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* Posts by Jonathan Richards 1

1452 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

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Volvo to 'accept full liability' for crashes with its driverless cars

Jonathan Richards 1
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Alert

Mobile surveillance

Ah, yes. Any driverless car must have remote sensing, probably optical (audio, too?) and almost certainly that sensing data must be stored for some period of time, shorter or longer. Who is the owner of the data, then? Is it the owner/operator of the vehicle? Is it, e.g. Volvo "because we need the data for compliance"? Might it be The Government, who will make data access a provision of the licensing? Just who will be able to obtain a copy of the car's data, and in what circumstances? This is a question that I shall want to be answered long before I consider a driverless car of my own.

Dystopian vision: Google (tm) will license their driverless car technology to manufacturers, on condition that they get data on car journeys "to improve my travelling experience".

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Researcher messes up Wi-Fi with an rPi and bargain buy radio stick

Jonathan Richards 1
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Joke

Wired protocol

Ether, either, nether, neither, let's call the whole thing off!

:)

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World's oldest person scoffs daily ration of bacon

Jonathan Richards 1
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Becoming the oldest living person...

...must involve the previous record-holder turning in their metaphorical badge. I'm all for celebrating longevity, but the linked article from Guinness World Records makes no mention of the world's loss of the former record holder. His or her bacon-snaffling habits must therefore remain mysterious, and Lester's Hypothesis must remain based on a sample of one! :)

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Forget Ben Affleck – US, Euro boffins to SMASH spaceship into asteroid

Jonathan Richards 1
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WTF?

Space weapons

Self-reply, sorry.

I just realised that, should malign and violent extra-terrestrial intelligences turn up on our celestial doorstep (see Hollywood output, passim), we'd first have to get the UN together and quickly amend this treaty so that it limits itself to inter-human warfare, otherwise attempting to wipe out the baddies will be a breach of the treaty, and we couldn't be having that, oh no.

What's that, Sooty? Safe Harbor? I've got no idea why that's relevant.

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Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: if we're talking film influences

> We don't have any orbiting missile stations?

No. No we don't, for the very good and entirely sufficient reason that nuclear weapons in orbit are prohibited by international treaty. If any of the nuclear powers got caught *putting* nukes up there, the odds of "World War Three - The Last One" would suddenly get much shorter.

Article IV of Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies

States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, instal such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.

The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.

Source: http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/outer_space/text

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Hey, Facebook – these are the new Like buttons you should have used

Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: UMMM

I have this useful algorithm programmed into my wetware:

<pseudocode>

AUTHOR == 'Worstall' & next_article()

COMMENTARD == 'amanfrommars | *Bryant*' & next_comment()

</pseudocode>

Having said that, my wetware is non-deterministic: I don't want *never to see* the option.

On the subject of El Reg post icons, there are several that I don't even understand: what is the purpose of "Your foster parents are dead", for instance?

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BBC joins war against Flash, launches beta HTML5 iPlayer

Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: User Agent

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:41.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/41.0

I crafted this one for my Firefox 41 on Kubuntu and it gets me past the gatekeeper, so that when I select an iPlayer stream I get the 'HTML5 beta' banner, but unfortunately the content does not play. I have fiddled with the media.* settings related to mp4 in about:config, enabling everything in sight, and have set media.mediasource.whitelist to FALSE, but no joy.

It's not a big deal; Chrome works fine, and if FF 42 has the fix, I can wait.

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Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: Confused!

Me too. Firefox 41.0 on Kubuntu 14.04 doesn't work, but Google Chrome on the same platform works flawlessly with the HTML5 beta iPlayer. According to Wikipedia, Firefox is lacking MSE support at all, so I'm not clear how Firefox/Windows can work, and I don't have a test platform for it.

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MACAQUE ATTACK: Monkey plunders Florida resident's box, gobbles contents

Jonathan Richards 1
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Sorry, you can no longer edit this post.

Well, I'm wrong. Wrought is a past participle of the verb to work, and the correct p.pl. of wreak is wreaked. I'm quite sure that "wrought havoc" is an acceptable phrase in English, though.

Here is an entire blog post about the issue.

PS for El Reg. It's not polite to time out my post editing while I'm editing it!

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Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: "wrought havoc?"

Seems ok to me. To wreak is one of those verbs that has an irregular past tense, and (without looking it up) I think that has wrought is better English than has wreaked.

I'm going to hit 'Submit', and consult the OED; edit to follow!

