* Posts by ForthIsNotDead

937 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2009

Bad news, mobile operators: Unlicensed IoT tech rocketing ahead of NB-IoT and LTE-M – report

ForthIsNotDead
Stop

Hmmm...

Call me a sceptic, but I'd like to know who funded that report. I deal with both SigFox and LoRaWAN daily, and design IoT devices for the water industry that use both technologies. I can tell you that in terms of the "buzz" surrounding both technologies, with SigFox it's crickets, and with LoRaWAN it's deafening.

LoRaWAN is exploding world-wide, thanks in part to the "maker movement" and the DIY community installing their own LoRaWAN gateways. I run two LoRaWAN gateways in Aberdeen and one in Durham and they work reliably, and what's more, I have no data charges whatsoever.

The commercial guys could only dream of the take-up rate that LoRaWAN has.

Hear that? Of course it's Indiegogo's deadline for a Vega+ whooshing by

ForthIsNotDead
FAIL

F****d.

Completely f****d.

It's popcorn time, folks. Seriously.

Uber 'does not exist any more' says Turkish president

ForthIsNotDead
Happy

I'd like to Uber operate in Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan has the best taxi system in the world. You stick your hand out, and someone will stop. Anyone. They might be taking their kids to school, or just nipping out to the shops. They'll ask you where you want to go, and they'll give you a price, and if you agree you hop in.

Sounds terrifying doesn't it? But it works. When I found out about it I asked "How do you know the driver isn't a rapist/murderer/whatever?" and the reply was "How does the driver know you're not a rapist/murderer/whatever?". I like that kind of logic.

I took literally hundreds of "taxi" rides on the streets of Tashkent, Bhukara and elsewhere and never once had a problem. Language is a bit of an issue. My Russian isn't very good but I got by, and had fun.

I'd like to see Uber compete with that!

Internet engineers tear into United Nations' plan to move us all to IPv6

ForthIsNotDead

Oh dear.

"In effect, it would downgrade IPv6 into IPv4+, with the plus simply being more addresses."

Good. I'm not an expert in any way on IPv6, but I know when something has been designed by a committee and IPv6 was. A spec comes in for a greyhound, and out comes a camel. IPv6 is a camel.

If they'd left it to engineers to sort out then we would have simply tacked on a most significant byte to the IP and subnet octets and be fucking done with it.

Dixons to shutter 92 UK Carphone Warehouse shops after profit warning

ForthIsNotDead
Stop

No case/need for a bricks-and-mortar phone shop anymore.

Just don't need it.

If I don't have to get off my toilet to order a flat-screen telly, a laptop, or pizza, I don't see why I shouldn't do the same for a phone.

My last phone purchase was a Motorola Moto G 5S which I bought from John Lewis for £250 contract free. It has an 8 core processor. Absolutely fucking brilliant. Delivered to my door. Popped in my SIM and turned it on.

Prior to that, my previous phone purchase was a SECOND HAND Samsung. The wife was horrified. She's such a snob!

Anyway, the "shops" one needs to visit these days are supermarkets (and even they deliver now) and chip and kebab shops. And even THEY deliver now.

Might as well stay on the toilet.

US judge won't budge over Facebook's last-minute bid to 'derail' facial biometrics trial

ForthIsNotDead
Big Brother

The real reason Facebook don't want to go to court is:

It's the largest spying network on the planet, with back-door access provided to NSA, FBI, CIA, and their British equivalents (at least).

They have totally un-fettered access to the largest global surveillance network there has ever been. If there is even the slightest chance that FB will no longer be able to store biometric data without explicit consent, then FB will be directed by the dark shadowy smoking-man types to stay the fuck out of court.

That's where this whole thing comes from.

The future of radio may well be digital, but it won't survive on DAB

ForthIsNotDead

I know the exact area you are talking about. When looking at it on a map, it's very sparsely populated, hence one could imagine that it's not really going to be an important for DAB coverage. On the other hand, it's the main route between England and Scotland FFS! Sort it out!

On the plus side: I drive from Aberdeen to Durham and back every week along the A1, and DAB Radio6 works flawlessly all the way. Perfect.

Microsoft, Google: We've found a fourth data-leaking Meltdown-Spectre CPU hole

ForthIsNotDead
Facepalm

Sing like it's 1985...

