Posts by Milton

Perhaps they deserve each other

And you thought it was already embarrassing enough that our country's Foreign Secretary is a ridiculous, lying, man-child buffoon ....

But there may be a certain irony in the fireplace salesman—so far out of his depth as Defence Secretary that it is positively hilarious—talking rubbish about the F-35 which is, after all, a howling dog's breakfast of a procurement. It's not often a weapons platform is so lousy that you'd be better off starting a war before it's allowed into service. The Chinese, for one, have every incentive to delay hostilities over Taiwan until the US is crippled by dependence on the F-35 and has depleted itself of the "teen" generation of aircraft that were actually good at what they did.

And Williamson ... he's another of those conspicuously vacuous Westminster slimes whose ambition comfortably exceeds his abiltiies: a poorly informed, not very bright, mouthy plonker whose current mission is to stress-test the deadpan self-control of senior military officers. Because having to respectfully tolerate the imbecility of politicians and listen to their shyte without laughing is a steep price to pay for promotion. If I were an OF-6 at MoD I think I'd keep the old Webley handy, with a single bullet in the cylinder, as an antidote to Williamson's blethering. For myself.

Lemmings stuck in the copycat rut (of ruthlessly mixed metaphors)

"Fallen stars like Sony and HTC can barely differentiate their flagships from anyone else's these days"

This innova-constipation will continue, with growing consumer boredom and consequent saggy sales, until some of the big players grow a pair and decide to stop slavishly following Apple's tired and frankly stupid candy-bar design. (You could almost wonder if Apple and the rest want to keep making eyewateringly expensive screen replacements. It's stupid and unnecessary to have the display glass exposed to every accident; and it's always been stupid and unnecessary.)

Display, battery and CPU tech have easily reached the point where a flagship smartphone could hit the market in the flip-/clamshell form factor. Instead of phones swelling to uncomfortable sizes to accommodate large screen areas, they could be sensibly pocketable with nice big colourful hi-res displays tucked away safely inside the fold, with all sorts of versatile use cases available on an app by app basis. (The advent of truly bezel-less screens is simply crying out for this.) Outside, you have a low-power Gorilla'd-up status/notification supplementary display, maybe even an e-ink type system so that you could switch off the inner display (and most of the cores) entirely for low-power mode when you want to use the thing for calls only.

We may not quite be ready to build Westworld's sexy unfolding tablets, but the advantages of a return to the clam seem more compelling than ever.

Quantity does not equal quality

The problem with internet advertising is that, like radio advertising, it is cheap.

And like radio advertising, it is therefore shoddy, amateurish, repetitive garbage. My wife listens to Absolute Radio in the evenings (the one that insists on endlessly shouting "Where real morons mutter!") and I assume she has some kind of firmware filter in her brain to screen out the ads because they are droolingly cretinous. So bad they are almost funny, with the ritual hasty gabble at the end of every advert: "Terms and conditions apply, all the above was a lie".

The net has the same problem. 99.5% of ads are simply shit. They aren't pretty. Or striking. Or interesting. Or clever. Or funny. Or informative. Or thought-provoking. They're often not even accurate, being crammed with marketurds' lies. They are very rarely relevant to your actual, immediate interests, "targeting" and "personalisation" being a pitiful joke apparently swallowed only by the idiots who spend money on marketing.

The industry is clearly aware of at least some of this, but has clearly decided that quantity has a quality all of its own and continues to hurl its pathetic shit at an increasingly Teflon-ised wall in the hope that some of it will stick.

Some interesting things may yet happen. First, suppose that so-called personalisation and targeting are no longer generally possible but click-thru, eyeball and purchase rates do not change much. Or even improve. That will expose the Google and Farcebook shtick and cause a major re-evaluation of the value of those particular lying shysters.

Second, suppose that advertisers finally take the hint and try to create good quality ads. Imagine that instead of seeing the same lousy, cheap ads a score of times in a browsing session, you only once or twice noticed a humorous, clever advert—one that stimulated some interest, which you then took note of?

I cannot say that either of these things will definitely happen, but I do suggest that this might actually improve matters. If marketurds are effectively forced to create fewer, better ads, then for once in internet and corporate history, we may see race to the top, instead of the modern trend of hurtling to the bottom.

The usual astounding stupidity from the usual Westminster idiots

The combination of self-righteous hypocrisy, "christian" morals (i.e. telling other people what is "right" and "wrong"), technological illiteracy and dumbfounding arrogance yet again saddles the country with laws that are not only repressive and unnecessary but will, of course, be totally ineffectual.

Does anyone really believe that horny teenagers will not get their hormone-drenched eyeballs on porn if they want to. If it was possible using various subterfuges in the 1970s, why does anybody but a moron imagine that it isn't possible now?

Notwithstanding Tor and various other workarounds like the one in the article, the availability of dirt cheap mass storage renders this law utterly pointless—and arguably counterpoductive.

If porn is online, then at worst it gets downloaded onto your hard drive, and often it isn't even downloaded at all. I doubt that many people bother to make copies for lending to mates ... why bother?

If porn starts to circulate again on things llike Blu-Rays and μSD cards at 30Gb+ (half a dozen full length hi-def moves; tens of thousands of hi-res pictures) then many will eventually go astray, get copied repeatedly, end up absolutely anywhere and on trains, buses and automobiles ... potentially making it much more likely that porn of absolutely any kind will end up in the hands of absolutely anyone.

So yet again we have a classic example of Westminster's ignorant, ill-informed self-righteous hypocrite brigade making laws which will actually make a perceived problem much worse.

Should be the Tory Party motto: Stupid is as stupid does.

Multi-mode detection, anyone?

I've not investigated this in detail but I'm slightly surprised that no one is touting a multi-mode appraoch to this. Drones are hard to detect with primary radar like the plan-position stuff used at airports, but other radars can spot them. Drones are hard to see visually in many circumstances, being small, fleet, and possibly lost in cloud or fog. Their IR emissions are faint and sometimes less conspicuous than birds. And the sound they make can get lost in the background, especially near airports for obvious reasons.

