* Posts by Cuddles

2337 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2011

You cannae break the laws of physics, cap'n... Boffins call BS on 'impossible' black hole, fear readings were botched

Cuddles

Re: Don't black holes accrete mass?

Yes. I commented about that on the original article as well - there's absolutely nothing impossible about this black hole and it's extremely misleading to keep calling it that. However, it is both unlikely and, importantly, never previously observed.

For the former, the important point is that you don't get entire stars simply falling straight into a black hole and disappearing. The process is actually extremely messy and results in huge amounts of material being blasted away rather than falling in - that's why we see very active accretion discs, jets of material and radiation, and so on. So to form at ~10 solar masses and increase up to ~70 doesn't mean eating 60 stars (which would already be a lot), but probably several hundred at minimum. Aside from being unlikely to start with, since pretty much nowhere has that many stars positioned in a way that they'll collide (even dense globular clusters and galactic cores are noted for having a lot of closely packed stars that aren't actually constantly colliding), that sort of thing should leave plenty of evidence behind.

As for the latter, the fact we've never seen it before obviously still doesn't mean it's impossible, but it's always going to raise questions about why we haven't seen any others. New discoveries that also contradict existing theories are always going to suffer under Occam's razor. If theory says something shouldn't exist, and all previous observations agree that it doesn't exist, you need pretty good evidence to support a claim that it actually does. The original guys might turn out to have been right after all, but at this point it seems relatively unlikely.

Revealed: NHS England bosses meet with tech and pharmaceutical giants to discuss price list of millions of Brits' medical data

Cuddles

On the plus side

Given what a shambles NHS IT projects inevitably are, there's very little chance this database will ever actually work.

ESA trumpets 'world's first space debris removal' with 4-armed junk botherer

Cuddles

Re: Conventional clean-up is extraordinarily expensive

The sad part is that by far the best way to remove orbital debris is actually with giant frickin' laser beams. Even with atmospheric distortion, the power and focus required is well within the capability of commercially available laser systems. Really big junk would take a while to deorbit, but it's far better at getting rid of the much more numerous smaller stuff than all the silly ideas about multi-armed robots and shooting nets at things. Unfortunately, it seems to be pretty much politically impossible, since no-one wants to be the first one to build a system capable of untraceably knocking absolutely any target out of orbit.

https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.asr.2012.02.003

Americans should have strong privacy-protecting encryption ...that the Feds and cops can break, say senators

Cuddles

A bit contradictory

"its pre-2014 phone unlocking process never led to a known security breach... he recalled the situation before 2014, when different security mechanisms on devices were readily removed."

"The pre-2014 security was never breached, except for all those times we breached it."

With a warehouse of unsold AR goggles, Magic Leap has a brainwave… let’s rebadge ‘em and sell to business!

Cuddles

Re: Run for it

I'm a bit surprised it doesn't already exist. There are already a variety of glasses, goggles, and such that try to replace the watch entirely and do all the GPS, tracking, and everything all in one place. But that always ends up with heavy, bulky, expensive glasses that probably still don't do the things you actually want and can't connect with other hardware in any useful way. Having glasses with nothing more than a display and bluetooth/ANT+ to connect to other devices would make much more sense - don't try to reinvent or reimplement all the things that already exist, just give a convenient way to display the information.

Hell, a lot of cycle computers these days are little more than a passive screen that connects to all the sensors you've glued to various bits of your bike and body. It doesn't seem it should be that difficult to just stick that screen on a pair of glasses.

Boffins find proof that yes, Carl Sagan and Joni Mitchell were right, we really are all made up of star stuff

Cuddles

Re: "[Palladium] is easily destroyed by heat"

Yeah, saying it's "destroyed" is rather misleading. The important part is the quote following that:

"Palladium is slightly more volatile than the other elements measured. As a result, less of it condensed into dust around these stars, and therefore there is less palladium from stardust in the meteorites we studied"

Essentially, palladium has a lower boiling point than the other elements they were looking at, so there tends to be less of it stuck in the dust that ultimately forms into planets and asteroids. Looking at the abstract (unfortunately the paper is behind a paywall), the destruction part is actually about the dust itself - dust floating around interstellar space evaporates when it gets too close to a star.