I want my... I want my... I want my Motorola 68000.

Virtue singing – Spotify to pull hateful songs and artists

ForthIsNotDead
FAIL

Dire Straits Banned

The service has defined hateful as “content that expressly and principally promotes, advocates, or incites hatred or violence against a group or individual based on characteristics, including, race, religion, gender identity, sex, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, veteran status, or disability.”

"See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup?

Yeah buddy, that's his own hair!

That little faggot got his own jet airplane.

That little faggot he's a millionaire."

Of course, the fact that Knopfler was being ironic will be lost to the baying mobs, just as it was lost to the baying mobs in Canada.

Hacking train Wi-Fi may expose passenger data and control systems

ForthIsNotDead
Pint

Re: Security researcher clickbait

@Starace

Thank you - that saved me quite a bit of typing. Have a beer!

NASA will send tiny helicopter to Mars

ForthIsNotDead
Alien

I do have to wonder...

...why all this interest in Mars? What about our moon? Why is NASA not working on colonising our moon? We're spending a lot of money, man-power, and human intelligence on sending vehicles to Mars, when we have the moon on our doorstep, cosmologically speaking.

IBM bans all removable storage, for all staff, everywhere

ForthIsNotDead
Thumb Down

Note to self:

Never work for IBM.

Glibc 'abortion joke' diff tiff leaves Richard Stallman miffed

ForthIsNotDead
FAIL

Fail

I'm not a fan of Stallman the man, but his contribution to free software speaks for itself.

That said, perhaps the virtue-signalling bell-end that is advocating removal of this comment from the source would find his time much more productively spent if he focused his efforts on the Mexico City government's effort to ban the actual *discussion* of abortion.

Prick.

More Brits have access to 1Gbps speeds than those failing to muster 10Mbps – Ofcom report

ForthIsNotDead
Stop

WAIT

The Beatles split up?

RIP: Sinclair ZX Spectrum designer Rick Dickinson reaches STOP

ForthIsNotDead
Pint

A legacy for all time...

Only relatively few of us get to really make an impact in society in some way. Famous scientists, engineers (Brunel, etc.), politicians (spit), and rock stars. Most of us will shuffle off of this mortal coil having had a full life, being loved and missed by our family, and... well that's about it. And nothing wrong with that.

Then there are people like Rick Dickinson, who, through their talents, tenacity, and hard work, actually produce something that not only benefits an entire generation, but serves to live on long after the man himself has passed.

And so it is with Rick Dickinson. I'm sure his family and friends will miss him very much, but I hope they can take some comfort from the fact that the work he produced, while not being the cure for Malaria, really did benefit a generation of people, and his memory will not only live on in the hearts and minds of his loved ones, but also the hearts and minds of those that benefitted from his work in those heady heady days of the home computer revolution.

Rest now, Rick. You've done your bit. Bravo.

Bravo.

Who will fix our Internal Banking Mess? TSB hires IBM amid online banking woes

ForthIsNotDead
FAIL

So TSB's answer is to throw more people at at it.

Outsiders, that had nothing to do with building the system, no less. Clearly, nobody in TSB manglement has read The Mythical Man Month. Ironic, since it was written by a former (and highly respected) IBMer.

Blighty stuffs itself in Galileo airlock and dares Europe to pull the lever

ForthIsNotDead
WTF?

How?

How are they going to switch off access to god knows how many millions of sat navs and mobile devices in the British Isles? Physically, how are they going to do that?

GPS devices don't authenticate in anyway with the satellites. They're listen only. Are they going to send a man into space and have him physically move the dish to put the UK "in the shade". Are they going to change the orientation of the satellite to do the same thing? If they do, what effect will that have to GPS accuracy on the ground throughout Europe? It certainly will have *some* affect.

The whole thing sounds like a lot of bollocks to me. I mean, what are they going to do? Change the bloody password on the satellites?

GTF outta here!

Academics: Shutting down Facebook API damages research, oversight, competition

ForthIsNotDead
Mushroom

Burn it.

Burn it with fire.

Fuck Facebook, and the academics too. Get off your lazy fat arses and do some proper research, like, oh, I dunno, curing cancer.

Social media shouldn't even be a thing, much less "studied" by a bunch of pink-haired social-studies communist hippies.