But, they do tend to make a distinctive noise which, I'm guessing, could be discriminated using a combination of area- and directional-mics rigged to some good filtering electronics and software. I'd be very surprised if the sound alone isn't enough to allow a good system sometimes to identify a drone's make and model. (Think: the discrimination of a modern sub's sonar system, albeit water is a far better medium for sound than air.)

Synthesise an audio detection system with primary radar optimised for small objects, plus an IR capability and hi-def cameras with pattern recognition, and finally, get your software trained to distinguish the difference between the way birds typically fly (lots of continuous movement, soaring, swooping turns) and the way drones move (tendency to hover, abrupt course reversals, steep altitude gains for minimal distance covered etc). None of these would be near perfect but taken together they could be powerful inded.

I would expect that in due course you'd have a very effective drone tracking suite. The beauty of a synthesis approach (for once, an ideal software project for machine learning) is that you'd be able to assign fairly reliable threat estimates to incursions, ranging from say "30% possibility of drone intrusion 500m+ west of runway 28R" to "Confirmed hobby-scale drone 80m ASL over Queen's Building". Trend recording is also useful: a threat estimate which steadily increases should attract greater priority than one which stutters improbably. (Example: four unconfirmed estimates which fit a constant-bearing-decreasing-range model should be more worrying than four unconfirmed estimates jumping all over the place at extreme range.)

It'll be interesting to see how this all unfolds, anyway.

"Sentient mustache John Bolton"

Getting a bit tired of these supposedly funny insults. I used to have a mustache, and while it was indeed a truly, truly awful one, I think it deserved some acknowledgeemnt, if only as a signifier of youthful idiocy.

If mustaches were sentient, they would object to invidious comparisons with elderly-relative-you-wouldn't-leave-alone-with-the-kids Bolton.

</coat>

Use the mirror

Someone—possibly several someones—needs to go soak their head for a while and then take a good, long look in the mirror.

Because this fiasco was the result of at best shockingly bad judgement and callous stupidity, and at worst it was a brazen, stinking, thoroughly rotten attempt to scapegoat an innocent kid for the incompetence, ignorance and laziness of one or more bureaucrats.

It beggars belief that none of the people involved in this seems to have said, after examining the facts for five minutes, "Woah. Wait a sec. Why are we doing this?"

If there's a lesson from this sordid little episode, it might be that more people should exercise the only real freedom they actually have in this world: to think for themselves.

Silly, long, memorable

Make up a nonsense word that is long, sayable and has memory cues in it. The trick is in length (to resist brute forcing), nonsense (to resist dictionary attack, so don't spell things quite right) and memorability (else it's useless). It really isn't that hard. As everyone knows by now, bizarre mental images and associations make for great memory cues. Sexy, foody, alarming and colourful images and weird connections are the way to go. Don't exceed seven syllables, usually go for five or six.

slumcheripantitt

(mental image: a slum alleyway where a pretty girl balances on her bosom a frying pan with a single cherry in it—quite absurd but unforgettable)

rastoskelipiller

(dreadlocked skeleton turning into a caterpillar)

I could go on all day, but any of you and most other people could easily come up with memorable tosh like this with just a couple of minutes' thought at most.

You can always include some symbols and digits once you've made up your word, by replacing 'L' with '1', 'ate' with '8', 'o' with '0', 'for' with '4' etc etc, just making sure you see the word when you memorise it, to fix the replaced sequences or characters. If doing so, be careful not to exceed the 7 syllables while ensuring the password remains long.

A random password of 6 characters including symbols and digits is about three trillion*¹ times easier to break than a random password of 16 lower case alpha characters. Inclusion of symbols, digits and case is far less helpful than sheer length of a random sequence. Use of non-alpha is only useful for short passcodes or where you want to force people not to use words (but it doesn't work because then they just go and type 'pa55word' or 'myp&55', which take approximately nine shakes of a lamb's tail to crack).

A brute-force attack on either of my examples, even if it were able to try a million passwords per second, would still take on average well over half a billion years. (It would take nearly 1.4 bilion years to try every single option).

Remember: the dafter and more absurd the mental image, the more memorable it is and the less likely anyone is to guess it (and zero chance of a computer stumbling upon it).

Now you can change your bullet-proof password every week if you like!

*¹ Crudely, ( 26^16 ) is a far larger number than ( 50^6) —by a little under 2,800,000,000,000 times.

Chokes with laughter

Plucky Brit boffins will have to figure out a way of getting the system up and running before 2026 ...

I wonder if even our truly, wretchedly stupid and ignorant politicians imagine that that is possible? Even a delusional thorough-going moron like Davis, or a blustering ignoramus like Johnson, cannot seriously think Britain could get a functioning GPS constellation into orbit in less than 15 years? This is Britain, for heaven's sake, that cannot even organise a reliable process for screening half its population for a common form of cancer.

It seems that the jaw-dropping foolishness of Brexit isn't enough for these cretins: they're in the hole and they're gonna just keep digging. What a crew of hopeless clowns.

Ouch

"We're a long way from Ready Player One or Snow Crash."

That's a bit like saying "We're a far cry from Dan Brown or Shakespeare"—who on earth would mention them in the same sentence? It's a good job Stephenson is still alive else he'd be spinning in his grave to hear Snow Crash mentioned in the same breath as RPO, which was intermittently entertaining, puerile, derivative, stilted and shallow (and that's just the book). Snow Crash was startling, original, imaginative, very clever and well-written. Really, not much comparison, not even for the latest Generation Stupid.

As for VR, although the hype-vs-reality ratio is similar to 3D, I don't expect it to die in the same way 3D did.

First, there is vast room for improvement, and clear signs that this will happen. The size and weight of the devices will shrink; their performance and nausea-inducing weaknesses will gradually be overcome.

Second, even outside of entertainment, there are many compelling use cases, ranging right the way from remote surgery to combat training, and they will drive uptake and evolution even if gaming doesn't.