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Do you agree with our fee hike? Press 1 to answer Yes; or 2 for Yes

Jonathan Richards 1
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The FIFA option

Upvoted, because Herr Blatter came to my mind too, and I came here to say exactly what you did.

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EU data protection chief: Snaffling all air traveller data goes too far

Jonathan Richards 1
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re Disinformation Engine

As a first step, I suggest that we *all* order the halal or kosher option the next time we fly*. For bonus points, on long haul, have the halal lunch and the kosher dinner.

* The next time we fly with an airline that provides in-flight meals, I mean.

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VW’s case of NOxious emissions: a tale of SMOKE and MIRRORS?

Jonathan Richards 1
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Headmaster

Re: I give up

germane ~== Germaine

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Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: 'Greater Good', or emissions trading

> Which stop start cars are doing this?

1. Kia c'eed (stoopid name, sure). Mine has an "intelligent stop-go" feature that cuts the (diesel) engine when (a) in neutral, and (b) the clutch is not depressed, and (c) the car is travelling at something close to or less than snail's pace. Use of the hand- or foot-brake is not involved.

FWIW, I like it, once one has un-learned the reflex "Oh, sh*t, I stalled the car" reaction, followed by shoving one's left foot on the clutch, which restarts the engine. This is a manual transmission, obviously (six forward gears, count 'em!). I've no idea how it might work with an automatic.

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Texan hotshot coughs to $4.5 million Bitcoin Ponzi scheme

Jonathan Richards 1

BTC maths

Hmm. Feds calculate annualized rate as 3,641% p.a., but 1.01^365 is 37.78. You get close to 36.41 with 1.01^362. I deduce that BTCST had some built-in bank holidays!

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POLAR DINOSAURS prowled ARCTIC NIGHT, cast doubt on COLD BLOOD theory

Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: wtf?

To get a diagnosis of sense of humour failure, you have to challenge the patient with an actual joke. That whole 'only six thousand years old' thing is so old, it doesn't qualify any longer, so several downvotes were probably from readers, or petunias, thinking "Oh, no, not again".

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PETA monkey selfie lawsuit threatens wildlife photography, warns snapper at heart of row

Jonathan Richards 1
Stop

Joke suit

The single phrase which marks this out as a piece of theatre (theater?) rather than a genuine litigation is

> repeatedly infringed on Naruto's copyright

We are told that a proper US court has ruled that animals cannot own copyright. Indeed, I believe that animals cannot own anything, and they have no standing to sue in human courts of law anywhere (though I see this is California, so who knows). Let's get this in perspective. PETA and Engelhardt are bringing action in the US courts on behalf of a wild animal living half a planet away from California, on the basis of that animal's property rights. Irrespective of the nuances of copyright based on who opened a camera shutter, this is just crazy. Next up, PETA sues Wiley Fox for harassment causing alarm and distress to A. Roadrunner.

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Russian Tor network-wrecking effort takes bizarre turn

Jonathan Richards 1
Facepalm

Doesn't seem to be very onerous

In two different articles, El Reg has told us that the contract was for a study into the possibility of cracking ToR (for certain values of cracking). Seems easy to fulfill *that* contract: "We studied it, and don't see any possibility. Please remit 3.9m roubles by return". Of course, if somebody signed up without reading the contract and has found that they're now on the hook for actually supplying a crack, then it will be worth employing m'learned friends to wriggle out. Good luck with that.

Caveat: I have not read the original tender, in Russian or in translation.

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Cesspool 4chan sold … to former owner of Japanese cesspool 2ch

Jonathan Richards 1
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Disambiguation for the uninformed

> Gamergate is what killed 4chan

A gamergate is a mated worker ant that is able to reproduce sexually, i.e. lay fertilized eggs that will develop as females.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate. Just thought you would want to know.

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Get that OFF dot-com, hysterical France screeches at Google

Jonathan Richards 1
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> the idea that irrelevant information should not be displayed

Whatever the merits of that idea, it is not the idea that the EU Data Protection Directive tries to realise. Misuse of information is forbidden, not display.

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Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: Geo-blocking?

> nowadays every employer does as a matter of course.

I guess you mean prospective employer, and the harm that we are discussing is the failure of an individual to be given a job when "his/her past com[es] back at them".

