* Posts by DropBear

4733 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013

Senator Wyden goes ballistic after US telcos caught selling people's location data yet again

DropBear

Re: Instead of piecemeal legislation

"The only people who want that sort of thing are users, and what users want doesn't really matter much."

That's actually a damn good concise sum-up of democracy in general.

DropBear

Re: Re-seller

That won't necessarily help you. Granted, they probably won't be able to look it up simply punching in your name, and I certainly have no idea exactly how the data access interface is structured, but your "burner phone" could easily be tied to your address where you presumably keep it (or at least the general area) and/or continued proximity to some other handset or location you _are_ on record with. So unless you are willing to never use your "burner" at places that can be related to you, and never take any other phones with you whenever you go to retrieve and use it, you might still be on hook. And that's way too far into "LARPing a drug dealer" for pretty much any sane person.

Cops: German suspect, 20, 'confessed' to mass hack of local politicians

DropBear

Re: B...b....but...

I have no stake in the "Putin race" either way, but if you honestly think it was just this "annoyed" guy "acting alone"... I have a bridge to sell you.

Pewdiepie fanboi printer, Chromecast haxxx0r retreats, says they're 'afraid of being caught'

DropBear

Re: Youtube channel subscribers

I really don't see how "bookmarking" anything can be compared with subscribing to a YouTube channel, which results in any new video uploaded by people you subscribe to appear on a single page you can go to whenever you want to catch up with things. Trying to keep revisiting each and every channel of the several dozen I subscribe to in order to figure out whether they have any new videos I haven't seen yet borders on unfeasibly impractical compared to refreshing one single page occasionally. That's not to say I automatically watch anything that comes up, but this sure serves up anything available in a nice single-page format as a grid of thumbnails, helpfully tagging stuff I've already seen. It also lets me one-click hide anything I have already seen or have no intention of watching. There's just no comparison IMHO.

Full frontal vulnerability: Photos can still trick, unlock Android mobes via facial recognition

DropBear

Re: What is security for?

"If all you want to do is stop your mate getting on your Facebook page while you're in the toilet," you have already failed. You're right that biometrics is most likely sufficient against opportunistic thieves (or someone who does not intend to return your lost phone) as they're likely not interested in investing _any_ effort whatsoever in accessing the data on the phone; they just want it wiped and shifted.

But anyone in your circles (family / mates / work colleagues) with even a weak motivation to access the phone is a completely different threat model altogether, and biometrics won't do almost anything against them. Even PINs can have the same problem but that depends on how observably you tend to input your PIN. But hey, if you've never even heard of anyone ever getting their phone's language set to Chinese while they were away for five minutes as a mere prank, you might just be ok...

DropBear

Re: Stupid idea in the US

No need. My PIN is _not_ a swipe pattern and it actually involves _all_ digits except one. Have fun with what you learn from my potential smudges over my non-randomized keys. Yes, I type it in every single time I take out my phone for any reason as it auto-locks in a couple of minutes, and using it hasn't killed me yet. Or the phone.

DropBear
Joke

Re: Securing Private Parts

Admit it, this is just an elaborate setup for a "credentials too short" joke...

It'll soon be even more illegal to fly drones near UK airports

DropBear

Re: Drones with a mass of 249g, thousands of 'em

But that's perfectly okay, because the fuzz will now have the right to lawfully steal any carbon fibre rod stock / brushless motors / LiPo batteries whenever they feel like it from you, along with any Arduinos you might have and your suspicious 3D printer you might try printing some propellers with, because you might be using them to DIY a drone for your tyke to fly at 5m in your back yard (unlawfully failing to consume by buying a lobotomised DJI toy as any proud member of a capitalist society ought to); while those intending actual harm laugh all the way to the bank somewhere else, blissfully unmolested by the long but apparently not nearly long enough arm of the law.

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Keystone Cops

Generally speaking no news seems to be properly proper anymore unless you can present them by interviewing some personally affected idiot that the audience is supposed "emotionally bond" with or something. It's a personal pet peeve of mine having to start watching even air crash investigation shows halfway into the show because the first half is invariably introducing a bunch of irrelevant folks and whatever it is what they were doing that day and during the accident and after the crash and all their anguish and fear and post-traumatic miseries haunting them every day of their lives following it. Meanwhile, I only care about the reason of the crash having been failure to regularly grease the wrong nut...