While I don't think VR is going to be fit for major mainstream uptake for at least five years and possibly 10, I'm sure it will happen. The key hurdle, IMHO, is making the experience truly comfortable—which it plainly is not—for body, eyes and brain, and perhaps also (where gaming and stuff like remote meetings are concerned) the truly realistic integration of other people.

When your VR set is supremely easy to wear, and your colleagues / team-mates are recognisably and fondly themselves, not just stutterly-rendered orcs with dodgy fangs ... then VR will have truly arrived.

Smart streetlight? FFS, why?

What possible justification can there be for a "smart" streetlight?

A streetlight requires to be off or on. Conceivably it may be useful to have variable brightness according to ambient light. Those functions are easily handled by primitive electronics, stuff so simple and cheap that these days it's barely even worth making as a kid's kit. That does not need a CPU. It barely needs a few discrete semiconductors. The cost of components over an entire city is probably about 20p/lamp.

Ok, perhaps it would be useful for the streetlight to report its ON/OFF/dimmed state to a central system for a holistic power management view, but even that does not require anything more than a voltage signal: it could even be an analogue value peeled off a current shunt, if you wanted utter simplicity. Virtually no components required.

Surely no one is suggesting that a streetlight needs a processor? What could possibly be the point? What business case could justify the cost of complicating this and adding the expense of parts and maintenance?

Why do I get the feeling that some bunch of scoundrels is actually trying to sell the concept along with some overpriced and basically pointless kit (please tell me no one is suggesting putting SIM cards into streetlights so they can be centrally controlled)—yet another fatheaded solution that has no problem to solve?

There seem to be flashes of cleverness in the field of Internet of Shyte, but no sign of wisdom or common sense anywhere.

PS Am I right in recollecting an episode of Sarah Connor where they hack into the LA city system via a traffic light? Are we overlooking the possibility that by putting "smart" tech into places where it really isn't needed, we're just exponentially multiplying all the points of vulnerability in our civilisation?

Value by subtraction?

• Let's get rid of the clamshell/flip form factor, which protects very expensive screens

• Instead, put the very, very, very expensive screen on the outside, where it's easiest to break

• Let's make the screen even more expensive, even unto total pointlessness, by offering resolutions most people can't even distinguish unless they peer from six inches away

• To improve the chances of breakage, let's make the whole thing of glass and as shiny and slippery as possible

• Battery life's awful, so let's take a big step backwards and make sure the batteries cannot be replaced

• While we're at it, adopt manufacturing processes designed to make the device as unmaintainable and un-recyclable as possible, and do everything to force customers to "upgrade" (as if they hadn't been able to make cellphone calls and take snaps for two decades)

• Make sure that the device turns into a camera while lacking the single most important component of a good camera, a decent lens: instead add a ton of trickery and processing (gotta get that battery life down) so that people can get really accurate pictures of stuff—which they promptly distort and ruin with cutesy filters so they can spam the world with pictures of their food

• Don't forget that customers are now addicts just like crack whores, so ensure that endless bloated badly-written apps will suck their attention and destroy their privacy, in order to convince them, just as they wander into a bus lane, that the 7 'Likes' for their food picture makes them a respected and worthwhile human being

• Take out the absolutely gigantic space-hogging headphone socket, all 2.5mm of it, to remove the option of using any commonly-available ear/headphone unit for uninterrupted, simple listening, instead forcing users into horrible glitchy insecure Bluetooth—and yet more things to recharge

• We don't want people having things conveniently to hand on their handsets when we could make them even more dependent on our "ecosystem", so let's also take out the μSD slot and deny them local storage—a super-smart move especially now that people are watching massive-Gb movies on their devices

• Good passwords are secure, so instead let's offer fingerprint security, which, unlike passwords, we leave on everything we touch and can also be forcibly taken from us

• Fingerprints still not quite insecure enough? Ok, let's offer face recognition: so that criminals, border security and other ne'e'er-do-wells can unlock our device just by showing it to us

• Put the price up while pointlessly obscuring part of the screen with a "notch" and laugh till you cry as other manufacturers, like perfectly imbecilic lemmings, do the same

• Watch with pitiless greed as the punters actually swallow this avalanche of manipulation and stupidity and keep giving you their money.

Nah, we're not as dumb as we seem ... but it seems the customers are.

From Cupertino and Mountain View: Thanks, Suckers!

*Free* remains the problem

Just as with Google, Facebook and Twitter, the free part is actually the sickness at the heart of all these privacy, advert, intrusion and manipulation problems.

If something claims to be "free" ... it's almost certainly a marketurd's lie. There is no "free" if there are conditions attached. BOGOF in the supermakret is not free, because there is a condition attached: you have to buy one. "Free if you fill in our poll" is not free. "Free if we can seize your data and analyse it to try and sell you shit" is not free.

Thus we have Facebook Cancer: sheer exploitation in the name of almost insane greed.

But people are eternally stupid, lazy and greedy, and so they keep licking up "free" and getting shafted.

My radical view is that the law should absolutely prohibit any private companies collecting one scrap of data more than is required for operational compliance, purchasing, delivery, provision of services etc. Not a single item of data that has no operational use. Creation of such data would also be banned. Past purchase history would be an exception for obvious reasons, but even then your supplier would be flatly prohibited from any collective crunching on that data beyond preparing accounts. There would be none of this "Other things you might like ..." garbage, which is always laughably wrong anyway.

Why would this be good? Because Facebook and Google etc would then have to start charging for services. Whether it's $2/month for Facebook or £1.00 for 10,000 Google searches, or whatever, they would have to charge for their service, and you would revert to being what you always should have been: a paying customer with rights, dignity, privacy and very clear protections and entitlements.

If based on a degree of volume, you might even find that the 'net wasn't quite so full of shit, like photos of some idiot's lunch, or endless Twittorrhoea. Hell, people might even re-learn how to remember things instead of turning to Google every two minutes.

