* Posts by Voland's right hand

5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011

Auto-makers told their autopilots need better safeguards

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: It is easier to automate the damn highway

Just a quick note, I'd be fine with having a single automated lane per direction

Bingo - start with the trucks too. The numbers are less and the economic and pollution benefits are staggering. There will be plenty of people willing to join in a car too despite it being 10mph headline speed slower.

In addition to that a lane under computer control can be narrower too with significantly lower safety margins under bridges, in tunnels and on overpasses, so the cost of adding it is lower than the cost of adding a normal lane.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

It is easier to automate the damn highway

Frankly, it is easier to automate the highways, then automate driving in general.

Here is an autopilot lane(s), please surrender your control to the highway computer and tell it which junction do you want to leave at. Next step - interconnect the systems. Sure, it will not be door-to-door, but it will be good enough to automate 95% of the journey.

The issue is that no country is willing to even consider investing into something along these lines at this point.

Sacre bleu! Apple's high price, marginal gain iPhone strategy leaves it stuck in the mud

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: £1,149

Thats what Steve Balmer said in 2007 and we know who had the last laugh...

The difference in 2007 was that it was new and there were a number of big steps forward in hardware design (gorilla glass), ui closely mated to the new capacitive screen and usability.

In 2017 - not so much. Every "new" feature it has is already shipping in multiple android phones, some of them not even high end.

Act fast to get post-Brexit data deal, Brit biz urges UK.gov

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: £240bn

EU failed to get a UK exodus of banks

Have you been to Dublin lately? I suggest to go and book a duckmarine excursion around their docklands. You can observe the exodus in motion (with the cranes hastily stacking up the new buildings) with your own eyes. Some of it is declared openly as an exodus. Some of it is "additional office capacity"

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: £240bn

The financial services rely on the data deal. The likelihood of any passporting for Eu in the city if there is no data deal is NIL. If you add that to "classic data economy" your number may be significantly higher than 240Bn.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

The UK is risking a data economy worth £240bn if it doesn’t secure a “simple” transition deal that minimises disruption of data flows after Brexit, the Confederation of British Industry will warn today.

To put it bluntly, as long as Generalissimus Josephina Vissarionovich May is in charge and has the same goals, the industry can forfeit all of this now and then and go straight to "plan B" (if they even have one).

The likelihood of Eu agreeing a deal which is not governed by ECJ rises above NIL only when it has someone its size on the other side of the table. Otherwise it is "take the ECJ or leave it". UK alone is NOT in this category.

Apple: Our stores are your 'town square' and a $1,000 iPhone is your 'future'

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Bought £150 Android

Concur. My new one which is anything but a landfill (it is an XA1) cost 189. Better camera than the iPhone too.

As far as no bezel, it matters very little as you get a bezel from the case you need to put it in to keep it from damage.

1000 for a phone? You are out of your f*** mind mate.

D-Link router riddled with 0-day flaws

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Some people by based on price only

There is plenty of idiots who will buy based solely on a price tag + claim to support a given feature. D-link always ticks both boxes.

It is cheap as manure and it claims to support all sort of kewl features. How well... that is a different story.

Oracle to shutter most Euro hardware support teams

Voland's right hand Silver badge

The UK hardware support branch has more directors than other countries

The UK hardware support branch has more directors than other countries

Color me surprised. Very surprised.

Apologies if you need to go and fetch the bucket to clean up the sarcasm that oozed out of the monitor and onto your desk.

Linus Torvalds' lifestyle tips for hackers: Be like me, work in a bathrobe, no showers before noon

Voland's right hand Silver badge

I found it does not quite work

I cannot get properly settled to work until I get my bathrobe off. Sure, I prefer working in the same ripped jeans or shorts I use for DIY, but not a bathrobe.

The shower thing is spot on - mine is after I have expended my useful brain charge and had my afternoon 3 mile run with the daughter. By that time USA has woken up and has started scheduling meetings so that nicely coincides with me being freshly shaven and with a new shirt when the video-conferences kick in.

The privileges of working from home I guess :)

Boffins fear we might be running out of ideas

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: there's always

Those are taxpayer funded.

The examples were areas where research is 90% corporate.

What the paper shows (with numbers) is that modern corporations suck bricks sidewize through a thin straw in R&D. It is something some of us who have suffered from being Research Detention in a modern corp know all too well.

