Posts by Cuddles

Re: I'm not sure which is worse

"That may well be true for those who bought after the vulns were found and reported. But how long were they on the market before the reports made the mainstream press and rose to the top of search results?"

That's a fair point, and I have sympathy for people who actually did do at least some minimal research when there wasn't anything for them to find. But these things have been on sale for 18 months since then, and despite all the warnings they were only looked at in this paper because they're still very popular.

"And not forgetting that most people have short memories and are likely to believe the marketing, especially on impulse buys."

Which is exactly the problem. There's no point complaining that companies are at fault for making shoddy products when the only reason they do so is because people blindly buy said products and strap them onto their children without a moment's thought.

"Is millenial that clearly defined ?"

Fairly clearly, yes. It refers to the generation that came of age around the turn of the millennium, specifically the term was coined to refer to those who would graduate high school in 2000. It generally covers birth dates of around 1980-1995, although sometimes it can include the late '70s and as late as 2000. It's very specifically not "born in or after 2000", despite that being an oddly common misconception.

Re: Pretty soon, you won't be able to turn them off

"New build properties, on the other hand, will be the reverse: just as car manufacturers are currently obsessed with adding 'connectivity' to their cars, so house builders will soon decide that building a smart house will be a selling point."

Not a chance. Have you ever seen the state of new builds? Try having a quick search for complaints about new estates not having access to the internet, for example. For the most part you can count yourself lucky if you get four watertight walls (roof optional), minor details like working electrics and plumbing are well down the list. New builds are very firmly in the "do slightly less than the legal minimum" area, knowing that few enough people will complain so that cost of fixing and fines will be less than the cost of doing it properly. There's absolutely no chance that any of the big developers will start installing IoT crap in houses unless it's made a legal requirement, and even then it won't actually work until you've ripped it all out and redone it yourself.

"So, the solution for people who are worried that Alexa et al might be eavesdropping on their homes via their built in microphones is to provide them with a device with a built in microphone which is always listening for an activate phrase."

The solution for people worried an always connected internet device with unknown internals and workings might be eavesdropping on them is to provide them with a local, entirely disconnected device with fully open internals.

"Better solution is the more basic Alexa enabled smart speakers where you have to push a button to speak to it."

So the solution for people who want to replace button pushing with voice commands is to force them to use both?

Re: took down 800m and 754m fake accounts in Q2 and Q3

"Without data on the age of the accounts these could include new accounts spawned by scammers who've just had their previous account taken down. It doesn't necessarily tell much about the proportion of fake accounts existing at the start of Q2 which have been removed."

Fortunately we don't need to worry about not having that data, because it's all presented in the report linked at the start of the article. 99.6% of the accounts removed were done so automatically within minutes of registration. Fake accounts make up 3-4% of active accounts.

Re: Apple boredom

"We've seen the same ole crap for the last 3 years"

The first smartphone I had was an HTC Hero, released in 2009. It had a capacitive multitouch screen, camera, 3G data connection, wifi, bluetooth, GPS, accelerometer, compass, USB, headphone socket, SD card, removable battery. It could even make phonecalls if you really wanted. Compared to a brand new £1000+ flagship phone today, the only things missing are NFC and possibly some level of waterproofing, but you may also note that at least a couple of significant things have gone missing as well.

So no, we haven't seen the same ole crap for the last 3 years, we've seen the same crap pretty much since the first smartphones were sold. The only thing that's changed is that the incremental improvements to the various parts have reached the point where even the most bling obsessed no longer see the benefit of regular upgrades; most of us were at that point a lot more than 3 years ago.

Re: Look very hard!

"Also remember those Voyagers are using valve amplifiers."

I didn't even know they played guitar!

Re: wtf does not "freeing prisoners unlawfully" mean ?

"Such characteristics not only demonstrate the intellectrual dwarfism of such a poster, but are the reason we have mems"

I find myself confused by the terms "intellectrual" and "mems". Could you explain them please?

Re: Umm... nope.

"Even if the area covering the current (already hot and tropical) coffee belt gets TOO hot, then won't that merely shift the crop areas further into higher latitudes?"