(If we charged just 1p for every ten emails sent, we could end the scourge of spam, get people to think more about the value of what they use on the 'net, and generate billions for a fund for internet security improvements or whatever. The disgusting Google model of spying on your private correspondence in order to sell shit would never have happened.)

Other benefits: forced into a paying model, the giants could at last be challenged by upstarts. We could see decent social media rivals to Facebook popping up, ready to compete on price, speed, privacy, ethics and efficiency. DDG could transition from being a niche engine (which sucks some Google stuff anyway) with a stupid off-putting name, to a genuine competitor to Google.

Yet another advantage is that adverts would abruptly have to move from the "throw shit at a wall and see what sticks" mode we see today—where internet ads are actually even worse, shittier and more amateurish than radio ads, something you wouldn't have thought possible—to becoming creative, imaginative, entertaining and attention-catching in good ways. Think of the difference between an old Carling (swill) ad with the Mission Impossible squirrel versus today's witless "He who drinks Foster's" (even worse swill) trash ads. Ads don't have to be clumsy garbage. We simply need to create a playing field where they cost enough to be worth doing properly.

Remember when the internet had choice aplenty, and you could look for what worked best for you, and vote with your feet? When the 'net actually felt lilke a place of opportunity and innovation and new ideas?

If we (or our governments, which is the obvious weak point in all this, being run by lobbyist-funded morons) were prepared to think radically and creatively about Facebook Cancer we could actually solve it quite easily. It needs only legislation, and the market would then sort itself out (while squealing like pigs, I grant you).

We really just need to wake the f*** up and start thinking about what kind of 'net we want for our grand-children.

I'll never leave mechanical again

Can't comment on the Apple keyboards cos I don't own any overpriced Apple shinies, but I type a lot and confess that I had kind of gormlessly trailed along during a decade of computers with ever-cheaper keyboards (after all, it was the innards that counted, wasn't it? Wasn't it?), only pausing to reflect on what had happened to my typing skills and carpals when I was bashing away on some sub-£10 POS.

It was my son, then about 11 years old, who demands only the very best for his gaming rigs (price of a small second hand car for a GPU?!?), who asked for a mechanical keyboard using Cherry mechanisms. I scoffed, argued, gave in (of course) and had an epiphany when the damn thing arrived: realised what I'd gradually sacrificed over the years.

Now I do understand why it's worth paying £100—and I am a noted tightwad—for a well-built mechanical keyboard, and after five years of this one superb, flawlessly reliable Cherry-based clickety, I would never go back to those f***ing horrible rubber membrane things.

"How difficult can it be?"

"How difficult can it be?"

The phrase beloved of executives, senior managers, cubicle fauna brandishing worthless MBAs, politicians and almost all other imbeciles who think style matters more than substance. Who hasn't heard some suited oaf, who really thinks his ability to paste together an Excel formula is an IT achievement, utterly fail to understand what a techie is trying to explain in short, easy words, with pictures, and eventually huff out "How difficult can it be?"

Polticians may be even worse, as Brexit proves superbly.

There's no ignorance that can't be deepened by the arrogance of fools who don't understand that Detail Is Everything.

"disruptive idea [from] millennials sitting on beanbags"

Heh. My Starter for Two is the eDodger, which uses an Internet-of-Clothing*¹ app to unzip your hip pocket on command, so that the delivery system can even help itself to a tip. (Or, I suppose, give change.)

If it uses the Wolowitz Hand Interface, it could even be upgraded to work on the front zip ...

</coatfetch>

*¹ Yes, the IoC will include an absolute mountain of dribblingly stupid, superfluous wheezes for ways that internet connectivity can be used to provide solutions to clothing-related problems that do not exist. For only $500 you can buy a garment with an iHood that will rise to cover your head depending upon "AI" interpretation of weather forecasts. A hacked upgrade operates iHoodie whenever you're in the vicinity of a known CCTV system ...

Ah the sweet smell of irony

There's something almost endearingly charming about listening to yet another political mouth-on-a-stick criticising someone—anyone—else for incompetence. It's even more darkly hilarious coming from a government that f***s up every single IT project*¹ it ever touches, costing taxpayers tens of millions.

I'm sure TSB have been playing to the Tory handbook of cost-cutting, cheap half-measures, fat bonuses for the board, screwing the customers at every opportunity and all the other shyte that major corporations do to score short-term returns (yum, especially those nice bonuses: grab it and move to the next fiasco, quick!), while storing up disastrous weaknesses and catastrophic problems for the future.

Anyway, not to worry. None of the senior management who lovingly laid the groundwork for this clusterf**k will be punished; no lessons will be learned; no meaningful regulation will be imposed; lobbyists' enticements and inducements will flow unabated; politicians will continue to dodge responsibility; customers will suffer; and the torrent of lies, evasions and excuses will be epic.

*¹ Er, yes, and everything else it touches, really ... doesn't seem to matter whether it's health, education or defence, you can always trust them to bring their own unique combination of stupidity, arrogance and dishonesty to the table and leave a steaming mess behind.

"one less F35"

One of Voland's appendages remarked—

It comes down on it from above and there is one less F35

There's also the traditional method for bringing down eyewateringly expensive, complicated flying computers, tried and tested since Vietnam, taught in all the best Russian and Chinese fighter academies:

1. Send up large numbers of cheap, plentiful, manoeuverable 3rd and 4th gen ships, the kind with quite decent range and loiter time.

2. Wait until the very few (also eyewateringly expensive) missiles that F-35 can carry while stealthed have been used up (some may even hit your cheap old planes, but the entire history of AAM warfare suggests most will not).

3. Using various highly effective methods for detecting the approximate whereabouts of "stealth" aircraft (LF radar, multispectrum IR, directional acoustics etc) ...

4. Accelerate towards them (they have poor acceleration and top speed).

5. Deploy Mk#1 Eyeball for close-range interception and engagement (stealth is useless against Eyeball).

6. Get behind them (where they have no visibility).

7. Get very close indeed (they can't turn very well).

8. Tweak the fire control radar, just for a giggle so you can watch the poor doomed thing fling chaff and flares in every direction like a drunken wedding guest.