When an employer obtains personal information about a prospective employee, the employer is immediately a Data Controller with respect to that information, and (in the EU) has to process it in accordance with national laws which all align with the EU Data Protection Directive. If the employer then uses some or all of that information which is out-of-date, erroneous or irrelevant, to make decisions affecting the Data Subject, then that is the offence. A responsible employer would look at a report of, oh, I dunno, outrageous behaviour with a dead pig, and decide whether that was relevant in giving an individual a responsible post.

Availability of links to the information from a general-purpose Internet search engine is a secondary issue, although to read all the coverage, you'd think that it was the whole point.

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Jonathan Richards 1
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@Indolent Wretch

> If my country say[s] I have the right to see and easily find this information why should another country that has nothing to do with me be able to stop me?

Take that entire sentiment, and put it in the context of Kim DotCom. The USA wishes to extradite him from New Zealand for the crime of making information available, which the USA says should have been suppressed from the Internet.

For what it's worth, I don't believe that every person in the world has an inalienable right to access every bit of information. Misused personal information can cause immediate and definite damage to individuals. That is what the EU Data Protection laws are designed to mitigate. Compliance is not optional.

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Boffins crowdsource web for TREE of LIFE. What could possibly go wrong with that?!

Jonathan Richards 1
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re Tube with four limbs

Actually, a double-walled doughnut topology, if you look at the build plan for coelomates. Food goes through the middle hole of the doughnut, and the organs live on the inside (think: inner tube of a tyre). This is the basic plan for all the bilateria, see this node at opentreeoflife.org, which is much more inclusive than the set of animals with four legs!

On the subject of "most things are related", I don't believe there is a convincing example yet of anything now living which is not related to some putative first life on Earth, and I recommend The Ancestor's Tale (Dawkins, R; Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004) as a good read.

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Jonathan Richards 1
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Other readers also enjoyed...

... the Encyclopedia of Life at eol.org. The two sites are not trying to do the same things, exactly, but EoL is more mature.

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Crash Google Chrome with one tiny URL: We cram a probe in this bug

Jonathan Richards 1
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Vivaldi

Also crashes Vivaldi, which uses the Chromium project code.

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Bookworms' Weston mecca: The Oxford institution with a Swindon secret

Jonathan Richards 1
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Facepalm

Re: Magna Carta in Latin

> a dead language called "English"

I had occasion recently to review* an ebook edition of The Voyage of the Beagle (Darwin, C; 1839). One of the other reviews stated that the book was hard to read, since it was written in "Old English". I suppose this to mean that it uses both words of more than four syllables, and grammatically correct sentences of many lines.

>sigh<

*I gave it only one star, not because Darwin's prose is anything but sublime, but because whoever had generated the ebook had totally butchered the formatting.

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Bible apps are EVIL says John McAfee as he phishes legal sysadmins in real time

Jonathan Richards 1
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re folding in half

"Fold, Spindle and Mutilate for personal attention"

How many people here remember what the items were, that one was told never to 'fold, spindle or mutilate'?

Edit: bloody search engines make this easy to answer even if you were born (figuratively) yesterday. </grumble>

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Let's Encrypt certificate authority signs first cert

Jonathan Richards 1
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Joke

Re: Yes! Get on with it ElReg.

3. Tim Worstall refuses to use free certs until they cost more and contain 7.2% neodymium.

FTFY

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British killer robot takes out two Britons in Syria strike

Jonathan Richards 1
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WWII historical treason @ Voland's RH

There are a few mistakes there which seem to me to indicate that you're making stuff up. Firstly in absentia is the right term (one t), so you probably weren't directly quoting a source, were you?

Secondly, England (and after 1702 the United Kingdom) never had an offence [sic] of "grand treason". Treason was either high treason, or petty treason. High treason is still (partially) governed by the Treason Act of 1351 which explicitly states that adherence to or giving comfort to the King's enemies is treasonable. [1]

Finally, The Encyclopaedia that Anyone Can Edit has a list of people tried for treason, and there is no entry for anyone tried during or after WWII in absentia. If you have an example, please let us know what it is.

[1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw3Stat5/25/2/section/II

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NHS to go paperless by 2020. No, really, it will, says gros fromage

Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: £1m per trust for storing paper

> ...compared to what they'll be charged for storing it all digitally

Or fined for losing it all digitally. Advantage of a ton of paper in half a ton of filing cabinet: it can't be "exfiltrated" without heavy lifting equipment and massive incompetence on the part of the data owners. Oh, hold on...

