* Posts by Cuddles

2337 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2011

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

Cuddles

Re: "I for one do NOT see this as being reasonable"

"I strongly suspect that it's primarily another attempt at enforced churn rather than a genuine concern for our security."

It's the same as requiring passwords to be changed regularly, while also having rules that prevent strong passwords. It's more important to be seen to be doing something than it is to actually be secure.

Researchers trick Tesla into massively breaking the speed limit by sticking a 2-inch piece of electrical tape on a sign

Cuddles

Re: Satnav isn't fooled

My TomTom always used to drop the speed limit to 50 every time the motorway went under a bridge. Which was particularly odd given that most of those roads would have had a 60 limit anyway. Satnav may be more difficult to attack in real time by messing with signs, but it's certainly nowhere near reliable enough to run autonomous cars.

In reality, some combination of mapping, real-time sensing and common sense is the only way to get a workable solution. The first two are getting there, programming the latter is where the real problem lies.

Auf wiedersehen, pet: UK Deutsche Bank contractors plan to leave rather than take 25% pay cut for IR35 – report

Cuddles

Re: Alternatively

"Non-clinically trained isn't only management, though. Receptionists, janitors and other cleaning staff, technicians maintaining hospital infrastructure and equipment etc would all count as Non-clinically trained."

Exactly, it's like complaining that the air force has more support staff than pilots. The pilots, doctors and nurses might be the ones at the pointy end of things, but if you don't employ anyone else they won't actually get anything done. The exact numbers needed in various areas can always be up for debate, and there are very organisations you can point at that couldn't function perfectly well with a hefty reduction in middle management, but the idea that simply having more support staff than doctors must be inherently bad is just silly.

Vodafone: Yes, we slurp data on customers' network setups, but we do it for their own good

Cuddles

Re: BT does the same

I have an old enough Homehub that BT refuse to believe it exists, despite it clearly connecting perfectly well. I doubt they're spying very successfully on the rest of my network when they can't even figure out what their own kit looks like.

Shipping is so insecure we could have driven off in an oil rig, says Pen Test Partners

Cuddles

Re: That's not unreasonable

"Bobbing about in a launch on the high seas alongside a passing merchant ship while trying to (a) find a spot where you can connect to the wi-fi (remember that the point of the rogue AP's was that wi-fi doesn't travel that well through a series of metal boxes), and (b) hoping this is one of the vulnerable ones, doesn't sound all that efficient to me."

Or you could just wait until it's in port. The vulnerabilities still exist when the ships are not out by themselves on the high seas.

As for hoping it's one of the vulnerable ones, I rather suspect that the list of vulnerable ships is extremely similar to the list of ships.

Voatz of no confidence: MIT boffins eviscerate US election app, claim fiends could exploit flaws to derail democracy

Cuddles

Old version

"The app biz claims the researchers looked at an old version of Voatz, one that has since been updated at least 27 times."

"the Voatz app used in West Virginia's 2018 midterm election."

If they're looking at how terrible the app was when it was actually used in the election, is it really relevant how many times it might have been updated since then? If anything this seems to be an outright admission that the researchers' claims are true, otherwise those updates wouldn't have been needed.

Can AI-enhanced virtual sports presenters do the job? It's a big ask

Cuddles

Re: To be fair...

"For people who are running on odd schedules, and/or that are away a lot for say work, they can be quite a useful thing to have and can lead to reduced bills."

Can they really though? I'd be interested to see any actual studies showing that people reduce their bills this way. It seems a lot easier and cheaper to simply put a jumper on for the 20 minutes or so it takes for your house to start warming up. And then keep said jumper on because you save a lot more money by dropping the thermostat a couple of degrees and just wearing some clothes than you do by wandering around in your underwear with the heat cranked up as high as possible.

Unless you're living in a stately mansion and need to telegram the butler three days in advance to give the fires time to warm the place up, heating a house just isn't that complicated. Wear clothes. Install better insulation. Don't worry about it being slightly colder than the Caribbean for a few minutes after you get in. The amount of money that can be saved by a "smart" thermostat is pitiful at best, and potentially even negative, compared to far simpler and more sensible measures.

Not a Genius move after all: Apple must cough up $$$ in back pay for store staff forced to wait for bag searches

Cuddles

Re: Minimum wage?

$14 is just above $13. It appears the claim that this affects people earning just above minimum wage is entirely correct.

Best buds? Apple must be fuming: Samsung's wireless earphones boast 11 hours of listening on a single charge

Cuddles

Re: Powered what?