I think the article also has the conclusion backwards. It's not that dust from supernovae gets destroyed while dust from giant stars survives, but the exact opposite - giant stars produce less of the heavy elements and more lighter ones (palladium here being considered relatively light). When the dust arrives near the Sun, the lighter elements boil off while the heavier ones remain stuck in the dust, leading to large variations in the amounts of light elements depending on where you look, but not much variation in the heavier ones.

In tribute to Galaxy Note 7, BBC iPlayer support goes up in flames for some Samsung TVs

Cuddles

Re: DIY

"For the 99% of the population who aren't going to be farting around setting up a tiny computer the actual real answer is to..."

...set up a different tiny computer.

Den Automation raised millions to 'reinvent' the light switch. Now it's lights out for startup

Cuddles

Re: Boy genius

The real problem is that people tend to get touted as geniuses despite not actually having done anything to deserve it on either the inspiration or perspiration fronts. Based on the article (I hadn't heard of Den before and they don't even rate a Wiki article), the "genius" involved here came up with the idea of a remotely controllable lightswitch in 2014, long after other people had not only exactly the same idea but were already selling working products. And while the article is light on details, it sounds as though at least some of the problems the company had were not related to the smart parts, but failing at simple wiring and making a basic physical switch work correctly.

All too often when the media gets hold of a teenage genius with an amazing new idea, it actually turns out that the idea wasn't actually particularly amazing, probably wasn't new, and in any case falls flat when confronted with the challenge of actually making a useful product. There are, after all, good reasons we don't rely on children for the vast majority of our innovation and product development. It sounds as though he had a decent idea for an A-level, or maybe even undergrad, science project, but I'm just not seeing any amazing ideas or new way of implementing things that would justify anyone involved being called a genius.

Lazarus group goes back to the Apple orchard with new macOS trojan

Cuddles

Re: Apple tried to warn you, several times

"Perhaps Apple users are lulled into a false sense of security, so they ignore all these warnings."

Or perhaps they quite rightly hold the view that it's their PC and they'll install whatever software they damn well want without asking mother for approval first. That used to be how all PCs worked, whether they had Apple, MS, Linux, or any other OS running. It's bad enough that people so often roll over and allow their phones to be locked away in a walled garden, but doing it for desktop PCs as well is just nuts.

The problem here is not that people might have jumped through the multiple hoops required just to have some control over their own property, it's that having done so, they were stupid enough to install something making claims about pretend money. If you choose to install obvious malware, it's entirely your own fault when it turns out to be malware.

Explain yourself, mister: Fresh efforts at Google to understand why an AI system says yes or no

Cuddles

Cycling times

"The tool shows factors like temperature, day of week and start time, scored to show their influence on the prediction."

Looking at the results, I can't help being surprised that accidentally diverting into a non-Euclidean geometry didn't have greater impact.

Uni of London loses attempt to block mobe mast surveyors from Paddington rooftop

Cuddles

Re: Can someone dumb this down for me...

Pretty much. It's not actually a new idea, essentially the same principles apply for things like power and telephone lines. The main difference is that it's extremely rare for anyone to want to build a power line directly through your back garden, so the only people it really affects are farmers and other landowners in rural areas. Hence the clause about being adequately compensated with just money - loss of working land is only really an issue due to the lost income, and most farmers would be very happy to accept an equivalent amount of guaranteed rent in replacement.

It only starts becoming an issue because things like mobile masts can't just be put on posts along the street because they need line of sight, which in urban areas means on tall buildings. So instead of just taking a corner of a field and paying for the lost crops, you're now demanding that people accept having structural changes, wiring, maintenance access, and so on forcibly applied to their property. Which not only makes it understandable why people might object, but also a lot trickier to figure out if solely monetary compensation is adequate, and if so how much. "This field produces crops worth £x per m^2 and you've taken y m^2" is pretty easy. Sticking an antenna on the corner of a building causes some hassle but not usually any direct monetary damage, but if things go badly it can potentially cause catastrophic damage.

So this probably isn't the last time it's going to end up in court. It's not really clear how sensible it is to apply the old principles directly to mobile masts, and especially mm-wave 5G ones. And even if you do so, it's not obvious exactly how to do it. As 5G rollouts grow in scale, there are likely to be a lot of arguments about exactly how and where they can do so.

Astroboffins peeved as SpaceX's Starlink sats block meteor spotting – and could make us miss a killer asteroid

Cuddles

"Unfortunately that's not really a viable option."