The vast majority of the species in question are not crops. Grapes can grow in areas they couldn't previously because humans decided to plant them there. Absent such human intervention, most species that suddenly find the climate unsuitable simply die, especially plants which obviously are less able to migrate.

"Once upon a time during the minor warming period in the dark ages, England grew some acceptable varietals for a short time."

There's been wine produced in the UK pretty much continuously since the Romans arrived, it certainly didn't require the Medieval Warm Period to make it viable.

"So I must admit to being a little puzzled abut what Sidhu is in court for and the line of questioning."

You certainly are puzzled if you think Sidhu is in court for anything. As the article says, Randeep Sidhu is the former employee who is taking Your.MD to court for unfair dismissal. Professor Maureen Baker is the one being questioned. She is in court because it is suggested that as Chief Medical Officer of the company, it was at least partially her responsibility to ensure confidential medical information was, in fact, confidential and not open to be viewed and edited by literally anyone with an internet connection.

To be honest, I'm not sure why so many people seem to be having trouble understanding the article, it all seems to be very clear and well explained. The only part that is at all confusing is the fact that Professor Baker's replies appear to bear very little relation to the actual questions, but I suspect that's rather par for the course in a situation like this.

Re: Well, yes

"That's probably more because this campaign is obviously nonsense"

Since when has that ever stopped a crowdfunding effort from being successful?

"digital documents should be viewed as physical, if there is a reasonable way to do it and working safety mechanisms to protect from abuse then there should be ways for law enforcement to search devices."

If you'd read the article, you might have noticed this is the entire point of the ruling. Physical things already are protected - police need a warrant to search specific things, they can't just blindly demand everyone in an area open everything and let them search it. Yet that's exactly what they wanted to do in this case, and so the judge said exactly what you claim to want them to say - it's fine for the police to get a warrant to access specific, relevant devices, but not for them to demand blanket access to every device owned by anyone who happens to be nearby.

Re: Boom!

"No, far too hot"

To begin with. They're going to cool down eventually though. Indeed, it's actually an interesting question which crops up in many places - at what point do you have to stop doing particle physics and start doing physical chemistry instead?

Re: Where did they get these people?

"One would think that the longer you live the wiser you get to being conned"

Why would one think that? Certainly there doesn't appear to be any evidence that the aphorism "older and wiser" is anything other than propaganda put about by Big Age. Old people have a well established history of being at least as gullible as everyone else, if not more so. Personally I'm of the opinion that wisdom peaks somewhere in the 30s. Younger whipersnappers are clearly all idiots, but it's all too soon after that point that things like combovers, socks with sandles, and tight lycra to match the shiny new road bike start seeming like good ideas, and it's only downhill from there.

Re: Do phones still have an IR port?

"It's a flaw in the review systems. They should all have separate ratings for not only the quality of the item purchased but also the customer service. This would allow someone to grade it as "1" for the item, but give a "5" for the way the seller responded to the problem."

That's exactly what Amazon do have. Ratings and reviews for goods and vendors are completely separate. The problem is that far too many idiots are apparently unable to understand the difference between the two and insist on putting the wrong reviews in the wrong places. Presumably these are the same people who have the bizarre habit of responding to random questions people have asked about products with the very helpful "I don't know".

Re: That data is useless anyway, why keep it?

"So many people move, change jobs, change doctors, this wouldn't be terribly practical to advertisers trying direct targeting."

In the UK, the average person moves house every 23 years (and are unlikely to change doctors except when moving). They change jobs every 4-5 years. So 5 or 10 year old location data has a very high chance of showing your current home, doctor, lawyer, shops, and so on, and still a decent chance of knowing where you work. Given that Twitter only stopped attaching all this information 3 years ago, you have well over a 50% chance of it still being correct about pretty much everything.

"So, why does Twitter keep it around?"

It was attached to tweets when they were posted. Twitter aren't deliberately keeping it around, they just haven't bothered to make the effort to remove metadata from old tweets.

Re: Wow, it's almost...

"BUT ignoring the referendum result because you don't like it isn't how things work in a democracy."

