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* Posts by John Lilburne

1026 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Dec 2009

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User needed 40-minute lesson in turning it off and turning it on again

John Lilburne

Hmmm!

A few years, systems had setup a new windows workstation for me. It had been running 24/7 for about 10 months. Xmas came and I'd taken some extra days so someone shut it down on the 24th. On 2nd January I came in and it took me several minutes scroffling about under the desk to locate the damn power switch, if fact it was a colleague that pointed out that the button next to the DVD drive was the power button.

Then there was the time I was talking to some tech support about a bit of kit that need jumpers reconfigured. I'd taken the thing down stairs so that I could fiddle with it whilst on the phone. Eventually he says OK plug in now and see if it starts up. So I pulled the plug that was in the socket out and plug the bit of kit in. Naturally the plug I'd pulled out was powering the phone. Fortunately the thing powered up OK.

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And with one stroke, Trump killed the Era of Slacktivism

John Lilburne

Unfortunately Google already ...

... have a seat in Trumps transition team.

oshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government.

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/15/google-gets-a-seat-on-the-trump-transition-team/

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UK Home Secretary signs off on Lauri Love's extradition to US

John Lilburne
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they should not be at the level where a lone person like Love can penetrate their system to the extent that he supposedly did.

Only one of them needs to be lucky. The problem is that the Love's of this world have an endless amount of time to screw about. Once in a system like the FBI there is no telling what data they may extract, personal details of crime victims, or informants. The result is that a large amount of money and time is spent trying to keep the little bastards out. What if they were in your home system ferreting about, do you know for sure that you don't have any sensitive data on it. Young and immature hackers know for sure that they aren't supposed to be doing this, its why they call themselves hackers, and Love at 31 is certainly neither young nor immature.

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John Lilburne
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No it didn't occur in the UK, it occurred in the USA. He wasn't hacking computers in London, he was hacking computers in New York.

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Pythons Idle and Cleese pen anti-selfie screed

John Lilburne
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Re: Blame the people not the technology

I was perplexed to watch them spend the first 10 minutes of the journey staring into their phones held at arm's length tilting their heads from side to side and puckering their lips to get a picture they liked.

They can do that for ages and ages apparently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1XwvCxVPTc

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McDonald's sues Italian city for $20m after being burger-blocked

John Lilburne
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Re: I haven't been to Florence

I have and even in the tourist areas (we were based near the Medici Chapel) the price of food was OK, equivalent to what you'd pay in the UK. Something in the region of 15-18 euros would get some very nice indeed.

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John Lilburne
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Re: Its not just American tourists

"I read that France, home of snooty cooking traditions, is actually McDonald's best market per capita, even more so than America."

In Paris they tend to stick them in between brothels and sex cinemas which is rather appropriate - must remember to process that image.

OTOH in Egypt they tend to stick them so that you can see them through the columns of Karnak Temple, which isn't.

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John Lilburne

There is an effing ...

... McDonald's less than 600m from Piazza del Duomo

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Celeb-backed music TV phallus Electric Jukebox finally ready for launch

John Lilburne

Well I'm one of those that won't have a smart phone

However, I'm not going to pay £52 a year for a streaming service when I have all the music I want on CDs and on the LAN. Simply none of these services contain much of the music I listen to, and I have a vast collection of stuff from years of buying CDs and Albums. Will it contain any ECM albums? If Eicher still holds out 6+ years already then no it won't.

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Julian Assange to be interviewed by Swedish rape prosecutors

John Lilburne

A match made in heaven

"Assange has: taken to ranting on Twitter at all hours of the day and night!"

Assange and Trump - Ah sooooo cute. Well after they give Trump his twitter account back that is.

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Twitterstorm erupts over suspected murder of record-breaking earthworm

John Lilburne
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Re: I'm glad to watch, once again...

I recall a sequence of photos on some entomology forum thread. The first image was of a bee. The second post of the dissected wings, then came the genitalia. Caused a stir amongst the critter lovers on the forum. LOL.

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Hell Desk's 800 number was perfect for horrible heavy-breathing harassment calls

John Lilburne

Dunno about phone calls but ...

... our manager once put a link to a competitors website into an internal document. Some months later the competitor had abandoned the website, and clicking on the link resulted in hardcore porn.

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Exit through the Gift Shop? US copyright chief was assigned to shop till, tweeting

John Lilburne

Google is not essential ...