Especially when it comes to watching meteor showers, given that the whole point is that they're not actually in space.

No wonder Bezos wants to move industry into orbit: In space, no one can hear you* scream

Cuddles

Re: The space talk is interesting, but...

"what about the fact of almost 1 in 10 workers suffering serious injuries whilst working for this outfit"

While Amazon look pretty bad based on that, I'm more surprised that the industry average still involves 4% of workers being seriously injured every year. I work at a facility with hundreds of employees, and thousands of visitors, containing all kinds of heavy machinery, high voltage equipment, biological and chemical hazards, radiation, and pretty much any kind of danger you can think of short of wild bears*. We get maybe one or two serious injuries per year, almost always things like heart attacks or people tripping over their laces; actual work-related injuries are rarely anything more than the odd cut finger.

What the hell is going on in those warehouses to injure a significant proportion of their workforce every year? This doesn't sound like a problem with Amazon, it sounds like the entire industry is a complete mess in desperate need of proper regulation. People love to complain about health and safety going overboard, but this is exactly why it's needed.

*A similar facility in Sweden does have potential bears as well.

Found on Mars: Alien insects... or whatever the hell this smudge is supposed to be, anyway

Cuddles

Re: Maybe

"And I think it's foolish to take a "Mars is dead" attitude rather than a "let's find out" attitude"

Yeah, if only they were spending billions on sending a variety of probes and rovers to look for signs of life...

It's one thing to complain that someone is wrong in their interpretation of observations, but it's really a bit weird to complain that they're not even interested in finding out when you're commenting on an article about the latest robot they've sent for the specific purpose of finding out.

We(don't)Work: Rent-a-desk outfit cuts 2,400 staff in bid to be a functioning business

Cuddles

"What in the world does an office rental gig need 12000 people for?!"

The reason becomes clear if you look at what type of company WeWork really is. In the real world, it may appear to be just an office rental business, but in the world of social media and venture capitalists it's an amazing tech unicorn disrupting the tech blockchains. What accounts for the difference between the two? Several thousand employees in the marketing department. By far the most important people to rake in those sweet VC billions for your shiny startup, but completely unnecessary for actually running a business and so first to get cut once those at the top have taken the money and run.

No wonder cops are so keen on Ring – they can slurp your doorbell footage with few limits, US senators complain

Cuddles

Ring provided this statement to The Register

"Ring users place their trust in us"

"...hahaha, suckers!", they added.

Pack your bags, you're going to America, Lord Chief Justice tells accused Brit hacker

Cuddles

Re: He's screwed

"I don't think that US law should be applied extra territoriality but believe it or not one of the unfortunate side effects of being a US citizen is that you can be busted at home for things that are not an offense overseas."

He's just been released from jail after being convicted of exactly the same crimes here, and he hasn't even tried to deny he committed the additional ones he's accused of in the US. His only defence is that if they'd sent the evidence to the UK earlier he could have been convicted of some additional crimes over here. For all the flaws the US justice system has, this is not the case on which to try to make a stand. He's not screwed because of a crooked justice system and the UK bending over to let the US do whatever it wants, he's screwed because he's an unrepentant criminal for whom the only question is which country he most deserves to be jailed in.

Like a BAT outta hell, Brave browser hits 1.0 with crypto-coin rewards for your fave websites

Cuddles

Granularity?

"If the site is either well-behaved and you want to allow ads to be displayed, or so badly behaved that it does not work with Shields on (and you are desperate to see the content), you can disable Shields for a site by clicking the icon."

Does it allow more options than just on or off? And does "ads, trackers and cross-site cookies" include scripts more generally? Because from this description it just sounds like a much worse version of Noscript and Adblock, and not really any different from recent Firefox's default settings.

Welcome to cultured meat – not pigs reading Proust but a viable alternative to slaughter

Cuddles

Re: ""What was a wistful daydream just five years ago is now an inevitability,""

"You simply wouldn't have the capacity to do conventional animal farming"

The whole point is that we don't actually have the capacity to do conventional animal farming here on Earth.

1Password hopes to cross some items off its todo list with help from $200m in venture capital

Cuddles

privacy and security are the two areas of focus

For a password manager, aren't privacy and security pretty much the only areas of focus? Literally all it needs to do is store passwords in a way that allows them to be used but prevents unauthorised people accessing them. I can't help agreeing with Mr Hansson that hundreds of millions in venture capitalist funding is most likely to end up filling it up with pointless shiny gimmicks to try to build up company value and is not likely to end well.

