Posts by Francis Boyle

I'll see your Spaceballs

and raise you Quark. (No not that one.)

It 2018

just buy shares in a company with blockchain in its name.

Yor riht

I do't undrssnd yur jke.

Re: WTF!

Just retain the picture. Make it an 8x10 glossy for good measure, securely sealed in a strong envelope. Just break the seal and whip it out at the right moment and your little wrigglers aren't going anywhere today.

I seem to remember

there was one thing, a sort of distributed document thingamajig, that looked quite promising in it's time.

AFAIK

the term was, and still is, 'hermaphrodite'.

Yes, really just an incremental improvement

And no, not particularly useful in surveillance, since it's essentially about optimisations designed to produce aesthetically pleasing shots, not about subject recognition.

Given that the issue in question is a vulnerability

that's like suggesting that builders make houses that can't burn down.

Not only can you tune a vacuum cleaner

you can play it as well.

Not unless

you can work out how to install a radar dish on your head.

I suspect

it's less a matter what people are doing with their cables and more where they're getting them. Someone must be buying all those sub $1 cables on eBay.

Re: The Holy Trinity

"That's the issue, the problem, electorates of 'free' societies now face."

And what is this problem? The statistically insignificant problem or terrorism? Predatory paedophiles who have always existed even if we chose to ignore them? Emmanuel Goldstein? (He's out there, you know.)

O.K. I'll tell you. The problem is, always has been, and probably always will be, the desire of those in power to grab more of it.

In short, nothing's changed.

So when the passengers got high the pilots decided to get low

Sounds like common sense to me.

I'll go with the subhead

The way things are going in the US of A they will be taking inspiration from Starship Troopers* for uniform ideas.

*The movie of course.

You might want to

have a word with Yogi Berra about that.

Re: What we really need

I understand what you're saying but I don't "we need to buy fewer milk" has ever been grammatical English.

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You seem to be missing

that this is a hardware security device. Yes, I expect hardware security devices to have secure hardware.

Fuck IQ tests

Being stupid is a choice people make (a.k.a intellectual laziness).

It's the whole human brain that's the problem

since it has the "I'd rather be doing something else than driving" module. Sometimes less is more.

"I'm sure HP and Dell would sell you a Ryzen box if they thought it was profitable."

This is of course completely unrelated and in no way represents the sales team of any large microprocessor manufacturer.

Re: Maybe some compromise

I doubt that hashing would word since the forwarded message would probably not have the same hash as the original) and those with malicious intent could just change it) but with the appropriate network analytics it should be possible to send a warning to those likely to be targeted. It needn't be perfect. Just catching a majority might be enough to prevent the critical mass needed for mob violence. Of course, it won't work at all if there is a critical mass of people just wanting an excuse for violence but sometimes just questioning the message, sowing a seed of doubt, can be enough.

A second point. The problem here seems to be the familiar one that the internet can spread lies faster than the relevant authorities can deal with them. (Yes, something like that was always true, but improved communications made it a much less serious problem. Now, it seems, we are going backwards.) I don't see it as an unreasonable burden for the companies involved to be required to help deal with a problem they are a party to creating.

Re: Organized religion is the root of all evil

I beg to differ. But I as cannot possibly say it better than Patton Oswalt, I will refer you to his take on Sky Cake.

Patton Oswalt is wrong. The reason psychopaths don't get to do what they want is not because someone invented religion to fool them, but because most people are not psychopaths¹. Indeed, given that "leaders" tend to be psychopaths, you could argue that every religion is creation by started by a psychopaths because it takes someone with an interest in controlling others to take an idea and turn it into an organisation.

1. Altruism and a sense of community came first² or there wouldn't have been anybody to invent religion.

2. On second thought, don't ask a chimp. It'll probably try to rip your arm off. Ask a bonobo. It'll try to have sex with you but that's just it's way of saying hello.

Connections, connections

Don't count on that !

Well, yes.

But the chance of there being no operating tower your phone can connect to is probably smaller than the likelihood of the outage taking down the exchange your landline is connected to.

Re: Halted machine on other side of the planet

Not when the "server" is a Raspberry Pi hanging off the end of a consumer broadband connection.

Then get another Pi to manage the first one. The solution* is always another Raspberry Pi.

*Even when there isn't actually a problem.

Re: No Wear Levelling hmmmmmm

Six to eight months is only a few hundred writes. Nowhere near enough to hit the cell write limit unless you've got some very badly written code that somehow manages to continually write the same locations. I suspect it's your dashcam that doesn't deserve the enterprise moniker

Well

I think you'll find the Romans got there first. Though some of their murals probably would have been NSFS (not safe for slums).

Unfortunately it's not about justice, it's about the law

Refusing to hear an appeal is the default for the Supreme Court and, given the number of petitions for appeals, overwhelmingly the most common outcome. Basically the court will hear an appeal if it thinks there is a sufficiently important issue of law at stake. Otherwise the lower court's decision stands. In effect the decision is "legally speaking nothing to see here folks - go home".

That's odd

I'm a bit older than five and I've never learnt how to catch a ball. It's just not something I can do. Meanwhile, we have drones that can build a bridge.

Yes

but since it's all online, unlike Uber, they won't kill anyone. . .

Well of course

You don't own a phone (or any other consumer product) made with by cheap Chinese labour.

So we've started downvoting amfm

This is a sad day for the Register. I generally don't bother to read his (its?) comments but without them this would be a duller place.

AIUI

It's really just M.2 with some of the reserved pins used for "enterprise" features and is designed for "backward compatibility". But, yes, we all no about compatibility that is backward.

First

make sure that your mouse isn't using its wheel. . .

Revenge of the AI

I want to do a remake of Max Headroom in which both Max and Edison Carter (his human counterpart) are computer generated.