Atlassian kills God, rebrands as a mountain, a structurally unsound 'A' or a high five

Voland's right hand Silver badge

a mountain ready for teams to scale”

"a mountain ready for teams to scale”

Sisyphean labor the agile way. Jira issue 222276: "Move the stone next 3 feet".

Crackas With Attitude troll gets five years in prison for harassment

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: So being a dumbshit ...

I am not.

Looking at what he specifically did, it had nothing to do with hacking. All I see is plain harassment and should have gone under completely different paragraph of the penal code. Like it or not, that paragraph fetches considerably less.

The appeals court will have a field day with this one.

Hi Amazon, Google, Apple we might tax you on revenue rather than profit – love, Europe

Voland's right hand Silver badge

No

VAT is to move the tax burden to the end-consumer in a transparent manner. All companies in the chain reclaim VAT so they do not pay.

As a result, as long as you allow VAT to be claimed in the country of Eu where the sale is done and not the country of residence of the end-consumer it is trivial to shift "perceived business activity" to the lowest tax jurisdiction. It costs almost nothing to add one more company so that business happens elsewhere.

This is different from turnover tax which is paid at every step and not reclaimed. It works in the opposite direction by creating vertical monopolistic conglomerates which control the path of goods from ore to the product.

Neither will do anything as far as digital goods are concerned. The only way to deal with those is to move taxation to country of residence of the end-consumer and that is nearly impossible to achieve.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Back to the USSR

I remember, how once upon a time we pointed fingers at the Soviet Block and how backward and retarded they are to have a turnover tax instead of value added tax.

The argument by Eastern Block economists was exactly that - that VAT creates endless chains of unproductive companies leading to shifting profits out of jurisdiction.

So come 30 years and we do what? Borrow the idea. How what goes around comes around.

If we put the ideological paint aside, maybe they had a point. Having a mix of both is actually not such a bad idea. In addition to clamping down on tax avoidance, it is also good for the environment. The only people it is bad for are the gazillion of lorry haulers which carry one bumper 5 times from one end of Europe to the other until it is put into a car.

Lord Sugar phubbed in peers' debate on 'digital understanding'

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Closing scene of "The Ruling Class"

See subj^·

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xz88K9YJOE

I suggest decreasing the volume if you are in an office though.

The bigger the drone, the bigger the impact

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: WTF?

That's not a moon... Sorry, that's not a helicopter - it is a heavy cargo drone. Making a let's say drone version of a Mi-10 will allow to dispense with a lot of surplus equipment originally designed to carry the meatware necessary to load and unload the cargo.

In any case, until it is just a "drone", it stands no chance to compete with a Holden/D-Max with an extra fuel tank. Get on the dirt track and press on the gas. Oops, 500km just went by (been there, done that, albeit not in Australia - in deepest, darkest Eastern Europe).

IMHO "the outback" is the wrong use case. The real use case is probably island hopper - you are likely to see these in the Bahamas long before you see them in the outback.

F-35 firmware patches to be rolled out 'like iPhone updates'

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Samsung TV software update comes to mind

"Instantly fatal"? That's a bit of hyperbole, methinks. I'm pretty sure the software updates won't be delivered in flight,

So instead of being bricked in-flight, it will be bricked before flight. Isn't it wonderful having most (for some countries all) of your air force on the ground for a nice "fish in a barrel" shooting spree exercise.

Add to that the idea that USA has to approve your flight plans as the mission software is integrated with spares and logistics and is located in USA mil cloud.

Even the most desperate Nazi super-weapon attempts towards the end of WW2 did not get anywhere as surreal as that. This just beats the Sur out of Surreal.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Samsung TV software update comes to mind

Dunno why, but the software update for Samsung TVs comes to my mind...

Google rushes to curb Oreo's massive appetite for your 4G mobile data

Voland's right hand Silver badge

"Improved management for WiFi devices"

It is doing it all right. Just as advertised - manages them into oblivion.

SpaceX sneaks in X-37B space plane launch ahead of Hurricane Irma

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: I was probably cheaper and simpler to launch.

Damaged is an understatement.

For the time being it has been forecasted to track further west through the mid-Florida swamps so Cape Canaveral is likely to be spared the worst of it.

If the original forecast from 24h ago was still valid Cape Canaveral would have taken a direct category 4 (if not 5) hit on the chin with the eye tracking across the launch pads.

Have a look at the pics from St Marteen and Barbuda on what exactly can this thing do. 185mph winds can destroy pretty much anything. There is no normal building (except bunkers) that can withstand that without taking severe damage.

