Posts by Cuddles

Re: Whither the gray hats?

"But it strikes me that the best way to fix the problem is to accept that the ransomware gangs are doing valuable work, and pay them for the work - as long as they inform the right people instead of using their access to lock stuff."

If that actually worked, most crime wouldn't exist. It's no different from saying that the best way to eliminate bank robberies is to employ potential robbers as security guards. The unfortunate fact is that while some people may be happy with a steady paycheck for doing a regular job, others would much prefer the jackpot from emptying the entire vault. No business can afford to pay enough to keep happy those who won't settle for anything less than everything.

Plus there's the obvious catch-22 situation - if you pay all criminals to work as security, then there are no longer any criminals and hence no reason to pay anyone to work as security.

Re: Forgive my ignorance but...

I wouldn't say wrong as such, it just depends what you mean by hard to disprove. Like any scientific theory, dark matter is very simple to disprove in principle - just find enough contradictory evidence, or an alternative theory that explains things better. The reason it's really hard to disprove in practice is the same reason it's difficult to disprove general relativity or Boyle's law - we already have a huge amount of evidence saying things work the way we currently think they do. No single anomaly is ever going to be enough to justify throwing all that out, so you either need enough contradictory evidence that things start looking really suspicious or, again, a better theory. Lots of people have worked on the latter and so far failed to come up with anything that works at all, let alone is better than we already have. And while occasional things like the case this article covers pop up, the vast majority turn out not to be interesting after all on further investigation, and the remainder are few enough to be odd anomalies and outliers rather than anything that conclusively points to a specific problem or new solution.

So it's not hard to disprove because it's not really scientific, but simply because there's already been a lot of work done on the subject, so you'll need to do a lot more work again before you're going to be able to come up with something with a similar amount of support.

Re: kit may interfere with implanted medical devices

Yes. Not mentioned here, but the BBC article on this subject notes that Apple is just following Samsung and Huawei in issuing this guidance.

Re: Do I know you?

What about the more friendly dogs who respond that way to anyone who calls their name? Or to anyone who calls a name vaguely similar? Or makes pretty much any kind of sound at all? Or who doesn't make a sound but looks vaguely in their direction? Or a different direction entirely? Who just exists at all? Who doesn't exist, but there might be something exciting in that direction in a few seconds, so better run over excitedly to check!

Or alternatively, one of the grumpier and/or lazy dogs who secretly wishes it was a cat and refuses to acknowledge anyone unless there's food involved?

And that's before you even start thinking about people deliberately trying to subvert such a test by hiding a treat in their pocket or smothering themselves in meat beforehand. A national DNA database may or may not be the solution, but certainly you want something a little more reliable than relying on the one-off reaction of a dumb animal with no clue what's going on.

Re: Potato, potatoe

Indeed. When people talk about something like "Facebook stalking", what they actually mean is looking at someone's Facebook page slightly more than they might normally do. It's not stalking in any meaningful sense of the word, and is not at all the same thing as installing programs on someone else's property to spy on them. It does seem there is a real problem with stalkerware, and it's not going to help matters if it's conflated with completely different and entirely harmless behaviour.

Re: Brilliant!

It's more than just toys. Some of the beamlines at Diamond have used Lego to build sample holders for actual experiments. Lego is so ridiculously overengineered for a toy that you can actually build many things more accurately than they could be manufactured by CNC.

Re: Which orifice??

I don't know if they're all the same, but with mine it's easy to remember because the power hole is the one on the corner. Unfortunately while this means I don't fail to charge by plugging it into the wrong USB socket, I keep accidentally turning it off by trying to plug the cable into the power button instead, which is on the opposite corner.

I actually have a similar issue with my desktop, which has the reset button, mic socket and audio socket all nicely placed in a line, which has led to several accidental resets when not quite paying attention to where I'm sticking a plug. The worst part is that even looking at the labels doesn't help, since for some reason the icon for reset is almost identical to the one for headphones. So even if I am paying attention, half the time I'll plug headphones into the mic socket instead. You'd really think design decisions like "Don't put an indented button the same size as a socket right next to a frequently used socket" would be something people had figured out by now.

