* Posts by Neil Barnes

6222 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007

Microsoft received almost 25,000 requests for consumer data from law enforcement over the past six months

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Linux

Microsoft browser history, anyone?

<search> Firefox/Chromium download

<download>Firefox/Chromium

<end>

Isn't that the traditional MS browser history? Or have things changed?

Watchdog thinks Google tricked Australians into giving up data, sues. Judge semi-agrees

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Big Brother

what amount of trouble was reasonable for users to undergo to protect their data

The correct answer here is 'none'. Sharing your data should always be voluntary. You should never need to turn anything off, out of the box.

We're on our way already: Astroboffins find 5 potentially habitable Tatooine-like systems from Kepler 'scope

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Coat

3970 light years away, eh?

Best pack my towel and stick my thumb out, then. I think I've got a handful of Altarian dollars around somewhere.

---> it's a coat, but it's got a towel in the pocket.

Vote to turf out remainder of Nominet board looks inevitable after .uk registry ignores reform demands

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: Shine a light

Indeed. This has changed post EGM, and now I can see that my supplier - one.com - have moved from 'undecided' to 'for the board'. I am not amused.

Blue Origin sends Mannequin Skywalker aloft again, testing out comfier capsule for future space tourists

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Impressive, but...

(a) why does that thing remind me of Flesh Gordon? Oh, yes: https://thenewbev.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Flesh-Gordon-3.jpg (possibly NSFW)

(b) where is earth-shattering kaboom?

Nigerian email scammer sent down for 40 months in the US, ordered to pay back $2.7m to victims

Neil Barnes Silver badge

3-year supervised release AND deportation?

How does that work, then? They have to keep this fellow around for three years to see he doesn't misbehave, and only then export him?

Surely you'd want rid of the chap as soon as possible?

A keyboard? How quaint: Logitech and Baidu link arms to make an AI-enabled, voice-transcribing mouse

Neil Barnes Silver badge

I don't have one, so I don't know

but can you tell Alexa (other spies are available) "hey, transcribe the following please and send it to my email"?

That ought to be a doddle, given Google's resources.

OVH services still not fully restored as boss rates ongoing recovery efforts a 'real nightmare'

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: Assessment of risk

No, and yet the whole of project management still teaches that horrendous completely subjective risk matrix.

Have you ever seen anyone sit down and look at that matrix, and instead of 'low, medium, high' actually talk to an actuary and plug some real probabilities in? Do they talk to the financial officers and get an accurate cost to recover from a particular event? I suspect not (and back in the day when I was a PM I was as guilty as the rest: if it's got some green bits and some yellow bits it's probably gonna be ok).

Bless you: Yep, it's IBM's new name for tech services spinoff and totally not a hayfever medicine

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: Kyndryl

Nah, it's a rather unpleasant skin disease of sheep.

Quality control, Soviet style: Here's another fine message you've gotten me into

Neil Barnes Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Skodas and Ladas

And Trabis...

I once watched a little drama from the window of the BBC office in Savignyplatz in Berlin. A cold winter's day, with maybe six inches of snow standing on the cars parked at the side of the road.

A Jag is parked behind a Trabi. Mr and Mrs Jag plib their car, get in... chug chug chug chug. Mr Jag gets out, looks at the bonnet, gets in again. Chug chug chug chug. Mr Jag gets out again, opens the bonnet, looks inside, closes the bonnet, gets in. Chug chug chug chuuug...

Meanwhile, Mr Trabi comes along, sweeps the snow off the roof with his arm, gets in the Trabi. Chug, plub, bluppa bluppa bluppa.

Mr Jag leaps out of his car, walks to Mr Trabi's window, gets his wallet out, and starts counting out d-marks. After a while, Mr Trabi holds his hand up, collects the d-marks, gets out of the car and starts walking away.

Mrs Jag, with an expression of extreme distaste, gets into the Trabi along with Mr Jag and bluppa bluppa bluppa off they go...

Never did find out what happened to the Jag. It wasn't there a couple of days later.

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: Ziebart.

