* Posts by Nick Kew

2841 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2007

Forget Brexit, ignore Trump, write off today: BT's gonna make us all 'realise the potential of tomorrow'

Nick Kew

Credit where credit's due

I guess UK workers are getting radically cheaper compared not only to the developed world but also to a rising economy like India.

More to the point, this could be learning real lessons. BT have acquired a decent chain of high street shops with EE, and a UK call centre with Plusnet. Perhaps they've genuinely come to appreciate the value of those and concluded the rest of the consumer-facing business could benefit from things consumers like.

Uncle Sam punishes China for abusing Uyghur Muslims – by blacklisting top AI surveillance companies

Nick Kew

Nice timing ...

This story coinciding with your report on the FBI's snooping.

Plusnet is doing us proud again with early Christmas present for customers: Price hikes

Nick Kew

Having been a customer of both Plusnet and Virgin, I can tell you emphatically you've made the wrong change there.

Your 4mb becomes 0.4mb (dropping down frequently and for extended periods to zero). And you can substitute months for the days to get it fixed - if you can contact them at all.

Hey, I wrote this neat little program for you guys called the IMAC User Notification Tool

Nick Kew
Pint

Re: non-native-english-speaker

I am a native speaker. But having lived and worked in several countries where I'm not a native speaker, I can tell you it gives tremendous licence to say things you wouldn't dare say in your own language. You can laugh off an unwitting faux pas, but better still you have plausible deniability when it's entirely intentional. Best of all, keep 'em guessing!

Nick Kew

Re: Bradford University School Of Management...

Birmingham Uni went on my UCCA form[1]. Had I gone there, I expect I'd've joined their Mathematical Society.

[1] UCCA form: Standard in UK schools in my day (very likely still today). You put down five choices of university. Originally introduced in the 1960s expansion to help collect statistics saying "look, five applicants for every place, we need more". Or so my dad - who worked in a poly and struggled to get students - told us.

Surprise! Copying crummy code from Stack Overflow leads to vulnerable GitHub jobs

Nick Kew

Chicken or Egg

Which came first?

Were stackoverflow snippets copied to or from code that happens to be on github? I expect both, but in what proportions?

Here we go again: US govt tells Facebook to kill end-to-end encryption for the sake of the children

Nick Kew
Coat

Family Friendly

ISPs or BOFHs may offer - or impose - "family friendly" 'net access, with "unsuitable" sites blocked to protect you from "here be dragons" parts of the 'net.

What if you were to extend that principle to chat? Offer a government-backdoored chat branded as "family-friendly" where your not-at-all-creepy spooks could watch benignly over your kids' chat?

After all, there's precedent. $God has been watching over them for generations so nothing bad could happen. Just update Hansel&Gretel's prayer a bit ... Abends wenn Ich schlafen geh, vierzehn EngelGeister um mich ziehn.

Tetraplegic patient can now move his four limbs with the help of a badass neuroprosthetic suit

Nick Kew
Alert

Is it worth it?

That suit looks like it'll get fearsomely hot if worn for more than a few minutes. If I had to wear one, I hope it would make me so fit I could take up a career in arctic exploration!

Also begs the question of bodily functions (not to mention pleasures).

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

Nick Kew
Coat

It was snow joke. But only Dino saw.

Nick Kew
Coat

Re: They were left with a rather large bill

Eliminated for an inappropriate tweet.

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

Nick Kew
Facepalm

Re: UK Smart? Meter

Strewth!

Who paid for all that? If that's Blighty it'll be all of us, through our bills funding it all.

EU's top court sees no problem with telling Facebook to take content down globally

Nick Kew

Re: Just

You don't need to participate to suffer the consequences of anti-social media!

Like Shakespeare's Desdemona?

Like Orwell's Snowball?

Like Thomas a Becket?

Malicious misinformation is nothing new.

Remember the millions of fake net neutrality comments? They weren't as kosher as the FCC made out

Nick Kew
Holmes

Re: No confirmation email?

Much harder? Only for the plebs. The average Reg reader could surely script it within an hour.

Somewhat easier to detect? OK, that's fairer: a few thousand email addresses @mydomain would look suspicious even with a Turing-worthy bot generating the messages. On the other hand, email addresses are cheap, and if you could substitute @gmail and @hotmail for @mydomain without triggering abuse takedowns from those services ...

