* Posts by DropBear

4733 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013

European Space Agency squirts a code update at Mars Express orbiter

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Deep space comms

Screw tunnelling through the Sun. Let's just use gravity wave comms...!

DropBear

Re: Quality Control

To be fair, while the pucker factor of restarting something like this so far away is never going to be zero, it shouldn't exactly be that hard to make something damn near update-proof*. Just make sure you have enough memory to store at least two whole OS images and ensure that unless the updated OS can present suitable proof of successful two-way comms with Earth within a convenient time frame following an update (or on an ongoing basis), it gets mercilessly booted by a hardware watchdog** back into the original OS image which tells you this and asks "okay, now what?"

*don't even THINK about "completely update-proof". No such thing. The Universe is on Murphy's side.

**by which I mean multiple redundant independent watchdogs of course. Paranoia IS a virtue.

No password? No worries! Two new standards aim to make logins an API experience

DropBear
Alert

Not happy

Sorry but I find it hard to trust all the "keys of the kingdom" to a specification (U2F) containing phrases such as "assuming the browser is working as it should", especially in the same sentence as "this is a critical privacy property". Furthermore, as long as U2F in practice seems to mainly just mean "Yubikey", which specifically chooses to base the security of every single account you entrust to it to ONE single, common, fixed (to the key) secret, I won't be using any of it thankyouverymuch. Especially seeing as how they still want me to remember a per-site password, completely eradicating the need of which being the absolute minimum I would expect in exchange for agreeing to keep all my eggs in a single basket that isn't my brain.

Data exfiltrators send info over PCs' power supply cables

DropBear
Trollface

That's quite ok, would you like to buy some of my consumption-randomizing desktop UPSes? They also have embedded AI that starts beeping like crazy as soon as it detects suspicious patterns in the consumption of the attached load! The AIs even share their experience securely, via blockchain...!

You. FCC. Get out there and do something about these mystery bogus cell towers, huff bigwigs

DropBear
Trollface

An inconspicuous van

Oh, those should be easy to recognize if you know what to look for - Hollywood taught me all those have a company name that includes two adjacent "O"s painted on their sides in large, friendly letters to mask the holes where you're supposed to stick the binoculars out...

Modern life is rubbish – so why not take a trip down memory lane with Windows File Manager?

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Still have one

Find will for me forever be associated with having to look up Yet Again how to redirect eleven hundred pages worth of "unable to open" to /dev/null. Until the next time I need it, when I duly have to look it up again. As for locate - it can find absolutely everything under the sun in the current- and any number of parallel dimensions, _except_ the exact file you're looking for.

DropBear
Devil

Screw Norton. Volkov Commander for me! (Well ok, these days I accept MC as a substitute...)

DropBear
Trollface

Re: life extension - file extension

Ah, you're right - I forgot search isn't spelled "Agent Ransack" by default in windows...

Linux Beep bug joke backfires as branded fix falls short

DropBear

I'm puzzled...

...How come the first commit to the vulnerability's "Github repo" dates several months back...? How long have they been keeping us in the dark?!? Soylent green is people...!!!

DropBear

Re: Eh..

Motherboards with 7-segment LED displays do exist, but they're by far the exception, not the rule.

Is there alien life out there? Let's turn to AI, problem solver du jour

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Garbage in, garbage out

Based on the laws of natural selection I predict that the first true AI will be a system developed to write convincing AI research grant applications...

I say, I say, I say: What's the difference between a king penguin and liquid?

DropBear
Trollface

Re: I say, I say, I say: What's the difference between a king penguin and liquid?

Well, you could have chosen to go fashionably noir instead and propose "a bathtub full of acid"...

2001 set the standard for the next 50 years of hard (and some soft) sci-fi

DropBear

Re: HAL

"We can discuss these with them, but we cannot force an intelligent being to do something against their will."

Oh, really? Robocop would like to have a word with you*...

* starting to argue on what is and isn't possible with an intelligent brain while we have hardly any idea what either of those two words really mean is not a worthwhile use of anyone's time IMHO. But placing constraints on intelligence is definitely a neither novel nor unexplored concept.