Fuck the fucking lot of them.

Can you tell I had a shit drive to work this morning?

Russians poised to fire intercontinental ballistic missile... into space with Sentinel-3 sat on board

ForthIsNotDead
Joke

So if it goes boom...

...can we blame it on the Russians? ;-)

Facebook can't admit the truth, says data-slurp boffin Kogan

ForthIsNotDead

@AC

"Let's be realistic. They might have had a marginal effect, but Trump got elected because there is a large sector of US society that is pretty stupid."

Changed to:

Let's be realistic. They might have had a marginal effect, but Trump got elected because there is a large sector of US society that is pretty pissed off with establishment politicians.

You're welcome.

The tech you're reading these words on – you have two Dundee uni boffins to thank for that

ForthIsNotDead
Pint

Thank you dear author...

...for this most excellent article.

And very best wishes to LeCombers widow and family. At long last his talent and skill has been recognised. Have pride in his memory.

God bless.

Brit bank TSB TITSUP* after long-planned transfer of customer records from Lloyds

ForthIsNotDead
FAIL

Wow

What a cluster fuck.

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

ForthIsNotDead
Joke

You're wrong about the Sinclair BASIC thing...

...FAR more people have used Sinclair BASIC than have ever used a M$ mobile 'phone ;-)

BT pushes ahead with plans to switch off telephone network

ForthIsNotDead
Unhappy

Just imagine...

You and your lovely wife are out for a romantic long-weekend in the Scottish Highlands. It's been years since you had any quality time together, what with bringing up the kids and working all the hours that God sends. But hey, the kids are older now, and the grandparents are delighted to spend a little time with their grandchildren, so this trip is just the ticket.

The weather, however is terrible. Gale-force winds and punishing, driving rain, and the late hour are doing their best to take the shine off the occasion, but both your spirits remain high. It's only another mile to the holiday cottage that you've rented, so there's no way you're stopping now.

On the B874, between Janetstown and Shebster, with the wipers on maximum, peering through a semi-fogged screen, you hit the brakes hard when you suddenly notice an old broken farm trailer, abandoned at the side of the road. It's clearly been there for years. The front of the trailer is parked well enough, but the back end is hanging out over the verge, into the road.

Screeching tires, a terrifying smashing sound, sparks, and then... Black.

You awake goodness knows how many minutes later. Or was it hours? A nasty cut on your head has already started to congeal. It hurts, but you'll be alright. You look to the passenger side.

"Are you alright Sarah?"

"Sarah?"

"Sarah, can you hear me? Are you okay?"

Silence.

Gently, you turn her head towards you. The left side of her head is smashed in. Eye socket gone. Massive blood-loss. The trailer bed had come through the windscreen and... well, you know the rest.

You check her pulse. Yes! She's alive. Okay. Hold it together. It's important not to panic. You know where you are because you're only a mile away from the house and you have the address in your wallet.

You reach for your mobile phone. 999.

Nothing happens.

Shit! No signal.

Now what? You look around for lights. There must be a house somewhere near. It's only 9pm. Somebody will still be up.

Nothing.

"There's nothing for it", you say to yourself. "I'm going to have to get to the cottage and raise the alarm myself".

You set out into the howling wind, leaving the hazard warning lights on.

After about 15 minutes you reach the cottage. Well, presumably this is the right cottage. You slip the key into the lock. The lock turns! Yes! Stepping into the hall you find the lightswitch and turn on the hallway light. Nothing. Damn it. There must be a power cut.

Using the light on your mobile you find the phone on an old-fashioned three-legged corner-table just behind the living room door.

You pick up the phone. Wait for the dial tone.

And wait.

And wait.

You check the phone socket on the wall. It's one of those new VOIP RJ45 phone sockets, and right next to it, under the phone, on the floor is the router, plugged neatly into the phone and a nearby mains socket.

And there's a power-cut.

That's when you realise. You are alone. Totally alone. The only thing that can now possibly keep your wife alive, is you.

Super Cali health inspectors: Tesla blood awoke us

ForthIsNotDead
Pint

Best headline...

... and by-line I've seen in a long time.

Beer to author and/or editor.

Bravo!