Thanks, Brexit. Tesla boss Elon Musk reveals Berlin as location for Euro Gigafactory

Cuddles

Re: No, the UK was never in the running

"We no longer have a native mass-market automotive manufacturer though (JLR might beg to differ but they make a tiny amount of cars compared to people like Ford and they are also now owned by Tata) - all the big car factories are owned by non-UK companies (Honda (for the moment), BMW, Nissan et. al.)"

You mean the JLR owned by Indian company Tata? I'm not sure they count as native any more than the others you mention. As far as I can tell, Aston Martin and McLaren are the only actual British-owned car companies that can claim production numbers even in the thousands.

Section 230 supporters turn on it, its critics rely on it. Up is down, black is white in the crazy world of US law

Cuddles

Re: The law of Unintended Consequences applies....

"In this case, Section 230 probably seemed like a good idea at the time."

This is why it feels a bit harsh to accuse Biden of hypocrisy. Sure, he voted for Section 230 in 1995, but no-one back then predicted how the internet would look 25 years later. Changing your mind on things when the situation changes or new facts come to light is exactly what everyone, not just politicians, should do. For that matter, even knowing he voted for it doesn't tell us all that much; it's entirely possible he could have thought it was flawed or overly broad even back then, but was better than not having anything at all.

Companies supporting a law when it's in their favour and arguing against it when it goes against them is certainly something worth calling out. A politician who thinks a law they previously supported needs changing decades after it was implemented when the thing it governs has changed almost beyond recognition? That deserves applause for being one of the rare times a politician actually seems to be doing their job correctly.

SpaceX flings another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit in firm's heaviest payload to date

Cuddles

Re: Optimism

"They are more of an annoyance to radio astronomer, blanketing the whole sky in Ku and cat pictures - but realistically doing radio astronomy from Earth in any band useful for mobile data is too late"

The important difference is that normal mobile masts, and other radio related stuff, can be regulated locally. There are various places in which transmissions are banned for precisely that reason (usually for military, with astronomy piggybacking off that), and if that fails you can always fall back to the traditional astronomy standby and find a really remote mountain somewhere. The trouble with satellites is that they really do blanket the sky, with no regard for where the signal ends up - 100% coverage is pretty much the ideal. Radio astronomy currently works because, given sufficient authority, you can just tell the mobile operators to bugger off. You can't do that with a satellite operator that may not even have any legal presence in your country.

I'm still not that Gary, says US email mixup bloke who hasn't even seen Dartford Crossing

Cuddles

"I have an initial.surname email account with what used to be my ISP. I do get emails relating to one stupid cow in particular who obviously cannot be bothered to type her correct email address for the shops she uses."

To be fair, the hooves make it really hard to type accurately.

Morrisons is to blame for 100k payroll theft and leak, say 9,000 workers

Cuddles

"So there was a pre-existing joke with the same setup but a different punchline. The first punchline was "Down the M5". A pun on "To Wales"."

You're going to struggle to get to Wales on the M5.

OPPO's Reno 2, aka 'Baby Shark', joins the deepening pool of high-spec midranger mobes

Cuddles

Re: £449, putting it firmly within the middle of the pack

"There was a time when that would be considered a very high price to pay for a phone - the Nokia N95 and original iPhone were significantly less than that figure on launch."

The original iPhone cost a minimum of $500 at launch. I can't find the UK price, but that would usually translate directly to £500, and they'd gone up to $600 within a couple of years. The Nokia N95 cost £370 at launch. Meanwhile £450 today is the equivalent of £330 back then. It's easy to just look at prices and complain that the numbers are getting bigger, but when you're dealing with time scales greater than a decade inflation is much more significant than most people seem to think. The Reno 2 is cheaper than both the phones you mention.

That said, comparisons with the prices of a decade ago are rather pointless. Back then smartphones were new and there was a reason for them to cost more than regular phones. The article says there's not much reason to buy an expensive flagship when you can get a phone like this for half the price, but I can't see any reason to get a phone like this when you can get a phone like my Moto G5 for half the price again. A flagship doesn't offer much in addition other than some completely unnecessary extra processing power and some shiny gimmicks, but what exactly does the Reno 2 offer over a two year old, sub-£200 phone?