Facebook ran $100k of deliberately divisive Russian ads ahead of 2016 US election

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Only 100K

I thought Cambridge Analytica gave the expertise to the leave campaign for free.

Not to Trump. Trump paid.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Only 100K

That is a good ROI. Pretty cheap too. Especially compared to the amount of money Cambridge Analytica and SCLE have charged for doing exactly the same in other countries elections and referendums.

Just to be clear - they (and their ilk) will still be allowed as they interfere in elections "in the direction we want". It is only the Russians who will be banned from buying ads in the future. It is the reds under our beds, you see. If it is brown, white or any other color, they should be allowed. In the name of "democracy".

Google puts the last coat of polish on Chrome 61

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Google's UK Privacy Check up. A 35 step process to hell, to set, what are just 5 toggles.

There are basically only two activities that you would care so much as to not want authorities to know.

Since when a slimy marketeer scumbag is an authority?

Voland's right hand Silver badge

The worst of UPnP

The worst of UPnP and Javascript combined. Excuse me while I retch (I hope there is setting to disable this).

A furious think-tank boss, Google, and an academic 'fired' for criticizing ads giant

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Lost me here...

was complicit in giving a corporate giant undue influence over an organization whose job it is to keep an eye on such abuses of corporate power.

I never had the faintest idea that a Stink Tank has this goal and modus operandi.

AFAIK, their goal and modus operandi is to supply seemingly objective position for lobbying. They have NO OTHER REASON TO EXIST. OK, I am being unfair here, they have one more - to provide jobs to liberal arts parasites who are too lazy or incompetent to find real work as well as low-load retirement positions for public servants who have served well their real paymasters.

Any ideas that a Stink tank has anything to uphold as far as moral or factual standards are delusional. It upholds only one thing - producing what is expected from it based on its orientation. Its orientation is chosen not because there is a public good expectation from it. It is chosen so that money can be collected and its founders can retire on the Bahamas one day. As a payment for providing what their paymasters require.

Give staff privacy at work, Euro human rights court tells bosses

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Court is right

With all due respect, you missed

By that logic if the contract says you have a CCTV camera installed in the toilet up your butt, you are obliged to accept that and have absolutely no entitlement to object.

I will repeat - Contract clauses DO NOT OVERRIDE LAW. If the LAW (and in this case the EUHR Convention as implemented in the law of all member states) says you have a right to privacy, this is is supreme to any contract clause. It would and should have been the same even if the company warned him.

Just to be clear - what the court has decided (and what El Reg has omitted from their coverage) is that the company is entitled to monitor on corporate resources. It however MUST respect article 8.

This is the decision, and it is quite clearly valid in both Eu and UK law and fair too.

So for example, based on monitoring, it may take an issue with how much time you are spending on your family affairs, but it cannot take an issue with the content and the fact that you may have to do so at work in some cases - as in this case.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Which is exactly why it is higher on May priority list

That is exactly why it is even higher on May's priority list than Eu.

Her original (even more idiotic than now) position during the referendum campaign was "I grudgingly support us being in the Eu, but the Human Rights Convention and ECHR must go". Remember?

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Court is right

There is no need to be "el reg style flippant".

It is a fundamental legal principle: "YOU CANNOT SIGN OFF AN UNALIENABLE RIGHT". Contract clause cannot override any of the so called fundamental rights. Same as in UK law - an illegal clause in a contract usually nullifies the whole contract (unfair contract terms act of 1977 and several truckloads of precedent to support it).

The amount of time it took for something that simple to be put right is a testament to the amount of pressure lower courts were put under.

Three challenges UK watchdog to a duel over mobile spectrum rules

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: 5G vs 4G?

More MVNOs

Google "network slicing".

Thousands of hornets swarm over innocent fire service drone

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Eek!

Even when I climb the tree in mid-August, to pluck the best figs, they will coexist quite happily in general.

Pretty much describes them - you do not mess with them, they do not mess with you. You will not find them trying to get into your plate, drink, etc. They like fig and olive tree gardens because there is plenty of insects to hunt including other wasps. They are nowhere as keen on bees as people pretend them to be. The reason is that high dose of sugar is actually lethal for wasp young. So the adult has to do extra work to squeeze every bit of nectar out of bees. As a result if they can raid a wasps nest they will do so instead of raiding beehives.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Can I get a pinch of salt?