Microsoft has designed an Arm Linux IoT cloud chip. Repeat, an Arm Linux IoT cloud chip

ForthIsNotDead

DROP

It'll be dropped after a couple of years, just like a lot of M$ other products, leaving adopters high and dry.

Avoid.

Scotland: Get tae f**k on 10Mbps Broadband USO

ForthIsNotDead

Well, you can add Dyce, Aberdeen to the list of crap speeds...

If I want to upload a longish HD video to YouTube, it is LITERALLY quicker to put it on an SD card, and mail it to a relative in England, and get them to do it.

No bullshit.

'Housemate from hell' catches 24 new charges after alleged nightmare cyberstalking spree

ForthIsNotDead

Long may he rot

This guys sounds one, maybe two steps away from a serial killer. Just a matter of time.

Long may he rot.

Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte creating app to register 3m EU nationals living in Brexit Britain

ForthIsNotDead
Facepalm

WTF?

It is intended to condense the 85-page permanent residency application into a 10 to 20-minute process involving an applicant scanning in their passport and national insurance number to an online or phone app.

And you need six agencies to do that, do you?

I could develop that system - the front-end app, and the back-office systems, with six blokes using nothing more than open-source software, coffee, and a single office.

It's failed and it hasn't even started yet.

Then again, this is a government project, so I'd need sixteen project managers to liase with all the government departments that each have competing, overlapping, yet contradictory requirements, associated secretaries to help the PMs, and dedicated legal team to negotiate, manage, and track the contract.

So, about 60 people to manage the government, and 6 blokes to write the software.

We're gonna need more coffee.

You know what? Let the six agencies do it!

Fear the Reaper: Man hospitalised after eating red hot chilli pepper

ForthIsNotDead

Not clever...

I know it's seen as a bit of fun, but I was talking to my son who is a paramedic about this subject over the Christmas holidays. It's really not a clever thing to do. The body goes into a form of shock similar to anaphylactic shock - it thinks it's been poisoned - which is exactly what has in fact happened - the body has just ingested a potent toxin. If you're a middle-aged out-of-shape type it can easily induce a heart attack. And guess what, if you've just scoffed one of those chilli's down, aint no one gonna resuscitate you!

Seriously, don't do it!

Spring is all about new beginnings, but it could already be lights out for Windows' Fluent Design

ForthIsNotDead
Facepalm

Microsoft have no clue what they are doing.

Absolutely no clue. Clueless, rudderless company.

Intel outside: Apple 'prepping' non-Chipzilla Macs by 2020 (stop us if you're having deja vu)

ForthIsNotDead

Good riddance

I long for the demise of the x86. I have to take my hat off to Intel though. When you can run old machine code written for an 8086 on a modern Intel CPU, that's pretty fucking impressive.

But at the same time, it's pretty fucking dumb, too. I do wonder how much progress has been arrested by having the planet married to a processor that, even today, has some DNA from a 1976 8086 in it. How many transistors are there to just make the thing 8086 compatible? It's bonkers.

I'm looking forward to owning a non-intel/non-intel-clone laptop so that I can get back to assembly language. I've written assembly language code on a variety of cpus over the years, but the one I could not stand was the Intel stuff (it was a 286 when I was looking at it) and it's a LOT harder to write assembler on a modern x86 (apparently - I haven't done it). I've assembly language on ARM M0 CPUs and it was quite nice.

Please no Basic Instinct flashing, HPE legal eagles warn staffers

ForthIsNotDead

Re: Can be embarassing

Speak for yourself. I'm 47, but when it comes to that sort of thing, I'm 18. If the goods are on show, I'm looking.

Lots.

I realise that's not the politically correct accepted viewpoint in todays mad world, but there it is.

ForthIsNotDead
Coat

This will be why...

...I never really found a Stephen Hawking presentation particularly engaging.

(just a joke friends, may the world's biggest genius finally find some very much deserved peace).

Happy as Larry: Why Oracle won the Google Java Android case

ForthIsNotDead
Facepalm

@el kabong:

As much as you may not like to recognise it, it's the serial litigators that safeguard your job by protecting their intellectual property, so that they can continue to have a successful company, and pay your wages.

ForthIsNotDead

Re: As usual Andrew hates Google

@Captain Hogwash:

What monopolies? Do you mean a company that has spent millions developing a product? Is Microsoft a monopoly? Is SAP a monopoly? How about Oracle?