When I first visited Berlin - just after the wall came down - I was told a joke:

A comrade visits the ministry, and says he has saved enough Ostmarks to buy a Trabi, and can he get his name on the list, please.

Certainly, says the official, but it will take ten years.

Ok, says the comrade, but morning or afternoon?

What do you care? It's ten years away!

Ah, says our hero, but in the morning, the plumber is coming.

Satellite collision anticipated by EU space agency fails to materialize... for now at least

Neil Barnes Silver badge

space lasers

I read the whole report, but there was one noticeable omission: how will the sharks breathe?

Lenovo's latest gaming monster: Eight cores, 3.2GHz, giant heat sink, two fans. Oh, and it has a phone bolted on

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Obviously, people really really really want to play Minesweeper...

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: it was a common news studio downtime activity, updating obituaries.

Yes. Someone 'important' dies, step one is to get the news out. Having a prepackaged item ready to play out, and a well-defined process of notification, means you can get something on air quickly while the newsroom is still running around like a headless chicken. Updating an obit is just a matter of adding the last few months on the end, and maybe cutting some of the earlier stuff out if it's no longer relevant.

That's an easy one. Harder ones have included, after September 11, 'what happens if someone crashes a jumbo jet onto Buckingham Palace during the opening of the Olympic Games' (yes, I did consider the process there) and 'what happens if a sub-dinosaur-killer rock drops onto London?' (yes, the BBC will continue to broadcast).

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: No TV

I recall assisting with the creation of Phillip's obituary in 1978, and at regular occasions thereafter - it was a common news studio downtime activity, updating obituaries.

As AC says above: the BBC has rules for what happens in the event of a death in the Royal Family - whether you voted for 'em or not.

How to ensure your tech predictions catch on in a flash? Do the mash

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: Future Gazing

But archaeologists always label any not-immediately-obvious object or activity as 'ritual'.

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: And this is why air travel is so safe

5. 200 driverless cars...

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: And this is why air travel is so safe

But surely with an automated electric car, every event which is considered out of the normal, every running out of volts, every failure properly to identify an object in the road... is noted, analysed, and all use of similar vehicles halted if the event is severe enough until and unless it is fixed?

What? It isn't? Why not?

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Coat

Re: 11 stone..

No, no, I asked for a twelve inch pianist...

DoorDash delivery drivers try to manipulate the food biz's payment algorithm to earn a living wage in gig economy

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Pint

Saltaire...

Sadly though he had views about public houses, and forbade them in his new town.

Privacy activist Max Schrems claims Google Advertising ID on Android is unlawful, files complaint in France

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Linux

Re: That's what you get when software has to cost nothing

Damnit, all these years and this desktop and applications have been unusable.

And I thought that only happened at work, where I had to suffer Windows?

Imagine your data center backup generator kicks in during power outage ... and catches fire. Well, it happened

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Coat

Re: electric cars

Well obviously, the emergency generators will be powered by electric motors. And they'll be powered by a nice big stack of batteries...

--> the one with the safety isolator fuse in the pocket, thanks!

Is that... is that a piece of Unikitty? Remembering Skylab via the medium of Lego

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: there are enough Lego bricks out there to go to the moon ten times.

Damnit, I hate it when that happens.

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Well the good news

is that there are enough Lego bricks out there to go to the moon ten times.

The bad news is that a Lego crushes under the weight of a tower only a couple of miles high.

Shame, really.

Australian ponders requiring multiple IDs to sign up for social media, plus more crypto-busting backdoors

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: You need to prove who you are to buy a SIM in Aus.?

I got a DE sim card (two actually, one for she who must be obeyed) and don't recall the PostIdent step which I was expecting. I did have to register a German bank account, though.

Neil Barnes Silver badge

I have to admit that was my first thought: how will they get anyone to sign up in the first place?

Subaru parks plans to make 58,000 cars due to brakes on silicon supply chain

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Holmes

a more basic and less expensive car.

But, but, but... how will we make a profit on that, if it doesn't have all the pointless toys? How will the punters tell our car from any other maker's?