Re: Honestly

"The information I've gleaned about 'the Great NHS Data Grab' does not explain to me what the data can or cannot be used for"

Anything at all.

"who will have access"

Anyone who pays for it. Shortly thereafter, anyone with access to the internet.

"how effective any pseudonimisation may be"

Not at all.

"or what benefits the NHS will obtain from allowing access to commercial organisations or other country's health organisations."

None whatsoever.

Re: "hats solve the problem presented by AR glasses"

"What contraption will see the light of day that keeps heating elements away from the wearer's skull ?"

There are already baseball caps with propellers and/or beer holders attached, so there are options for both air and liquid cooling systems. And since you're already going to look like a right twat if you wear one of these things, there aren't really any further downsides from adding the cooling.

Re: Hang on

No, but Farnsworth was the inspiration for Professor Farnsworth in Futurama.

Re: "With no one onboard to fix it"

The simple answer to that is convoys. Even if you can't eliminate people entirely, having a single fairly small boat full of engineers escorting a bunch of autonomous ships would still likely be a lot cheaper than having to have staff on every boat.

Even in the worst case, I don't see there being a lot of very expensive losses involved. Like the one in this case, most mechanical issues are likely to lead to reduced sailing ability. So things might be late, but not lost entirely. Even major issues are much more likely to leave a boat without power rather than destroy it entirely, so even if you need to take a week or so to send out a rescue boat, you're still not looking at a complete loss. Delays happen for a variety of reasons anyway, so nothing critically time senstive gets sent by ship. So it will really come down to whether occasional resuce operations and late penalties are cheaper overall than paying to have crew on every ship at all times.

Re: Viasat

"It's not a long-term risk because the junk will eventually deorbit"

Sort of. The junk will deorbit, but it will also be immediately replaced by new junk, since the whole point is to constantly replace the satellites rather than just put them up once and then not have any left once they all deorbit. It will eventually reach an equillibrium at some point after the maximum size of the constellation is reached, but at least for a while there will be a constant increase in the amount of junk. So while each individual piece of junk isn't a long term risk, a constellation of continuously replaced junk could be.

Re: Why has this not happened already?

Indeed. Not least because, as the article notes, it's not the same hardware anymore. New batteries, new sensors, various other new bits of electronics attached to things. Your procedure may have worked perfectly before launch, but you want to be very sure it still works with the hardware that exists now.

Plus there's the human side of course. No matter how good the procedure itself might be, you want to be sure you're actually carrying it out correctly. The people doing it today are likely not the same ones who tested and documented it. Some of them may not even have been born when it was launched. Anyone with experience running old code written and documented by someone now retired or deceased will know exactly how well things are likely to go the first time you try running it.

Finally, it's worth considering the time involved. The issue occured on the 13th, a Sunday. The first attempts to get things working were done on the 14th, but failed. NASA made the announcement about the issue on the 16th and said they were planning to fix it that same day. Exactly how much faster is it reasonable to demand they work?

Re: magnetic vaccines.

How quickly people forget. Magnetic people were being debunked by the likes of James Randi decades before social media even existed. It used to usually be nuts claiming to have superpowers rather than linked to vaccines, but the basic claims and methods to (totally fail to) demonstrate them remain identical.

This is the part I find most sad about conspiracy nuts; the total lack of any imagination. The specific details of which authority figures are part of the lizard people cabal gets updated occasionally to stay current with politics, but the actual meat of the claims is just endless repetition of the same things people have been ranting about for decades.

Re: Actually ....

"Obviously they have many other problems (such as wasting energy) but the analogy partially works (for me at least): "I know you also have an identical copy of the book but mine is special (a.k.a. more valuable) because someone signed their name on it""

But even that still doesn't work. Sure, people can argue about the value of an autographed book versus a plain one, but in both cases the owner actually has a book. Having an NFT is the equivalent of saying you have the right to read an autographed booked kept in a public library. You don't actually own any such book and everyone else also has the right to read it, but you have a little piece of paper officially saying you can.

It might be different if the data itself was actually encoded in the NFT. It might just be a copy of the same data everyone else has access to, but like an autographed book it's a unique copy stored in a particular way that may have additional value to some people. But as the article notes, that's almost never the case.