If I produce a software product, and it becomes hugely, massively successful, that is not a monopoly. It's a successful product. Other people are still free to produce competing products.

Better still, if YOU produce a software product, and it becomes hugely, massively successful, having spent all the money on its development, upkeep, marketing, staffing costs, salesman costs, pension contributions etc., would you be okay with me *effectively* copying it (by copying your API) and either massively undercutting you, or (worse) giving it away for free, rendering your product worthless overnight?

Would you just walk away and say "Oh well, fair enough?" and walk away, or would you fight.

Larry, as much as I think he's a twat, decided to fight, naturally. And so would I.

And so would you.

ForthIsNotDead

Re: As usual Andrew hates Google

Duncan, this is a large rant, so you may want to skip it! :-)

The impact is clear: If you want to make a compatible version of my operating system, and in so doing, take advantage of the money that I have spent in developing it in the first place, marketing it, and generally doing everything I can to make it successful (to the point that it becomes an attractive enough target for you) then get a fucking licence. It's as simple as that.

It all depends on which side of the fence you're sitting on. We're all using descendants of the IBM PC. The IBM PC BIOS was re-created "clean-room" style and that led to the demise of the IBM PC, and the rise of the compatibles. That's great if you're Compaq, but shit if you're IBM which has spent literally millions (possibly a billion or more in todays money?) to develop it, develop business software for it, and bring it to market.

Imagine you are a Microsoft developer working on Microsoft on Windows. Then a company comes along and says "Hey, we've independently produced our own operating system that is totally compatible with Windows, and we're giving it away for free! You're welcome!". How would you feel to see the company you work for brought down? Would you just say "Ah well, that's the way it goes, I suppose!"? In the Sun/Oracle and Google case nobody was brought down, so it's not quite oranges and oranges, but you see my point, right?

The API is the be-all-and-end-all of all commercial software. Measured in dollars or pounds, a function prototype is FAR more valuable than the code in the function itself, because it's the function prototype that is the key to a competitor (previously, prior to this ruling) effectively stealing your lunch. Not your product, but your income. Fuck that.

Of course, the companies themselves are partially to blame. Perhaps they (Sun) could have avoided this mess by simply copyrighting the API explicitly. I dunno. Sun was lead by a fucking clueless hippy that should have never been in the position he was in.

As far as hating Google is concerned, fucking right! They, and Facebook are literally the planets' masters at taking things that other people produce, monetising it, and paying nothing for it. Be that the information you produce as a living human going about your everyday life, or copying every fucking book on the planet, or the millions/billions of copyrighted videos and music on YouTube that they earn from, but the producers earn nothing from.

They are a cancer on earth, and the sooner they are gone, preferably in a large mushroom cloud, Terminator style, the better. When they are not stealing your earnings by providing free access to your copyrighted material that you sweated over to write, record, produce, and publish, they are buying companies that are producing autonomous killing machines, designed to hunt humans and kill them.

"Don't be evil" my big fat hairy fucking arse. They are Earth cancer, plain and simple.

</rant>

What a mesh: BT Whole Home Wi-Fi users moan over update

ForthIsNotDead
Coat

I'd just like to say...

...that the Sky router supplied to me by Sky is absolutely perfect and works just fine.

Linux Foundation backs new ‘ACRN’ hypervisor for embedded and IoT

ForthIsNotDead

Re: Balony

I think what is really annoying me about this article, or, rather, the people behind this "Hypervisor for Embedded" nonsense is it appears to originate from people who have literally no fucking idea what they are talking about. They have heard of functional safety, they maybe know a bit about embedded, and are now talking themselves up as some sort of (self-appointed) experts on automotive automation with a new shiny that is really great and you-don't-know-you-need-it-yet-but-trust-us-you-really-do "technology.

Pah. Spare me. I'm too old for this shit!

Their approach (which seems to be a thinly veiled attempt at promoting x86 technology, you know, those really reliable, secure CPUs which are not at all affected by the recently discovered Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities) is based on added complexity, when, in actual fact, one of the FIRST things an engineer/engineering team does when it starts a projects is to say to itself "How much programmable complexity can we DO AWAY with?".