Surely everybody knows that the way to make profit is to build something cheap and sell it for a fortune?

While truly self-driving cars are surely just around the corner, for now here's an AI early-warning system for your semi-autonomous ride

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: And the purpose of self-driving cars is..?

With delight I just purchased a bottom-of-the-range car... the only driver assist toys it comes with are ABS and a thing that goes beep if you get too close to something while reversing.

It occurs to me that in forty years of driving I have never had the ABS come on. I wonder if it works?

Android, iOS beam telemetry to Google, Apple even when you tell them not to – study

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: It's this sense of entitlement that get's me

>> “we value your privacy..."

Yup. It's very valuable to us.

Nominet ignores advice, rejects serious change despite losing CEO, chair, half its board in membership vote

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Alien

Remind me again

On which planet do these Nominet board members live?

And the Turing Award for best compilation goes to... Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Awkward

And after forty years, I see how it got its name!

Microsoft to supply US Army with 120,000+ HoloLens units in contract worth 'up to $22bn'

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: This will result in

I think you missed the bit where the opponent's first strike knocks the cloud offline (and sends a message to all users telling them how many bitcoins it will cost to get their data back...)

AI recommendations fail fans who like hard rock and hip hop – official science

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: So it's racist

As the T-shirt says: the good thing about being old (like me) is that you got to see all the good bands the first time around...

Browser tracking protections won't stop tracking, warns DuckDuckGo

Neil Barnes Silver badge

<sigh>

If only there were some sort of standard...

Neil Barnes Silver badge

One (i.e. the BBC) could still limit content based on geolocation simply by blanking - ideally with some sort of explanatory message.

I was heavily involved with iPlayer - the predecessor to Sounds (stupid name) - and know far too much about geographical rights issues. I worked for the Corporation for over thirty years. But just about anything on e.g. the news site is (c) BBC and can be shown anywhere.

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Bah, geolocation. I hate it.

So I'm in Berlin, and I'm trying to look at the UK website of a company which also has a DE website. And the website looks at my IP address, says aha, that's a German location, and promptly serves up the German website instead.

Is it really so difficult to assume that if someone types .co.uk at the end of a URL, that's where they're actually trying to go?

(And don't get me started on the BBC - I typed .co.uk, not .com...)

Wi-Fi devices set to become object sensors by 2024 under planned 802.11bf standard

Neil Barnes Silver badge

I suppose this was inevitable

given that people will stick microphones around the house... but what possible reason is there for this technology?

It's a communications protocol, not a motion detector. If you want one of those I'm pretty sure there are other more mature technologies.

Intel accused of wiretapping because it uses analytics to track keystrokes, mouse movements on its website

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: How many times?

I bought something from Amazon.de today, and the delivery *wasn't* auto-stuck on the join prime and never get out mwahaha button. And yet it's not April first!

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Mushroom

How many times?

Where I put my mouse is none of your fucking business!

You put Marmite where? Google unveils its latest AI wizardry: A cake made of Maltesers and the pungent black tar

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Pint

Re: I admit...

I wonder if I'm still allowed to bring it from England to Germany? Assuming *I'm* allowed to go from Germany to England and back, of course...

--> Marmite, beer, same thing, sort of, no?

Distorted light from ancient explosion when the Universe was 3 billion years old helps point astroboffins to intermediate black hole

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Coat

Looking for an invisible thing in the dark; it's not easy

Yesterday upon the stair

I met a man who wasn't there

I met him once again today

I wish that man would go away

I don't think there's a black hole in my pocket, but I can't get my hand out... --->

OVH reveals it's scrubbing servers – to get smoke residue off before rebooting

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: OVH's experience might be useful

Yabbut, it's not very good: the evidence of those two pictures rather suggests that things shrink in the wash!

Semi-autonomous cars sales move up a gear with 3.5 million units leaving forecourts

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: The plus side.

With all sympathy for your friends, this is a classic case of arguing for the outliers by emotion (in perhaps the same way so much new legislation proposes 'think of the children!')

