* Posts by JimmyPage

3213 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2010

Your next laptop will feature 'CMF' technology

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Meanwhile, the committee on fire hasn't reported back ...

"OK, smartarse, what colour would you make it ?"

Parity's $280m Ethereum wallet freeze was no accident: It was a hack, claims angry upstart

JimmyPage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: The Blockchain

Rule #1 of (pseudo) financial transacting is you never roll back. Instead you post correcting transactions later in the record.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the underlying Ethereum blockchain isn't really well designed for this sort of thing.

Also, in order to post correcting credits you may need access to the multiple keys on each affected wallet. From the sounds of it, this is the problem.

Personally I don't see this as a failure of the blockchain. As with the previous Ethereum snaful, the blockchain did exactly what it was designed to do. It's the design that's dodgy.

JimmyPage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

...thus setting back blockchain development by years ...

which may have been the original idea ?

Given the current climate, I'm surprised no one has asked "cui bono ?" and suggested the 5-eyes might have had a hand ?

Uber loses appeal against UK employment rights for workers

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Mushroom

Re: Uber are planning on taking this all the way to the Supreme Court.

Well, it's their money. Better pay lawyers than drivers, eh ?

JimmyPage Silver badge
FAIL

As I recall ...

the original judgement was very full, precise, and had no real room for any wriggling. As this appeal seems to show.

There were several interconnected checkboxes which made the drivers employees, not just a single rebuttable point of law.

One has to wonder whos paying the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self Employed (IPSE) expressed surprise at the ruling. for their opinion ???? And they might have looked a little less tittish if they had read the original ruling, rather than sounding off willy nilly, as they'd know the fact that an Uber driver cannot negotiate the fee for a job before acceptance moves them from being "self employed" to an employee. That was one aspect - there were a raft more.

Boffins: We can identify you by your typing, and we're gonna sell the tech to biz, govt – yay!

JimmyPage Silver badge
Boffin

Since it's just data ...

it should be fairly straightforward to write an app to inject any amount of random crap (you could use the Daily Mail website) into the key streams to render this useless.

Uni staffer's health info blabbed in email list snafu

JimmyPage Silver badge
WTF?

Sorry, is this El Reg or "Take a Break" ????

UEA's IT department responded by remotely extracting the email from the accounts to which it had been sent.

What does that even mean ? They just did a Microsoft Exchange "recall" ? What about non-exchange mail servers ? What about people who use Outlooks preview feature (which bypasses the "recall" feature, as many a co-worker discovered when I saw "recalled" emails).

Intel's super-secret Management Engine firmware now glimpsed, fingered via USB

JimmyPage Silver badge

Underscores a point I've been making forever ...

It's all very well promoting FOSS as less likely to have holes because of plain sight oversight. But unless and until you have verified every underlying component - including the logic gates bakes into the silicon - you are still placing your trust in Somebody Elses Work.

When I was cautioning about trusting CPUs, I envisaged the odd dodgy or undocumented opcode that could escalate privilege, or access processes.

I have to admit, that cynical as I am, I didn't imagine a hidden OS in the CPU.

So, how many other chips have hidden depths then ?

UK's surveillance regime challenged in landmark European court hearing

JimmyPage Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: watches the watchers?

Wrong question. It's

who pays the watchers ?

Qui poenas custodes, if my rusty Latin serves ....

JimmyPage Silver badge
Unhappy

... and ... ?

The UK - like every other country in the world - has a proven track record of ignoring judgements it doesn't like whilst simultaneously wringing it's hands over (say) smoking bans and metrication saying "we had to do it, or the nasty man will be cross".

This will change nothing - whatever the verdict,

Commuters' phone data could be tracked to save megabucks on census

JimmyPage Silver badge
WTF?

cut the cost of producing population statistics. - WTF ?

It's once every 10 years FFS, How on earth can it cost THAT much, that we need this to save it ? Are the DUP delivering the forms by unicorn ?

Pixel-style display woes on your shiny new X? Perfectly normal, says Apple

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Windows

Re: Those indicator "flags" on metal poles

"Trafficators"

JimmyPage Silver badge
WTF?

'image persistence' or 'burn-in'

In other news, my new Ford will have a choke lever and need to be run-in for the first 1000km ?

Mind you given the length of time it takes my "Smart" TV to actually be ready to use, the old warming-up time of valve TVs was an improvement.

Look out, Pepe: Martha Lane Fox has a plan

JimmyPage Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Some years ago I served as Invited Expert with the W3C on accessibility.

But now realise how you wasted that time.

My partner has MS, so problems with vision as well as locomotion. I could count on the fingers of one hand websites that are *properly* accessible.

If society as a whole can't manage to make the web - which should be accessible AS STANDARD - accessible, what hope for the real world, with those stupid steps, and kerbs, and narrow doorways.