Hands off that Facebook block button, public officials told by judges in First Amendment row

DropBear

In general, in the real world any freedom of expression seems to only last right up until you happen to inconvenience anyone with any power. Shoot the messenger and you'll never need to address the problem. Works the same absolutely everywhere. What else is new?

Low-power chips are secret sauce behind long-life wearables

DropBear

Re: Lower end

I always held the strictly personal opinion that the intended meaning of that well-known quote was "people so primitive they barely just reached the 'digital watches: achievement unlocked' phase", but somehow got perverted into apparently meaning "analogue watches are so much nicer than digital ones and these stupid people completely fail to appreciate that" in wide-scale popular usage.

DropBear

Re: Where does all the data go?

Without proposing or endorsing any particular piece of kit, you might want to take a look at GadgetBridge and whatever it may or may not support, for blissfully cloud- and snooping-free fitness. Although it most likely won't come close to all the bells and whistles manufacturer's original apps tend to throw at you along with the kitchen sink.

Drone goal! Quadcopter menace alert freezes flights from London Heathrow Airport

DropBear

Re: pictures?

In particular, the camera would be perfectly fine to record the ear-splitting ZZZZZZZ these things produce, doubtlessly audible just fine from any range that permits positive visual identification.

DropBear

Re: At least people can take comfort from the fact that ...

"Things might get a bit iffy" is arguably the exactly right wording, considering that no, airliners are _required_ to be able to take off perfectly fine even after losing an engine, right at take-off, as the first reply at this link not only asserts but convincingly documents. Not that anyone would WANT that of course, but let's not panic worse than it's actually warranted.

Bish, Bash... gosh! Good ol' Bourne Again Shell takes a bow as it reaches version five-point-zero

DropBear
Trollface

Re: "with the latter having microsecond granularity."

Nah, it's just a backup for whenever the main microfirst granularity fails...

This is the final straw, evil Microsoft. Making private GitHub repos free? You've gone too far

DropBear
Mushroom

Not impressed

I would be easier to convince that "look MS isn't so evil after all" if they didn't suddenly start to remind me on every single visit that my Firefox 52 ESR is apparently far too old to be usable with Github anymore. Really...? For browsing a tree of text files?!?

Oregon can't stop people from calling themselves engineers, judge rules in Traffic-Light-Math-Gate

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Technician Vs Engineer

"The GP knows what you need to be treated for (and takes responsibility for getting it wrong)"

I'm clearly living in the wrong universe, because in mine the ARE NO cases of "getting it wrong", only unfortunate patients, and there's such an utterly unending supply of those that absolutely nobody bats an eyelid if it turns out any number of them have been mistreated to any degree. Unless the press picks up some particularly egregious case and runs with it, in which case there will be much political posturing and various noises will be made but absolutely nobody will get penalized to any degree and absolutely nothing will change (other than the Head of the hospital in question because high level power play is all any such incident is ever good for - everybody else carries on exactly as before).

More nodding dogs green-light terrible UK.gov pr0n age verification plans

DropBear
Devil

Re: Just like buying a magazine.

...well, the upside is the kids have already learned to sing "so long farewell auf wiedersehen good bye" and respond to whistle signalling.

Oz cops investigating screams of 'why don't you die?' find bloke in battle with spider

DropBear

Re: Even in Australia

" Yes, they can startle you if you wake and look up and see the 6-inch spread of legs above your head. But that's about as much as they can do to "lethal" you."

I beg to disagree. I'm fairly sure that merely seeing a 6-inch sized spider would have me drop dead there and then via some kind of explosive heart failure. I once nearly walked face first into the tiniest of itty-bitty spiders that had the stupid idea of descending from the head jamb of a door I was going through at the exact wrong moment - I'm pretty sure a doctor would have no problem identifying the consequences on a set of before / after MRI scans...

Mark Zuckerberg did everything in his power to avoid Facebook becoming the next MySpace – but forgot one crucial detail…

DropBear

Re: Gelocation

Absolutely true; occasionally I get "placed" in some other city as well, although most of the time geolocation seems to get at least the city right - and because of that, I would probably use that information as a starting point on which area's WiFi SSID records I should try comparing to those visible from a given user's phone, if I were working for Facebook.

