* Posts by ratfox

3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007

Internet luminaries urge EU to kill off automated copyright filter proposal

ratfox
Pint

Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"

EU-US Privacy Shield not up to snuff, data tap should be turned off – MEPs

ratfox
Holmes

No shit Sherlock

The EU will either have to admit they cannot protect the privacy of their citizens, or grow some balls and demand from all US companies to only store private data in EU-owned datacenters.

Trump kept ZTE alive as ‘personal favour’ to Chinese president Xi

ratfox
Terminator

Re: Even if he were a perfectly well-behaved excellent negotiator...

pre-established rules that would apply identically to everybody?

Ha ha ha ha... Wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder: HAA HAA HAA...

British egg producers saddened by Google salad emoji update

ratfox
WTF?

Re: More inclusive?

Non vegans will NOT be represented by that salad

Seriously?

ratfox
Angel

Re: More inclusive?

They should give people the possibility to add eggs to the salad using a zero-width joiner!

Google freezes Android P: Get your shoes on, tire-kicking devs

ratfox

Unlike Apple?

It didn't seem possible to me to set a supervised account on an iPad without creating an account for the child.

G Suite admins need to RTFM – thousands expose internal emails

ratfox
Alert

When enough people make a mistake, it stops being a user issue, and it becomes a UI issue. Maybe putting a big warning sign on the option would be enough to solve most of the issue.

You have suffered without red-headed emoji for too long. That changes Tuesday

ratfox
Headmaster

I demand moustaches and beards!

How can I properly express myself without handlebars on my emojis??

Facebook stockholders tell Zuck to reform voting rules as data scandal branded 'human rights violation'

ratfox

Re: Meh

Well yeah. There's things in life that cannot be bought, such as love, or control of Facebook. That's a fact that outsiders should have known from the start. It makes no sense to complain about it.

Outsiders shares give no power, but they do give money. Well, theoretically; in practice they don't give dividends, so you only make money from them if you sell them higher than you bought. Luckily, the actions are at a historic high, so if you don't like the voting arrangement you can sell them right now.

Whois? Whowas. So what's next for ICANN and its vast database of domain-name owners?

ratfox
Pint

We don't have a popcorn icon

So the beer will have to do. Anyway, it's Friday.

As Tesla hits speed bump after speed bump, Elon Musk loses his mind in anti-media rant

ratfox
Headmaster

Technically, the media is plural

The singular is medium. Look, if people can annoy me by saying that "data" is plural, I see no reason to hold back myself.

One year late, US senators act on fake net neutrality comments that drowned the FCC

ratfox
Meh

Pai is not going to react to such a polite letter. The only thing he might listen to is a cut to the FCC budget... And that might not even be enough, considering he's probably looking to his future cushy sinecure more than his current job.

You've got to be kitten: Vet recruiter told to pay £1k after pinching info from ex-employer

ratfox
Happy

Nice to see that people do want to hire veterans!

Great Scott! Bitcoin to consume half a per cent of the world's electricity by end of year

ratfox

Wonderful

It's amazing to think people might soon start using global warming as a reason to make bitcoin mining illegal.

It has happened four times since 2011 that the bitcoin price went 10x in a few months. If it does that again, it's going to have such an impact that I think governments will intervene.

Brit prosecutors fined £325k after losing unencrypted vids of police interviews

ratfox
Meh

"Lost"

I think you mean, was stolen.

Zuck to meet Euro MPs for ‘please explain’ session

ratfox
Trollface

Re: How about...?

Do it. Chicken!

Boffins urge Google to drop military deal after Googlers storm out over AI-based super-drones

ratfox

But... Money...

Oracle tells tales about Google data slurps to Australian regulator

ratfox

Oracle playing the Knight in shining armor

They also told the world about Google recording the cell mast the phone is connected to:

https://www.theregister.co.uk//2017/11/22/google_oracle_location_privacy/

Were it any other company than Oracle, you'd think they're trying to act for the public good! However, since it's Oracle, I can only conclude they're still pissed off about Java.

Cisco cancels all YouTube ads, then conceals cancellation

ratfox
Angel

Google does claim that they try to remove unintentional clicks. Who knows how hard they try?

Bombshell discovery: When it comes to passwords, the smarter students have it figured

ratfox

Corellations? Are those related to Corellian freighters?

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Cool

That means if I get a better password, my grades will go up, right?