JimmyPage Silver badge
Flame

Re: Accessibility

What grinds my gears (have a partner who has to use a wheelchair) is when the "accessibility" link on the website blabbers on about the website accessibility (which is almost invariably shit as my partners sight is poor too) rather then the premises accessibility

The end result is a less able person can't even read how inaccessible the place is.

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Like "Checkatrade" ? Or "RatedPeople" or "Trustatrader" or even "TrustedTrader"

and just as useless ?

First question: who is paying the piper ?

How we fooled Google's AI into thinking a 3D-printed turtle was a gun: MIT bods talk to El Reg

JimmyPage Silver badge
FAIL

Pattern matching ... keyword matching ...

A *awful* lot of what is laughing called "AI" at the moment is no such thing. It's keyword matching on steroids. Or, as evinced in this instance, pattern matching (on steroids).

It was pretty whizzy when you only had a few million targets, and fairly simple selection criteria. But as we are seeing, scale things up, and add in more complex (i.e. real-world) criteria, and you get distinctly unintelligent results.

The most impressive display of machine learning I have seen was in IBMs Hursley labs, where a neural network was run over a video of a scene in a park. It managed to spot when a skateboarder (which it highlighted in red as "human using wheels", jumped off and walked - which it then highlighted in blue (as "human on foot"). However even it still struggled to spot "human not moving", so missed the people sitting around the fountain unless they moved. Not sure if that was a good economy of processing, or a mistake.

Human/mammalian cognition is a much more distributed and subtle process. I suspect it's working in a very intermeshed manner simultaneously looking at shape, colour, symmetry in the first instance, and creating a matrix (or matrices) of probabilities which is then being compared to learned objects and how they would be expected to behave if they are what the guess is.

If we're going to get anywhere near, I would expect to see a wall of smartphones looking at the scene, with each one doing a single specific job, but (and this is the bit we *can't* do yet) communicating in real time to refine it's little bit of the universe.

For fanbois only? Face ID is turning punters off picking up an iPhone X

JimmyPage Silver badge
FAIL

I was using FaceId (or whatever)

on Android in 2014. Decided it wasn't really solving anything, so lost interest.

3 years on, I really can't see anything has changed.

With the nod to Henry Fords dismissal of customers desires, I'd wager that if Apple asked their customers what they really wanted in the next-gen iPhone, a better removable battery, and SD slot would have been way above "FaceID".

But they didn't, and here we are.

HTC U11: U-hoo. Look over here! Two new phones! We're Not Actually Dead

JimmyPage Silver badge
Thumb Up

RE: or sd slot or removable batteryDual SIM ?

good catch sir ! Yes, the cornerstone of any new phone I get (my 2 year old Wileyfox Swift is still covering all but one need) will be:

Dual-SIM,

SD-slot (which doesn't require losing a SIM),

Removable battery,

Full GPS suite (US, EU, Russian and China)

NFC

Not network locked

Basic Android which doesn't need rooting to remove cruft

No cruft to start with

But - in a microcosmic example of market pressures - I don't need a new phone. I am "managing" with a 2 year old device and am mature enough to not care about the shiny.

Giza geezers' muon-geyser visor reveals Great Pyramid's hidden void surpriser

JimmyPage Silver badge
Holmes

Occam here

it's a mistake from the construction phase.

Anyone who has vaguely read up about Egyptology will know that they had to build a few pyramids before they perfected the art (so much for "space aliens" doing it for us).

Incidentally, satellite imagery archaeology has shown the sites of loads of "lost cities". One lesser known fact (well I didn't know it until the BBC docu) is that over the thousands of years Egypt has been populated, the course of the Nile and it's tributaries has changed many times. So there are cities waiting to be found (although one Pharaoh did actually move a city block by block).

Archaeologists are able to trace where these rivers ran by the style and dates of excavated pottery.

Black Horse Down: Lloyds Banking Group goes TITSUP*

JimmyPage Silver badge
Holmes

On the day the BoE base rate goes up ?

I wonder if they are running a piece of software somewhere that is less than 10 years old, and not been tested against a BoE rate rise ?

Wheels are literally falling off the MoD thanks to lack of cash

JimmyPage Silver badge
FAIL

It's great to know the price of everything ...

if you can afford it.

Hells door-bells! Ring pieces paralyzed in horror during Halloween trick-or-treat rush

JimmyPage Silver badge

Re: the last thing you want floating around a space station

Which was what NASA pointed out ... hence the work to find an alternative (which I think ended up being the Papermate pen with the heart that could write upside down).

Agree about the crayon.

JimmyPage Silver badge
FAIL

I know it's apocryphal ...

but the old canard about NASAs $1,000,000 space pen versus the Russian pencil still applies.