Is Google purposefully breaking Microsoft, Apple browsers on its websites? Some insiders are confident it is

DropBear

Re: Mozilla

"but for the moment it works"

...for modest amounts of "works". I did try it and some of the legacy stuff seems to be working indeed, but two out of the two extensions I had pinned on my toolbar work either erratically or not at all.

Houston, we've had a problem: NASA fears internal server hacked, staff personal info swiped by miscreants

DropBear
Joke

We're onto you...

Hah! Secretly, Marc Zicree must surely be behind all this...!

The Palm Palm: The Derringer of smartphones

DropBear

If I wanted a credit card-sized phone, I still have my previous Symbian phone - and it (still) runs for a WEEK between charges, not for a day. It still isn't running anything I didn't install* on it, and that goes equally for my current Galaxy, or anybody's smartphone. So no, I still don't see the point.

* Yes, yes, technically it does have some pre-installed software some of which indubitably wakes up and runs some code in the background every now and then. Except I can't really tell, because as long as I don't use them and do not register accounts with any of them none of them are ever doing anything visible**, and I'm fine with that.

** Potential snooping is a whole different ballgame, and not what we're discussing here. This is supposed to be about how allegedly annoying, harassing and impossible to reign in smartphones are in contrast with dumbphones.

Ding dong merrily on high. In Berkeley, the bots are singeing: Self-driving college cooler droid goes up in flames

DropBear
Trollface

Re: @ $3.80 a pop?!!

That's what they _charge_ for it. You'd get the $0.80...

Oh Deer! Poacher sentenced to 12 months of regular Bambi screenings in the cooler

DropBear
Devil

I can attest to the traumatising powers of Bambi - although I had a double dose seeing as how we had our own version (involving the cutest little fox for a change). Then again, there was a whole LOT of traumatising going on back then - don't ever get me started on what "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" did to me...

Astroboffins spy a rare exoplanet evaporating before their eyes

DropBear

Re: Rather a lot of unanswered questions there

Sorry but that excuse is objectively wrong. The article clearly says "in only a few billion years from now, half of the planet may be gone". Not the atmosphere. The planet. I continue to consider my question valid, and apparently eight people didn't read the article.

DropBear

Rather a lot of unanswered questions there

So how exactly will the planet continue to evaporate once it lost all its atmosphere - is its sun going to start chipping away at rock then? Or is it a completely gaseous planet (in which case what exactly delimits its "atmosphere")...? And how can we even possibly know it's shrinking, considering that based on its expected billion-year lifespan and the history of our ability to detect exoplanets being measured in mere years it's hard to imagine we could possibly have detected any directly measurable change in its size...? Is this a theoretical inference only, based on the circumstances we expect the exoplanet to exist in...?

Waymo presents ChauffeurNet, a neural net designed to copy human driving

DropBear

Re: Simple questions

It's not about the emergency services. Around here the law says if there's simultaneously a working traffic light and a traffic agent actively directing traffic, the latter wins no matter what the lights say (and this happens all the time, whenever cops have nothing better to do I suppose). So yeah, it's quite on point asking whether an AI driver would recognize the often relatively subtle gestures those guys use to signal "your turn, get moving..."

Equifax how-it-was-mega-hacked damning dossier lands, in all of its infuriating glory

DropBear

There's rather significant difference between wrongfully blaming an innocent for something he's not guilty of and wrongfully blaming an admittedly guilty party as the sole reason for the consequences that were not caused by his actions alone. Neither is fair, but I don't think the "scapegoat" was fired for "single-handedly leaking the whole database" but rather for "not applying an important patch in due time", which apparently he did (fail to) do. Unless he can prove holding back the patch was an instruction from higher-up, I don't see how he can sue simply for nobody else being blamed at the time.

Official: Voyager 2 is now an interstellar spacecraft

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Scale

Okay, attempt number two: if Voyager 2 could shine a laser pointer on the Sun from London, by the time we would see the red spot (if we could) Voyager would already be in Sydney...

College PRIMOS prankster wreaks havoc with sysadmin manuals

DropBear

That is not my experience at all. More specifically, while most students would probably indeed frown upon causing significant problems or harm to others, most of them are absolutely fine "pranking" their peers with stuff that adults (including the same people later on) would find distinctly distasteful.