FCC sets a record breaking $120m fine for rude robocalls

ratfox
Devil

The FCC listens to consumer complaints now?

Last I heard, they called it DOS attack.

Waymo robo-taxis to accept fares in Arizona in 2018

ratfox
Go

I for one am looking towards having a self-driving car. It probably can't happen until I'm retired, due to various things like snow and European roads being probably more difficult to handle than those of Phoenix, but it's still something to look forward to.

JEDI mind tricks: Brakes slammed on Pentagon's multibillion cloud deal

ratfox

Oracle lobbying in action?

The post is required, and must contain letters.

Twitter signs for Google cloud at list price of about $10m a month

ratfox

I suspect Google is deliberately encouraging the multi-cloud strategy. If they manage to get everybody to use two or three clouds, they become relevant again.

It's self-serving, but I think we shouldn't complain. The APIs get more compatible, and the risk of lock-in is smaller.

GoDaddy exiles altright.com after civil rights group complaint

ratfox

Re: Human rights

Ultimately, there is a point to what Timmy is saying. If you're a baker, you're not allowed to refuse baking a cake for a gay wedding, but you're allowed to refuse baking a cake which says "Hang all the N***"

And Timmy doesn't get why those cases are treated differently by the law.

Publishers tell Google: We're not your consent lackeys

ratfox
Paris Hilton

This is way too technical for me

Can someone give a simple example of what is going on? What Google wants the websites to do, and what the websites want Google to do?

ratfox
Angel

Re: I am Shocked I Tell You.......

Untouched landscapes tend to be smaller tracts of land...

Scammers use Google Maps to skirt link-shortener crackdown

ratfox

Re: Links are already short

The IP address is not guaranteed to always point at the same website, and many websites can have the same IP address.

In any case, the path after the domain name is often much longer than the domain name.

Supreme Court to dig into Google's very cosy $8.5m deal with lawyers over web search leak

ratfox
Boffin

Re: Classic that they missed the most honest solution..

The reason the payment was so low is that the data "leak" was rather trivial.

It used to be that when you clicked on a Google result, the target website would automatically receive as referer link the URL of the Google results page. Now this is pretty much exactly what the referer link was defined for. The problem is that the URL of the results page contains your search query, and so the target website would learn the search query that had returned their website.

For instance, if you searched for "nytimes" and clicked on the New York Times website, the New York Times would know you had just searched for "nytimes". And the porn site would know the exact fetish which had brought you to them.

I guess people didn't thought about privacy when they defined the referer link in HTTP, but now it would be a non-starter. In any case, that's why Google ended up having to pay so little.

Penguins in a sandbox: Google nudges Linux apps toward Chrome OS

ratfox
Go

Chrome OS is having a certain success in schools, where students receive a ChromeBook managed by the school. Would you be willing to manage a fleet of Linux laptops for a hundred teenagers, fix their issues, be responsible for them being secure, etc...?

Europe fires back at ICANN's delusional plan to overhaul Whois for GDPR by next, er, year

ratfox
Happy

We're going to need a bigger bag of popcorn

It's always fun when organizations pretend that the law doesn't apply to them, and especially so when it's ICANN.

Facebook: Crisis? What crisis? Look at our revenue, it's fantastic

ratfox

Re: Facebook / Google are the biggest Con-Artists in Silly-con Valley

Why con artists? Madoff was a fraud from the beginning, but they're actually making money, and more money every year. They have a stranglehold on the online advertising business in much of the western world, and that business is booming. It's going to take a very long time for that to change. Putting more regulations on data privacy would actually benefit them, because it would make it harder on new entrants to break the market.

Even Microsoft's lost interest in Windows Phone: Skype and Yammer apps killed

ratfox
Windows

“may continue to work, but we can’t provide any guarantees.”

Ouch.

"Maybe it will, maybe it won't. We don't care either way."

It's not you, it's Big G: Sneaky spammers slip strangers spoofed spam, swamp Gmail sent files

ratfox

I assume that Gmail does something "clever" so that emails that are not strictly sent from the mail account, but that appear to the rest of the world to be coming from that mail account, end up showing in the Sent folder. Some kind of "feature" to let you send emails from a third-party system.

US sanctions on Turkey for Russia purchases could ground Brit F-35s

ratfox
Happy

through the simple method of batting its eyelashes at Russia while pointedly glancing back at the US

That's a beautiful image.

