Re: Question
Hmm. The Guardian counts as major dead wood publication, I think, and they covered PRP recognition of Impress in October: Max Mosley-funded press regulator recognised as state-backed watchdog.
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Hmm. The Guardian counts as major dead wood publication, I think, and they covered PRP recognition of Impress in October: Max Mosley-funded press regulator recognised as state-backed watchdog.
Attempted explanation of the dilemma faced by El Reg, though IANAL either:
Key point: there is currently no choice of "approved regulator". Only Impress has received approval, and for the reasons Gareth explains, submitting to regulation by (and paying subscription fees to) Impress is unpalatable. IPSO is the industry's response to the widespread call for a regulator to curb excesses of The Press (phone 'hacking', making stuff up, etc.) following the Leveson report, but it's not approved so membership doesn't give a publisher the protection from the Section 40 jeopardy.
Corrections/amplifications welcome.
References:
Impress recognition [guardian.com]
Impress site [impress.press]
> triggering when enough time has elapsed for offline data to be encrypted along with the online version
How would that work? I would expect the attack to be immediately obvious to an enterprise of this size, and the very first thing one would do is to isolate the backups and shut down the network, probably invoking the business continuity/disaster recovery plan at the same time. In the past, when we used to do backups to half-ton tape drives, the backups were 'grand-fathered'. I don't know how modern backup technologies work in this respect.
> Do the images protect our kids after all?
One thing is certain. Unless the images are cartoon/CGI then one or more real children have been abused and exploited to make it. Stamping out the incentive to create images like that will protect children other than mine, and that's a fine objective, right there.
Version 1.0 proposed a toast:
> a big Christmas Cheer to the unsung coders
If I remember correctly, most device drivers were written by the device manufacturers, not by Microsoft. Before the internet was a useful channel for software distribution, one got a floppy disk [1] (maybe even a Compact Disc <gasp>!) with drivers thereon, bundled with the hardware device. The ISA card manufacturer (per your example) would have been on the hook for supplying and debugging device drivers, not Microsoft.
I subscribe to the sentiment re the unsung coders, though!
[1] Exhibit A: ftp://ftp.msan.hr/drivers/LAN/3COM/3C509B-tpo/README.TXT
> I think Signal underestimate how much control these places want over their populaces
Indeed. Outside the USA, not many of us use google.com. If the authorities block google.com, would users still be able to reach google.com.eg? Signal developers may have bought into the 'Google is the Internet' idea.
Scene: 1994, office with synthetic fibre carpet and wheeled office chairs with which to sit at desks bearing computers running Windows 3.11.
If one scooted the chair across even a moderate stretch of carpet, a static charge built up which was quite painfully discharged once one touched an earthed surface. I got into the habit of discharging by touching my wedding ring to the metal desk frame, (which produced a nice fat spark but no pain!), and noticed that doing so would frequently lock up my PC. For a while we worried about the quality of the electrical earthing, but all was well there. We conclusively demonstrated that moving the keyboard a foot or so up off the desk prevented the lockups: apparently the discharge through the frame induced a voltage spike in the keyboard that was transferred to the PC (keyboards had PS/2 connectors then, not USB) and the motherboard didn't like it.
> Go read Ken White's account ...
+1
Here is the link to the latest of Ken's articles, which the good Dr Syntax unaccountably failed to supply.
>For what purpose?
"connected services for drivers, including real-time traffic and weather reports and accident or road works warnings"
Apparently.
Source: https://www.gsa.europa.eu/newsroom/news/satellite-navigation-core-future-connected-car-systems
> the money you're paying them isn't paying them
Prolly, it isn't money at all... which means it can't be taxable! Doubles all round!
Uber's corporate behaviour reminds me of that of a bolshy teenager, always trying to find a smartass way to get one-up on long-suffering parents.
It takes a little time, but if everyone re-read what they had just written before committing the message, fewer mistakes would be made [1]. I'm a bit too far the other way in this respect: I will now click 'Preview', check for spelling mistakes, repunctuate, 'Preview' again ...
[1] ... and add footnotes. The trick in proofreading your own work is to dis-remember what it was that you *think* you have written (because that's what your brain will see, half the time). Advancing age is a great help :)
[2] repunctuate seems not to have been a real word... until now.