... I would suggest that people turn it off.

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Murder in the Library of Congress

John Lilburne
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Re: And how does that affect you?

I seem to recall that 50 years passed before LoTR was turned into a film. And some 10-15 years after first publishing before it became something other than a cult book in the 1960s-1970s.

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John Lilburne
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Re: If giving power to Google is the price of removing it from Disney, I'm all for it!

That is the type of argument one would expect from a turnip, though turnips probably have more sense. Disney doesn't tack you every movement, it doesn't track your reading habits, it doesn't track your listening habits, it doesn't scan your emails, and yet you whine about a cartoon character. Numpty!

A book that that was published 20 years ago can be bought for pennies, and have you actually seen those Google transcribed books. The quality of many that I've seen has been atrocious.

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John Lilburne

Let us not forget that ...

... pursuing a federal copyright claim is almost impossible for the individual. However, Pallante has also recommended that certain infringements could take place in the small claims court. IOW that the Grand Theft Copyright (Google) could be on the hook for millions of $1000 claims based on their penchant to purloin the work of others.

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Paid Wikipedia-fiddling on wheels

John Lilburne

Their editor numbers have plummetted.

Most of it is now done by turd polishing bots. Conversions of foreign language pages by AI with less intelligence than a log of wood. Scaping of gazette databases "Xstan is a village in Iran with 5 familes. The head man is very nice." Scraping from sports almanacs "Joesph Blight played football with Tesco under 21's in the 3rd division of the Truro league for two games in 1972"

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

John Lilburne
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Re: Maybe..

'Problem is proving that the USERS/Owners suffered at all.'

Apparently it took down GitHub, Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, AirBnb so the world actually got smarter.

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

John Lilburne
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Re: Scams?

No. But the belief that it is "falling for the biggest scam ever" is.

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Spinal Tap’s bass player sues former French sewer

John Lilburne
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Re: Best comedy of all time?

Not if you are Donald Trump. If they are funny about you then they are part of a huge EVUL media conspiracy.

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Social media flame wars to be illegal, says top Crown prosecutor

John Lilburne
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Re: John Smith

Isn't the issue creating an account on tindr or grindr along with someone's phone number. IOW the sort of shite that arseholes do.

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My Nest smoke alarm was great … right up to the point it went nuts

John Lilburne
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Re: Why would anyone have thought IoT was a good thing?

Why? Its an example of the more superfluous electronics there are, there are more things there are that can go wrong. It isn't the traction control that has gone wrong, its the test system checking that it is working that has gone TITSUP. Similarly its not the smoke detector that has gone wrong its the tests that are checking that it is working correctly that has gone TITSUP.

I put an electronic timer on the immersion heater a couple of years ago, after three months it stopped switching, replaced it with a new one that went gaga too. So no hot water because the electronic switch has failed. Got a manual timer and its been working flawlessly for the last year (the previous mechanical one worked for over 20 years).

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John Lilburne
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Re: Headlights that steer around corners

"Those are not new."

Maybe ones that work are?

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John Lilburne

Why would anyone have thought IoT was a good thing?

Just think of all the crap we have to put up with with the electronic gizmos in our cars. Electronic handbrake goes tits up £1000 to fix it, and your going nowhere buster until its fixed. Water slashed on a traction control sensor and suddenly the car has as much power as a milk float, sod it if its 0200 in the morning, your 100 miles from home, and you've got to get over the Newbury bypass.

The list goes on and on. We know these things screw up, we know that they do so at the most inconvenient time, and we know that fixing them is going to require the sacrifice of your first born.

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What's not to love about IoT – you can spy on customers as they arrive

John Lilburne
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Re: "If those databases continue to be siloed, you will not generate the right outcome,”

Since some bean countered decided to try and make monet from it.

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‘Andromeda’ will be Google’s Windows NT

John Lilburne

Damn and blast

My cats is called Andromeda. Now every time it barfs it will remind me of Google.

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Buggy code to the left of me, perfect source to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with EU

John Lilburne
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Re: Gotta lurve the EU.

'Oh, we have a mad Russian in the basement with a minicomputer. Lord knows what he is doing.'

If that is so then 10:1 it will be impenetrable code, using single letter variable names, with zero comments, it will have duplicated a large part of the existing runtime code, and exploited undocumented side effects in the rest.