The problem isn't that phones have got more expensive. Unless you deliberately opt for the most expensive ones available they really haven't. The problem is that phones have actually got cheaper, but most people seem to get suckered into buying the ones that still cost the same as they used to instead.

This news article about the full public release of OpenAI's 'dangerous' GPT-2 model was part written by GPT-2

Cuddles

Eh

The reason deepfakes and such are a problem is that we have a habit of recognising people by how they look and sound. If you can fake their face and/or voice and show video and audio of them doing or saying something, people will tend to believe it actually happened. Text just doesn't have the same problem. Or more accurately, it's always had the same problem so using a computer to do simply isn't relevant. The difference is that text is inherently anonymous. As Albert Einstein once said, you can write anything you like and claim some famous person said it. It doesn't matter if a computer can churn out some barely coherent nonsense, because people have already been doing that for thousands of years. That's precisely why we already have issues with fake news and the like. Throw an AI to spout randomly generated crap onto Twitter and no-one is going to notice the difference.

On a different note, I'm a little confused how the researchers concluded that there was no risk from releasing the model because people hadn't been using the model they hadn't released maliciously.

Baffled by bogus charges on your Amazon account? It may be the work of a crook's phantom gadget

Cuddles

Re: Samsung

"Weren't Samsung TV's the common link here?"

No. In this article there are TVs which claim to be made by Samsung and Vizio. In the original article, the TV in question was supposedly a "Samsung Huawei", which is obviously not a real device at all and therefore has nothing to do with Samsung. Whatever the exact hacking method is, there's no indication it's related to any specific manufacturer. As others have noted, by far the most likely explanation is that the scammers are gaining access to accounts by completely normal means such as weak passwords and credentials from other breaches, and using them to add fake devices with names that could appear legitimate at a first glance.

Astroboffins rethink black hole theory after spotting tiny example with its own star buddy

Cuddles

Re: 4 Msol limit?

"Did I miss something?"

The important thing is the difference between what mass it's possible for a black hole to have, and figuring out a way for a black hole of any particular size to actually form. In fact, it's possible for a black hole to have any mass - compress enough mass into a small enough volume and you get a black hole. The question then becomes what processes can do that. As it turns out, there only seem to be such process to form three broad classes of black hole - supermassive ones, stellar mass ones, and microscopic ones.

The latter form through high energy particle collisions, which means they don't get above a certain size due to the difficulty accelerating particles to such high energies - even extreme processes in supernovae and quasars can't produce energies high enough to form black holes as big as something like a grain of sand. Meanwhile supermassive black holes aren't understood as well, but appear to be the result of things happening at the galactic scale, and not simply from the merger of lots of smaller black holes (one of the big open questions is whether the black hole or the galaxy forms first). Then you have the stellar mass ones discussed in this article, which oddly enough have masses similar to stars and mostly form as the result of stellar processes.

What you might notice here is that there are pretty big gaps. There are no black holes with masses falling between atoms and stars, and none falling between stars and galaxies. That's not because such black holes can't exist, but simply because there isn't anything happening at those scales that actually forms them in practice. Finally getting to the actual question, the same is true around the edges of stellar-mass black holes. Yes, a black hole could have 3 solar masses, but we don't actually have a theory of how it could form. Models of things like supernovae predict 4 and up, and we've observed them to actually exist, but smaller ones just don't seem to happen. Without going into too much detail, supernovae are pretty chaotic things that involve throwing a lot of material off into space, and if you're that close to the lower limit of forming a black hole, the models predict that too much material will be lost to actually form one in the end.

In addition, simply taking something that has too little mass to form a black hole and letting it accrete more material may not actually work. A white dwarf that gains too much mass doesn't turn into a neutron star, it explodes in type Ia supernova. Depending on how much mass is thrown off, it may actually end up as a neutron star afterwards, but ironically one with lower mass than the white dwarf it formed from. Exactly what happens to a neutron star when something similar happens isn't really clear, but it's entirely possible that if you simply take a heavy neutron star and add more material, whatever happens to it could end up still not having enough mass to actually form a black hole.

tl;dr, It's not that black hole such as described in the article is impossible and its discovery will overturn decades of physics. It's simply that models and observations up to this point suggest such black holes don't actually form in practice, so finding one will need to lead to some revisions to the model, or entirely new theories, to explain where this one came from.