You need a bucket. They had some pictures of the Indonesian variety which is the most venomous wasp on the planet to illustrate one of their articles. Same article, further down, a giant Japanese one. They live like f*** 4000km+ away from each other.

Here is the article for the reference:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2462797/30-Chinese-children-suffering-organ-failure-stung-giant-hornets.html

First pic is indonesian, second is Vespa Mandarina. Article after that surprise surprise spreads scare stories that we got these too. Neither of them had anything to do with the Chinese incident by the way. If a child was stung 10+ times by either one of them the child would be not hospital, but morgue material.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Eek!

Concur.

They are becoming more common too. We shared a beach with them in Lun in Croatia this summer and there were some around in late August when we had lunch in Kassel near the river. It will not get into your plate, picnic basket, glass, etc. It has no interest of you and it minds its own business which is killing other insects. You can see it landing on a stone or a bush next to you, cleaning itself, then taking off and minding its own business.

Granted, having them around is like having a neighbor with a machine gun, but usually, if you do not mess with them, they do not mess with you.

The real danger are the nests - the hornets have a different attack mode defending a nest - they release a hormone marking you as a target and then you are pretty much a guaranteed hospital case.

Networking vendors are good for free lunches, hopeless for networks

Voland's right hand Silver badge

That works for a simple network

The approach does not stand a chance for a complex large scale network connected to the Internet.

1. Routing protocols (and their implementations out of which ~95%+ are commercial) have had decades to sort out feedback loops and stability issues. You do not get any of that if you start trying to code "direct network control" yourself. As a result you quickly learn that optimal control is hard. It is one of the highest paid areas in math for a reason. It often takes man-millenia to learn that too (and some people and companies are yet to learn it to the full extent).

2. If you want to participate in the Internet as an equal you need to peer with other people and TALK THE RIGHT LANGUAGE. That means talk BGP and not talk gibberish. If you think that you will be tolerated until your developers polish their home grown implementation, well, think again. I highly doubt it.

Argentina eyes up laser death cannon testbed warship

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: .Sarcasm, I take it?

and the Argentinians not having the capability to find out if it's true or not

FTFY: The Argentinians not having the capability to buy (or get as a present) the data from the Chinese, Russians or anyone else who keeps an eye on them from space.

At least at one point this year there was not - the Admiralty unintentionally leaked the fact by stating which one is in for repairs and which one is participating in various junkets (all away from there).

In any case, laughing about the state of the Argentinian fleet is easy. It is surprising they have anything at all considering the economic situation in the country. If, however, their situation continues to improve this may stop being a laughing matter.

Asterisk RTP bug worse than first thought: Think intercepted streams

Voland's right hand Silver badge

You should not be using RTP outside your own LAN in the first place

Plain RTP has no security to speak of. Trying to introduce it via a retrofit is a lost cause.

If you are running telephony outside your own network you should start looking at sRTP, zRTP or packing the traffic into a VPN.

Belarus declares war on imaginary country within borders of Belarus that is better than Belarus

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Not really a Laughing Matter

So. We are entitled to express the concern, right?

Playing the devil's advocate 1: Why is Kim Fat The Turd then not entitled to express the same concern about the similar size South Korea/USA exercise? We are poo-poo-ing his concerns and we are suddenly concerned about the same issue on Russian borders. Double standards anyone?

Playing the devil's advocate 2: Putin and the Fuhrer lookalike have at least tried to put a lipstick on a pig and use imaginary countries as opponents. We have not. Noble Jump 17 a few month ago used Russian colors on surplus soviet equipment from Eastern European countries as targets. Here is the enemy, he is Russian, kill the f*cker. This continued despite it having to be MOVED. It was originally planned to be done in Bulgaria, not Romania, where both the prime minister and the president said that "If you want to stage WW3, stage it somewhere else and get the fuck off our territory". It still continued with the same target color selection after once again the Bulgarians as well as several other NATO countries pointed out that what is being done is an open and blatant provocation (that is in the press around Eastern Europe - you can find easily, with pictures).

So, frankly, based on OUR behavior, they are entitled to be paranoid and demonstrate military readiness.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Hehe... Love the fake names.

Last NATO exercises this summer (Noble Jump 17) used Russian equipment and colors for the enemy for all targets. Openly. Not even pretending that the pig needs a lipstick. That did not go down very well with some of the participants (while getting a roaring applause from others). So much for "allied unity".

Not sure if what the Belorussians and Russians did is an improvement or the opposite.