Of course it is. Some people seem to have a very odd idea of what democracy actually means. Every single democratic country in the world is a representative democracy, in which a small number of people are chosen to actually make decisions. Direct democracy, in which the people as a whole vote on all decisions, is essentially non-existent. Even Switzerland, which is well known as having a lot of binding referendums, actually still runs on representative democracy most of the time, and the few other examples around the world are mostly for minor local matters not for entire countries.

In systems like the one we use in the UK, referendums are rarely binding. They're essentially little more than an opinion poll that happens to be run by the government rather than a polling company. The whole point of having elected representatives is that they are supposed to make a considered decision based on all the facts available; a public referendum might help inform that decision, but it is far from the only relevant factor. To claim that a non-binding opinion poll being overridden by an elected government is undemocratic is just plain nonsense.

Re: Alternate theory

"All we actually know - the only believable observations are:

1. angular velocity vs diameter of a spinning galaxy doesn't quite add up right.

2. something gravitationally lenses light from very far away - space is more warped than we thought.

That's it."

And yet even a cursory glance at Wikipedia would show at least 11 separate, independent lines of evidence all supporting it. Calling actual scientists idiots while demonstrating less understanding than that of an uneducated layman with a few spare minutes on their hands is probably not the best way to convince everyone you're worth paying attention to.

Re: All you need is......

"Soon the hedgerows will be alive again with naked ladies and men, although video is a bit harder."

Looks like it's time to rediscover the lost art of flip-books.

Re: So what ?

"The power level is tiny - +10dBm peak transmitter power is 0.01watt (10 milliwatts) - 2.4GHz WiFi allows 10 times the power 0.1 watts (100 milliwatts), 5GHz WiFi allows up 4 watts (4000 milliwatts) and 802.11ad (depending on use) allows 10 watts or more (at the same frequencies as the Soli equipment)."

I guess the question is how much power is needed to interfere with a signal, as opposed to simply drowning it out? Scatter a few of these sensors in an area and they can easily be putting out 1% or more of the maximum allowed power for a router. Is that irrelevant, or is it actually enough to cause potential issues? Perhaps more importantly, the maximum power isn't generally where you want to operate all the time, so even if all these things do is force routers in the area to crank up their power output a bit to compensate that's a potential issue, if only due to increased power consumption.

"This seems to be a reasonable technical increase"

Which brings up the other important question others have already mentioned - if it really is not a problem at all and is all perfectly reasonable from a technical standpoint, why keep the old rules in place for everyone else? Presumably the existing figures were calculated somehow based on some assumptions. If those assumptions and/or calculations are no longer valid, the rules as a whole need updating. If they are still valid, why don't they apply to Google? Maybe it's all perfectly above board, but it's always going to look suspicious when a hilariously incompetent and corrupt body gives individual approval to the biggest* briber lobbyist in the US.

* They were second in 2017. Final figures for 2018 aren't around yet, but Google were on course to be number one based on data from a few months ago.

Re: Statistically speaking

"I completely agree with that. AD&D 2nd Edition (where I started with the hobby) was the current edition for 20 years under TSR. And then we had 4 new editions (counting 3.5 as seperate) in 15 years."

2nd edition was the current edition for less than 11 years (1989 - 2000). The first version of OD&D was current for between 3 and 5 years depending on exactly how you count it, and the game was effectively rewritten at least three times in 20 years, so complaining about new editions not lasting doesn't make a lot of sense. Even 2nd Ed AD&D was heavily revised halfway through its time, so the only edition that actually stands out as lasting a long time is 1st Ed AD&D which lasted for 12 years with no changes.

Re: Terminological inexactitudes

"You wonder what it'd take to blow the skirt up of some of the less-impressed posters - I don't get any human who doesn't think the achievement is spectacular."

What achievement? Rockets capable of doing better than this have been in use since at least WW2. Multiple countries routinely launch rockets not just into orbit but to land on other planets, and even private enterprise has started hitting orbit as a matter of routine. There are student groups launching rockets almost as capable in their spare time. An online IT rag sent a paper aeroplane not too much lower for goodness sake.