When you are working on SIL rated projects (I haven't worked directly in automotive, my experience is in 61508 on pipelines, subsea wells etc.), one of the first rounds of the design exercise (post requirements gathering and review) is to say "From the solution that is *beginning* to emerge, what portions of the solution currently use programmable technology, and of those, what proportions can we remove and replace with mechanical/electrical/discrete replacements?" The emergent answer feeds back into the front end and you have another round. This is not news to anyone that has worked in this kind of thing. Automotive, aeronautical, shipping, rail, national infrastructure etc. design engineers have been doing this now for literally decades.

Software is shit. We're trying to engineer it OUT. Not engineer it IN.

Idiots.

The presumptive stupidity of it. Yes! What we need is a Linux OS (with x bugs and y vulnerabilities) and a Hypervisor running on top of it (with k bugs and m vulnerabilities) and we should build our automotive software on that. Yes, of course! And not only that, but run it all on the same box. Fuck it. Why not?! What could possibly go wrong?

Such idiocy. I thought it was April 1st for a moment!

ForthIsNotDead

Re: Future in-car computers

Thank you for writing this. I'm still raging at the utter stupidity of this!

ForthIsNotDead
Mushroom

Balony

"Today, cars have several computers linked over a bus. It’s widely envisaged that future cars will have one computer running a hypervisor to isolate workloads, an arrangement that will mean fewer integration hassles and lower costs for auto-makers. ACRN likes that idea, but thinks a hypervisor used in such scenarios needs to prioritise workloads related to safety."

There's so much fail here I hardly know where to begin.

It’s widely envisaged that future cars will have one computer running a hypervisor to isolate workloads

No it isn't. It just isn't. If you go to your chief engineer and say "Hey, I've done a design whereby the ABS, Engine Management, economy and emissions management, air conditioning and ICE can all run on one box" you will literally get laughed out of the office. They run on different systems for a reason. One of the reasons is certain clauses in the standards MANDATE it. The other reason is redundancy. If the engine management system develops a hardware fault, do you want your ABS to fail at the same time? Common failure modes is another consideration. Utter nonsense.

an arrangement that will mean fewer integration hassles and lower costs for auto-makers.

Again nonsense. After years of doing this sort of thing, I can tell you that it's FAR easier to "integrate" your application, and my application, at two ends of a wire of fibre-optic connection, running an agreed protocol. That way, if your code has a memory leak and the watchdog reboots it every few days, my system keeps running, and the clue that your system faulted and mine didn't indicates perhaps an un-caught exception in your code, or memory leak etc. When they are all running on the same silicon, everyone points their fingers at everyone else.

This is fairy-tale land, nuclear levels of bollocks. All engineering best-practices, refined and improved over decades, thrown out. It's like a marketing press release and The Register just re-posted it!

but thinks a hypervisor used in such scenarios needs to prioritise workloads related to safety.

Yes, because embedded application developers have never ever ever developed our own, application specific, extremely low latency, extremely simple (sometimes just a few assembly instructions) task switchers and schedulers. We've never heard of time-slicing micro-kernals. No. What we really really need is a fucking entire Linux OS with a Hypervisor between us and the hardware.

Yep. We need that. More of that, please.

FFS.

ForthIsNotDead
Thumb Down

Embedded

This is hardly embedded. Intel, get back to me when you can produce an embedded IoT project that runs UDP protocol, can run for 3 years on 2 AA batteries, and monitor a reservoir in all-year-round conditions. Oh, and the compiled binary is < 32KB. We do that all the time here, but we're coding in Forth for embedded and embedded mission-critical applications.

The libraries that we use have been developed and tested over a decade or so (and only amount to approx. 3KB compiled) and the entire application is small enough to be written, understood, and documented by exactly one human.

Intel will never be able to do embedded in a million years. It's too "small" for them. They, like most companies, will chuck a large room-full of coders at a project and tell them (or, rather, their lower layers of management that will look after said room-full of coders) to produce something "small, agile, and robust, for IoT", and after many man-years of development, they will design something that runs on Linux, thus at a minimum requires an Intel x86 with half a gig of RAM, storage, and associated power budget.

Embedded my big fat (grey) hairy arse.

It's nonsense. Literally non-sense. It might be cool, and probably work quite well, but please don't hijack the "embedded" moniker, 'cause embedded it isn't.