Data Diodes are a thing.
Simon says this was run by the RAND corporation. They've been researching, and influencing policy, for sixty-odd years, so yes, I would expect the outcomes at least to be placed within easy reach of the policy-makers and executives. Whether they take any notice is somewhat up to people like the Reg readership - there won't be, for instance, a security quality star rating system, unless there's a widespread call for it.
> scrap[e] search queries for ... IP ideas
Ideas are not intellectual property. No-one can own an idea: this is not some utopian ideal, it is a settled matter of law. What you can own is a state-granted patent on an implementation of an original idea or innovation. It is crucial to note that the patent MUST disclose the idea, and the innovation, in enough detail for someone else to implement it. If what we are seeking is a better way of protecting the direction of innovative research at e.g. the hypothetical Green Tech Company, then not shoving illuminating search queries into public search engines would be a hot favourite.
OK, I'll bite.
One of us is wrong, and it depends on your OS which that is. I'm running a KDE/GNU/Linux machine, and if I press Alt-Ctrl-F1 I can have a CLI from which I can shut down the GUI1 and the machine continues to run. The virtual Teletype terminals are certainly not macros sitting on top of a graphical user interface.
If you're running a recent version (like later than 3.1.1) of Windows, then yes, your CLI (cmd.exe or powershell) is an emulated terminal running in your GUI. If you kill the window manager, then your CLI disappears with it.
'Macro language' is still pretty much wrong, though. The CLI doesn't automate the GUI, e.g. by simulating mouse inputs; it provides alternative commands to manipulate operating system objects like files.
1 jonathan@Odin:~$ sudo service lightdm stop
Eighties? I worked for PHBs in the nineteen-eighties (for certain values of 'pointy'), and none of them would have had a clue what to do if you had placed them in front of any sort of computer interface. GUIs then were rudimentary - Windows 1.0 was released in late '85. The rise of personal computing has been faster than we sometimes remember. It was the middle of the nineteen-nineties when giving computers to office workers as a productivity tool [1] became normal. I submit that the productivity value for PHBs even then was questionable: someone else has pointed out the whole secretary-prints-the-email thing (this still happens, and it's 2016!).
[1] Scientists and engineers had been using computers for computing stuff, and for information retrieval, for quite some time, of course. I'm talking about word processing and spreadsheets for administration.
Remember the Sony Playstation update that removed much-loved OtherOS functionality?
I have to say that Samsung are in a hard spot here. Suppose they *didn't* take steps to render safe these devices, when they have a mechanism to do so. Are they then liable for increased damages? I bet you can find a lawyer who would say so.
A better change might be one that destroys the ability of a battery to hold a charge (maximum chargelevel := 1%). The phone would still work when connected to an external power supply, then. Maybe there's no way to do that with an over-the-air update.
Afterthought: you're never going to get 100% of phones turned in for refund, anyway. How many have been stolen, or dropped in the lav.?
> my speedo pair
Aaahh, when read your first para, I thought "speedo pair" was a euphemism along the lines of "the dog's proverbials", and then I read the last four words, and cognitive dissonance + extreme sympathy resulted!
For readers unfamiliar with rhyming slang, Tea Leaf === Thief
> ... some species is "more evolved"? How is that possible if there is not a plan that is being followed?
There isn't a plan, and I don't think that respectable evolutionary biologists use loose language such as the examples you give. No organism is "the pinnacle of evolution", or whatever, except in the sense that the current generation is the end result of about three billion years of evolution from the first life form [1]. Evolutionary mechanisms don't look forward in time, and don't need to have any such direction to explain fully the diversity of life which we observe. That is what makes it a successful theory: it explains observations better than any other theory, without having to invent anything more than (i) heritable variation amongst siblings and (ii) some of those siblings reproducing more effectively than others.
[1] Possibly not the first life form. Maybe there were others, before and after, not based on DNA/RNA and twenty-odd amino acids, but those didn't survive.