Re: BBC News 24 talking to a medical researcher last night

The part that really bugs me about that argument is that it actually makes things worse. If this data is so critical to share with everyone and people will die every moment it's not available, why have they waited until now to share it? How many lives could have been saved if there just hadn't been a six week notice period? How many lives are the Conservatives responsible for taking since they came to power over a decade ago? If it really is so urgent to get this data right now, why on Earth are they being so casual about it?

Re: They're weirdly touchy

Indeed, I think people really underestimate just how effective propaganda and brainwashing are, especially when sustained over a long period of time. Even in countries with a relatively free press and decent education systems, most people are entirely oblivious to huge amounts of important events and recent history. This is even more the case for events that happened before their own lifetimes or outside their own locale. And I've always been amazed that even with easy access to things like encyclopedias, libraries and of course now the internet, most people make no effort whatsoever to actually go and look things up if they do hear about something they don't know much about.

Throw in 30 years of blocking and oppression on top of that, and it's very easy to ensure that most people will have no idea about some events. It's not in history books or schools. No-one talks about it openly. No-one can look it up without much more effort than would normally be required for all the other things they don't bother looking up anyway.

It's easy to say "everyone knows", but it's dangerous to assume that everyone actually does know the same things you do. Most people don't actually know as much as you might think, especially when it comes to major events that it's easy to assume are common knowledge. The Chinese government, along with most other dicators, and plenty of supposedly more ethical governments for that matter, don't go to such great lengths to control information just for fun. They do it because it really does work.

Re: Notepad++ is genius

"So it's not the prettiest editor."

Have to admit I'm a bit confused by this comment in the article. There's a small menu bar at the top, and then a blank page for writing text in. What exactly could be done to make this somehow look pretty? It's a text editor, not an art installation. Anything unnecessary added on top would just get in the way. But there are various optional features that can be used if you happen to want them. It looks exactly as pretty as I would expect a blank page for writing on should look.

Re: Some of those...

"The weird thing is the source material being from 1996."

Why is that weird? RE4 started development in 1999, so using a relatively recent database of textures seems fairly normal. This isn't a newly released game - not counting remakes the most recent is the 23rd game in the series (although as seems tradiational these days, the numbers are largely irrelevant - RE4 was the 12th game).

What's particularly interesting is that it appears they copied files directly from the CD without even changing file names. I'd say that makes it less likely they got the files through some convoluted route and might have thought they had a legitimate license. The filing also references another lawsuit where Capcom are being sued for copying designs in the most recent game. Doesn't look great for them really, although sadly I'd be surprised if any punishment is big enough for them to change their ways.

Re: Complacent

"They don't have access to vaccine. UK & US snarfed most of the capacity."

Like many people. you're massively overestimating how relevant the UK is to the rest of the world. Of over 2 billion vaccines doses so far administered, the UK has used under 70 million. Even the USA is only third in number of doses used, or fourth if you count the EU as a whole. There's certainly a good argument that rich countries should be doing more to help countries that can't afford vaccines, and not, for example, doing the exact opposite by taking this chance to cut foreign aid. But lets not pretend that a tiny country like the UK is somehow responsible for soaking up the entire world supply of vaccines. Also, Taiwan has a higher GDP per capita than us, so maybe they're not the ones that actually need our help anyway.

Re: Dispassionately

See here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

The problem with allowing all opinions to be posited and challenged respectfullly as equals is that some opinions are inherently disrespectful and unequal, and some people have absolutely no interest in finding a common ground. Given the topic, it's a good example to point out how well a policy of respect and appeasement worked on the actual Nazis. Kicking off a flame war the moment someone says anything you vaguely disagree with isn't helpful, but neither is blindly assuming that everyone must be interested in having constructive, rational discussion if only you're nice enough to them. Some people really are just dicks.

Re: Complexity: Another nail in the coffin...

"If your critical business processes are on-prem, the chances are that you will not be stressing your CPU's to "mercurial" levels. But if your accounts data (for instance) is in the cloud, chances are CPU time in crunching it is being shared with other companies' CPU time."