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Drone deals DEATH – to deadly starfish

Jonathan Richards 1

Evolutionary drivers

The bot represents a very specific predator for the starfish, so deploying it at a large scale will rapidly produce an evolutionary pressure for the starfish to change their appearance: the ones that don't look too much like the bot's internal concept of a target will survive and breed. I really hope that somebody is going to make an ecological evolutionary study out of this, as well as dealing death to the coral-munchers.

Of course, reducing the nutrient runoff from Queensland agriculture could help, too.

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Spaniard claims WWII WAR HERO pigeon code crack. Explain please

Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: Howt to heap shit on your own head

It applies to anyone in the UK jurisdiction, and you don't *need* to have signed anything to be subject to it. The declaration one signs is merely to confirm that one has had the provisions of the Act drawn to one's attention.

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FORKING BitcoinXT: Is it really a coup or just more crypto-FUD?

Jonathan Richards 1
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Go

Re: PoopCoin

> I'm sure it will make a big splash..

... or maybe not, if it has improved liquidity. Contactless payment, I'm assuming (and hoping!)

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What Ashley Madison did and did NOT delete if you paid $19 – and why it may cost it $5m+

Jonathan Richards 1
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@AC Re: long weight

The good Doctor wrote 'weight' very deliberately. It's a reference to one of the jolly japes traditionally played on the newest, greenest apprentices in factories and workshops:

Journeyman [hefting a standard-shaped weight]: "Here, Bill, go down to the stores, and ask them for a long weight, will you?

[Bill trots to the stores, addresses storeman]

Bill: Mr Jones sent me down for a long weight, please.

Storeman [suppressing a smirk]: Alright, lad, stand over there in the corner, and I'll fetch you one.

[time passes... .... .... ]

--<[curtain]>--

Storemen were also in on the joke when asked for left-handed screwdrivers, or replacement bubbles for a spirit level.

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Fiery old geysers FOUND ON MOON: Volcanic past explained

Jonathan Richards 1
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Boffin

O<sub>2</sub>

Three times, you wrote "atomic oxygen", over-riding my science-pedant restraint circuits, and so I am forced to point out that atomic oxygen is rather rare: one fifth of earth's atmosphere is composed of molecular oxygen, though.

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Curiosity rolls over onto Martian WET PATCH, takes satisfied selfie

Jonathan Richards 1
Joke

Neutron albedo....?

... seems like over-engineering to me. Should've strapped a hazel fork on the outside somewhere, and waited for the twitch.

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Wikiland turns to Shapps and says ‘those emails you wanted, we deleted them, sorry’

Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: FOI?

> FoI does apply if a charity gets a significant portion of its funding from government

Ummm... unless you have some evidence for that, I'm not convinced. The Act says it is An Act to make provision for the disclosure of information held by public authorities or by persons providing services for them, and it defines 'public authorities' in a long inclusive list at Schedule 1, which includes exactly no charities at all. I could just about see how some of the "charities" which are really sub-contractors to Government departments might get hauled in, after some wrangling, but merely getting a chunk of money from public sources does not make a charity subject to the FOIA, as far as I can see. IANAL, of course.

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Boffins raise five-week-old fetal human brain in the lab for experimentation

Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: This is just wrong

You're right about it being wrong, at least until we know something about its possible consciousness. You wrote "12 year old brain", but the article says the plan is to maintain the brain until it is "the equivalent of a 12-week-old human". That would be bad enough, though. Anyone who has been around a baby of that age knows that it's just as conscious as an adult. I'm pretty sure that the plan must mean 12 weeks from conception, which isn't the same thing at all. Human age t=0 is at the point of birth, roughly 40 weeks after conception.

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Been sleeping well lately? No nightmares? Here's a lumbering Google bigfoot bot

Jonathan Richards 1

Google-owned...

Oughtn't we to get used to saying (and writing) "Alphabet-owned"? Although Google-funded would continue to be correct, I guess.

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Surprise! World stunned to learn that AT&T is in the NSA's pocket

Jonathan Richards 1
Pirate

Not as unique as one would like

Memoranda may call the relationship "unique" but it has features very similar to that between Cable & Wireless (latterly Vodafone) and certain arms of Her Majesty's Government.

Try putting "GERONTIC +cable" into a discreet search engine.

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Is this the most puzzling DEF CON attendee badge yet on record?