Reaction Engines' precooler tech demo chills 1,000°C air in less than 1/20th of a second

Cuddles

Re: Here We Go...

"If you did make tea in a pressurised container to get water hot enough, that then raises the question of how you're going to drink it."

Carefully!

Cuddles

Re: Here We Go...

"However the reduced air pressure on board the ISS does preclude the making off a proper cup of tea."

Only if you make it in an open vessel. You can use a pressure cooker to get the correct boiling temperature, obviously with the release valve calibrated to 100 degrees so you don't end up with stew.

Wondering where the strontium in your old CRT monitor came from? Two colliding neutron stars show us

Cuddles

Re: Crt?

"Is iron the stable point between fusion and fission? Which suggested EE 'Doc' Smith was doing leg pulling, as he certainly knew enough. Skylark series 1928 to 1930s, also a late one in 1963. Inventor of Space Opera."

In Skylark, the magic sciency stuff happens as a reaction between copper and a new fictional element. I suspect you're thinking of his stories later collected and shoehorned into the first book of the Lensman series, in which iron is used as the new source of nuclear power.

"Edit. Hmm. Allegedly he started writing Skylark in 1921."

No, he finished writing the first book in 1921, he started in 1915.

Cuddles

Re: It's awesome when Science advances

Depends how big they are, and how much material is thrown off during the collision. A black hole has a very clearly defined point at which it comes into existence - gather a certain amount of mass inside a particular volume, and you have a black hole. A neutron star can have a range of masses and volumes, and interactions between them can result in varying amounts of material either merging into one body or being thrown off into space. So there's no simple answer; in one case a collision between two neutron stars might be enough to form a black hole, while in another case you could have an infinite chain of colliding neutron stars that never form a black hole.

Hell hath GNOME fury: Linux desktop org swings ax at patent troll's infringement claim

Cuddles

Re: Gnome vs Troll

"Probably a good idea, gnomes would have given people the wrong idea about this sub-set of the Elves."

Other way around most likely. A huge amount of the modern understanding of such terms comes directly from Tolkien (often filtered through D&D and similar). Elves, goblins, trolls, and such have traditionally described very different beings from the modern high fantasy versions, with huge variety in what they actually mean as well as plenty of overlap between them - there really wasn't any clear and consistent distinction between an elf, a goblin and a gnome once you go back before Tolkien. So if Tolkien had stuck to calling some of his elves gnomes, it's more than likely that people today would understand exactly what he meant because that's what the word "gnome" would have come to mean. It's only because he didn't write about gnomes at all in his published works that we instead have Dragonlance/Warcraft-style gnomes as the popular view.

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Cuddles

Re: They ALL mean Stop...

Technically red also means "Stop, unless it is unsafe to stop". All lights, signs and traffic rules always come with that proviso. You're never supposed to blindly obey a sign with no thought for what's happening around you, they're always saying what you should be doing unless there's a good reason to do something else. Exactly how good that reason needs to be varies - for an amber light simply not wanting to brake too hard is OK, while for a red light it needs to be something like getting out the way of an emergency vehicle - but it's always allowable to disobey road signs if it would be more dangerous to obey them.

So, what's fashion going to look like on the Moon in 2024? NASA's ready to show you the goods

Cuddles

Re: Snark away

"The they built an experimental Crew Rescue Vehicle and decided that they had spelled a girly-part word which might cause astronauts (or at least congressmen) in southern states to faint and have the vapours."

CRVX? Maybe I'm just not up with euphemisms from the youth of today, but I can't help feeling I'm missing something.

In any case, the prototype for the Crew Return Vehicle was the X-38, which used standard nomenclature from before NASA even existed, and is not recorded as having had any association with girly bits at all.

Her Majesty opens UK Parliament with fantastic tales of gigabit-capable broadband for everyone

Cuddles

Re: Always???

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Chemists bitten by Python scripts: How different OSes produced different results during test number-crunching

Cuddles

Precision

"For macOS Mavericks and Windows 10, the results were as expected (173.2); for Ubuntu 16 and macOS Mojave, the result differed (172.4 and 172.7 respectively). They may not sound a lot but in the precise world of scientific research, that's a lot."

Depends which bit of the scientific world you're in. In the part I inhabit, being within an order of magnitude is often considered a good result. Having a variation of less than 0.5% is the sort of thing we can only dream of.