I don't think it's anything to do with CPU time, but simply the number of CPUs. As the article notes, it's a few problematic cores per several thousand CPUs, ie. it's not random failures due to the large amount of use, it's some specific cores that have a problem. But since the problems are rare, only people operating many thousands of them are likely to actually encounter them. So it's a bit misleading to call them "stressors" of CPUs; it's not about how much stress any particular CPU encounters, but rather about companies that happen to use a lot of CPUs.

So it's hard to say if on-prem would be better or not. On the one hand, you're unlikely to have enough CPUs to actually have a problem. But if you get unlucky and you do, the problematic core will be a greater percentage of your computing, and you're unlikely to be able to actually spot it at all. On the other hand, being assigned different CPUs every time you run a task in the cloud makes it almost inevitable that you'll encounter a troublesome core at some point. But it's unlikely to be a persistent problem since you won't have the same core next time, and the companies operating at that scale are able to assign the resources to actually find the problem.

Re: Examples...

"people who got confused between Memory and Hard drive space."

To be fair, thats because RAM and storage are both memory. Giving a detailed explanation of how a hard drive isn't memory is always going to result in confusion because it's just plain wrong. Your analogy works precisely because it makes it clear that they are different types of memory that handle data in different ways. Most people are capable of understanding the distinction if you just explain that you have short term and long term memory without even needing the analogy. It's only when you start calling one type of memory "memory" while pretending the other type isn't memory at all that it starts causing problems.

Re: Go for it

"Maybe.Fusion is still X years away but progress is being made and what was bleeding edge tech a while back is slowly becoming routine."

The thing to remember about fusion, and any other technological progress for that matter, is that progress and predictions about progress are not the same thing. Yes, back in the '50s people were saying fusion was 30 years away, and they were obviously wrong. And people today are saying fusion is 30 years away, and they may well be wrong as well. But just because they're both wrong doesn't mean they're wrong by the same amount in the same way. Scientists haven't just been sitting on their arses not doing anything for the last 70 years, we've made a huge amount of progress in understanding how fusion can work and what the people back then were wrong about that made them overly optimisitic. Obviously we still haven't solved the whole problem and some people may still be overly optimistic, but they're now making different mistakes about different things.

When it comes down to it, predictions about scientific or technological progress in any field are not worth the electrons they're printed on. But that doesn't mean progress doesn't happen. And fusion is far from the worst offender in terms of failing to meet predictions (flight has a good argument there; people were dreaming about that for thousands of years before we figured it out). It may or may not be 30 years away, but at the very least we're 70-odd years closer than we were before.

Re: A people & their government are different

It's almost as though people are generally just people, no matter where they happen to have been born.

What makes you think the Army have anything to do with Whatsapp? The article says the leaked document is being sent to other people using Whatsapp. That's equivalent to saying it's being shared using email - it has nothing to do with how it was originally accessed or how it was leaked. Indeed, it's rather odd to see El Reg using phrases like "available to download on Whatsapp", given that there is no such thing as being available to download on Whatsapp. If someone sends you a message with an attachment, you can view that attachment, just as you could if someone emailed it to you. You can't go wandering around Whatsapp looking for things to download.

The actual news here is that the army appear to have really shitty privacy procedures involving confidential documents being available to tens of thousands of people with essentially no security or access control, making leaks inevitable. The details of which messaging services have been used by various people to share a document after it has been leaked is of no interest whatsoever.

Re: Domestic supply issues

"Is anyone thinking about the peak power demands on a domestic property these days?"

No. Electric cars are new, but everything else you mention has been standard for a long time. Sure, gas heating and hot water are more common, but electric is really quite common as well. There are plenty of old houses* with an electric immersion heater for water and a few electric heaters instead of central heating. Electric ovens have also been standard for a long time. As have toasters, fridges, freezers, TVs, computers, and so on. And of course, not too long ago it was normal to have a few kW of lighting in most houses. A 200W phone charger wouldn't even be noticed.

Electric cars could be a problem, but as things stand the grid as a whole couldn't cope with every house having a car to charge, so that's something that needs to be solved at a much higher level than individual domestic electrics.

* And when I say old, the flat I used to live in was built in the 1980s with no gas, as was the entire estate it was part of.