Jonathan Richards 1
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Shavian

Good spot. I actually installed a font that does Shavian Unicode glyphs [1] so I could compare the photo and the text. I think the correct (and more meaningful) transcription is

if hes not

one thing hes

another

The Shavian is a bit random, though. As written, the first word ought to rhyme with 'leaf', the word "thing" ought to have been written with the Shavian 'hung' glyph instead of 'n+g', and there's a character for 'th', too, without using 't+h'. So it's like a transliteration of English words with 1:1 character mapping. I've got no idea what the significance of the phrase is, though. It doesn't seem to have a well-known provenance, if a search engine can be trusted. Could it be a passphrase? That would be a good reason to be character-mapped rather than written in proper shorthand.

[1] MPH2BDamase

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Doubts cast on Islamic State's so-called leak of US .mil, .gov passwords

Jonathan Richards 1
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Facepalm

Re: President Password

> if you can get away with "david9" on a .mil or .gov account...

Such a password wouldn't be accepted on any .mod.uk system with proper security accreditation.

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Jail incompetent council folk who leak our data, thunders furious BBW

Jonathan Richards 1
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FAIL

Re: Failure at all levels.

>users who don't bother with or care about any Information Governance training they may be given

Indeed. When I was involved with training Ministry of Defence staff in these matters, they had to record the training in the Personnel database, which featured a free-form field for description of the course. Memorably, I recall seeing "More data protection crap" submitted from one fine officer. I had trouble counting *that* one as a 'course delivered successfully'.

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Twitter will delete jokes after a DMCA takedown – but NOT my photos, fumes angry snapper

Jonathan Richards 1

Never mind all that copyright stuff...

... what in the blue blazes is a "juice cleanse", and why would seeing someone spill one be remotely funny? Doesn't a joke have to be actually amusing?

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So just WHO ARE the 15 per cent of Americans still not online?

Jonathan Richards 1

Avoiding Kardashians

I've used the Internet for a long time, and I haven't had any problems with Kardashians. Shit, I don't even really know where Kardash is.

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Amazon comes up with delivery-drone zones after watching Fifth Element all night

Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: The real problem ...

> Why should what you enjoy or even tolerate dictate what we all must put up with?

Votes, Trev. Votes. If there's more of them than there are of you, they win.

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Happy birthday Alf Garnett, you daft, reactionary old git

Jonathan Richards 1
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FAIL

...the races did get along and work together

The hell you say!

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You can secretly snoop on someone if they butt-dial you – US judges

Jonathan Richards 1
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I see what your butt did there...

> manages to complete the entire sequence of motions

*snigger*

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Get root on an OS X 10.10 Mac: The exploit is so trivial it fits in a tweet

Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: A simple temporary fix or am I missing something here?

> about several thousand other files

Just out of interest, I used find to locate all the setuid files on this Kubuntu 14.04 machine. There are 21 setuid root executables in directories in my $PATH:

04755 root /sbin/mount.nfs

04755 root /bin/mount

04755 root /bin/ping6

04755 root /bin/su

04755 root /bin/umount

04755 root /bin/fusermount

04755 root /bin/ping

04754 root /usr/sbin/pppd

04755 root /usr/bin/passwd

04711 root /usr/bin/wodim

04755 root /usr/bin/pkexec

04755 root /usr/bin/gpasswd

04755 root /usr/bin/chsh

04755 root /usr/bin/mtr

04755 root /usr/bin/sudo

06755 root /usr/bin/X

04755 root /usr/bin/traceroute6.iputils

04755 root /usr/bin/chfn

04755 root /usr/bin/lppasswd

04711 root /usr/bin/cdrdao

04755 root /usr/bin/newgrp

I can see the point of most of those. But wodim and cdrdao ... ? The wodim manpage recommends setuid root, because of driver issues (in summary). Ah, well.

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Lottery IT security boss guilty of hacking lotto computer to win $14.3m

Jonathan Richards 1
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Re: And then : my opinion about jury system

Whereas a commenter above writing

> I'm sure considering how long this investigation has been going on, they wouldn't be moving on him unless they were sure they had enough for a conviction.

is an equally disturbing remark.

A jury should never be looking at the person in the dock and thinking "... yeah, must be guilty, the prosecutors wouldn't have brought the case if he was innocent...". The jury is there to test the evidence, and reject the "is guilty" hypothesis when they still have a reasonable doubt. Weakening this protection for the accused (and any of us could be accused) is damn dangerous.

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