Welcome to the World Of Tomorrow, where fridges suffer certificate errors. Just like everything else

Cuddles

Re: Sure, it'd be handy to be able to tell what's in the fridge without opening it...

Transparent aluminium?

As for letting the cold out, I assume that's at least part of the justification for the idea. However, it doesn't actually happen. Air (gasses in general for that matter) has an extremely small specific heat capacity, especially when compared to something like water. If you carefully pumped all the cold air out of your fridge and replaced it with air at room temperature, it would increase the temperature of a litre of milk by somewhere around 1 degree, if that was the only thing inside. If you have a fridge full of various solids and liquids, the temperature and energy change to them caused by letting in a little bit of warm air when the door is opened isn't even a rounding error on the measurement.

And of course, even if you've managed to make your life so incredibly energy efficient that the tiny loss from opening the fridge door is a real worry for you, installing a large internet-connected touchscreen display probably isn't going to help matters.

Stalker attacks Japanese pop singer – after tracking her down using reflection in her eyes

Cuddles

"Couldn't the sicko just have followed her home from one of her concerts? Tad easier."

Or potentially found the information out in many other ways. Even if they make some effort to protect their personal life, how difficult is it really to find out information on a well known celebrity who regularly performs in public and spends the rest of their time posting pictures of their home on the internet for their fans to see? There was certainly a lot more information being leaked than just eyeball reflections and patterns of light on curtains. All it takes is a single fan to spot them in the local shop, or a single selfie with the curtains not quite closed properly, and the cat is out the bag. The events as described may well be possible, but seem to be going out the way to do it the hard way.

Then again, would it really be expected for nutjobs who attack people they're supposedly fans of to make sensible decisions?

MacOS wakes to a bright Catalina sunrise – and broken Adobe apps

Cuddles

Re: I'd love to know the rationale...

"...behind this decision by Apple. I mean even Microsoft was able to keep compatibility with 32 bits apps, FFS!"

People like Microsoft because they keep tons of legacy code in their OS in order to keep backwards compatibility with programs written 30+ years ago. People like Apple because they don't. Realistically, it's difficult to argue that either is objectively better. If you rely on old code, MS is obviously the better choice. If you don't, there are clear benefits from avoiding all the legacy bloat and associated bugs and quirks that come with it.

The only company really at fault here is Adobe, who might be cynically trying to push people into paying them even more, except they didn't even manage to get the new versions working properly.

HP to hike upfront price of printer hardware as ink biz growth runs dry

Cuddles

Easy solution

"hackers can exploit a "vulnerability where the supply chip meets the printer""

The obvious way to prevent hackers from exploiting the DRM chip would be to not have the DRM chip.

Aside from that, there's an interesting question to be asked about how locking down printers from using third party supplies interacts with right to repair laws. Is there anything in said laws distinguishing consumables like ink from other parts? If my printer stops working, it shouldn't matter whether that's due to a part with a known lifetime or a part that was expected to last for longer, I should be allowed to fix it using whatever third part services I like and not be locked into using only one provider. With a lot more focus on right to repair at the moment, I can't help wondering if HP can see the writing on the wall and are changing their game now before an expensive lawsuit forces them to do so.

Online deepfakes double in just nine months, scaring politicians – and fooling the rest of us

Cuddles

Profile pictures?

"Fake bot accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn using deepfake images as profile pictures are plastered on the internet too."

So what? The problems with faked videos of politicians and so on are fairly obvious, but why would anyone care that a scam Twitter account is using an edited image instead of just a random one it's found someone on the internet?

When the satellite network has literally gone glacial, it's vital you snow your enemy

Cuddles
Flame

Re: Ah, those laser links....

"Solution - move the transmitter further up the window!"

Or get a more powerful laser.

Linky revisited: How the evil French smart meter escaped Hell to taunt me

Cuddles

"Compromised to what end? So TheBadGuys[tm] can taunt the occupant about their inefficient 1970s appliances. Does it really matter? ... and besides, why would TheBadGuys[tm] bother? There's no money in the taunting game."