Re: Just say no to the Bezos borg

I have no problem buying things from any number of shops that aren't Amazon. Most of it ends up being cheaper, usually has next-day delivery (not that most things actually need it), and almost always far better customer service. Plus usually much easier to actually find what you're looking for since it's not drowned out in a sea of counterfeit crap from fake sellers. And most shops have far better stock than Amazon, because they focus on having specific types of goods rather than just cramming in all the random shiny stuff they happen to trip over.

The trick is simply that you have to remember there is more than one shop in the world. It's not actually necessary to buy every single thing from the same place. If you're capable of handling the horrific inconvenience of having to use more than one website, shops dedicated to selling specific goods are almost always far better than the likes of Amazon.

Re: Please, Firefox, just go away already!

"How many years has it been since JavaScript performance was well and truly good enough? Many. Sure there are probably incremental gains to be had, and better performance translates to longer battery life, which is always a good thing, but the limitations to web performance these days aren't JavaScript performance"

Indeed. A few years back when boasting about JS times was how browsers liked to do their penis measuring, I still never uinderstood why I was supposed to care that one might be 2ms faster than another. That's just not something anyone will ever notice while actually using a browser. Hell, you could be a full second slower and it would still hardly be noticeable - people don't click through links at high speed as though they're playing Starcraft, so a tiny pause just isn't a big deal. Of course, by far the best way to improve JS performance is NoScript, since the vast majority of it is completely pointless anyway.

As for battery life, saving fractions of a second in CPU time isn't going to make any difference compared to just turning the screen brightness down a notch or two, or just sticking with a 1080p screen because there's really no point in having anything more in a laptop or phone. If you've really done everything you possibly can do improve your battery life, you can maybe eke a few more seconds from it by picking the optimal browser, but by that point you're at the level of scraping the paint off your bike to lose weight.

Re: Is massive amount of excessive heat still a sign of cannabis cultivation?

Cannabis needs heat to grow, it's not just an unwanted byproduct of the lighting. A poorly insulated house or warehouse being kept at 30 degrees is always going to stand out.

As for arresting people for a different crime, I'm not sure why so many people seem to think this is a problem. If they'd found someone being stabbed in there, should they not be allowed to arrest anyone for attempted murder just because that's not why they were looking? Obviously fabricating an excuse to go in and then digging around for any reason you can find to arrest people would be a problem, but if you legitimately suspect there is a crime, and then it turns out there actually is one but you happened to be wrong about the exact details, why would that be a problem?

Re: Thermal cameras

That was my first thought, but reading the linked article makes it clear that it's actually talking about systems used for taking temperature measurements for Covid screening, not some nefarious surveillance thing. The actual news was that they blew half a million on non-functional cameras because they didn't bother buying the calibration devices to go with them so they could boast about getting them cheaper than other schools.

Re: How is He Getting Paid Anything?

The trick is in the word "conglomerate". The Vision Fund gets plenty of headlines here, but that's only a small part of Softbank. As per the article, this year Softbank made over $45 billion. Losses from Uber and WeWork combined were less than $10 billion in the previous year. That's how they keep getting money, and how venture capitalism works in general - as long as the successful gambles pay off, the failures aren't considered a problem. We might suggest that having multiple prominent failures due to obvious scams suggests a bit of an issue, but all investors see is that money goes up.

Re: OAIP

Pigs can land, it's being able to walk away afterwards that is the tricky bit. Anything is airdroppable once.

"Someone is going to pay for it."

Uber has consistently lost billions every year because they're more interested in gaining market share than actually operating a profitable business. So what difference will it make if their costs go up a bit? Today they lose $1 billion, tomorrow they lose $1.5 billion. It's not their money, venture capitalists have been happy to shovel all that cash into the hole. If they didn't care about it before, why would they start caring now?

In a normal world, sure, if you force a company to pay their workers more, that additional cost will be passed on to customers so the business can stay in business. With the likes of Uber, there is simply no connection between costs and income, so there's no reason to expect anything sensible to happen as a result of any changes.

Re: Just how to monitor the ban

The same way they do now. All cryptomining in Iran already has to be licensed, so they know exactly who is doing and and where it's happening. All they need to do is check their list of miners (not minors) and make sure they're not using any electricity.

"Some 85 per cent of the current mining in Iran is unlicensed"

Oh. Well, now it's on double secret probation. I'm sure that will make a big difference.