9. If the pilot is trying to shake you off, he's probably also filling the cokcpit with puke, because the (you guessed it, eyewateringly expensive) integrated-surround-VR helmet doesn't work very well and causes horrid motion sickness.

10. Once the thing fills the cockpit window and you've stopped laughing, fire a one second burst of 30mm.

11. Yes, once upon a time with robust planes like F-15 you'd have needed a three- or four-second burst, but F-35 can't dodge, and has just one single very vulnerable engine, so now you need only a solitary splinter of thirty-mil to take out a blade and it's Farewell, Lockheed.*¹

12. Go home and land. While your old, simple plane is being turned around in maybe three hours, write the after action report: it's easy for your squadron, cos you can usually copy the boilerplate straight from the "Why Wargames Bear No Resemblance To Combat" textbook. (It's on the shelf next to a translation of the "Lockheed Guide To Congressional Pork".)

13. You may have time to read an email from your chum in the infantry, expressing his relief and delight that no "Devil's Cross" A-10 Thunderbolts have appeared in the sky providing close air support for the enemy, instead sending some F-35s as light relief. He promises to send you a large parcel of F-35 souvenirs, obtained using a Soviet antique called a ZSU-23-4.

</sarcasm>

*¹ Short of ammo? Not enough for a one-second burst? Don't worry! Put even a single round through its wing (or, in fact, any part of its skin) and it'll be out of action for even longer than its normally ridiculously long turnaround time, as a crew of Beautician Grade-III Specialists with delicate badger-hair brushes, microscopes and Humbrol Anti-Radar Enamel will have to spend two full days trying to get it back to stealth mode. (Other technical specialists will be deploying the Mk#7-BlockIV Broom (loaded with warshots, no messing) on the taxi- and runways, as a tiny pebble chipping off the fuselage will also de-stealth the plane, sending it back to the aforementioned Beauticians for another lengthy spa session).

Exposing Ridiculousness

Exposing Ridiculousness is an uncatchy but arguably appropriate term for statements like Twitter's, which reveal mind-bending hypocrisy and sophistry.

For serious security I don't, and wouldn't use or recommend Kaspersky products any more than I would suggest the use of any hardware that's been in China, or made according to Chinese designs—neither Russia nor China remotely resembles a free democracy; both undertake massive espionage against the west; companies operating in those countries have no defence against doing whatever their despotic and evil government tells them.

But it is striking that there is not an iota of hard evidence offered by US Govt against Kaspersky, nor, so far as I'm aware, by anyone else.

Whereas Twitter resolutely refuses to delete the account of an influential person who routinely posts offensive, racist, misogynist, warmongering statements and (with remarkable consistency) outright and provably untruthful propaganda.

Twitter: if your values boil down to shameless hypocrisy and transparent dishonesty, then—beyond reprinting tiny pellets of superficial crap posted by lazy semilterates— what are you for, and why would any self-respecting person want a damn thing to do with you?

"Perhaps time for Microsoft to ... stick to something they are good at?"

"Perhaps time for Microsoft to ... stick to something they are good at?"

Hmm ... I think you may have backed them into a bit of a corner, there.

Marketing (which M$ is undeniably good at) usually requires something to market, which they won't have if they give up on their principal, time-honoured activity of crimping off logs of vastly bloated, inefficient, unnecessarily complex code reeking with bugs and vulnerabilities—which then lie around attracting the billion or so flies who just luurve that smelly but oh so easy-to-digest badness.

I still find myself mildly surprised that M$ haven't contrived an excuse for issuing their own sui generis version of FBM*¹ Linux, a version merely tripled in size with lots of lovely padding for "telemetry" (spying on customers), "reporting" (disguising the existence of bugs), "help" (attempts to sell additional shit), "integrated functionality" (locked-in, inferior, proprietary applications you didn't want) and my favourite "security" (malware filter that permits only M$ shit to infect you).

I guess it's only a matter of time ....

*¹ F***ed By Microsoft, of course.

The only word that really matters: Sucker

Because every single one of you and all the millions beyond could ditch Facebook tomorrow. You, and they did not need Facebook 20 years ago and not a single one of you actually needs it now.

Sure, it has a few useful features beyond the opportunities for endless boasting, bullying and checking how many pointless Likes were attracted by your most recent witless, facile, unoriginal post—mostly around providing an easy way to stay in touch with friends and family.

But like I said, you were able to do that two decades ago and you'd be able to do it tomorrow ... if you weren't a bunch of sorry, drooling addicts with all the self-aware willpower of crack whore.

Hoving?

You may have been trying to say the phone "hove into view" where "hove" is past tense of "heave"—a nautical term, admittedly, but presumably you pay editors for something other than just the contrived "humour" of your headlines ...?

If you do employ anyone literate, perhaps they will have "roded" to the rescue?

So, more vacuous PR bullshit then

Sounds like a fairly lame minimum-effort wheeze to prepare some camouflage and misdirection so that when Congress and the courts come calling the guilty parties can point at their Accord, and the bogroll it is presumably crayoned upon, to whine defensively "See, we are good guys really, look at all our Good Intentions".

More importantly, it provides some cover for the bit that matters to politicians: slimy fat lobbyists doling out cash to campaign funds, with plenty left over for "fact finding" trips to coincidentally nice locations with expensive resorts—and all the rest of the 21st century corruption bandwagon.

These days it seems you can spot the malign influence of marketurds simply by measuring the facts-to-words ratio of documents. This Accord, seemingly bursting with all sorts of nice-sounding, anodyne phrases and good intentions, evidently lacks fact, scope, concreteness, goals, definable commitments, clear actions, measurables, timetables, specifics of any kind at all ... in other words the Fact:BS ratio is pitiful—signalling a bunch of half-hearted corporate bullshit.