A fucking hypervisor running in an embedded system FFS. A bunch of us guys in the office are all reading this article in open-mouthed disbelief, I can tell you!

Such nonsense!

Private Internet Access VPN opens code-y sarong, starting with Chrome extension

ForthIsNotDead

Re: Why not openVPN?

I pay for PIA but use their openVPN servers.

Where I can I find more info about this? I'm a PIA customer, and their client is rubbish! (Though it does work just fine).

ForthIsNotDead

Well...

Given that the Linux client for PrivateInternetAccess is ONE-HUNDRED-AND-TWENTY-SIX-FUCKING-MEGABYTES (and that's the COMPRESSED TAR, before you unpack it and install it) then that's a mighty fuck-ton of code they're gonna be sharing.

Facebook confirms Cambridge Analytica harvested profile data

ForthIsNotDead
Thumb Up

Massive irony overload...

I love how The Reg just put it out there with no additional comment, because, well, no additional comment is necessary (emphasis added by me):

He set up a similar firm called Eunoia Technologies to do more ethical marketing, taking a copy of the data with him...

Wow!

Facebook suspends account of Cambridge Analytica whistleblower

ForthIsNotDead

It's free market.

If Facebook don't fix this and Facebook has been used to stop a party getting elected (e.g. the democrats) then what will the other side do when they eventually get into power?

It's a free market. Both Republicans, AND Democrats (and the Russians) are free to spend their money with Facebook in order to target the electorate.

Or not.

No one is forcing them to do it. Or not to do it.

"Waaa waaa waaaa it's not fair. The Republicans used to Facebook to unfairly swing the election"...

Translation: "The Republican party decided to focus considerable human and financial resources into taking their message to the electorate via the online medium, using Facebook in particular."

It's as simple as that. I don't see how it's any different to a TV campaign, I really don't. We may not like it very much, but either side using it as a platform is a non-event as far as I'm concerned. Of *course* they are going to use it. You'd be an idiot not to!

ForthIsNotDead

Why is it a good thing...

...when governments use Facebook to run campaigns to educate on issues such as gun violence, and a bad thing when political parties (on either side of the political spectrum) use Facebook to attempt to convince people of the merits of a particular political party or issue?

Both are using Facebook for the VERY THING it was designed for. The biggest human database on earth.

Seriously: Ask yourself: Who *isn't* going to use it?

That's what it's there for. That's it's raison d'etre. All this faux outrage when a marketing company uses the biggest database in the world to get data and execute its programme on the Facebook platform... Bollocks. Please. Spare us. The mock outrage by Facebook. The denials. Fuck off. That's what you're there for you asshats.

Windows 10 to force you to use Edge, even if it isn't default browser

ForthIsNotDead
Stop

Re: Fucking idiots

It's like the 90s never happened.

For the pointy-haired MBA-toting millennials that are now in charge at MS, the 90's literally didn't happen, because they were still in nappies when Netscape was suing Microsoft.

They'll learn.

Maybe.

This made me laugh out loud:

"...Edge is the best, most secure browser on Windows 10."

Err... Right... Okay then...

Patent quality has fallen, confirm Euro examiners

ForthIsNotDead
Unhappy

This is a difficult problem to solve...

I can't think of a solution that is going to be wholly tenable to both sides, unfortunately.

I mean, on the one side, as a patent examiner, you want plenty of time to the appropriate due-diligence in order that you can be sure you have taken all reasonable precautions when a decision on the application is made.

On the other side, if you are a company that has literally spent millions, maybe billions, developing a technology, you want your patent as quickly as possible so that you can put your product on the market and begin to recoup the costs.

On that note: A note to corporations: We should not lose sight of what patents were originally invented for. They were invented to allow a company/individual an opportunity to recoup development costs. That's the entire point of a patent. They are not there (or, at least, it was never the intention) to provide profit-making opportunities through technological monopolies. Though of course, it's inevitable that that would happen.

Apple and your "rounded edges" on mobile phones: I'm looking at you, you total twats.

We're between a rock and a hard place on patents, it seems.

Openreach hiring thousands more engineers

ForthIsNotDead
Unhappy

Yes, that's a tidy sum isn't it...

And will they reduce the line rental charges when all upgrade work is done, and those engineers get the boot back to the dole queue?

No.