"I don't really get what's not to love."

The wires. As with so many things, it's a trade-off. In exchange for the added inconvenience of needing to charge them, you gain the convenience of not having wires flapping around the place, getting caught on things, and so on. Depending on your preferences and the situation, you may or may not find that trade-off worthwhile, but it really shouldn't be difficult to understand why others might. Personally I prefer wired when at home and not moving about much, but wireless for running.

As for being difficult to lose, I don't see how that changes at all. When in use, they're on my head and not about to go anywhere. When not in use, I'm perfectly capable of losing things that have wires attached. Which is why I didn't mention travel above, since my preference in that case is generally to use the free airline ones because I've either forgotten or lost my own. I can only assume they're partying somewhere with my car key and several odd socks.

Cuddles

Re: $150 == £159

While that's true, the exchange rate isn't quite that bad yet. With 20% VAT and £1 = $1.3, that makes the UK price equivalent to just under $175. Not the worst markup in the world, but always a bit annoying.

Parks and recreation escalate efforts to take back control of field terrorised by thug geese

Cuddles

Just one goose actually.

There's got to be Huawei we can defeat Chinese tech giant, thinks US attorney-general. Aha, let's buy stake in Ericsson and Nokia

Cuddles

Re: Ignorance-fuelled decisions

"I am an unapologetic China sceptic"

I can confirm that China does indeed exist.

Sketchy behavior? Wacom tablet drivers phone home with names, times of every app opened on your computer

Cuddles

"this invigilation is something you need to actively sign up to"

That does not appear to be the case - as the article notes, it's enabled by default and will work unless you specifically disable it. The account log-in you're looking at is a separate thing that gives access to cloudy stuff and so on, it has nothing to do with whether they're tracking you or not.

Malware infection attempts appear to be shrinking... possibly because miscreants are less spammy and more focused on specific targets

Cuddles

Attempt != detection

"A mere 9.9 billion of these malware attacks were picked up by Sonicwall in 2019, the American company claimed in its latest figures, saying that this represented a six per cent decrease on 2018's figures."

Maybe they've just got better at avoiding detection by Sonicwall?

Trivial backdoor found in firmware for Chinese-built net-connected video recorders

Cuddles

Who did what?

The article talks about an issue with HiSilicon firmware, but then seems to randomly blame Huawei a couple of times. Is one a subsidiary of the other or something? Yes, I'm aware DuckDuckGo exists, but this is the sort of information that should be included in the article.

"You then connect to that remote service with the username root and password 123456"

Well, at least it's slightly more secure than my luggage.

This AI is full of holes: Brit council fixes thousands of road cracks spotted by algorithm using sat snaps

Cuddles

Re: Pointless busywork

Exactly. The article says that "all of it" isn't precise enough, but that's precisely what is needed. When a road starts coming apart, half-arsed patches that disintegrate within a few weeks or days aren't just annoying for the people who want to use the road, they're more expensive in the long term than resurfacing the whole thing properly. The problem is that the cost comes all at once instead of little bits at a time, so it doesn't fit in nicely with elections and yearly budgets.

Only 6 ransomware attacks on the UK's NHS since WannaCry worm hit in 2017 – report

Cuddles

Obvious problem

"20 per cent of hospitals refused or failed to respond to the survey"

Presumably because their PCs have been locked by ransomware.

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

Cuddles

Re: 5... 4... 3... 2.. 1...

Yeah, that whole part seems weird to me. I'm no lawyer, but the idea that I could be sued merely for having bought a commercially available product sounds utterly insane. I have also bought things from companies at various times; I'm pretty sure that doesn't make me liable for any infringements that may have occurred during their production.

Not call, dude: UK govt says guaranteed surcharge-free EU roaming will end after Brexit transition period. Brits left at the mercy of networks

Cuddles

"It will only take one company, probably one of the smaller ones to be forced in to raising roaming charges, for every other company to follow. Expecting companies to give away something free of charge when they are allowed to charge for it is somewhat naive in my view. It might not happen immediately, but roaming charges will return."

On the other hand, 3 were offering free roaming, and not just in the EU, well before everyone else was forced to do so. We may not keep blanket roaming from all operators, but there are likely to be at least some options that keep free roaming because it's a potentially big feature to advertise to attract customers.

Google says its latest chatbot is the most human-like ever – trained on our species' best works: 341GB of social media

Cuddles

What's the problem?