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FCC keeps secret Google TV landgrab under wraps forever

John Lilburne

Why haven't PK leaked ...

... the document. After all that are called "Public Knowledge" and they've leaked every other document that has come into their possession that is contrary to their paymaster's (Google) benefit.

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Apple's Breaxit scandal: Frenchman smashes up €50,000 of iThings with his big metal balls

John Lilburne

Should have done in a MS store 'cos as Emmeline Pankhurst explained "The smashing of windows is a time on honoured method of expressing displeasure ..." http://strikemag.org/the-argument-of-the-broken-window-pane/

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Alleged German YouTube-to-MP3 ripper sued by labels

John Lilburne
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Re: How is that supposed to work ?

Do the audio-stream rippers sell into the US?

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John Lilburne
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Re: How is that supposed to work ?

Tit-for-tat. Germany rules that it has jurisdiction over the US (well in fact the world)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/18/outcry_against_flickr_censorship/

Indeed because the internet occurs worldwide all national jurisdictions apply. Whether one can enforce judgement or not is another matter. Though there is always the possibility of extraditing the alleged culprit.

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But is it safe? Uncork a bottle of vintage open-source FUD

John Lilburne

Have you learnt nothing over the years?

One of the main problems with OS software is that it decays. OK maybe not with Linux or Apache but other stuff? So you've found some OS software that does its job today, but next year the developers are off doing something else and what you have is abandoned ware. Maybe you don't notice this has happened, after all you have no maintenance renewal, indeed nothing to indicate that the software has tumble weeds blowing through it. Have security flaws been found in it? Does it use other bits of OS code that was found to be pwned? You really don't know.

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Ofcom punts network-sniffing Android app

John Lilburne

Waste of bloody time ...

... the utility companies are rolling out smart metres which don't work in not-spot. Why don't ofcom just ask them where it is that the bloody things don't work? Much easier and quicker and no wifi snoopage required.

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HP Inc: No DRM in our 3D printers, we swear (unlike our 2D ones)

John Lilburne

Tricky ...

... 3D printing it is.

Way back in time it used to be possible to do colour film printing but there were so many variables involved that by the time you had managed to get the development time correct and removed the colour cast, you'd either run out of developer and needed to mix up another batch or you'd run out of paper and needed to open another packet. All of which meant that you needed to go back through the test printing and colour cast removal process.

For most people what you get most of the time out of 3d printing is an amorphous blob of plastic. You need controlled inputs into the process (industry) otherwise your cheapo printing material is going to end up producing expensive junk.

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Facebook's AI boss is on a mission to end spoon-fed machine intelligence

John Lilburne

Tanks in Poland

"it’ll help researchers build more intelligent machines, and maybe a deeper understanding of human intelligence and the underlying mechanisms of learning."

We heard all of this. Their AIs remain crap in most situations. See this latest Google AI crap:

https://www.wired.com/2016/09/inside-googles-internet-justice-league-ai-powered-war-trolls/

You can test it out here:

https://wikidetox.appspot.com/

Though it may have been the input of wikipedia that made it as crap as it is:

"Our tanks will cross into Poland at dawn"

not attack: 0.96

attack: 0.04

aggressive: 0.01

neutral: 0.98

friendly: 0.00

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R2D2 delivery robots to scurry through the streets of San Francisco

John Lilburne
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Looks capable of carrying a load of explosive and shrapnell, remotely into crowded spaces. OTOH:

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--5ghxisXZ--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/1370872643588849068.jpg

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UK copyright troll weeps, starts 20-week stretch in the cooler for beating up Uber driver

John Lilburne
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Re: 20 wks in prison! He's a kid for fucks sake!

If the joke is meant to be referencing whines over copyright conviction then the law applies to all equally. The age ofg criminal responsibilty starts at age 10. Whether you are 20 or 40 you don't go kicking someone and you don't go ripping off some musician, photog, or film maker either.

Being a director of some company is no excuse, and neither is Aspergers, or Hipsterism.

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Video service Binge On 'broke the internet' but 99pc of users love it

John Lilburne
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Re: Yeah, brilliant!!

Idiot your smart phone can't display 4K and your eyes can't resolve it.

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Forgive me, father, for I have used an ad-blocker on news websites...

John Lilburne
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Re: I added the TheRegsiter to whitelist

TheReg is not too bad. I have ABP whitelist it, and Deleteme. Though I notice that Ghostery is still blocking 2 advertising trackers (Data Point Media, and Google Publisher Tags), 3 social media thingies, and Google Analytics.

