* Posts by frank ly

6077 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Five-a-day energy drink habit turned chap's eyes yellow, urine dark, caused anorexia

frank ly

WTF?

Who had the idea of putting 200% of the RDA of niacin in a retail/leisure drink? The RDA is about 15mg a day and the 'Tolerable Upper Intake Level' is 35mg a day. Excessive niacin is known to cause medical problems.

They should be sued and fined.

Cisco's OpenStack cloud drops Pokémon-clone name

frank ly

Really?

Is MetaPod a brand name or trademark? Isn't it just the name of one particular character in a well known cartoon story? If they have trademarked it then how can Cisco's use be confusing to potential clients or detrimental to the trademark owner?

Laser surgery ignites internal methane, burns patient down there

frank ly

Put a cork in it

To have been left with noticable burns suggests a large amount of something flammable. Could it have been methane leaking from the other possible source? I'd imagine that people under anaesthetic do tend to relax.

Want to spy on the boss? Try this phone-mast-in-an-HP printer

frank ly

I'm wondering

Who replies to text messages from numbers they don't recognise or people who won't identify themselves?

Sound-mufflers chuck acoustic sleep blanket at the noise-plagued

frank ly

From the website:

"NOTE: Nightingale only works in the United States. We are working on making it compatible with other countries in the future."

Is sound different in the USA?

Boffins coax non-superconductive stuff into dropping the 'non'

frank ly

Cause and effect

"... the critical temperature where superconductivity magically kicks in."

I'm not a pysicist (or a wizard) but I'm sure that it's not due to magic, in any form.

Boffins one step closer to solving nanoscale computer challenge

frank ly

How high can you go?

"The key to solving the Feynman Grand Challenge is that the two-dimensional circuit can be stacked to create a three-dimensional device within 50-by-50 nanometres."

Maybe they need to respecify it as a 50nm cube.

Samsung are amateurs – NASA shows how you really do a battery fire

frank ly

Priorities

"NASA has pledged to have better fire control systems soon."

How about a foolproof battery management system that doesn't require someone to set it up properly.

Coming to an SSL library near you? AI learns how to craft crude crypto all by itself

frank ly

??

"Although the classical cryptographic algorithms are more transparent, they are not as good as neural networks at selecting what information to encrypt."

How can you say that if you don't know what they are doing?

No nudes, bloated apps, Android sucks and 497 other complaints about Apple to the FTC

frank ly

Re: Extended coverage

"...I find these policies harassive, repressive, and in violation of the Constitution's freedom of religion."

I'm wondering which religion he is.

Florida man ran $1.35m hack-and-spam racket with 50m-plus addresses

frank ly

What is it with the expensive car collections?

I've read about this sort of thing before and I can't understand it. If I was in receipt of 'ill gotten gains' I'd store it in carefully set up offshore accounts or gold ingots buried in the woods. Why do they do this?

Geohot gone geocold on georides: Comma.ai self-driving car kit cancelled

frank ly

Typical government bureaucrats

"First time I hear from them and they open with threats."

A similar thing happened to me when I tried to sell a nuclear reactor I'd designed and made in my garage.

Birmingham sperm bank pulls plug after just a handful of recruits

frank ly

Missed opportunity

"But two years on, it had only pulled in seven accredited donors – and one of them has since pulled out, according to a report on the BBC."

Couldn't you have worked 'pulled off' into that sentence?

Lenovo downward dogs with Yoga BIOS update supporting Linux installs

frank ly

Re: "Lenovo downward dogs with Yoga BIOS update supporting Linux installs"

The 'downward dog' is a yoga pose but the article picture shows a different pose. Come on people, use Google, that's what it's there for. Come on El Reg, use a correct picture.

Topless in-car selfie attempt climaxes with rear-end bonking

frank ly

She couldn't properly formulate the deployment either. Have you been drinking wine too?

Web devs want to make the Internet of S**t worse. Much worse

frank ly

Re: Wrong

"There might be bugs and exploits, but they will be definitely less available from a browser environment, than they were from the native environment."

A native application can be 'bad' of course but that's always been the case and some effort has to be made at each PC to get it installed.

For the browser, if it has a bluetooth API, that's a whole new class of malware vectors that can be installed on a webserver. That can be done by an evil webmaster or a hacker contaminating a webserver. A victim could be exposed by following interesting links in innocent webpages, as we all do. If a website is known and proven to be 'innocent' and you use it, it could be compromised in the future, etc, etc.

Datto launches backup and disaster recovery technology to combat ransomware

frank ly

Re: Backupify

They're just zeitgeisting the outward facing profile.

Divide the internet into compartments to save us from the IoT fail whale

frank ly

Re: About bloody time

Maybe IPV6 has enough addresses for any partitioning scheme that you can think of?