"their opening replies may pass as human, but the next sentences won't make sense or are just completely factually incorrect"

How exactly does this differ from talking to a human on the internet?

Xerox names the 11 directors it hopes will oust most of HP's board and put $33bn hostile takeover to shareholders

Cuddles

Re: Interesting list

"leaving the running of HP up to Xerox and Xerox's existing board."

I think you misspelled "Carl Icahn" there.

Amazing peer-reviewed AI bots that predict premature births were too good to be true: Flawed testing bumped accuracy from 50% to 90%+

Cuddles

"Just because something is peer reviewed it doesn't mean to say it works and results reproducible"

Indeed. However, ideally peer review at least acts as a decent filter to stop obviously shoddy work getting put out in the first place. Scientific publications get a lot of flack for not being reproducible or not giving significant enough results, but that's not actually a problem most of the time because the whole point is to put the results out there and let other people look into it and try to reproduce them, extend the work, or whatever.

In this case though, it appears to be sheer incompetence on the part of both the reviews and editorial staff. This is exactly the sort of thing peer review is there to catch - obviously unbelievable results caused by poor experimental method. Either the papers clearly describe their own failings and shouldn't even make it to review in the first place, or they don't describe the work in enough detail to justify publication. Many papers don't hold up given time to do reproductions or further related work, but it's rare to see such clear sloppiness through the entire experimental and publication process.

Safari's Intelligent Tracking Protection is misspelled, says Google: It should be Dumb Browser Stalking Enabler

Cuddles

Re: Even so

Is that actually the case? My understanding of this is that Apple's method does effectively close off several common tracking mechanisms, but in doing so opens up a new one of its own. So at the very worst it doesn't help much but also doesn't make anything worse, while in reality it replaces multiple common techniques with a single one that is a bit more difficult and convoluted to exploit, making things a bit better overall. Maybe it doesn't actually fix the problem as well as Apple claimed, but it seems to be better than not doing anything at all.

A-high: Prototype drug squad bot to patrol Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc for dodgy ads for opioids

Cuddles

Relevance?

"If deals are discussed in private messages on Facebook, though, for example, the machine-learning model, which leafs through public posts, will miss all that chatter."

And how exactly does a bot trawling through public posts address that? Note I don't say "address that problem", because the fact that random people trawling through internet comments aren't able to see private messages is in fact the whole point of the word "private", and not a problem that actually needs addressing. I'm sure various government TLAs would disagree on that point, but I don't see how it's relevant given the subject of the article.

Ancient Ore Crusher or KillBot 2000? NASA gets ready to pick a name for its Mars 2020 Rover

Cuddles

Rover McRoverFace

I feel Buggy McBugface rolls off the tongue a bit better.

How a Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25,000 AI contest with hidden code – and was fired from dream SV job

Cuddles

"Is is that someone genuinely sat down and decided that the way to solve the problem of abandoned pets was to artificially enhance their social media profiles?"

Definitely this one for me. The rest is just a bog standard machine learning problem combined with the usual result of the current trend of gamifying everything and turning into a competition with a top spot. What gets me is not just the idea of lying about pets in order to get them adopted faster, but the idea that there is even a problem here that needs solving. Some animals are less desirable as pets than others. A mangy arthritic mule is not going to get adopted as quickly as a playful fluffy kitten. Short of just claiming the former is actually the latter and hoping no-one notices when they come to pick it up, there's nothing you can do about that. Humans cheating in a competition isn't something anyone should be surprised by. But I'm am very confused why anyone would think the fact that nice pets are preferred to shit ones is something that could be fixed by throwing machine learning at social media optimisation.

LastPass stores passwords so securely, not even its users can access them

Cuddles

"a fraction of a percent of our user base"

100/1 is a fraction.

Why is it so difficult for companies to actually apologise? It's always waffle about how hardly anyone was affected, security is our number one priority, and all that nonsense. How hard is it to just say "Sorry, we screwed up. We've found and fixed the problem, and we'll learn from this mistake so we can try not to do it again."? Personally I'd trust someone who said that far more than someone who makes multiple statements about how it wasn't really a problem because hardly anyone was affected.

Intel server chip shortages continue to bite: HPE warns of Xeon processor supply drought for the whole of 2020

Cuddles

Re: "Those aren't being hit by any major restriction, right ?"

"Did you read the article? "keeping as many high-margin, high-end server chips rolling off its 14nm fabrication lines as possible, to the detriment of desktop and mobile parts". (bold mine)."