EU under pressure to slap non-compliance notice on Google over pay-to-play 'remedy'

ratfox

Agree

They are accusing Google of "taking money from one pocket and putting it into another". But that would mean Google is taking money from its own pockets rather than accepting the money from its rivals. There's no advantage for Google to do that. If the rivals were super good and Google Shopping was not competitive, Google would just happily shut down their own product and take the money from the rivals instead. It's not like they've never shut down products before.

Will Dell eat VMware? Or will Carl Icahn snack on Dell? And where does Uber fit in? Yes, Uber!

ratfox

Why he’d want to go from a stable, ethically-led company to the controversial world of Uber is anyone’s guess.

Well, if he won't do it for money, maybe he'll do it for a shitload of money?

As CFO, maybe he'd enjoy the challenge of fixing Uber's finances.

Elon Musk's latest Tesla Model 3 delivery promise: 6,000... a week

ratfox
Angel

But have you seen how the rear doors of a Tesla X open?? SO COOL!

Joking aside, I think Tesla are the only cars where the dashboard computer display is worth a damn. As far as I've seen, all the competition use roughly the same quality as in-flight entertainment systems.

Not that I'll buy any electric car soon, because I don't feel like planning on advance where I'll plug my car during road trips.

ratfox
Alert

A good salesman is like a double-edged sword. Sometimes the product works and then it's a good thing. If the product does not work, then good salesmen are dangerous. Personally, I tend to avoid buying from good salesmen.

Elon Musk is an excellent salesman.

One of IBM's latest financial figures was off by four cents today – so down go its shares

ratfox
Devil

These days, choosing IBM is a good way to get fired.

Google, AWS IPs blocked by Russia in Telegram crackdown

ratfox

Silly Russians, that's what happens when you don't have a great firewall.

New Galaxy un-smartphone can’t go online because Samsung's thought of the children

ratfox
WTF?

$180 for a feature phone?

I'm sorry, what?

Google accidentally reveals new swipe-happy Android UI

ratfox
Devil

Discovery is a problem

I'd like to give a special mention to iPhones for this gem: In order to save a PDF of an email, you need to use a "3D touch", aka press harder, on the print preview:

Create a PDF of an email on an iPhone 6s

As a bonus, this only works for phones that support 3D touch, so if you have an iPhone 6 or older, you can't save a PDF of an email.

Anon biz bloke wins milestone Google Right To Be Forgotten lawsuit

ratfox
Megaphone

Re: Right to be forgotten.....

Ok, for the people who still didn't get it, there's no need to use the Wayback Machine. Everything is still on the web for the world to see. The articles just won't show up in Google when you search for the man's name, but might still show up in other search results.

ratfox

Actually, I looked for a while, and it's really not easy to know exactly who they are. There's candidates, of course; but there's so many it's difficult to know which.

Schrems' Facebook case edges closer to ruling over EU-US data flows

ratfox
Windows

I'm prepared for a whimper

I frankly doubt that the EU courts will have the balls to force Facebook to balkanize its data into independent units. The recent US law makes it very clear that as long as Facebook US keeps control over the place where the data is stored, they have to cough it up to Uncle Sam whenever he asks. So the tech giants would have to set up separate entities, which cannot even exchange data if they want to... Even storing emails becomes a huge problem if they're sent across the Atlantic.

I'm fully expecting the EU authorities to give up and admit they are unable to protect our privacy from the US government.

A developer always pays their technical debts – oh, every penny... but never a groat more

ratfox

Re: if it works

I would say it differently: Working unit tests means everything is fine, if you will never need to change it. If you know you will need to change the code, but you don't understand how the code currently works, then you have a problem, and working unit tests are not going to help you.

Google's not-Linux OS documentation cracks box open at last

ratfox
Headmaster

Counting Oracle's chickens

The court ordered the internet advertising behemoth to cough up US$9bn to the database giant

Not quite. The court ordered that Google would have to pay Oracle damages that must be determined in another lawsuit. The $9bn is Oracle's own estimate of how much they should get paid, and they might be biased.

C'mon, Zuck... don't make us feel second class. Come talk to us in Europe – EU politicos

ratfox

I find a bit pathetic that politicians insist on talking to the CEO of the company, when he is obviously not the most competent person to talk to.

By the way, is this the first time that EU bods ask for an American CEO to cross the Atlantic? Meetings must happen all the time, but I don't recall there was a similar invitation for Bill Gates in the 90s.