Posts by Nick Kew

I don't understand

If the price was $24.67 per share, presumably that was agreed between buyers and sellers. The latter by voting on a Special Resolution, or something of that nature.

How does a judge then set a price that is any different - either higher or lower - than that agreed?

Surely that can only happen if someone argues successfully that there was some kind of skulduggery in setting the original price. Presumably the hedgies had some such argument? But then the decision for the judge would be to accept or reject their case?

Did HP claim successfully they'd been hoodwinked? They do seem to have a bit of a track record, as in the bizarre story of when they borged Autonomy. Or is this a judge playing God and overriding the market?

[edit] Thanks to Jon 37 for what looks like a good summary explanation.

Translation?

While it seems entirely likely that Iran has its share of nutters, is it not possible that translation issues might offer an alternative explanation in this instance?

It was a dark and stormy clock

Opening line of a computer-generated story I encountered as a student in the early 1980s.

It was surreal, but then we'd been brought up on Monty Python, the previous generation had had the Goons. This Very Silly Story may not quite have been Gogol, but was in a tradition going right back to Aristophanes.

It scanned rather nicely, without the turgidity reported here. Which rather suggests that a more readable narrative style might be a solved problem, if it had been on these researchers' agenda.

From the department of the bleedin' obvious

El Reg commentards could have told you that, probably for round about as long as El Reg has existed.

Though it's got worse during that time due to geopolitical and geoeconomic events: in this case the rise of world-class Chinese giants like Huawei. If the rise of Japan half a century ago is anything to go by, this backdoor protectionism could be part of something uglier.

Single point of failure

So long as a CA is a single point of failure, trusting *any* of them might be considered a false sense of security.

When a browser vendor takes it upon itself to trust some authorities over others, I wonder if that might lay it wide open to being held responsible for its users' losses when someone pulls a successful heist with a CA that it does trust? The argument being, by excluding Symantec, you're setting yourself up as an authority on the subject.

May will argue that such abuse is disproportionately targeted at political candidates who are female, black, minority ethnic or LGBT, which damages equal representation in politics.

Might it be fairer to say that abuse disproportionately targets candidates who make a big thing of being [identity group] and make a huge sense of Entitlement of it, and are impervious to argument? And above all, implicitly attack the other?

This is not a speech we ever heard from, say, Barack Obama or Angela Merkel. Nor Margaret Thatcher, though she herself was the focus of such massive abuse, not least from those who felt cheated out of a grievance by her achievements.

Women are better at ..

This has [...] increased opportunities for women [...] because they are better [...]

Would an article even be allowed to go to press if you reverse that? Substitute men for women, or worse for better, in a context like a market for good jobs?

Hmmm ...

Not convinced this column is going to work.

My reading of this story is that Fred is innocent: he had no reason to know that removing a printer would hurt anything, and noone would have thanked him for bugging them about every individual box he moved!

If this is the best facepalm you can come up with so early in the column, how are you going to persuade others to contribute more cringeworthy stories? Are you going to put people under hypnosis to try and dig up traumatic memories people have buried deeply for self-preservation?

OK, I'm curious.

I block many but not all ads. Basically if an ad doesn't do anything annoying - like animate, or obscure page contents, or form part of an excessive lineup of clickbait - I'll accept it. Not click it, but not rush to block its source either.

Yet I don't recollect ever seeing the kind of ad described in the article. The worst I get from google are "shopping" results in some searches.

Who really gets these things? Are they going to be people capable of using a browser feature, unless perhaps with the help of their (grand)kids?

WTO Rules?

China may be a convenient scapegoat, but this affects manufacturers around the world who might seek to sell to the USA[1]. Including ours here in Blighty - and yes, we have at least one pure-play manufacturer of polysilicon wafers for the solar industry big enough to be FTSE-listed.

Is this what international trade under WTO rules looks like?

[1] Unless the article is misreporting.

You forgot to tell us

What were the typosquatters actually doing with the domains?

Low-grade ads and link farming would be basically harmless: would Nominet necessarily rule for HMRC? Obviously certain other plausible scenarios could be a lot more problematic, and a no-brainer for Nominet.

Sounds perfectly normal

Where would we be if we didn't have dysfunctional management doing half-baked things and leaving the underlings to deal with the mess? Would we ever have had Dilbert, for instance?

Many years ago I was developing custom systems for Big Science. The Client had procured a shiny SGI 'puter, whose keyboard and screen were sheer luxury. But no compiler of any kind! I couldn't even bootstrap gcc to get hacking, and this wasn't an era when one could just download a binary package of anything. And the sysop job was outsourced to the lowest bidder (a well-known UK bigco).

Me: Can we please install a C compiler so I can get hacking?

Sysop: The C compiler is installed as standard!

Me: OK, so where do I find it?

Sysop: Oh, the usual place.

Me: Like the /usr/bin/cc that displays a release note advising me to install the compiler?

Resolving it took months, before finally getting the Client to sit down with both of us, see the problem for herself, and order that the compiler be installed! Meanwhile I had learned more esoteric shell scripting (now mercifully long-forgotten) than you'd wish on your worst enemy.

Why?

If you spend serious money on a 'puter, you do so for a reason. The reasons stated here seem a bit nebulous, and better suited to the private sector (and up to a point, public-sector consumers like Big Science institutes) than to governments. It might make some sense if it takes the form of a budget for Big Computing projects from the likes of CERN and ESA, but as described in your piece it smells a bit of MeToo-ism.

And boffins go offshore because they land an opportunity somewhere else. That's two-way traffic, of course. As for the location of actual computer resources? Dammit, I worked on a distant computer in my first job after graduating. If I could do that back in 1983 (with a teletype terminal with no screen, just a paper feed and printing that was fast but also full of line noise), how much more so in an era when we take the 'net for granted?

From reading the article (which confirms prior expectations), this is applying similar principles to spam filtering. It looks for characteristics commonly associated with malware, and aggregates them in a score.

I'd expect it to have less usable information to work with than spamassassin, but I'm open to having that prejudice challenged.

That'll make it better than nothing in some situations, but not really much more than that.