And it's worth bearing in mind that the same applies to AMD, with TMSC's 7nm fabs being fully booked as well. Things would be looking a lot worse for Intel if AMD had been able to take up all the slack.

Copy-left behind: Permissive MIT, Apache open-source licenses on the up as developers snub GNU's GPL

Cuddles

Times have changed

""to ensure the evil corporations of that time would not be able to use open-source software and then restrict its redistribution."

The top ten open-source projects today are managed by Facebook, Google, and Microsoft"

It's lucky that none of them are evil.

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

Cuddles

"There's no particular reason that "Europe" has to mean "EU". There are other European organizations, the European Space Agency comes to mind, whose membership extends far beyond the EU.

A patent court should be able to determine it's jurisdiction with the agreement of the desired members. If it wants to be EU, fine. If it wants to be pan-European, fine."

The problem seems to be when the general becomes the specific. Yes, there's no reason Europe has to mean EU, and a patent organisation can certainly extent over more than just the EU, as the EPO demonstrates. The trouble is that the specific proposal for the UPC is defined as being only for the EU. And it also requires the UK to be a signatory. That's a bit of a problem. The whole thing could go back to the drawing board and either accept non-EU members or get rid of the bit about the UK, but that would involve starting over again rather than just getting the existing agreement up and running.

So sure, there are all kinds of ways to think about how such an idea could be implemented. The problems are with the actual proposal currently on the table. And whatever the decision turns out to be regarding Germany's constitution, any deal that requires a specific country to participate while simultaneously banning them from doing so has a bit of an issue.

UC Berkeley told to cough up $5m in compensation to comp-sci, engineering students recruited to teach classes

Cuddles

Too far the other way?

On the one hand, it's clearly unreasonable to expect people to work without any pay or benefits (yes, the idea of unpaid interns is insane as well). But on the other hand, this appears to be saying that people who worked 8 hours per week for a year should be paid a salary of $22500. That seems pretty excessive for essentially untrained assistants working part time. Even a full time lecturer is unlikely to be making that sort of money, especially as a recent graduate (it's the equivalent of ~£90k, closer to a senior professor), and things like tutoring and teaching assistants take far less work than being the primary teacher running a course.

Globo PC sales up for first time in 7 straight years – but market still 25% down on 2011

Cuddles

Are you sure?

"The also-rans - Apple, Acer and Asus - all declined in the year, both analysts agreed."

The table directly above this sentence says Acer grew 3.5%.

MI5 gros fromage: Nah, US won't go Huawei from dear old Blighty over 5G, no matter what we do

Cuddles

Re: Bog Off USA

"UK politicians should back off in meddling in matters whereof they are clueless."

But then they won't have anything to do!

Guilty as charged: Apple confesses some Smart Battery Cases are having 'issues', offers replacements

Cuddles

Goldilocks

Samsung makes batteries that discharge much too quickly. Apple makes batteries that don't discharge at all. If only they worked together, we could end up with batteries that work at the correct rate.

The soap opera continues. HP again tells Xerox: Show us more money!

Cuddles

A relevant quote from that article:

"In 1985, Mr Icahn took over TWA, the now defunct American airline. He loaded it with debt, sold its most valuable flight routes and ground the airline into bankruptcy."

And people are surprised HP aren't interested in what Icahn wants for them?

We won't CU later: New Ofcom broadband proposals mull killing off old copper network

Cuddles
Paris Hilton

Re: Got my new FTTP connection yesterday

"And you propose to do *what* with this much bandwidth?"

Porn, obviously.

More seriously, why do so many people constantly complain about high bandwidths as if the only possible reason for wanting high download speeds is if you're going to be using all of it at all times? Is it really that difficult to understand that people might sometimes want to download large files (games are routinely >50GB these days, for example), and are willing to pay to have access to decent bandwidth at all times so they are able to do so in a matter of seconds rather than hours?

As for cars, there are two important points. Firstly, there are plenty of places where it is entirely legal to drive at those speeds, so obviously it's not useless. Secondly, it's generally the power output (and torque) that is more important - you can use the acceleration at any time, but if you have the power to accelerate quicker, it's almost impossible for that not to come along with a high top speed. Top speed might make a nice marketing point, but the engineering behind it has very real benefits to normal drivers. So you are correct that it is similar to good broadband - some people consider having access to high peak performance worth paying for even if you won't actually use that peak most of the time.