£99,999, what's your emergency? Paramedics rush to OAP's aid after shock meter reading

Nick Kew

Re: Scam phones: Off topic but maybe worth reading

I would check a minor-nuisance number like that. In this case your impression is well-supported. Other times a number might be spoofed and random.

Cassini may be dead – but its data shows basic building blocks of life spewing from Enceladus

Nick Kew

Methane

Titan - once thought the most Earth-like (and potentially inhabitable) body elsewhere in the solar system, famously has a methane-rich atmosphere. Could that be the long-term outcome of organic matter venting in the absence of biological processes to capture and recycle it?

Here's that hippie, pro-privacy, pro-freedom Apple y'all so love: Hong Kong protest safety app banned from iOS store

Nick Kew

Google Maps can get you traffic information. Not so hard in principle to add other things that might cause a user to avoid somewhere or choose a different route. My guess would be, this app might have included features specifically for rioters themselves, as opposed to just for innocent folks looking to avoid trouble. In other words, it packed a riot-organising tool.

Given that governments around the world claim the authority to turn off/block social media at times of crisis (and India has gone much further than that in Kashmir without even the provocation of HK riots), it says something about the liberal tolerance of HK that they still have access to 'normal' social media.

EU's top court says tracking cookies require actual consent before scarfing down user data

Nick Kew

The ad blocker makes all that even easier for the lazy among us.

Nick Kew

If it's $work then you're using a $work persona and giving $work consent. Be sure to separate that from your personal persona if you're unhappy with $work's choices.

Nick Kew

Re: That was nice

I generally find an adblocker can make that box go away without ticking anything.

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

Nick Kew

Heard them

Monday early morning on the Today programme, broadcast Boris with some "turbulent priest" rabble-rousing from his party conference. I certainly hope the cheering acolytes were bots, 'cos if they were humans this comment would bring me perilously close to Godwin.

Nick Kew

Re: Sigh

You appear to be looking for an Electric Monk.

Chinese sleazeball's 17-year game of hide-and-seek ends after drone finds him on mountain

Nick Kew

@JohnG - Defying TPTB may trump all personal comforts. C.f. Assange's time in an embassy compared to the prospect of a Swedish prison.

There are fine stories of historic fugitives living long-term off-grid. Some of them the stuff of legend, like Elijah or Bin Laden smiting the unbelievers.

WeWork, but We don't IPO: Self-styled techie boarding house calls off cursed stock offering

Nick Kew

Re: Why bother?

Expensive cities? Just move!

Laptop, wifi, phone, bed. Light, ventilation, peace&quiet. Availability nearby of water, kettle, and loo.

What else do you need for a working office environment?

Come to think of it, some of the offices I've worked in have been pretty defective. Inadequate ventilation, lights that buzz and flicker, foul coffee, desks and/or chairs that cause agony in my back. Definitely better off at home. Peace and quiet is the joker: no likelihood of that either at home or in an office until and unless you're doing pretty well for yourself.

Nick Kew

Re: If there is a way to revolutionize the commercial real estate business...

At a time when most commercial real estate firms are doing pretty well

Erm, I don't know about worldwide, but here in Blighty, REIT (commercial real estate) shares have been severely hammered in recent times. The worst have been retail space (retailers going bust everywhere), but office space providers have been hard-hit too.

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Yet another critical flaw threatens Exim servers

Nick Kew

Re: Credit where credit's due

I've used postfix for many years, ever since migrating from qmail around the turn of the century.

But I think qmail deserves the credit for introducing secure-by-design to smtp with its thought-through separation of components and privileges. That was the first serious alternative to sendmail, right back in the mid-1990s. I switched away from sendmail for both simplicity and security, but it was the ease of introducing my own spam-fighting filters that motivated my own qmail->postfix change - at which time I also looked at and dismissed exim.

Computer says no: An expression-analysing AI has been picking out job candidates for Unilever

Nick Kew

Re: Computer says no?

You've been listening to the BBC. I've heard them too: they sample very selectively and spin a generation's worth and more of change as all having happened because blind auditions. As it happens, most of the orchestras (and - much more so - all the choirs) I perform with are majority-female, but they don't audition blind.

Nick Kew

Re: A less biased system

Yeah, that theory is very trendy, and indeed is not without merit. I think where it falls down is that it commonly leads to rejecting the Good because it's not the (unattainable) Perfect.