"Be in the first handful of people who've seen our home from above?"

First handful? If this was still the 1960s maybe, but we're a bit past that now. I completely agree that this would be a cool sight-seeing trip for those who can afford it. But in terms of actual achievement it's about equivalent to catching the train up Snowdon - trains were impressive engineering when they were invented but we've had them going higher and faster for quite a while now, and taking one to somewhere people have been visiting for decades just isn't a big deal. There are plenty of spectacular achievements around that absolutely do blow my skirt up. But when we're landing on comets, bringing back bits of asteroids, looking at multiple probes still working while leaving the Solar System nearly 50 years after launch... finding yourself arguing about whether your rocket reached space because you can't even reach the generally agreed border is not something most people would consider spectacular.

Re: The War on Drugs

"Given that the CIA is known to have dabbled in the drug trade in order to fund its black projects, the war on drugs was doomed from the start."

People always bring up the CIA and similar in this context, but they're really not relevant. People have been enjoying drugs for as far back in time as it's possible for us to detect that sort of thing. Alcohol is unsurprisingly the biggest, but you just have to look at how almost every culture has some kind of tradition involving some sort of mind altering substance to see just how fundamental this is. And of course, once you start looking at other animals, you find that pretty much all of them will behave in exactly the same way given half a chance; they're mostly limited simply by the inability to produce said substances themselves rather than all being puritanical teetotals.

The war on drugs was doomed from the start not because of the CIA, but simply because running around shouting at everyone to stop enjoying themselves was just never going to work. Sensible regulations and education are one thing, but trying to enforce a blanket ban on everything is obviously stupid on the face of it. No government black ops required, just basic human animal nature.

Re: I spent two years in tech support

"Though the button no longer has the text 'Start', if you hover your mouse over it you get a tooltip that says 'Start'. In Windows 10 at least."

Not the version of Windows 10 I'm using. In fact, the not-start button appears to be the only thing on the taskbar that doesn't have a tooltip at all.

Re: You can read my SMSs but you can take my WhatsApps from my cold dead hands

"1. Are we ok with lawful intercept?

2a. If not, why is nobody saying this in these discussions?"

They are. The problem is that some technologies are inherently insecure, so there's very little point making a fuss about it. Not all that long ago, the only way to send communications beyond shouting distance was to write it down and give it to someone to carry for you. Complain all you like about whether they should be able to, but there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop anyone from reading that letter, so for the most part people simply didn't bother complaining about it. Similarly, intercepting telegraph and radio signals was not particularly difficult (with broadcast radio, potentially much easier), so if the government says they reserve the right to snoop, why bother complaining? They're going to do it anyway, and there's simply no such thing as a secure alternative.

The arguments about encryption are all coming up now because there's actually an argument to be had. The development of things like public key cryptography and the spread of powerful computers means that people now have the option to have truly secure communications. And not only do they have that option, but since these things have spread before laws regulating them have been made, they've become used to actually using that option. It's similar to how people were willing to buy hilariously overpriced albums because that was the only way to get music, then Napster came along and suddenly there was an argument to be had about how things should work. No matter what your thoughts on ethics and such, once you've shown people a way of doing things that they like, taking it away from them again is not an easy task. Hence Amazon and iTunes and Spotify and so on.

Communications are in essentially the same position now. All communications used to be open to easy snooping, so there didn't used to be much point worrying about it (although some still did; see for example protests about censorship of letters during WWI and II). Now we have some secure methods of communication, but some people want to take them away from us.

As for why some formats should be privileged and others not, see above. There's absolutely nothing you can do to stop someone reading your letters, so complaining that they shouldn't is just wasting your breath. As the British government has demonstrated recently, spy agencies are going to snoop on everything they can whether it's legal or not, and they'll make it retroactively legal if they think it's worth the bother. Since I can't, in practice, protect my letters, I'm willing to accept that they are not protected. But since I can and currently do protect my Whatapp messages, encrypted emails, and so on, I'm willing to fight not to lose access to such things.

Re: Well, the accretion disk anyhow

"To be clear, the black hole itself is still extremely spherical."