> non-living particles with some chemical characteristics similar to those of life
+1
Crucially, though, those chemical characteristics include DNA, and its transcription to form the proteins that constitute the phenotype of the virus (bacteriophage, in fact). This is the 'engine' that mutation and evolution work on. Because the phage needs the bacterial cell mechanisms to achieve its reproduction, the phage isn't considered alive: it can't reproduce. But clearly it can evolve: mutations in its DNA lead to different phenotypes, with different abilities to infect certain bacterial cells. Whether that is 'speciation' depends on your definition of 'species'. That way madness lies! After all, the entire concept of 'species' was made up when species were considered to be immutable.
I think not. Approximately 9 nano-seconds after the tadpole metamorphoses into a (probably tiny) giraffe, someone will opine that the frog was designed by the Creator to become a giraffe at the appropriate time, and that evolution doesn't come into it. Word-of-the-Year 2016 refers, depressingly.
Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, perhaps?
There is a handful of El Reg stories featuring him.
When the media are in a feeding frenzy for poll results, it seems to me that the motivation is just wanting to know the news before it happens. Even for the campaigns themselves, it doesn't seem to have a real democratic (lower case) benefit. Swinging the vote your way particularly in places where it will get you a parliamentary-seat-benefit, or an electoral-college-vote benefit, is not democratic, or at least not as democratic as making your case clearly, stating your policies lucidly, and communicating with all the voters in all the constituencies. I agree with an earlier poster: the days of polls being able to produce convincing results is over, and I shall not be sorry to see and hear fewer of them in future (supposing that to be likely).
> Why is it so tricky to change?
Because it's introduced way back up the supply chain. Bank of England buys the plastic unprinted web from Innovia, Innovia buys the base plastics from one or more polymer producers, one or more polymer producers use or produce plastic pellets which are kept free-flowing by trace amounts of tallow.
I just signed up at the beerfuelled petition.
C'mon guys! There's over 200 comments on this El Reg story, and only fifty-odd signups, so far!
> could be other factors
Tallow is almost exclusively saturated fat, so it won't oxidise and become adhesive as partially unsaturated vegetable oils will - for an experiment, try treating your cricket bat with tallow, and compare with the traditional linseed oil! I'm thinking that the tiny quantities of tallow involved must be about ensuring the free-flow characteristics of the base polymer pellets. In a similar way, SmartiesTM are polished with a waxy substance to stop the sugar coatings from sticking together.
A little trivial research seems to indicate that tallow is cleaved to produce materials for soap manufacture in quite large quantities: washing one's hands is likely to generate much more contact with molecules that were once part of a cow than is handling a new fiver.
> Still can't see how he managed to 'accidentally' upload 700 pages...
I ran the linked Dutch article through Google translate: apparently the documents were copied to an Iomega network-attached storage device, without password protection.
she made a backup of documents on a private Iomega network drive, a hard drive that was connected to the Internet without a password
Also, from TFA
> If organisations like Europol ... can make mistakes,
and
> Human error is the weakest link
There's no luck involved in this idiocy. It's not a mistake to take home a stickful of security protected documents, it's doubly not a mistake to copy them to a personal storage disk, and it's triply not a mistake to expose that on the internet. The first step is probably criminal, and the second and third are just reckless. Edward Snowden faces a lifetime of exile for just exposing classified methods of intelligence collection; this clown is termed "unlucky" for exposing actual intelligence in contravention of policy. Policy isn't made for arse-covering, it's meant to lead to processes and rules which make stupid behaviour like this extinct.
I'm fresh from a briefing about Smart Meters, and I brought away two important points:
(i) whatever they tell you, smart meters are not compulsory. You may decline to schedule a change of meter, or indeed change your mind about declining it, as you wish.
(ii) the "first generation" of meters, or the backend connectivity (it wasn't clear) won't talk to suppliers other than the one that installed it for you. I wish I'd known this prior to having EON install a SM, and then switching to British Gas for a cheaper tariff a couple of months later. Now the in-house display doesn't work as it did, and I'm back to reading the meter for BG. Waiting until the system works across all suppliers seems to be a good idea, but of course the suppliers won't tell you that: they have SM installation targets to meet.
(iii) THREE! Three important points!! The installers are forbidden by a strict Code of Practice from selling anything else during the installation visit. They can give you marketing information, but they can't transact a sale. They will, however, inspect your gas boiler, and if it's unsafe they can condemn it, and turn it off. However, you wouldn't want to go on using an unsafe boiler, would you? [icon]
> a full (realtime if possible) copy elsewhere ...