Mozilla rejects your reality and substitutes its own … browser for VR and AR goggles

DropBear

Re: *sigh*

It's not really complicated though. "What can we possibly do next to delay slowly sliding even further into irrelevance? Quick, throw some fashionable buzzwords at me...!"

DropBear

Re: Right there with the special web browser for dogs & cats

Are we back yet at "it's a Unix system, I know this"...? More prosaically, does anyone still remember VRML? From the era when people thought Second Life and its ilk is the Next Big Thing...? Do we need to go all the way back to Microsoft Bob...? Yes, I grok the great deal of mental comfort provided by using a familiar paradigm; unfortunately the concept of "things nicely laid out in 3D space" invariably turns out to be a much, much inferior paradigm to the ethereal alternative of "there is zero distance between any two object connected through a single click".

In practice, 3D's superior storage density based on its extra dimension compared to 2D inevitably turns out to be an illusion as soon as we need to access any of it - a 2D surface is something humans can perceive and interact with in its entirety, while a true 3D one (that doesn't just decorate 3D walls with 2D windows) isn't; you can see all objects in a 2D matrix at a glance, but the first layer of a proper 3D matrix of objects would be obscuring everything behind it. And making everything transparent would just serve to confuse things even worse - I'll prefer a browser with thirty tabs any day over one with thirty windows overlaid on top of (or behind) each other. The specific relation between each object and all the others that 3D seeks to preserve and express simply doesn't exist in the amorphous world of ones and zeros.

IMHO as long as we are attempting to replicate things from the real world in the form of VR (or especially if we are attempting to pull data out onto the real world AR-style) 3D does make sense in computing - but as soon as we start dealing with abstract concepts related to pure-data-in-a-box, 3D immediately becomes more of a hindrance than an advantage regardless of how attractive it may seem at first glance.

Mad March Meltdown! Microsoft's patch for a patch for a patch may need another patch

DropBear

Re: Keep; 'em coming

Obligatory flashback to the comic strip with the (from memory) "here's a nickel son, go buy yourself a real computer..."

DropBear

Re: Askwoody

You mean compared to the list of updates I just applied on Debian which at some point modestly noted: "A reboot is required to replace the running dbus-daemon. Please reboot the system when convenient."...?

2001: A Space Odyssey has haunted pop culture with anxiety about rogue AIs for half a century

DropBear

Re: a crystal tetrahedron pyramid

I'm trying to picture this hypothetical crystal pyramid and somehow I keep seeing the sort of visuals associated with the original Battlestar Galactica's Cylons (best viewed through welding goggles)...

Linux 4.16 arrives, keeps melting Meltdown, preps to axe eight CPUs

DropBear

Re: And so fairwell blackfin, cris, frv, m32r, metag, mn10300, score, and tile.

"Because it's there"

How odd the same never seems to apply to certain other contexts like eg. "why wash those dishes"...

Watchdog growls at Tesla for spilling death crash details: 'Autopilot on, hands off wheel'

DropBear

Re: Damage control mode

What they should have done was reserve the name "Autopilot" to their fully autonomous driving tech (if they do indeed have that capability) and call their non-autonomous assist features something more reasonable and intuitive like "CO-pilot".

DropBear

Re: Crash (almost) re-created by another driver

Holy shit, that section of road is murder materialized! I saw the setting of the accident before so I knew what to look for and yet watching the "recreation" the first I realized anything at all is wrong was when the guy dropped the camera and hit the breaks. By the fourth re-watch I could see where the lane split marking were supposed to be, but they're dim as fuck, I would have probably completely missed them the first time around even driving personally. Yes, a fully self-driving vehicle would need to be able to detect that, but I'm not particularly surprised Tesla's glorified lane assist didn't. Crash barrier or no crash barrier, the absolute non-negotiable bare minimum that road needs there at all times is a long string of traffic cones in that "lane". And some actual fucking paint.

User fired IT support company for a 'typo' that was actually a real word

DropBear
Meh

Re: Contrary to popular belief, the customer is not always right.