Bloodhound SSC reaches the end of the road for want of £25m

DropBear

Re: Crowdfunding?

I follow this sort of thing fairly closely - and these days we're more like in the miserably failing to crowd-fund-my-pointless-hairdryer-on-wheels-that-also-makes-coffee era. Kickstarter et al. is no longer new or glamorous, and years of either failing to deliver completely or delivering half-assed stuff eroded the initial enthusiasm to a mere shadow of its former self; and that's not even speaking of the amount of competing rubbish that raises the noise floor sky high nowadays. Finally, altruism and grand ideals are well and good, but out here in the real world projects that actually promise to deliver a product to each of the punters tend to do spectacularly better than the "come share my dream" type. My prediction is they would have brought in less than a single million if they tried.

Ecuador says 'yes' to Assange 'freedom' deal, but Julian says 'nyet'

DropBear

Re: Double down?

Coming from a non-English speaking country I can only offer an outsider's anecdotal, strictly non-academic (and at least somewhat impartial) perspective, but to be honest I have encountered "double" or "double down" used plenty of times yet I have never, ever heard or read "double up" before today. Which is not a comment on what may "officially" be right or wrong - just a remark offered at face value...

It's official. Microsoft pushes Google over the Edge, shifts browser to Chromium engine

DropBear

Re: Oh Homer - "work with anything other than Chromium"

>> user@host:~$ apt-mark showhold

>> firefox-esr

>> thunderbird

>> user@host:~$

...just sayin'.

Awkward... Revealed Facebook emails show plans for data slurping, selling access to addicts' info, crafty PR spinning

DropBear
Devil

"I can one-up that, I'm Android free as well."

I can two-up that with my fiendish two-layer defence. Against direct snooping I'm protected by simply not having any Facebook or Twitter accounts. Second, against posts from friends and family betraying the Ferrari and the mansion I cannot possibly afford I'm protected by the fact that, uh, I cannot possibly afford any*.

* Yes, I also make my life dull and uninteresting on purpose for the same reason - to starve them of anything they might foolishly post about me. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it...!

DropBear

Re: Users should pay to use Facebook

"no one will pay ever and whatever the cost would be it will be too much anyway"

That sounds to me like Zuckerberg actually agreeing with them, not with you who seems to think there would be a reasonable business case charging the users for access. Zuckerberg very explicitly does not think so, at any level the users would consider not to "be too much anyway".

DropBear

Re: I'm out of here!

"elReg counts as anti-social media then I take it?"

I personally don't consider absolutely any interaction with others over the internet as "social media". It may well be a completely arbitrary distinction, but I see "social media" as places concentrating content concerning the subjective existence of their members, with well-defined networks of ties.

Considering here we tend to discuss topics of _common interest_ mostly based on objective happenings in the world (as opposed to whose most remote acquaintance had a new sprog recently which definitely fails the _common_ interest criteria for me) and generally without a particular distinction about who we are interacting with (or indeed any peer pressure concerning what we read or we decide to reply to, which I see as a huge part of the toxicity of actual SNs) I really don't see The Register comparable to what people traditionally call "social media".

DropBear

Re: $0.10 per Year

...from a _single_ company. Depending on how many of them spend that sum on your "content", you may well not be earning enough to offset your own data's value to FB even if you _would_ be willing to pay to keep it private.

Talk about a GAN-do attitude... AI software bots can see through your text CAPTCHAs

DropBear

While I am indeed one of those people who hates picking out cars, street signs and other objects in CAPTCHA image grids working for Google for free, the part I really hate with impossible-to-properly-describe fury is that apparently there is no limit on how many times you can be forced to try again. Usually it just goes on endlessly, tile set after tile set after tile set, and there is no recourse because a) you probably have something you _need_ to do behind that captcha you can't do anywhere else and b) absolutely everyone is using the same disgusting system anyway.

The fact that if as a consumer I had any power whatsoever then right now there would be a giant smouldering crater full of liquefied rock where the captcha servers used to be illustrates nicely that I am nothing more than powerless cattle and a product both for the suppliers of those captchas and the sites employing them.

FCC slammed for 'arbitrary and reckless' plan to change how text messages are regulated

DropBear

What in the name of...