When sites use non-Google ad networks I'll consider whitelisting more of them.

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Jakarta be kidding me! Google gets $400m tax bill from Indonesia

John Lilburne

Gubmint need to re-learn howto ...

... apply the winkle pin. Its well past the time that these corporations were allowed to remain skulking in the cracks between jurisdictions.

https://littlelessonslearned.com/2012/06/05/lesson-55-how-to-eat-a-winkle/

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Dark web drug sellers shutter location-tracking EXIF data from photos

John Lilburne
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Re: where a photograph was taken

I suspect that most of these things are taken on a smartphone which does have GPS. It is surprising how many devices these days have GPS and imaging capabilities. GPS tagging of photos isn't so much of a gimmick for most people either. If they are using services like flickr the GPS data will position the images on maps. Knowing exactly where something was taken can be useful. Whilst I certainly wouldn't want GPS data on images I've taken at home if I'm out and about photographing insects in woodland, meadows, and marshes the GPS data is important for the county recorders. When abroad GPS data could be useful as a reminder that a particular sequence of images where taken at location AAa not at AAb.

GPS data has some uses but one needs to be careful as to whether to include it in any images uploaded to the web.

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John Lilburne

First rule when getting a camera ...

... turn the GPS location thing off. Had to laugh a couple of years ago when some kid posted images of his pride and joy to wikipedia Commons complete with GPS data that located his bedroom.

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You should install smart meters even if they're dumb, says flack

John Lilburne

HaHaHa.

We had E.ON around the other month to install one. Seems they needed a mobile signal connection. Tough you only get mobile signal in our village if you stand on the cistern in the pub's loo. Installer shrugged and beat a retreat.

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Google-funded group mad that US Copyright Office hasn't abolished copyright yet

John Lilburne

Us peasant need to rebel.

The internet is now in hock to tax avoiding, property stealing, privacy invading, and soul eating tech corporations. Stop uploading stuff that these blood suckers need.

Lets start by demanding an internet free of Google.

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Petulant Facebook claims it can't tell the difference between child abuse and war photography

John Lilburne
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Really! Are you sure about that. On flickr there are 1000s of images of kids without clothes: on beaches, in baths, in backyards, in rivers, in front of mud huts,and in street. Yahoo! tends to be able to tell which are child porn and which are not, they also seem to be able to distinguish between those that are creating favorite collections of 100s of these type of photos and those that may favorite one or two amongst 100s of sunsets, flowers, and kitten images.

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EU court: Linking to pirated stuff doesn't breach copyright... except when it does

John Lilburne
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Re: Umm

Even the most ancient and non-technical of judges can distinguish between "This is an interesting site" and a raft of "download movie X here" links.

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Come in HTTP, your time is up: Google Chrome to shame leaky non-HTTPS sites from January

John Lilburne
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Re: It's pretty minimal cost

"This is to suit Gooogle."

meta name='googlebot' content='noindex'

Range block this little lot at the htaccess level.

64.233.160.0 - 64.233.191.255

66.102.0.0 - 66.102.15.255

66.249.64.0 - 66.249.95.255

72.14.192.0 - 72.14.255.255

74.125.0.0 - 74.125.255.255

209.85.128.0 - 209.85.255.255

216.239.32.0 - 216.239.63.255

Time to turn Google dark.

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John Lilburne
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Re: It's pretty minimal cost

"she will be using a hosting provider which will do all the work for her."

It is pretty damn easy to get a 'little-old-lady.net' domain and have it set up with wordpress or typepad, or something else, she can also have some photo gallert installed too. Godaddy can do it within an hour. Why should 'little-old-lady.net' need certing and fecking about with openssl (a software installation that wasn't needed)?

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John Lilburne
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Re: Dumb idea IMO..

Dunno about selling certificates but they sell ads, and extra costs on websites may make them more likely to signup fort Adsense to reclaim a bit of the cost.

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John Lilburne

Fuck Google and the Adsense Whore they rode in on.

There are a wealth of websites that don't sell shit, don't shove loads of ads all over it, and whether login passwords leak is of no consequence. Really what does it matter if your password for logging into commenting on this site leaks? Or on 1000s of other sites.

Besides one basic security rule is don't install software that you don't bloody well need.

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