Applying it to Unilever, they're a long-term very successful company. Guess they must've been doing something right all this time.

Nick Kew

Re: Psychometric testing

I always find that kind of question difficult. What do they mean by panic? That moment when you're at the checkout and reach for your wallet, but it isn't there (before finding it in your other pocket)? Or something more serious?

What does that say about my personality? Awkward bugger? Or useful attention to detail that'll avoid going ahead and solving the wrong problem? Nope, none of that, because I can't question the question when it's a multiple-choice tickbox. Can the AI say I'll put you down as Don't Know?

IT workers: Speaking truth to douchebags since 1977

Nick Kew

Re: Out of cheese error

Those bloomin' wizards! Can't (or won't) speak plainly.

That was of course an exhortation to sacrifice your virginity. It knew its audience!

Nick Kew
Facepalm

Out of cheese error

34 comments so far, and no PTerry (or comparable) references?

Everyone recalling stories that pre-date Hex? Or are we just a miserable bunch?

Fairytale for 2019: GNOME to battle a patent troll in court

Nick Kew

Re: Subsequent litigation.

It's primarily an instrument of economic imperialism. Grant lots of patents, and use them to block foreign companies competing with US companies, imposing patents via WIPO and via straightforward piracy (the latter as in NTP vs RIM).

It's not entirely coincidental that US companies were (are) way ahead of the rest of the world first in spamming patents whose 'invention' would be laughed out of court by a reasonable person, and then in making a business of using lawyers to ambush people who innovate in the real world.

SPARCs fly as Oracle recharges Arm server processor designer Ampere with $40m

Nick Kew

Isn't this just the long-term trend of a world increasingly dominated by ARM's ecosystem? Sparc has just gone the way of all the other challengers, to a niche that's hard to see ever again becoming profitable for a mainstream bigco like Oracle. Dammit, that dates right back to when Sun moved increasingly to x86 before Oracle acquired its interest in sparc.

Hey, it's Google's birthday! Remember when they were the good guys?

Nick Kew

Ever thus

Methinks the perception is what's really changed.

I first came to google as a search engine for Usenet, 'cos they bought dejanews. What they did to dejanews and usenet is surely a strong candidate for the most evil thing they've ever done, and it dates back right to the beginning (a case I argue here).

On the Web, what was good about Google compared to Altavista (IMHO the best of the rest when google first appeared) wasn't the content of the results. Rather it was a presentation free of the graphical clutter that got in the way of the results and added cup-of-coffee-length delays to simple search on the information dirt-track of the era.

Amazon, maker of racist and sexist facial recog, to suggest regulations for facial recog systems

Nick Kew

Re: Racist? Sexist?

Calling it Racist and Sexist based on dodgy[1] stories is classic dog-whistle politics. In a sane world it would be seen for what it is: an unhelpful distraction from whatever the real issues are[2]. In the real world, it works depressingly well for some: it seems to be strongly correlated with tribal identity: indeed, creating such identities perhaps more importantly than playing to them.

As for ANPR, not at all the same: after all, the whole purpose of numberplates is as identifiers, and they're discrete. ANPR is much closer to reading a barcode than recognising a face.

[1] For values of 'dodgy' including misreported and/or misunderstood.

[2] Real issues which might include uses that stray - accidentally or otherwise - into racism or sexism.

Multitasking is a myth: It means doing lots of things equally badly

Nick Kew

Re: What do you do?

Is your father religious, and thus attracted to your brother's holy calling?

Behold the perils of trying to turn the family and friends support line into a sideline

Nick Kew

Shirley, that's what factory reset is for?

OK, factory reset may have security implications, but isn't a surface more about cat videos than state secrets? Not exactly the kind of place I'd necessarily expect such concerns to trump brick-restoration!

Nick Kew
Pint

Re: Right cable, wrong hole.

I'm impressed your screen reader enabled you to do that kind of job!

*Microsoft taps your shoulder* Hi sorry yeah, we're still suing US govt for right to tell people when they are spied on

Nick Kew

Industrial Espionage

Interesting phrase: "... a lawsuit the company filed in 2018 to defend the rights of an undisclosed enterprise customer".

Hmmm. Does "Enterprise" in this context imply corporate? So that's not a terrorist suspect, it's someone conducting regular commercial business. Like for example NHS Business Services, who are an MS customer (evidence I'm aware of: their email is at outlook.com).