(If my memory is correct, the real incident was based around the docking camera. NASA built a joystick operated PTZ camera whilst the Soviets used a mirror on a stick).

Boffins befuddled over EU probe into UK's tax rules for multinationals

JimmyPage Silver badge
Holmes

My first thought was ...

here's a way to add a few zeros to any sum the UK might think it can get away with paying.

Even more warship cuts floated for the Royal Navy

JimmyPage Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: You do realise that this "colony" overwhelmingly voted in favour of remaining British?

*shrug*

So ?

What about the people of Diego Garcia who wanted to stay in the homes they'd had for generations ? They got told to get fucked. In fact they were evicted and told to get fucked.

UK's NHS to pilot 'Airbnb'-style care service in homeowners' spare rooms

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

May I be the first to be recorded as saying:

CareBnB

?

Hackers nip into celeb plastic surgery clinic, tuck away 'terabytes'

JimmyPage Silver badge

re: especially to a bribed insider.

with the added complication that the people that could are probably paid peanuts.

JimmyPage Silver badge
WTF?

How on earth did the hackers get the crypto keys ...

that must have been needed to unlock such sensitive personal data ?

Is one of the questions that will be awaiting the CEO, given the victim lists access to high-quality legal advice.

ARM chip OG Steve Furber: Turing missed the mark on human intelligence

JimmyPage Silver badge
Thumb Up

Plus ...

an awful lot of mammalian intelligence isn't in the brain anyway. Every single cell in the body has an input into it. Vision, for example. Your eyes and optic nerves are WAY more thank just cameras and cables.

Hearing ? Well, we know that the ear processes sounds before letting the brain know what they are.

and so on.

Windows Fall Creators Update is here: What do you want first – bad news or good news?

JimmyPage Silver badge
Linux

Reading with detached interest

None of these problems on my Mint laptop. Including needing anything that *has* to run under windows.

Customers cheesed off after card details nicked in Pizza Hut data breach

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Be more secure using BitCoin

just saying ...

FCC Commissioner blasts new TV standard as a 'household tax'

JimmyPage Silver badge
Megaphone

Is it wrong ..

to hold Auntie Beeb up as a paradigm of backwards compatibility ?

Beware the GDPR 'no win, no fee ambulance chasers' – experts

JimmyPage Silver badge

junk fax industry

Personally I thought that died a death when fax machines stopped using paper, so junk faxes cost nothing to bin.

Citrix switches on nuage français, deutsche wolke, nube española

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Black Helicopters

Still subject to US PATRIOT Act thougn

No US company can avoid that, no matter where they put their servers.

VPN logs helped unmask alleged 'net stalker, say feds

JimmyPage Silver badge
Boffin

So many posts about logs ...

and yet so little discussion on what a "log" is.

Once again, I feel a tad like the greybeard at a hipster convention.

There are "logs" - as in the technical definition of records kept by a system etc etc

Then there are "logs" which is what the law defines as "information relating to the operation of the system which if they exist can be captured for inspection ..." (or somesuchsimilar).

Remember, in the UK at least, courts are allowed to use the contents of caches - which are axiomatically transient - as evidence.

If the information exists in memory, then the law can decide it can be frozen as evidence.

Microsoft's foray into phones was a bumbling, half-hearted fiasco, and Nadella always knew it

JimmyPage Silver badge
Mushroom

Awwww shut up and quit your whining.

Windows Phone was a completely viable contender for a mobile device OS.

As someone who was forced to use it by his "Microsoft Everywhere" IT department (yeah, hows *that* working out for you now, guys. Boo fucking hoo, you can't force your users to use IE anymore) I actually found it quite a decent OS.

If it could have boasted the apps of Android/Apple, it would have been perfect.

Microsofts ludicrous insistence that very increment required a new app is what killed that.

I am annoyed because the lack of an alternative non-Apple alternative has effectively gifted the mass mobile market to Google. And nobody wants that.

Forget the 'simulated universe', say boffins, no simulator could hit the required scale

JimmyPage Silver badge
Angel

The worrying thing is ... a simulated universe

would pretty much be a paradigm of Occams razor when it comes to explaining the universe. Even (or *especially* "woo").

I'm sure the vast majority of commentards could imagine scenarios in which "woo" is actually a snafu in the program or the computer and OS it's running on.

Ghosts for example. Just some unzeroed memory that has retained data from a previous run ?

Time travel ? Well obviously - just restart the program with different parameters. And so on.

No quantum theory of gravity ? Well, Universe 1.0 was launched a bit early. They forgot to design that bit.

Taking the analogy further, supposing there *are* bugs in the simulation. If there are (and experience suggests there must be) then suppose further that these bugs can be exploited by mumbling in some weird language whilst prancing naked around a yew tree in a stone circle ?