Unless you were complaining that your speedo displays a higher maximum speed than the car is capable of achieving, in which case I don't see how it's relevant to broadband speeds which actually can be used. In any case, speedos always display a higher maximum speed than cars can achieve because they're designed to have common speeds at the most easily viewed location - you're not expected to drive over 100mph very often, but if your speedo goes up to 120 or so then 50-70 is right around the top of the display. In summary, whatever it is you're complaining about, you're wrong.

Under construction: CAT lobs bargain-basement rugged mobile that will take a kicking and keep on clicking

Cuddles

MIL-SPEC

"The manufacturer adds that the S32 meets the US Army's MIL-SPEC-810G standard for ruggedness. That covers the whole gamut of things that would ordinarily damage a phone — from drops to extreme temperatures. For what it's worth, no independent body certifies devices to this standard"

That's because it isn't actually a standard. Or more accurately, it's a standard that gives guidance on how to define what standard you intend to use to perform your own tests. Saying a device meets the MIL-SPEC-810 standard is like saying the standard was typed in 12-point Times New Roman. It's the content of what was actually written that matters, not how you set up the template for it. There are a variety of example tests given, but exactly how they are carried out and how results are interpreted is deliberately left up to the tester, because the whole point is to be a generic framework and not a specific testing methodology. There is no such thing as a test for "ruggedness" in those examples.

Beset by lawsuits over poor security protections, Ring rolls out 'privacy dashboard' for its creepy surveillance cams, immediately takes heat

Cuddles

Re: At WhitePines...

"In theory we need a set of standards for the IoT, security, updates, loss of functionality, bricking, etc. but if such standards were implemented there would be a couple of problems as I see it. Firstly, the pace of change in the industry would overtake the standards quite quickly - although I think that basics of safety, security, surveillance could be generic enough to be useful. Secondly, and most important, the cost impact would probably drive suppliers out of business or make the products so expensive that users would just buy knock off that didn't meet the regs; the main cost impacts being compliance and supportability."

Unfortunately there's a third problem you've missed - what is considered "safe" differs between people. In particular, what a government considers safe is very different from what ordinary people consider safe when it comes to surveillance. We already have politicians in several countries attempting to legislate the laws of mathematics when it comes to encryption. While IoT crap is a mess in its current state, I'm not sure I'd feel a lot better if it all followed a set of standards that included legally mandated back doors security holes.

And that's before you even start thinking about the problems of how different countries might view things. With something like a plug, if it doesn't electrocute you in one country, it's probably not going to do so anywhere else. So physical safety rules tend to be fairly universal no matter where you sell your products (obviously as long as you pay attention to grid voltages and the like). An internet connected gizmo that needs to obey 200-odd different security standards is a lot more difficult to handle.

There's certainly a case to be made for a sensible set of standards regarding things like providing updates, not being allowed to brick products remotely to force people to buy new things, and that sort of thing. But those are quality rules that, as with physical safety, are more-or-less universal no matter where you are. When it comes to actual security and safety, I see little possibility of getting any sensible standards that are actually agreed on by more than a few countries, and even less possibility of any country's government setting standards that I as a consumer actually agree with.

Cuddles

Re: At WhitePines...

"You know what else has cameras, microphones, & speakers? Pretty much every cellphone produced in the last thirty years. Should the parents be jailed for putting one in the hands of their children?"

Cellphones in 1990 all had cameras? I'm not sure that's entirely accurate.

As for putting them in the hands of children, perhaps you should read the article a little more closely. Some of the children in question were somewhere around 4-5 years old (the oldest is currently 8, with two younger ones also in the same room). I won't say that parents giving a 4 year old child unsupervised access to a smartphone should automatically be locked up, but it sure as hell can't be considered good parenting. In much the same way that putting a hilariously insecure surveillance camera in a young child's bedroom may not be actually illegal, but you have serious issues if you think it's actually a sensible idea.

Lenovo intros choose-your-own-adventure Yoga Slim 7: Ryzen spend $360 less on shiny or take a dip in Intel's Ice Lake?

Cuddles

"The prices haven't changed much, but the quality has increased..."

Also, as always when these comments come up, it's important to remember that inflation is a thing. A £1000 laptop in 2007 should cost about £1400 today. That means if prices haven't changed much, in fact the effective price has dropped very significantly. You're not actually getting a lighter, faster, generally better laptop for the same price as a decade ago, you're getting it 30% cheaper.