That anyone between a handset and another one gets to "not deliver" a text message is absolute news to me. Privacy issues aside (I never told the telco they may sift through what I type, even with a machine) I would plainly call that loss of service if it happened more than once and either move to another telco that doesn't do this or else encrypt every text I send or receive (99% of my texts go to a single, like-minded person).

Microsoft's .NET Core 3 is almost here, which means time to move on from .NET Framework

DropBear

I'm not particularly familiar with VS specifically but we live in a post-fixing-bugs world, don't you know. The current MO is to just move fast and when (not if) you break things just keep adding enough new bugs until the old one gets superseded naturally all on it own. And if in spite of your best efforts the code ever shows signs of stabilizing just declare it obsolete, abandon it, and rewrite everything using the latest even more bug-ridden tech, from scratch. Repeat as many times as needed, but long before you reach anywhere near feature parity with the old version. We live in a world of continuously improving software, where "better" is defined as "never mind the loss of features and stability, feel that Nightly goodness!".

As sales slide, virtual reality fans look to a bright, untethered future

DropBear

I don't see how stand-alones are supposed to be so much better than a Cardboard-clone plus a phone, considering that's exactly what they are except infinitely more expensive (assuming everyone already has their phone) and a lot less compatible with existing VR apps (for those which either don't run Android at all or run some locked down custom version of it that won't install Shark Experience or Rollercoaster Experience or whatever it is that goes this week).

So far no other rig including all the big names can match the fun per buck that can be had with a nearly decade old phone, a sub-$10 plastic box with (individually adjustable!) lenses, some PC-to-phone glue software and basically ANYTHING 3D built using the Unreal Engine, using nothing more than a single command line parameter.

Tesla autopilot saves driver after he fell asleep at wheel on the freeway

DropBear

Re: The elephant in the back seat

"The default behaviour is not happening. That is a bug the size of an elephant."

Wrong. See word in bold.

No, you haven't gone deaf – the Large Hadron Collider has been wound down for more upgrades

DropBear

It has already been done (aka "how you take a picture of the Sun at night")

Here's the list of space orgs big and small sparring to send next NASA gear to the Moon

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Probably not, because there isn't a cloud in space.

"And then there is the Oort Cloud"

Yeah sure, have you even looked at those ping times...?

WhamWham, bambam, no thank you, SamSam: Iranians accused by the Feds of orchestrating ransomware outbreak

DropBear

Oh...?

So the Feds "told" every single exchange, in every single country around the world they shall not process payments* for these addresses? I'm glad we worked out how things work. Or else what...?

* not that I'm defending those two pricks. It's just so rare to see the World Police openly in action...

3ve Offline: Countless Windows PCs using 1.7m IP addresses hacked to 'view' up to 12 billion adverts a day

DropBear

Not really - please note that it was _its_ decision not to install on systems _with_ security software that _it_ was obviously already running on. Unless you referred to the uselessness of security software that most people are already well aware of, so it's not particularly worrying news either.

DropBear

Re: "3ve" (pronounced "Eve".)"

I think I'll go with "thrive" and I think I can see Occam nodding too...

Australia to build a pirate-proof fence: Brace yourselves, Google

DropBear

Re: "primary effect" is infringement

I'd argue that depends rather a lot on how and who gets to decide how "primary effect" should be assessed. Because for the deluge of copyrightwise-challenged stuff that Youtube hosts, it still drowns in at least an order of magnitude more of cat videos, fail compilations, angsty teenager rants, furious SJW rants, rants of people furious about others' furious rants, rants of Dave Jones simply furious and never needing a reason to be so, "let's play" streamers and other genuine and would-be Youtube celebrities, and generally just people making a fool of themselves in front of a webcam. Astonishingly, even some arguably watch-worthy original content, which is already infinitely more than anything on "legitimate" TV (apologies to any mathematicians offended by equating "anything over zero" with infinity) - but that's just my highly subjective opinion.

Pulses quicken at NASA as SpaceX gets closer to crewed launches and Russia readies the next Soyuz

DropBear

Re: Drugs assurance

"What controls does SpaceX have in place to minimise the risk of doped-out or coked-up staff making dangerous manufacturing slips?"

And why do they need one specifically against drugs...? How about tired staff? Or improperly trained staff...? Or disgruntled staff...? And if they don't, why do "drugs" feature in the headlines announcing this investigation...?