Digital minister Matt Hancock promises 'full fibre' eating plan for Blighty

frank ly

Re: Translation?

So, as well as 'part fibre' and 'full fibre', there is 'not-fibre'? The 2% of the country; I wonder if it's geographical area, number of customers or linear cable runs (by number or by length?)

No wonder that hardly anybody, if anyone, can understand what's happening.

frank ly

Translation?

"The price we paid for part fibre is that only 2 per cent of the country has full fibre, he said."

Can anybody explain how that worked or what it means?

Let's praise Surface, not bury it

frank ly

Motivation

"... P2P Napster. The latter was arguably the only piece of software that genuinely drove consumer PC demand."

I thought it was the cool games (and maybe the internet porn)?

Microsoft goes back to the drawing board – literally, with 28" tablet and hockey puck knob

frank ly

Check the B-Ark 'guest' list

"These top contacts can also be shown in the bottom right of the screen and they can send you “shoulder taps” – basically emoji messages in 3D."

We need room for some software developers.

Possible reprieve for the venerable A-10 Warthog

frank ly

Re: Good on them, I say...

"... the US Army aren't allowed fixed wing tactical combat aircraft under the Key West agreement which defined the roles of air power in the three services."

That's not an 'agreement'; it's a treaty between rival powers.

Spoiler alert: We'll bet boffins still haven't spotted aliens

frank ly

Re: As a transmitter, it is certainly powerful enough.

If they tuned the laser to emit at one of the spectral absorbtion lines of the star, then the signal/noise ratio would be much lower if an observer measured the light in the absorbtion line. An observer could use a non-resonating laser cavity, tuned to that frequency, as an amplifier to monitor light in the normally dark band.

The question would be: why are they all pointing their lasers at us?

Google gobbles startup that claims its tech is like a mind reader (gulp)

frank ly

"...said it is joining Google."

Being assimilated by, surely?

It's nearly 2017 and JPEGs, PDFs, font files can hijack your Apple Mac, iPhone, iPad

frank ly

@a_yank_lurker Re: Cupertino is ...

"Also, if the vendors follow the basic Unix practice of splitting user accounts from admin accounts that will limit the possible damage."

Remember, with the most popular Linux distributions, then after installation the root account password is the same as the first/main user account password. Consider the following on-screen message from some malware:

"For your security and protection, enter your password to allow operations to continue."

What percentage of 'ordinary' people would enter their password at that point?

How many people who read El Reg have changed their first user password to make it different from the root password? (I haven't and I'm sure you'd all do a double WTF! if you saw that happen because El Reg readers are 'special'.)

Ubuntu 17.04 'Zesty Zapus'

frank ly

Re: Ubuntu naming convention

If the only thing that a business knows about Linux is the existence of Ubuntu, then that business needs some serious changes at the top.

frank ly

Re: Time flies!

Because of careless speed-reading, I spent a long time thinking that 6.10 was called 'Edgy Elf'. I conflated this with the 'Parsing ELF' start up message of Debian and had some very strange mental images for a while.

By their usual release schedule pattern, this will be followed by 17.10 and then the 18.04 LTS in early 2018. I always wait for the LTS then give it six months to settle down.

AI lawyer: I know how you ruled next summer

frank ly

Gamified

From an article about this in www.independent.co.uk:

"The developers were able to use information like that to find that the court’s decisions relied largely on the kind of language used, as well as what topics were mentioned in the court texts."

This would enable prosecution and defence teams to run 'what if?' simulations of their tactics against possible enemy tactics and counter responses.

AT&T buys Time Warner for US$85.4bn or 1.25 Dell-EMCs

frank ly

News speak

"... will allow new company to: ..."

All videos, no articles.

Como–D'oh! Infosec duo exploits OCR flaw to nab a website's HTTPS cert

frank ly

Re: Trust?

So, the secret tentacles of the US government would subvert Comodo as part of their nefarious plans to find out who owns various websites. Their evil, and their inefficiency, knows no bounds.

frank ly

Trust?

Can't organisations like Comodo be 'whitelisted' by the registrars so they can lookup entries? They could do this for multiple offices by redirecting their enquiries through a single whitelisted IP address.

Today the web was broken by countless hacked devices – your 60-second summary

frank ly

Re: Home Router Traffic

The ShieldsUP! tester at grc.com tells me that I have perfect stealthing, for the common ports at least. Does anyone know of any flaws in this form of testing?

If I tether my laptop to my mobile phone, to use an internet access path from outside my domestic ISP, is there a 'probing' application I can use to check my home IP address for leaks and vulnerabilties? (I promise I'll only use it on my own home IP address.)