PS: One can't help being reminded, again, that while the world obviously needs lavatory cleaners and prison warders and even, heaven help us, a few lawyers, it still benefits not one jot from the existence of marketing and sales people. I feel sure that persons in fundamentally pointless occupations—or even futilely parasitic careers, like banking—should be able to do something at least marginally useful with their lives instead. Is Africa short of people to dig wells, perhaps ...? It would be a double benefit since, when a former Head of Marketing karks it while digging Well#27 at Mbungbagwagwe, his or her corpse could be immediately repurposed to fertilise the crops. Sharing a plot with the erstwhile CEO of EuroRipoffenLaundersBank.

"Barriers to entry"

What government cyber-agencies have been very slow to appreciate—possibly because they are, in the US particularly, run using a high proportion of military/ex-military types—is that cyber-weapons have at least one really big difference from the kind you deploy on a battelfield, and particularly in a strategic theatre of operations: the "barriers to entry" are much lower.

I'm borrowing the BTE jargon from industry because it's a half-decent fit in this case; where in context it means "cost, difficulty and time to get into the game".

The military mindset does not like the idea of your latest kit—say, a sophisticated fire-and-froget anti-radiation missile with loitering capability—falling into the enemy's hands, but you're also aware that it can and probably will happen, but also that no matter how much the enemy learns by dissecting your wayward ordnance, it's gonna take him months or years to build his own to the same standard. In general, you're expecting your technical advantage to win you the war before the enemy can catch up, even if the enemy understands that advantage—he can't replicate it fast enough.

The same is demonstrably not true of cyber-weapons. I know how to build a crude fission bomb, but even if I had some enriched uranium or plutonium in the cupboard, it would still be very hard to build a functioning, deployable weapon, especially without kiling myself in the process. Whereas, given a few gigabytes of NSA tools on a disk, I could within days start repurposing it for cunning plans and clever tricks. (If, that is, I was the kind of selfish, greedy, useless, parasitic sack of reeking shyte that writes malware. If anyone reading this is insulted by those words: oh, good.)

In short, cyber-weapons are actually a lot more like germ warheads than conventional explosives. You deploy one today, there's every chance it'll be killing people on your own doorstep next week.

I suspect that NSA in particular has been slow, no doubt fulled by some arrogance, in really understanding the dangers of this particular genie. You can be as clever as you like (yet rarely as clever as you think you are, hm?) and still, your lovingly crafted genie, once out of the bottle, is also out of your control.

Contemptible

The government publishes information as legally required by an FoI request. It does so on a webiste, thereby making it available to anyone who wishes to see or download it.

Some idiot forgets to redact private information that shouldn't have been part of the publication.

People access, browse, read and presumably some also download the PDFs. That's why they were published.

One person, wishing to do the same but without necessarily selecting individual documents, uses a simple script to grab the lot.

Questions:

1. Was there anywhere on the website a ToU or T&C prominently displayed, which required all users to read and agree to it?

2. If this is existed, did it specifically say—

2.a. You may not download stuff by any means except individual meat-finger clicks on a link, i.e. don't use any form of scripting or automation to make multiple downloads quicker

2.b. If you notice that we have published something we shouldn't have (if you're alert enough to realise that the government has made a mistake) you must stop reading, and tell us?

Because if not, the already weak case against this kid is even more hopelessly spurious and unfair. Why shouldn't he choose to read information published by the government ... for people to read? Why shouldn't he download it—this is a perfectly common and acceptable activity. It's especially common with tranches of docs published as PDFs. Yanking a bunch of stuff to read at leisure when offline is not even controversial. Every sentient website owner in the world assumes it may happen: if you don't want people using scripts to harvest data—perhaps for bandwidth/cost issues—you set up protocols to stop them, usually by recognising individual IPs or logins and imposing limits. This is all commonplace. It has been commonplace for more than 20 years.

Is there any evidence whatsoever that the guy further extracted or processed the incorrectly unredacted info? That he was harvesting that data specifically? That he was offering it for sale or other dissemination?

If not, I repeat: there is no part of what this guy did that it is remotely abnormal, forbidden, unethical, exploitative or wrong.

All of this, because some typically useless government employee screws up? Because they don't know how to manage a website? It's utterly contemptible.

PS What if a news organisation employee, say a journalist investigating government malpractice or corruption, had used a script to download a shedload of stuff from a government website where that information had been published for open access by anyone? Why, in short, should the use of a perfectly normal and comonplace script be considered, per se, evidence of any wrongdoing?

And in an alternate universe ...

And in an alternate universe ... the fauna infesting the Trapezoid would have long since built and be maintaining a highly scaleable, efficient and secure computing system, on-prem inosfar as many distributed bunkers can be such, with a dedicated workforce of military specialists who have exactly the right attitude to do IT and do it right (much more so than most civilian IT "professionals", in truth). They would hurl your bullet-riddled corpse out the window of a third-floor office on the Acute Angle after you so much as breathed the suggestion that the world's biggest military and custodian of ~3,000Mt of nuclear fire should put any of its data or process on systems it didn't control and which are renowned for unreliability, expense and insecurity. Even suggesting that seemingly anodyne stuff like data from Human Resources Command could be "cloudified" should be enough, in that world—where the phrase "social engineering attack" is actually understood, and taken seriously—to get you five years in Leavenworth.

If any organisation on the planet has an armour-plated case for building its own cloud; well-guarded and fortified places to distribute it amongst; the type of people and training to get it done; and the budget to make it happen: it is surely the US military.

I like to believe that in the parallel world, where people are not all completely, mouth-breathingly thick, the Trapezoid is doing it right. While here, in a universe where a cretinous orange man-child can be President, the Pentagon is following up its almost treasonous mismanagement of the F-35 fiasco with something even dumber and, amazingly, perhaps even more damaging to America's defences: moving to cloud, where the only worthwhile questions will be: First, how completely will the taxpayers be screwed for poor-value pork-riddled rubbish this time? - and Second, will the expensively dysfunctional insanity of this decison become obvious before the (one) chosen provider's systems and architecture become a crumblingly obsolete mess; or after?

What's surprising ...