SanDisk's little microSD card sucks up 400GB

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: It's how big?

I'm pretty sure my phone won't see a 400GB disk.

There may be FAT issues with something that size. It should see it all right. Would it be able to use it properly is another story. I suspect you may have to "adopt it" and/or format it using something different from vFAT.

Deputy AG Rosenstein calls for law to require encryption backdoors

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Impossible

Done properly there is no way

Of course there is a way. There is a very well known side channel attack - you download the key by attaching two electrodes to the testicles and applying short pulses of 5Kv..

China: Cute Hyperloop Elon, now watch how it's really done

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Pressure suits?

No, the casualties will happen when there's a breach in the tube - whether caused by terrorism, faulty construction or just dodgy maintenance.

You missed the most obvious reason - earthquakes and loess subsidence. If it happens under a normal train people and goods stand a chance. If it happens under anything going at that speed there will be no survivors.

You can easily build a system like this in Scandinavia, large portions of Europe (except the South), etc. China - not so much (except a very short one for showing off).

Police deny Notting Hill Carnival face recog tech led to wrongful arrest

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: They didn't particularly try to hide it

I imagine that the evidence gathered in this would not not be admissible in court.

In the UK? I think you are wrong. UK does not have the fruit of poisoned tree doctrine. Probably the only developed economy in the world where the police is entitled to present evidence obtained via illegal means.

Samsung keeps the smartwatch alive. Just

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: They all try to do so much

Even Pebble tried to do too much to compete with the late-comers, if they had stuck with simple, they might still be here now......

Pebble demonstrated the failure of the crowdsource model for the purposes of building a company.

Crowdsourcing allows you to build a SINGLE product. You show people what you are going to build and build it. Pebble did that brilliantly. What it tried after that was to become a company to sell MORE products which did not get the implicit approval of crowdsourcing and whose products were decided by a newly formed board + marketing. If they put the financing of the new products to the crowdsourcing test they would have known they are a dud before they tried. They could have even still be around making what the people liked - the original pebble (with minimal incremental improvements).

Prejudiced humans = prejudiced algorithms, and it's not an easy fix

Voland's right hand Silver badge

There is an inherent difficulty in this

Paraphrasing an old Russian (and of course discriminatory) joke about a blond driving:

ML is a like a monkey with a hand-grenade - you never know where it is going to throw it.

This is an inherent problem with ML versus other approaches like optimal control, probability and statistics, etc. When you are using ML you are "guessing" the model which describes the process. You are not fitting data to a proposed model. So you have no clue what empirical model will the NN converge to.

So if it comes up with a silly answer, well, it comes with the territory.

Same as we have when we were little. Just listen to your children for a while. Or search for "kid's humor" on Google.

US government: We can jail you indefinitely for not decrypting your data

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Good quality encryption results in random data, which can be decrypted to anything.

Sort-a. The probability for a key which will decrypt a full-disk-encrypted drive to a valid filesystem state which is different from the "real" key is infinitesimally small.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

After seven days they'd let the poor bugger get to the street outside

The minor difference here is that the encrypted materials are still in their possession. If they have returned them to you, then they can run that gamut. If you have declined accepting the return they will have difficulty proving a new offense.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

And in five years when you are asked again?

For the time being an attempt to ask again gives you all you need to bring the case to ECHR. In addition to the current double jeopardy precedent base.

Voland's right hand Silver badge

It is not indefinite - RIPA act is quite specific. 5 years per offense if memory serves me right.

Nest cracks out cheaper spin of its thermostat

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Re: Still not happening

There is no advantage if:

1. Your HVAC does not have zoning

2. Your household has a regular schedule

The advantage of the Nest and other "smart" systems is integrating the thermostat to home security and other presence detection to turn the heating and/or aircon up/down when you are away on an irregular schedule. The cost of upgrading your HVAC to a standard where the Nest (or another similar system) can take advantage of it is an order of magnitude more than the cost of the Nest itself.

If your household lives on a regular schedule (that is 95%+ of the population) you can get to within percents of its advertised costs savings by using per-room timers/programmable thermostatic valves/thermostats retrofitted onto a legacy central heating system.

Oh, ambassador! You literally are spoiling us: Super-stealthy spyware hits Euro embassy PCs

Voland's right hand Silver badge

Why does everything seem to state 'Microsoft Windows'

That is what 99% of state institutions and employees use. While corporates are no longer the 100% Wintel territory they used to be, governments are and remain a MSFT stronghold.