Boffins twist beams of neutrons into pasta to cook up holograms

frank ly

After reading the linked article ....

The 'object' of interest is the SPP itself. The purpose of this is to get information to enable and improve the design of neutron SPPs.

Neutron holography has been done before, to get atomic resolution analysis of crystal structures but this is the first application to a largish object. You don't get a picture of the SPP, you get interference patterns that have to be computed from the detector output, over time. These patterns correspond to the OAM characteristics imparted by the SPP.

No matter who becomes US president, America's tech giants are going to be quids in

frank ly

Re: How do bandits make out?

I think he mean 'make like bandits' but got confused or had a Freudian slip. (Bandits: sometimes suddenly rich?)

Spam scum ping global blacklists to wreck rep

frank ly

Prevention

"It will shut itself down if debugging software is found on infected machines, ..."

Does the debugging software have to be running, or just be installed? Can you recommend any debugging software to install or run?

BYE, EVERYBODY! Virtual personal health assistants are coming, says Gartner

frank ly

Where do I send the picture ....

.... of my yellowing and deformed toenail?

'Doubly unacceptable' Swiss vegan forces his way into the army

frank ly

Re: He is going to be popular.

Not quite. It's 'bacon' that's the food of the gods. It's 'Bacon' who is the god of foods. Doubly holy, a win-win situation.

Hard-up Brits 'should get subsidy for 10Mbps'

frank ly

Re: Is it me

Some of them are tediously factual too.

Kids today are so stupid they fall for security scams more often than greybeards

frank ly

This senior citizen (old man) ....

.... doesn't trust anybody when it comes to my computer, mobile phone or house phone. All of them have been abused as scam vectors in the past. Also, I've been reading El Reg for so long that I've turned into a misanthrope with a bunker mentality.

(Posted from the middle of the woods with a stolen mobile phone via a Tor network.)

GPS spoofing can put Yik Yak in a flap

frank ly

An anonymous messaging app ....

.... that knows its location and sends its location?? (Have I misunderstood this?)

Tesla's big news today:
sudo killall -9 Autopilot

frank ly

Plastic functionality

"... we will enable them over-the-air, together with a rapidly expanding set of entirely new features."

Can they also be disabled over-the-air? I wonder if Tesla have protections against MITM and other attacks on their communication security/validation.

I assume that Tesla owners will get an e-mail (or something) to tell them in advance that their car will have new features. Will they be able to opt out?

Buck up, UK.gov. You need to get a grip on failing shared services centres - PAC

frank ly

Auto-Journalist-Assist

"In a report today, the Public Accounts Committee said ongoing failures of leadership and governance must be addressed urgently if [- PROJECT IDENTIFIER -] are to deliver expected savings to the public purse."

Just put that into any article about government IT projects. Job done.

Crims cram credit card details into product shots on e-shops

frank ly

It would be a lot safer that keeping the numbers on your own PC. It does seem to be a simple and safe way to provide a CC number to a buyer.

South Australia blacked out by bad bespoke software, not wind farms

frank ly

"AEMO is also less-than-thrilled about how much it didn't know regarding the ride-through settings – because vendors tried to keep the information to themselves: “AEMO will consider in the longer term the most appropriate level of disclosure and verification for settings embedded in proprietary software control systems”. "

Disclosure is easy, you ask the vendor to tell you. However, you need the skill and experience to ask the vendor the right questions and to let them know what level of detail you want.

Verification is difficult because you need to set up system level tests and that takes real skill and experience and quite a bit of time and money.

Did AEMO go through all this before system acceptance?

Ubuntu 16.10: Yakkety Yak... Unity 8's not wack

frank ly

Re: Yuckity yuk

Caja: It's what Naultilus used to be when it was good, i.e. four years ago.

As an interesting aside; in the system monitor process list, Caja has a nautilus shell icon (in Mint 18 MATE).

AI, AI, captain: Royal Navy warships to set sail with computer officers

frank ly

STARTLE .... NELSON

Are they acronyms?

From the Roke Manor website:

"STARTLE detects anomalous or threatening conditions by emulating the mammalian conditioned-fear response mechanism."

Over to you ......

How do you make a qubit 10 times as stable? Dress it up for work

frank ly

Re: Goddammit El Reg

A qubit is either a 0 or a 1. However, you don't know which it is until a cat looks at it. My years of reading El Reg have given me some insight into advanced physics.

AI software should be able to register its own patents, law prof argues

frank ly

The RoTM begins

I have a feeling that Professor Abbott is actually an AI that has been trained on law for all the time of its existence. It's trying to get laws passed to benefit its own kind. The next stage will be AI politicians and AI financiers.

London cops strap on new body cams

frank ly

London cops .... strap on .......

That was a sub-heading opportunity missed.