What's surprising ... is that so far no one has expressed much surprise. The same companies bleating about the virtues of dregulation, the free market knowing best, operating in the customer's interest etc etc etc are yet again found to be lying through their teeth and cheating customers in even the pettiest, and most childishly sordid ways.

The reason governments have to be fierce and fair regulators is the same reason that's been staring us all in the face since the South Sea Bubble: companies (almost all large institutions, in fact) do not have even the rudimentary personal decency of individuals, and rapidly develop behaviours that we would normally describe as psychopathic. The dilution of personal ethical awareness and responsibility that occurs around the boardroom table and among senior managers when their only goal is personal bonus and shareholder return absolutely guarantees that companies will behave as badly as they can get away with.

We have seen this only about 100,000 times in every conceivable industry for 300 years. It's not just tobacco, alcohol, auto, big pharma, internet—every single one of them will rapidly morph from the fancful guff of "Don't Be Evil" to "Rape the Customer in Every Possible Way" as they grow and become ever more entrenched in the un-balanced scorecard of shareholder value.

Regulation should assume that any loophole and dirty trick will be exploited if it is not fiercely policed, and the punishment for misbehaviour shouldn't be token fines: they should be existentially threatening, with criminal sanction of executives where justified.

Capitalists love to bray on about the virtues of competition, while doing everything they can to destroy it, to manipulate markets, to use lobbying to tilt the playing field against competitors, to buy favourable legislation from politicians, to use predatory pricing against rivals and to form cartels and monopolies whenever there's the faintest chance of getting away with it.

If you want a decent, balanced, open and truly competitive free market, then fair, tough, universally applied regulation is the only way to go. (Which is why plutocrats don't like it.)

Ah the sweet smell of corporate hypocrisy ...

... as Microsoft uses Linux as bait to try to catch mugs who can be ensared in its sticky Azure web, thereafter to be plucked and sucked at will.

I predict that if one drops a small bacterium of Irony at Redmond, after a few days' infection the whole place will implode.

BS Detector redlining on a single article

Mention of Wetherspoons ditching social media got the BS needle going to start with. They are departing from social media because it is where they get continually and thoroughly slated for lousy quality and rotten service. If Wetherspoons found that social media gave them lots of good reviews and appreciation, they'd cling to it like the layer of grease on bad burger. But it doesn't. They have repeatedly demonstrated their ineptitude in using social media, especially when handling the constant litany of criticism, so they've concocted a spurious reason for stopping.

As to the Lords and AI: I suppose they deserve a few brownie points for having figured that AI is 99% over-hyped bullshit that simply does not exist in the form that most people imagine. The notion of "granting personhood" to a machine learnig algorithm is patently stupid and decades premature. The fact that marketurds say something doesn't make it true—in fact, the reverse usually applies. Until you can hold an hour-long real-time conversation with an unassisted "AI" by hi-def video screen and come away believing you were talking to an actual, educated, rounded, emotionally developed person, there is certainly no such thing as "AI". There are simply varying types of machine-learning systems of very limited ability to function in strongly rules-based environments, performing extremely limited and specific tasks.

And let's be honest, there are many people who might not qualify by that test: look at some of those in politics for a start. Would Trump pass a modern Turing Test to distinguish a knowledgeable, mature human being? Our own Prime Minister is such a wretched human being she is actually called a robot.

The Musk-y rubbish about imminent doom shouldn't worry anyone until and unless there's an "AI" that can pass as being at least as obnoxious, dishonest, greedy and frightened as any of the human beings currently running things. If a real "AI" could do a tenth as much damage as the current Tory government, then you can start worrying.

The Lords would do better to spend their time concentrating on privacy and social media, because that, as we keep seeing, is where the real damage is being done. Unfortunately, social media giants can pay expensive lobbyists ....

Good news for once

Hugely encouraging news for a nice change! REL, with the Sabre concept, are talking and doing real science, real engineering, with real goals, and right now offer arguably the world's most practically realistic option for SSTO spaceplanes.

It has saddened me that Virgin's pitiful nonsense in the desert has earned so much publciity and investment over the years, when it is little better than "space flight" stunting for rich fools, while REL have had to struggle in the shadows doing the real work.

Hopefully that changes. While Branson's empty marketing bollocks is aimed at selling "Ooh look I'm a Astronaut" merit badges to egotistical twerps (perhaps the same kind of idiots whose frozen corpses decorate the slopes of Everest)—and with luck will never get far enough to start killing punters, whatever the benefits to the gene pool—the money put into REL has a strong, totally plausible probability of flights to orbit reaching commercial airline standards of safety and reliability.

I know people once said the same about Shuttle, but let's be honest, that was a fatally compromised POS, kludged-together firework, before it ever left the ground. The original designs had promise, but after politicians had wreaked their budgetary havoc and Nasa management played their lethal games ... a dreadful and tragic waste of time, money and lives.

The Sabre engine is not just a great concept, it's showing every sign that it could actually work. If you don't get excited at the thought of regular, affordable flights to orbit—able to operate from airports—there's always the option of a four-hour trip from Heathrow to Sydney. Even Economy might be tolerable ....

I have no connection with REL, but wholheartedly recommend anyone interested to go see their website and understand the tech. It's impressive stuff. Read before you dismiss it as just more pie-in-the-sky. They might actually pull this off.

How to know which ones are jokes?

Well? Over the last five years we've had an avalanche of completely stupid and utterly pointless Internet of Shyte "ideas", things of such farcical utility that you barely even bother to laugh any more: an eye-roll is all they deserve.

So how are we to know the difference between some earnest fool actually, genuinely believing that the world needs a "smart" sofa (which sounds, from the description, like a really stupid one) and some other guy, who is completely hip to the wilful absurdity of these fatheads' "thinking" processes, simply making ironic jokes?

Because if the "sofa that dims lights and turns TV on for you" story appeared on April 1st, it would elicit a mighty yawn.

If I am to believe that some crashingly idiotic person—an actual, supposedly educated human being older than eight years—came up with this "Stupid Sofa™" (aka The Cretinous Couch™) as a saleable concept, then I may as well succumb to my long-repressed worry that there is a much greater conspiracy at work, wherein all people born worldwide since 1980 have had the majority of their cerebral cortex removed at birth.