For every heart attack or stroke in charge of a vehicle, there must be millions of miles driven where this does not occur. For every person killed in a vehicle accident, again, millions aren't.

In the UK, in 2019 (latest stats I could easily find), there were 1752 fatalities in road accidents and ~150k serious injuries. At the same time, there were 74.6k deaths directly attributed to smoking with half a million hospital admissions - both these from a population of around 70 million. The top two causes of death in the UK were Alzheimer's and dementia - diseases of old age.

The rate of fatalities in road accidents was calculated as a shade under 5 per billion vehicle miles... I averaged 30k a year before I retired, so perhaps one and a quarter million miles. The diabetes is likely to get me a long time before driving does.

If the aim here is to reduce deaths, ban smoking (and I note that the UK is a fairly non-smoking country, compared world wide). If the aim is to sell expensive cars, at least be honest about it.

Diary of a report writer and his big break into bad business

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: A (La)TeX user writes:

I would put my hand up. Largely because Word tries hard to be all things to all people - ignoring the changes in UI over the year, it just does too damn much. If you don't use all the features all the time, how can you expect to remember them? In the thirty or forty years I've used it, I have never been trained on it; it has always been assumed that I already knew how to use it...

I recall a time when engineers wrote documents and secretaries typed them up, sorted out the formatting (and on occasion spelling or grammar), but some time in the eighties I guess some management training school worked out that it made so much more sense for the people who were on the computer keyboard anyway to do things *at which most of them were not skilled* and did away with the concept of secretary.

One might argue with Fader above though: I think I would prefer to see a word processor which does away with the majority of Word's functionality - in particular, character by character formatting - and requires that styles be used throughout. When I write a book, I use LyX/Latex...

Neil Barnes Silver badge

From the depths of my own life, from a time at which I was a project manager... the program manager had a word document he wanted me to 'just tidy up a bit'. It was about a thousand pages long, full of rather dense technical prose, supporting diagrams, plans, examples; you know the kind of thing.

Oh, and there were about thirty of it. One for each site where we were doing the essentially similar work - that is, similar in a 'replace this group of circuits with that group of circuits' but each one had different details, dates, and so on, as might be expected.

And every single never to be sufficiently damned page had every paragraph formatted differently, and every format was with character formats... whoever wrote them had obviously never heard of styles.

It is not a time I remember with delight - though I do recall that when we got down to actually doing the job, we had a single instance of unplanned downtime across the whole country, caused because someone had threaded a cable in such a way that we could not remove the hardware without disconnecting it - so thirty seconds or so.

What links ML, lasers, and tiny gold-plated micro-bots? Answer: Smart medicines

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Boffin

against the grain of the Brownian motion

Er, they're claiming Brownian motion has a default direction? Sounds like a contradiction in terms...

Microsoft 365 tries again at filtering swearing, bad behavior: Classifiers for seven languages offered

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Flame

Call me optomistic

but I can really see this working well... no, wait... no, it'll work almost as well as the grammar. It will assume that people didn't mean what they typed, and try and dress it in the latest flavour of fashionable newspeak.

Suggesting alternative spelling for words it thinks are misspelt is fine, provided there is no auto insertion of corrections (look at the amusement that can be had with autocorrect on a phone, for examples) - but that is where it should stop. No machine should *ever* replace what the operator writes...

If you, as a company, have a problem with the way your employees communicate, the issue is one of education, not of farming the problem out to software.

/rant

The silicon supply chain crunch is worrying. Now comes a critical concern: A coffee shortage

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Roast dandelion roots?

Don't look at me - I'm a confirmed tea drinker.

Can you imagine Slack letting people DM strangers in another org? Think of the abuse. Oh wait, it did do that

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: Never trusted slack, Never will.

All that, and it does little more than email has done for decades.

Oh look, the king has a new suit of the very finest cloth!

Your hardware is end-of-life... and it's in space. Worry not, Anglo-Japanese sat to test new orbital cleanup method

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: Err...

But surely, from up, the only place to break is down?