

Re: The B Ark isn't going to be big enough ...

The B Ark doesn't have to get off the ground. It can be as big as you like and Oooo! What's this? A vast entrance hall with a blue ceiling! Awesome, darlings!

Re: Trademarks?

"Trademarks are for large companies not regional dishes."

I think the FairTrade mark demonstrates that you can use trademarks to protect pretty much anything you want, just as (obligatory IT reference here) the GPL manages to use copyright law to protect a lack of protectionism.

Re: Would also bork legitimate code

By "modern", I assume you are referring to anything with out-of-order execution and branch-prediction, which means almost every x86-class CPU designed since the mid-90s. (If I remember correctly, Intel made a few in-order Atoms about 10 years ago.)

This sounds like it would have been a nice optimisation for hand-tuned inner loops in the 1980s and possibly standard-operating/optimisation-procedure in the 1970s or before. It's 2016 now and you could probably run that 1970s code in a VMM that was written in JavaScript and still be faster than the CPU you originally optimised for.

Re: Deadline

Registration has been open for about 400,000 minutes and yet some people left it until the last 20. Leaving something until the last 0.005% of the available time really isn't smart. At the risk of stating the obvious, it leaves you with very few options if your internet connection is down at the critical moment.

Re: That's yet another point caused by needless complexity

"You can keep your trivia apps, I just want vlc or mplayer, amarok firefox, kmail etc on a phone. I trust those guys more than I trust google."

That would be Ubuntu Phone then. I haven't used any version of x-buntu for a few years now, because I think there are better distros for just about any given purpose, but I'd trust their phone offering well ahead of anything else I've seen on the market.

Then again, perhaps running UP and sticking to the official repos is about as limiting and no safer than running Android and sticking to the Google-branded apps. In both cases you are intentionally cutting yourself off from all the third parties simply because you can't tell which ones are trustworthy.