FCC proudly wastes $90m getting data-capped, pricey satellite internet to tiny percentage of US population

Cuddles

Re: 98%

Why wouldn't those places be covered by the satellite service in question?

Cuddles

98%

I've seen this coverage noted a few times. Is the missing part places like Hawaii and maybe the northern end of Alaska which fall outside the coverage area, or are there actual parts of the mainland that somehow get missed?

Medical biz LifeLabs fesses up: Hackers slurped 15 million customer records – and we paid them to hand it all back

Cuddles

one year of free identity theft and fraud protection services

It's a good job things like names, date of birth and medical conditions all magically change every year, so no fraud will be possible using the leaked data once that time is up.

Who's that padding down the chimney? It's Puma, with its weird £80 socks for gamers

Cuddles

Nah, to prevent DVT you need knee-high compression socks/stockings. Low-cut ankle socks won't do anything useful in a medical sense.

The IoT wars are over, maybe? Amazon, Apple, Google give up on smart-home domination dreams, agree to develop common standards

Cuddles

Brillo

Internet-connected scouring pads? And I thought internet fridges and kettles were silly enough.

Your workmates might still be reading that 'unshared' Slack document

Cuddles

I must be confused about what the word "share" means. If you share a file with me, it is presumably with the intention that I am able to save a local copy and do something useful with it - some sort of data analysis, document corrections, or whatever. At the point you pass it to me, you lose any and all possibility of controlling what I actually do with it. Slack is irrelevant, there are plenty of ways for me to send it to other people. No amount of rights management can help with this, because the file needs to be unrestricted in order for it to be of any use to me.

Even if by "content" you mean useless crap like Powerpoint presentations, which could potentially be presented in-browser only and not allowed to download, you still face the same problem film companies keep running into. If I am able to view something on my monitor, I am able to make an unrestricted local copy of it, and there's nothing you can ever do to prevent it. At the very worst, that might mean taking photos of the screen, more likely just things like screenshots or finding temporary files. If I can see it, I can copy it.

So really the whole thing is nonsense. The complaint in this case seems to be essentially that if you send and email, the recipient can forward it someone else, which as Cronus notes is just stupid to complain about. But the more general issue is that the whole idea of being able to control files like that is stupid to start with. At the point you decide to send files to other people, you lose control over what happens to them afterwards. The problem is not with Slack or any other specific implementation of how to send them, it's that you're sending things to people you don't trust.

It's 2019 so, of course, this Wells Fargo employee accused of stealing customer cash posed with wads of dosh on Instagram, Facebook

Cuddles

Re: How many trainers?

"How do you get 14,400 followers with only 20 posts?"

You pay $88 grand for them.

What do Nginx, Twitch... and the English Premier League have in common? Russians. It's always the Russians

Cuddles

Re: I get a bit bored

"There's no easy way to check"

So? This is exactly the problem with a lot of modern tech companies. It may well be the case that it's not easy to check and moderate user-posted content on your platform (or to background check your drivers, monitor room rentals, have your scooters comply with road laws, etc.). That does not mean you don't have to do it. You do not have the inherent right to make money from whatever zany scheme you've come up with. If it turns out that providing a streaming/social media/whatever platform is not profitable if you run it properly within the law, that is entirely your own problem.

Attention! Very important science: Tapping a can of fizzy beer does... absolutely nothing

Cuddles

Re: Best "can abuse" I ever saw...

No, that's just because of licensing laws. In general on-licence and off-licence are exclusive - either you can sell alcohol for consumption on premises or off premises, but not both. Exceptions could be made so some pubs might be allowed to sell sealed drinks, but for the most part somewhere with an on-licence would always open the drinks to make sure they had to be drunk on site and not taken away for later. They were never actually required to do so, it just made it a lot easier to show compliance. Licensing laws changed around a decade ago, so there's a lot more variation and individualised license, but places with only an on-licence will still often do this.

Bad news: KeyWe Smart Lock is easily bypassed and can't be fixed

Cuddles

Re: Lots of bog-standard locks are easy to bypass.

Indeed, this seems to be one of the bigger issues with "smart" locks. It's not that they're necessarily easier to get through than a regular lock, but that it's possible to do so essentially untraceably in a way that doesn't look in any way suspicious to bystanders. Someone poking around at your door with bits of metal will have the police called on them if anyone sees, and will almost certainly leave some evidence of the tampering. Someone faffing around on their phone on the pavement, then walking straight through an open door doesn't look like a thief, and if they lock it again afterwards there might be no evidence anything happened at all.