@jake we know. You told us. Verbatim...

Uber self-driving car death riddle: Was LIDAR blind spot to blame?

DropBear

Re: Jaywalking

No they don't. Maybe they do where you live. Sure as fuck not where I do. Strangely enough, that's the sole point of the existence of marked pedestrian crossing points. No idea how it works in the US, but considering the mere existence of the term "jaywalking" your odds don't look good.

DropBear

Re: "...a [Lidar] blind spot low to the ground all around the car."

Not really, no. The whole sensor package looks mounted to the front section on the roof. There isn't any roof in front of it to block anything. I would expect the whole "blind spot" to be on the order of "something shorter than a foot, within two or three feet of the front bumper".

LIDAR maker CEO waxing about the indisputable need for more of its wares... laughable. That single one should have been perfectly capable of detecting the pedestrian, and I'm pretty sure it did too - at least at LIDAR reflection level. Why that never resulted in the car breaking is the actual million dollar question.

It's baaack – WannaCry nasty soars through Boeing's computers

DropBear

Re: It is not only Windows

Meh... "keyboard not found, press F1"...

DropBear
Trollface

I call shenanigans! Allegedly, there are provisions to turn off airplane engines mid-flight and turn them back on again - it this isn't evidence of Windows presence, what is?!?

DropBear
WTF?

Re: Hmm ...

Do you mean this...?

"Boeing was born in Detroit, Michigan to Marie M. Ortmann, from Vienna, Austria, and Wilhelm Böing (1846–1890) from Hagen-Hohenlimburg, Germany"

It's only the second line on the guy's own page, which is linked to from the first line of the "history" section of Boeing's page; and no it hasn't been edited since you posted that. Or is your problem that this isn't the first thing advertised on the company's page itself to anyone who doesn't give a shit about that particular detail / person...?

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

DropBear

"The Register understands the legalese needs to be broad"

Why, what's wrong with "If any of the content you submit through [list of apps] gets reported to us and we don't like it for any reason we may cancel your account as a result if we want to. FYI, we have always been reserving the right to do that without any justification whatsoever"...?

UK.gov: Here's £8.8m to plough into hydrogen-powered car tech

DropBear
Trollface

Re: While in Japan ....

Pure oxygen? What were they burning with it for fuel, water...?

Students: Duh, of course we're blowing our loan bucks on crypto coins

DropBear
Devil

Re: Investing?

Excellent strategy! Just make sure to double your next bet every time you lose and you're sure to come out on top!

Sincerely yours,

Martin G. Ale

Facebook's inflection point: Now everyone knows this greedy mass surveillance operation for what it is

DropBear

Re: Facebook idiot count

I'm not the OP, but nonetheless - ever heard of "priorities"? How about "Maslow"? I care deeply about my privacy and am willing to go to surprising lengths to protect it. But I would care about having food to eat a whole fucking lot more...

DropBear

Re: People will forget...

"Stored data about friends and IP addresses is the only way this could happen."

Or a cookie set to never expire miraculously surviving in a particularly uneventful environment. Or your unchanged browser/system fingerprint.

DropBear

Re: "What's Facebook?" - Musk

Okay, these days I'm a bit unsure whether my definition of "irony" aligns with the accepted one; is this it? Following immediately the "SpaceX's Facebook is gone" article:

"The Independent's bitcoin group on Facebook is the best place to follow the latest discussions and developments in cryptocurrency. Join here for the latest on how people are making money – and how they're losing it."

Guns, audio and eye-tracking: VR nearly ready for prime time

DropBear

Thanks for replying; unfortunately, the Vive is in the same "can't justify" price bracket as the Oculus for me, so no joy there. As for a), I reckon some goggles with nothing but pair of LCDs displaying content piped over from a PC could easily be produced for that much, I just don't really see anyone doing this kind of thing. And by c), I mean something like TrinusVR or TriDef3D - they just fool your 3D renderer into generating two side-by-side pictures of whatever your GPU is rendering instead of a single image, and they capture and send it over to an app on your phone for you to look at, in some cardboard-like goggles (they also send your head movements - as sensed by the phone's gyros - back to the PC to control the view). As for d), glad to hear the major players have this covered, but unfortunately most Cardboard-class goggles seem distinctly glass-unfriendly - some people even explicitly test this sort of thing in their reviews: most goggles fail it.