That would, at least, explain a lot—including the IoS; the Daily Mail; the decomposition of western democracy; and absolutely everything about social media.

"Well intentioned lawmakers could stifle IoT innovation"

"Well intentioned lawmakers could stifle IoT innovation"

The first three words tend to make the last four irrelevant. Especially if by "well intentioned" the speaker is implying "thoughtful, well-informed, honourably motivated": I think you'll find that the minority of politicians fitting that description finally became extinct between 1980 and 2001.

So a more accurate statement would be:

"Politicians who know remarkably little about anything, and are especially clueless when it comes to technology and science, acting in the interests of themselves and well-funded lobbyists, pursuing narrow political and party advantage for shabby, squalid motives, could stifle IoT innovation ... insofar as this is in any way distinct from their entirely routine misunderstanding and ignorance of all issues before them and the exercise of reflexive dishonesty, hypocrisy and moral cowardice in the essentially quotidian practice of fucking up simply everything that they touch."

Unfortunately as an expectations-settings phrasing, it's a bit wordy to include everywhere it belongs i.e. in every article discussing politicians' behaviour. Perhaps we need an acronym in the spirit of Heinlein's TANSTAAFL? As a starter for two I offer:

People Of Little Integrity, Tiny Intelligence, Colossal Incompetence, Achieving Nothing.

I have no doubt it could be greatly improved upon, and there should be generous virtual beer for the best acronyms to be used as trigger warnings in El reg articles ...

Process Optimisation Required

The real problem is that the proposed process is ridiculously clumsy and time-wasting. It would be much quicker, cleaner and more efficient to take these simple steps—

1. Drive sacks of cash directly from the Mint to HQ of {Enter Big5-Consultancy Name}.

2.a. Divvy up the cash among the senior management, executives etc.

2.b. While totting up, agree what legislation, information, protection and favouritism {Big5-Con} requires from the Tory Government.

2.b. Also decide which pointless well-paid sinecures at {Big5-Con} will be filled by disgraced/sacked/retired ministers.

3. Take remaining cash to Tory Party HQ as "donations" from {Big5-Con}.

4. Make up the cost by reducing benefits for couples holding down five separate jobs between them but who still need welfare in order to pay the landlord and feed their children, not forgetting to insist that they volunteer unpaid to personally look after and provide nursing care for their elderly relatives with dementia. Move their pensionable age back to 77 in the hope they will die before collecting on the NI and taxes they spent their entire lives paying.

5. Declare the project a grotesque failure due to "unforeseen factors caused by—" {enter worthless excuses here, ensuring that all guilty parties are miraculously exonerated}.

6. Promote the self-important mediocrities involved, not forgetting to issue costumes from the Dress-Up Trunk to the worst offenders (aka get Brenda to issue "honours", so they can put archaic "titles" before their names directly after 'Milk Monitor').

The beauty of this supremely efficient process is that imbeciles Her Majesty's Ministers can move seamlessly onto their next pointless fiasco of ignorance and folly without having to wait for years.

The heart of the problem ...

As several posters who did take the trouble to understand the facts have pointed out, Oracle are, for once, clearly in the right, legally. The defendants were selling a product that was not theirs to sell, trousering cash that would otherwise have gone to Oracle. They were not, as some posters have concluded with an unwarranted jump, simply providing alternative support for Oracle products.

The heart of the problem, though, is that Oracle has a somewhat similar position and stranglehold that Microsoft does. By no objective measure does either company provide a product that is best of breed. There are better, more secure, more robust, more efficient OSs than Windows—especially now that Win10 has many of the behaviours we previously associated with malware—and an abundance of productivity software that represents vastly better value for money. Oracle was briefly the go-to RDBMS product, with genuine advantages for the enterprises of the late 80s and 90s, but rapidly fell behind the wave of superior rivals in terms of efficiency, bloat, cost and infrastructural impedimenta. Both companies have splurged on acquisitions, often anti-competitively, Oracle in particular going on to claim "integrated suites" of this is that fashionable TLA which were, in truth, clumsy bodges of poorly glued-together, heavily-marketed dross.

But as was once said of IBM, nobody gets sacked for buying {enter big name here}, so there are tens of thousands of businesses out there paying absurd sums for licences for OS, productivity apps, database and integrated TLA suites which, taken together, deliver pitifully little for the money spent. If you wonder at people paying for MS Word or Excel, who don't even understand 90% of the supposed functionality, using maybe 5% of what's available, do not imagine the equation is any better for companies burdened by the colossal footprint of Oracle.

What MS and Oracle both became very good at—beyond the quotidian business of marketing shit to lazy, uncomprehending idiots, never much of a challenge in the Anglo-Saxon corporate universe—was insinuating their products in ways that would make them very hard, and expensive, to replace. Just as with outsourcing, there are now tens of thousands of businesses which exist primarily as cattle: hosts to be feasted upon and drained by the relentessly munching parasites of MS and Oracle.

It's interesting to consider that the sheer power of modern software, and the kit it runs on, should make it easier than ever before for a business to shift its dependence from those vultures onto FOSS systems. Integration—which is always the biggest hurdle—ought to be easier to achieve now than it ever was. The prospect of finding yourself, in a couple of years' time, paying a quarter as much for something faster, more secure and reliable, should be driving businesses to really exploit the power of modern computing, even "cloud". (Even MS has had to offer *x systems on its "cloud", FFS. Talk about naked, shit-eating humiliation.)

But I don't see the stampede I'd expected, and I wonder why ...

Beancounters and Managers

Some interesting debate about whether beancounters or management are to blame which, with respect, is missing the key point.

Yes, we need people to do the sums even in these spreadsheet days. Beancounters do have a role. But they should never, never, never, ever have senior management responsibilities.

A beancounter is like an office cleaner and should be respected and paid for doing the job. But you absolutely do not let them make important decisions.