One of the main reasons they want to install these things, although for some reason not one they advertise widely to the public, is the ability to remotely disconnect your electricity supply. Theoretically to enable load shedding in the case of emergencies or similar, but with the obvious benefit of not even having to send the bailiffs round when you fancy cutting someone off. The downside, other than literally everything else about them, is that a vulnerability would mean TheBadGuys[tm] can also remotely disconnect people from their electricity supply. And if every single house has an identical one from the same manufacturer, that means TheBadGuys[tm] can shut down the entire country. Plenty of fuss is made about the possibility of terrorists, The Russians, or whoever attacking things like power stations to cause problems, but apparently making every home and business entirely dependent on the security of the Internet of Shit is considered a great idea by exactly the same people.

'Six' in the city: Kiwi sportswear shop telly beamed X-rated flicks for hours over weekend

Cuddles

"In my head this company has always been "Oasics", a play on the word Oasis maybe I thought, through luck I've never actually said it out loud to anyone."

I thought exactly the same. But I have said it out loud to people, and they all thought that as well. You have to fail pretty badly at logo design to create one that consists of little more than just your company's name, yet still have no-one able to figure out what your company's name actually is.

This won't end well. Microsoft's AI boffins unleash a bot that can generate fake comments for news articles

Cuddles

Malicious use

"The paper didn’t mention any potential malicious applications of the technology"

Yes it did. Literally every possible use for it they mentioned is malicious - it's all about posing fake comments to trick real people into thinking an article or site is much more active than it really is. What the paper didn't mention is any possible legitimate applications. Because there aren't any.

We're all doooooomed: Gloomy Brit workforce really isn't coping well with impending Brexit

Cuddles

Re: Re:dave15

"many German cars are Opel, for example, which are GM (US owned) like Vauxhall. France has Peugeot Citroen which is part of a conglomerate including Vauxhall, Renault are closely lined to Nissan, etc etc."

While your overall point stands, I think you've got a bit mixed up here. Opel/Vauxhall used to be owned by GM, but were bought a couple of years ago by PSA (Peugeot, Citroen, etc.). GM don't really have any significant presence in Europe any more.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise, politicians will philander... And US voting machines will be physically insecure

Cuddles

Blame Huawei

The fact that voting machines remain hilariously insecure is sad, but not really surprising. The part I found particularly interesting, though, was this:

"found in one machine a hard-wired IP address pointing to an overseas address block. The exact purpose and nature of whatever underlying feature used this address remains undetermined, but it underscores questions about foreign control over voting system supply chains"

All kinds of noise have been made about the dangers of foreign hardware, especially in relation to Huawei but also including plenty of others. Yet here we have real voting machines in actual use containing foreign-made hardware with hardcoded connections to foreign IP addresses for unknown purposes, and apparently no-one gives the slightest shit about it. It shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone here, but it almost makes one wonder if security isn't actually the main concern, and maybe there are some ulterior motives involved in starting a global trade war.

Edit: On a different note, there's also this:

"This can easily create long lines at a polling place, since, as we also observed, it can take up to 15-20 minutes for these devices to complete a reboot cycle."

Speed and convenience seems to be the only argument actually in favour of electronic voting. Except they don't actually provide speed and convenience and can instead massively slow things down even when they're not being hacked.

Seriously though, 15-20 minutes to reboot? I didn't have to wait that long to load Spectrum games from tape. And that's including multiple attempts after the plug fell out just before it finished. How is anyone producing anything today that takes that long to boot up?

Astroboffins baffled after spotting solar system with great gas giant that shouldn't exist

Cuddles

Re: The standard model of planet formation

"Most stars seem to have companion stars (binary, etc.). It may be that these are two gas eddies that formed at the same time."

As far as I can tell, that's exactly what the paper suggests:

"We therefore considered a competing model of planet formation by gravitational instability of the gas disk at very young ages, when the disk is still massive relative to the star"

Basically, they say that models assuming the planet formed by having lots of little rocks collide long after the star has formed don't work, but assuming the planet and star formed around the same time directly from the gas cloud work quite well. Which doesn't sound particularly revolutionary at all; far from overturning the standard model of planet formation, it just says that in this particular case one of the ways bodies can form doesn't work but the other way we already knew of does.

Edit: I should note that the paper seems absolutely fine, they just say "Here's a fairly rare thing to see, we checked the two ways we think it could have happened and only the second one fits.". It's just a bit disappointing to see El Reg engaging in the shoddy tabloid "Einstein Proven Wrong!" style of science reporting. Astroboffins are not baffled, and no-one ever claimed this planet should not exist. The science is interesting enough on its own, it doesn't need this kind of overblown clickbait nonsense to try to sell it.