All of this aside, I would be curious to know if there is a movement in science which is specifically looking for bugs in a simulated universe. Or, at the very least, trying to come up with a definite test ?

(See also: If a tree falls in a forest ....)

HPE coughed up source code for Pentagon's IT defenses to ... Russia

JimmyPage Silver badge
Linux

Wot !? No FOSS ?

Surely, if the code were open source, this wouldn't be a story ?

Sorry, couldn't resists it ->

Home Sec Amber Rudd: Yeah, I don't understand encryption. So what?

JimmyPage Silver badge
Mushroom

"We will take advice from other people"

No you won't.

(In the absence of an explicit FOAD icon) -->

Brit prosecutors fling almost a million quid at anti-drone'n'phone ideas

JimmyPage Silver badge
Mushroom

Re:but the Government isn't restricted by the law since they can change it if they don't like it

... one of the most chilling things I think I've read this week.

If a majority of people believe this, we're already fucked.

(I know any US readers will have snorted at that, and thanked their lucky stars for 1776. I can already hear them saying "See, 231 years, and the British STILL don't get it.")

Governments that get to do whatever they like, unfettered by law, aren't governments. They are occupying forces.

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

Lateral thinking ....

rather than worrying about people getting contraband into jails, why not start with reducing the number of people in jail to start with ? (I.e. reduce the attack surface area).

Reviewing our asinine drugs laws would be a start. And then all the offences about "offence" ....

El Reg is hiring an intern. Apply now before it closes

JimmyPage Silver badge
Mushroom

So, in 2017, WFT is it London based

or, indeed, based *anywhere* ?

Hardly a great incentive for less tech savvy employers to provide homeworking, if august institutions like EL Reg CBA.

Why Uber isn't the poster child for capitalism you wanted

JimmyPage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

re:ten percent of the population of London. Seriously?

Probably 1%, with the rest all bots.

The petition sites were a good idea, but unless we find a way to restrict them to eligible citizens, they are going the way of google. Too much noise, not enough signal.

Of course, the uber-cynical (see what I did there ?) would content that was the entire idea behind online petitions in the first place.

Shock! Hackers for medieval caliphate are terrible coders

JimmyPage Silver badge
FAIL

Although, in the final analysis ...

With the various data breaches, outages, and numpty security cockups it's arguable that "the West" is doing a better job of hurting itself than ISIS or whoever could dream of.

Google's Big Hardware Bet: Is this what a sane business would do?

JimmyPage Silver badge
Happy

Re: Your link is dead/has been pulled...

Cheers. It's no great shakes. Just another generic "here's how you do things in Android" with a list of hardware and a (very small) caveat that you need to be on <this> version rather that <that>. Even if <this> version is 5 years old.

The older I get, the more irritated I get by the floppy-fringed gee-whizz of the young hipster brigade trying to convince me that some ill-thought out, badly designed, appallingly executed POS feature/gadget/app is proof that we're somehow living the Star Trek dream.

One thing these whippersnappers don't know (and that's the closest you'll get to a tacit admission that at one time *I* may have been a young hipster) is that 80% of "new" is actually "old". Indeed (in computing terms) "very old". AI ? read "2001". VR ? "Tron". And so on. iPhone ? Psion.

JimmyPage Silver badge
Meh

On of Androids Achilles heels

(although you could argue it's a strength)

is the diverse nature of handset/OEM-versions-of-Android that abound ...

example:

look at the "how to take a screenshot" guide here

as the article opens:

Every Android phone is different, and so is taking screenshots with them. Even though Android 4 introduced simple screenshots for all with the handy power-and-volume-down-key combo,

Oh, my Wileyfox (not listed, btw) has the volume and power keys on the same side. You need *two* hands to take a screenshot.

If Google themselves release a phone, at least there should be an "approved" way for everything.

Downloaded CCleaner lately? Oo, awks... it was stuffed with malware

JimmyPage Silver badge
Linux

Meanwhile ...

haven't used (or needed) CCleaner since dumping Windows ....

The architecture for sharing tokens across blockchains promises traction

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

It will all end in tears ...

I fear we are running before we can walk, and that we are just going to see recent history repeated.

Remember that Ethereum "hack" last year ? Of course it was no such thing, but the more astute El Regger will have noticed that the breathless incorrect infantile reporting actually revealed that very few people had any idea what was going on.

The past 12 months have done nothing to make me think anything has changed.

I predict we are going see a glut of shonky "smart" contracts emerging which will be moving currency all over the shop with no oversight or means of revocation. This will happen as the Dreamweaver "web developer" emerges in writing smart contracts.

While we're here, has anyone else had any emails from Chinese BitCoin entrepreneurs who have millions to smuggle out of there ?

UK attorney general plans crackdown on 'trial by social media'

JimmyPage Silver badge
Stop

It's not social media that's the issue

it's thickies - jurors and public.