As I said, this already kinda-sorta works, for basically $0 (not counting licenses for said software and the price of a cheap Cardboard-equivalent piece of plastic), but it's far from optimal - I'd love to see someone do it with a bit higher quality and better integration, which is why I'm allowing the $200 headroom for. Unfortunately, as I said, this doesn't seem to be a popular concept...

DropBear
Megaphone

So does anyone have yet anything that: a) costs no more than $200, b) is completely free of any involvement with Facebook or other snoop-ware (ie. works even with the WAN cable yanked out), c) is capable of displaying a video streamed over from a suitable partner app on the PC (while relaying back my head movements), and d)most crucially, either allows glasses to be worn during use or else can adjust each eye's focus INDEPENDENTLY? Honest question...!

I'm asking because I have zero interest in watching 360 "interactive" videos or playing any of the crap specialized apps that typically come with Google Cardboard-class "insert your phone" goggles - I want to play proper games on my PC, assuming I can coax them into displaying a VR/stereo double-frame using said companion software. I can already do all that with basically any classic cheap-and-cheerful goggle (minus the focus thing, very few do that), it's just that they seem to tend to have rather shitty viewing angles, so I'd appreciate anything slightly better constructed and/or more purposefully integrated with its companion PC software...

BOFH: Give me a lever long enough and a fool, I mean a fulcrum and ....

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Nearly similar situation...

I guess I could be persuaded to "do the needful" but it would heavily depend on whether said needful is a he or a she, and a few other factors...

'R2D2' stops disk-wipe malware before it executes evil commands

DropBear

This doesn't seem to do much against encrypting malware though - ultimately there's no way to know what counts as "destructive", any write operation destroys _something_. Unless you're prepared to use an infinitely versioning file system that preserves anything and everything ever written (yeah good luck with your storage medium capacity) the only viable solution I see is lots of decoy files, monitored by a watchdog that immediately trips and alerts as soon as any of them is written. It would still be an arms race about obscuring vs. detecting which files are the "trap" ones of course...

YouTube banned many gun vids, so some moved to smut site

DropBear

The problem with the sidestepping of YouTube monetisation in favour of Patreon crowdfunding (which I otherwise absolutely do endorse as the only acceptable modern revenue model) is that Patreon happens to sit right next to YouTube vis-a-vis any "icky" issues - they just want none of it, censoring and banning left and right anything that isn't strictly anodyne. They're _definitely_ not a refuge for controversial stuff (basically the entire porn scene on Patreon is already more or less in hiding), and they might prove harder to replace than YouTube might be (by BitChute or some other p2p / distributed storage mechanism). The only way to financially reward people with no means to install arbitrary censorship and gatekeepers seem to be cryptocurrencies, and they're not looking all that great right now...

DropBear

Re: Youtube's anti-freespeech stance is sad

"YouTube is not the government, it can censor whatever it wants without falling foul of free speech legislation."

Well yes and no. In a strict technical and legal sense you're of course absolutely right. Their site, their rules. The "no" part comes in once one realises that much like with ISPs and net neutrality, certain parts of the internet have become de facto "utilities", and as such they shouldn't be choosing what to publish and what to censor.

If, for instance, Facebook doesn't like you how exactly are you supposed to go to "some other Facebook"? It's basically one of a kind. Yes, you could argue there is no "right" of access to Facebook; on the other hand I could argue there bloody well should be - serve either anyone or no one. Nor is the Internet a "public good", there being no traditional, inherent "right" to access it - yet modern society all but accepted already that nobody should be denied the right to access it.