A US Government target for ... what kind of espionage?

Or of course it could be a Usual Suspect like Amnesty or Greenpeace (I've no idea if either of those is actually an MS customer) or a foreign government.

US immigration uses Google Translate to scan people's social media for bad posts – Er, don't do that, says everyone else

Nick Kew

Re: Can we please keep the lynchmobs quiet?

The story cited of Ismail Ajjawi might suggest there's a higher and more problematic hurdle somewhere in the system. Although there's no indication (other than the fact of it featuring in this article) that translation issues played any role in that story.

All your security are belong to us.

Consumer campaign to keep receiving printed till receipts looks like a good move – on paper

Nick Kew

Re: And e-tickets

That's what your phone is for - both of you. No sweat for it to deal with 17-character references and barcodes.

If you don't want that, fine. But it doesn't invalidate the concept, or make it dumb to offer you that option.

Nick Kew

Neither, please

I usually prefer no receipt whatsoever.

I've never been challenged on my way out of a shop. If I ever were, I'd (eventually) have the evidence showing up on whatever card I'd used to pay. Inconvenient, yes, but a negligible risk, and even if it happens it's offset against dispensing with a three-figure number of tiny paper inconveniences in a year.

Why worry about cost of banning certain Chinese comms providers? Fire Huawei, says analyst

Nick Kew

Blame Cisco?

No, I really wouldn't blame Cisco for this nutter. There is (in my mind more than) reasonable doubt, so let's give them the benefit of it. Is there any evidence that Cisco have heard of "Strand Consulting", let alone commissioned him?

Nick Kew

Re: The US was not like China

US spying targeted governments and terrorist organizations, not industry.

Not true. Not even true a generation ago in (at least the tail end of) the Cold War era.

Google 'Menwith Hill' to find documentaries on the subject from reputable sources in the mainstream media.

UK Supreme Court unprorogues Parliament

Nick Kew

Someone (not you) said there was "No evidence". My post was to disprove that. The strength of the evidence is a different question, but what I posted is just one among many examples that could be dug up if you were to spend more time and effort than me looking.

As for the revisionist history in your last paragraph, bear in mind that all Saddam's worst atrocities - including against the Marsh Arabs, took place in the 1980s when he was a regional henchman of the West, and the US/UK were violating their own sanctions.

Nick Kew

Sorry, I got the reference from my blog: https://bahumbug.wordpress.com/2006/12/15/body-language-is-the-liars-friend/ . Sadly the article linked from that is gone, along with the entire Indy's site of that era.

[edit] My blog comment finds it at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/diplomats-suppressed-document-lays-bare-the-lies-behind-iraq-war-428545.html

Nick Kew

There is indeed evidence that Blair knew he was lying on important matters, headed by Iraq. See for example The Independent of December 15th, 2006.

Depressing how many of our leaders are quite so vile. But you don't get to be PM by being honest or nice.

Nick Kew

72% turnout and the largest ever vote in favour of a specific policy?

If the vote had been for a specific policy, they'd have implemented it by now.

It wasn't. The vote was for a blank slate, onto which different people projected very different visions. So they couldn't agree on what that vision actually was.

EU court rules Right To Be Forgotten doesn't apply outside member states

Nick Kew

If you know a URL, you can view its precise contents. Craft a search so specific as to be sure to list it at the top of something. Be sure to include the term you think might be banned from searching on.

Of course that's not a complete solution. You'd also need to check whether the URL is self-excluded by the site's robot rules. And you might or might not be able to detect if the URL is doing something like serving entirely different contents to different users, thus messing with any such experiments.

DoH! Mozilla assures UK minister that DNS-over-HTTPS won't be default in Firefox for Britons

Nick Kew

Re: Who to trust?

Trust?

I have an issue with spiked DNS: anyone using it for censorship without my opting in[1]. I don't have an issue with privacy. I accept that a few people might, but I think for most of us it's a red herring. Maybe even a dead cat that distracts us from more important questions: the use by governments for censorship, such as the IWF in Blighty.

[1] I do opt in for the purposes of my mailserver, by using spamhaus.

Nick Kew

Needle, Haystack. Root servers in multiple jurisdictions. Your own DNS server's logs, on the other hand, will have all your data in one place if it gets seized.