No it isn't. The only kind of black hole that can be spherical is a perfectly isolated one with zero charge and zero angular momentum, and it's impossible for that to exist in the real world. It's been known that neither the singularity or event horizon in real black holes are actually spherical for quite a while.

It's also worth noting that this article is completely wrong. From the paper:

"which would explain the longstanding mystery of the physical origin of the AGN torus."

Note that "torus" is the technical term for "donut-shaped". The paper doesn't say anything about the accretion disk being fountain-shaped instead of donut-shaped, the fountain is the explanation for how the disk becomes donut-shaped. Without that, it wasn't understood why it would be a thick donut instead of the expected thin disk.

Re: A variation of the early computer model then...

"I would like to be able to upload or down load 5GB of grand baby movies or a 3GB Linux upgrade in seconds instead of hours."

Indeed. For some reason this keeps having to be said every single time anyone mentions internet speeds, but apparently some people just can't grasp the concept that saving time is actually useful, or that many households contain more than one person. Hands up who remembers the good not-that-old days when it took half an hour or more just to download a single entirely legal mp3 from Napster? Surely there can be no need for anything faster than 56.6kbps; after all, we had our music at the end of it so what could possibly be the point in downloading it any faster?

At this point, sane people will probably notice that being able to download an entire album in under a minute is actually quite a bit more convenient, and most people were quite happy to see faster download speeds even before online video became widespread. Nothing meaningful has changed since then. Gaming is bigger than ever and almost entirely online these days - even if you buy a physical disc you'll still need to download GBs of updates as soon as you install it. And with games easily topping 100 GB, anyone telling me that 20 MBps internet is fine because there's no reason I would want to download a game in minutes instead of hours is simply an idiot.

Sure, no normal home user is going to continuously saturate a gigabit internet connection 24/7, but that's not relevant. Pretty much anyone will be able to see a benefit from higher download speeds (and more rarely upload speeds). Exactly how much benefit they see and what cost they consider worth it will of course vary depending on circumstances, but the idea that there's no use for it at all is utterly ridiculous.

Re: Just to echo so many more of the comments

"Highest 'normal' usage I can think of is a spangly Netflix 4k HDR stream - which comes in around 15M."

And you have four people in your house all streaming different shows, while one of them also downloads a game on Steam, and they're all looking at videos and other shit on WhatsFace while doing it. I really don't understand why every single time this issue comes up, people insist on declaring that since they only ever have a single person doing a single low-bandwidth activity, no-one could ever care about having more than 256kB of memory 15Mbps download speeds.

Re: Interesting...

"Then I think you misunderstand the point of 5G.

It's not just about theoretical data rates to an individual phone. It's about scaling data rates in aggregate in congested areas where there simply isn't enough 4G spectrum to go around."

I think you misunderstand the point of 5G.

It's not about data rates at all. It's about a marketing buzzword that's been thrown around so much that now the poor engineers are having to desperately scramble to come up with a real idea it can be attached to. No-one has any clue what the standard might actually end up looking like or what purpose will be retroactively attached to it, but as long as we can throw around terms like IoT and blockchain, at least we can all have a good game of buzzword bingo.

Re: Does anyone use an IDE on RHEL anyway?

Not only do we use desktop RHEL, we're using KDE. Of course, given the version we're currently on, I don't expect anyone to notice this for a good decade or so.

Re: Anti-intellectual?

"It's one thing for a bunch of religion-stoned goatshaggers to be hostile to science, but it is positively baffling to see the same thing in Britain"

It's almost as though people are pretty much the same the world over, and trying to split them up into a nice neat "enlightened us" and "religion-stoned goatshagging them" doesn't do a particularly good job of representing reality.

"But I'm pretty sure I don't have to agree to have my house ripped apart to install gas pipes."

Try re-reading the part you quoted at the start:

"If a landlord is absent or unidentifiable"

If you say no to them, you're obviously not absent or unidentifiable. What they want is permission to install when the people actually living in the place want the service, but the person who actually owns the building refuses to acknowledge any communications - not saying no, but simply not replying to anything at all.