Yes, you could argue the right to not serve troublesome customers (eg. drunken ones) is not exactly a novel thing. Then again, I'd like to see how long would you manage to defend a decision to eg. only serve men but not women. And yes, YouTube is not _quite_ the only service of its kind, but we all know in practice it bloody well is, at least as long as you actually want anyone to see your videos at all.

So, TL:DR; YouTube censorship: Legally - entirely rightful; morally - absolutely indefensible.

Oh bucket! Unpack the suitcases. TRAPPIST-1 planets too wet to support life

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Hmmmmm

Wouldn't there be slight problems with those monks and long space travel, starting with the second, non-existent generation...?

2 + 2 = 4, er, 4.1, no, 4.3... Nvidia's Titan V GPUs spit out 'wrong answers' in scientific simulations

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Shades of the Pentium floating point bug?

Well that depends on whether you meant literally 41.999999999999999, or 41.(9), considering the latter is mathematically exactly equal to 42 (yes, really)...

Cambridge Analytica CEO suspended – and that's not even the worst news for them today

DropBear

Re: As a non Facebook user*, let me just say...

Well yeah but at least you're free of the side-effects of actually using FB...

CTS who? AMD brushes off chipset security bugs with firmware patches

DropBear

Re: Downgrade attack?

I guess it must be a matter of perspective but once something _is_ potentially a spy tool I don't care whatsoever whether it can or cannot be anything else. I just want it off my system.

Mozilla's opt-out Firefox DNS privacy test sparks, er, privacy outcry

DropBear

...so when you don't like your chances you just decide the rules don't apply to you, innit. What exactly was the difference again between these clueless knobs and that other clueless knob leaking secrets on Facebook, other then the "leaked secrets" bit...?

US govt's final bid to extradite Lauri Love kicked into touch

DropBear

"Um, I'm pretty sure that, a hundred years ago, that situation would have ended in a war."

Um, I'm really trying not to be rude here, but I'm pretty sure that you're confusing the concepts of "pretext" and "cause". The consequences of the existence of any given spark wholly and exclusively depend on whether it lands on dry gunpowder or wet sand.

DropBear

Re: Wishful thinking

Make no mistake, neither side cares where you are. It's only that forceful action of any kind would be obviously rather high profile and unavoidably cause certain image problems for said party, that the self-proclaimed "good guys" in the US would (still) somewhat be caring about whereas Russia decidedly less so.

We need to talk, Brit Parliamentary committee tells Mark Zuckerberg

DropBear
IT Angle

Re: Please find below all the data Facebook has on me...

Sorry to break it to you, but that is only your own pointer to the data that Facebook actually has on you.

DropBear

Re: Just Close Your Facebook Accounts

I get your point, yet it's not quite as simple as that. Short of direct coercion, nobody can make any particular person vote one way or another - they do have free will. People in aggregate, however, don't - what crowds do is the domain of pure statistics, and is easily swayed by various means with global reach and impact. There are no means in existence guaranteed to change a person's mind; there are various means in existence guaranteed to change total votes by at least some degree - which is why "voting" is a complete illusion by the way. The so-called "democratic process" as a free manifestation of will is long dead an buried (if it ever was alive at all) with the availability of entire arsenals of tools dedicated to swaying it to the whims of the most powerful / highest bidder. Nobody wants to control media for instance because it's so spectacularly profitable as a business - but because it's a direct lever onto people's supposedly "freely cast" vote. With that in mind, I'm sure you can see how anything that enhances and focuses the effect of such tools even more is somewhat... troubling.

Samsung’s DeX dock clicks the second time around

DropBear

I'm guessing the "soon" keyboard means they're thinking about adding one of those laser mask / IR sheet projectors to the phone with one of the cameras ogling where your fingers land. Which has the same problem all those already existing "virtual keyboard" gizmos have: nobody using them, apparently due to how uncomfortable banging your fingertips against a solid surface is. Hey, maybe that's their innovation - they'll throw in a rubberised mat to type on as extra...

US cops go all Minority Report: Google told to cough up info on anyone near a crime scene

DropBear
Trollface

Re: "... impacted users ..."

It has been reassigned to mean "effected" and vice-versa.