If your object is protection, then a real-time mirroring operation is probably not the correct strategy. After all, if some organization with hugely capable offensive IT attack capabilities were subtly to damage Copy 0, you wouldn't want that to be immediately mirrored in Copy 1. Unless there were many backups of both copies, of course. I have no idea what the resilience architecture of the Internet Archive might be, but creation of Copy 1 cannot make it worse, I think, so I've bunged them a few quid.
I refer the Hon. gentleman to my earlier reply (2013, blimey I didn't think my memory was that good!):
Rain - n., wet stuff that falls out of the sky. Hence vt. to rain (usu. down) upon something
Reign - vt., to rule over e.g. a kingdom or empire. Hence "a reign of terror", etc.
Rein - n., a piece of horse-harness, attached to the bit. Hence "rein in", i.e. to limit movement or freedom of action.
> In the event of a complete electrical power failure, you're essentially back to flying a C-172
I don't think so. In a Cessna there is a physical linkage between the pilot's controls and the plane's control surfaces, and the aerodynamic forces on the control surfaces are such that a pilot can move them with muscle power alone. Neither of those things is true for a modern jet airliner: the control surfaces are moved by hydraulics which don't go all the way back to the cockpit, and which depend on powered hydraulic servos - I would expect that an airliner with a *complete* electrical failure would be close to unflyable (un-landable, anyway), but IANAP, and would be very pleased if a real airline pilot would tell me otherwise.
Thank you, Alistair, I didn't know you could do that. My concern with building business-critical support applications using web apps and Zapier would be that one is at the mercy of each one of the web suppliers. If the "glue" depends on several web APIs not changing, then there's going to be a day when your gym owner's conglomeration of apps won't do what he needs and expects, and he'll be up the creek. At least his four hundred quid purchase is a sunk cost, and it'll go on working until it doesn't. If he's wise in line with his muscle mass, he'll have a sinking fund and data backups to replace it when that happens. I haven't looked hard at Zapier to see what the free offering can do, but I see that a premium subscription is 20USD per month (close to £20 sterling, these days). So that's over £200 p.a., just for the glue.
> take the plane up for hours on the first flight and fully explore the flight envelope
Actually, that seemed to be rather a conservative first flight, and nowhere near exploring the boundaries of the flight envelope. The Flightradar24 link shows the plane at about 10,000 ft and a groundspeed of around 200 kt for the majority of the flight, only on the last couple of legs did the throttles get opened a bit, up to 400 kt, and there was a brief excursion to around 28,000 ft.
Contrary to statements in The Fine Article, I saw no evidence of looping. Now that would have been an exciting first flight!
Genuine answer from a native English speaker:
I think the very correct wording is indeed "... helped to crash ...". In spoken and vernacular (British) English one might very well leave out the 'to', thus "I just helped Dad wash the car" is perfectly understandable, but Pedantic Grammar Nazi [icon] would have you say "I just helped Dad to wash the car".
Edit: added closing quotes. Muphry's Law strikes again!
> the crew in the magazine (shell storage) had to get out really very quickly indeed (up a vertical ladder) to avoid being drowned by the fire-suppression system
I believe the Royal Navy in WW2 didn't expect the magazine crews to be able to evacuate in case of a fire: they were locked into the magazine, and if it needed to be flooded then they would drown. As evidence, here is a tiny extract from a memoir by S. L. Bell, BEM, whose duty station was the 'A' turret shell room of HMS Exeter at the Battle of the River Plate:
... we all set about our work sending up prepared shells to A turret, when the ship seemed to stagger and shudder, we then noticed smoke coming down the voice pipe, and the turret wouldn't respond to calls; after a brief moment the person in charge of the shell room told the crew members there to get up top to see if there was anything that could be done to assist getting the gun back into action, as we left the shell room I asked about the personnel below in the magazine, and the PIC told me to spin the hatch to let them out and tell them what was happening, as they were locked down in the magazine in case the need to flood ever occurred.
'A' turret had been struck by a shell from Panzerschiffe Admiral Graf von Spee, but precautions against flash igniting the charges in the magazines meant that Exeter survived (just) both this hit, and many others.