Posts by T. F. M. Reader

we can't shake the image of ...

... Bruce Willis clambering through a duct in Die Hard ...

No, definitely more like Tom Cruise in the first Mission: Impossible. Didn't even hurt himself by hitting the floor, did he?

Obvious to anyone following recent developments

The requirements are driven by the Chinese: is it far easier to get everything worth knowing about the UK Government in a spreadsheet by email from a not very well placed source than hacking into a database. Can be done repeatedly, too.

"Sedated stuntman"

Priceless...

So that's what Meta-AI is good for then, eh?

Making sure we put the correct amount of salt and pepper in our food?

Seems to be a pretty low bar as far as aspirations go...

"Failure from the app to validate SSL certificates"

To me it is obvious that it is by design: China wants to play MITM at will.

Sorry for being dense...

I can understand that rather than flogging shares through an IPO or through private investment backed by normal lawyer-created contracts a company that does (or says it intends to do) X (a.k.a. "product" or "service", as appropriate on a case-by-case basis) may flog blockchain-based share certificates through an ICO. I would not necessarily invest in this way, but I can understand that it is theoretically possible.

In this case though, I am missing an essential part: what is this X that EthereumMAX intends to do that promises to make the equity (and thus the associated tokens) worth something? I went as far as https://ethereummax.org/ (there is no .com that would be more appropriate for a company), but it seems that EthereumMAX's X is the token and I can't see what's behind it. El Reg doesn't say, either.

Is it some new level of brazenness? Or is it a clever play on Ms. Kardashian being famous for being famous and on the multitudes that still follow her on social media?

Privacy if **we** provide it

I can understand that any ISP filtering won't work for VPNed traffic. However, a disclaimer in TOS seems to be more appropriate than blocking the traffic, especially if the customer hasn't asked for the filtering service. I'd even consider it reasonable to continue charging a few pennies for the filtering checkbox whether or not it is effective under the circumstances - refuse the add-on service if you don't want it.

And then the situation is the same for VPN/Tor, right? Do they block other VPNs for the same reason? Ah, maybe none of them is big enough to bother... But why should all those harvestable and monetisable fruits of surveillance go to AAPL, eh?

Brought to you by ...

... the same people who coded MSFT's patch identifiers as (signed) longs...

Apparently...

BluetoothDebugActivity ?

Keeping debug infrastructure in production is one of the more common ways to create security holes, innit?

Dunno about the distro...

... but I suspect it was an old ThinkPad. I went through all the BIOS settings once (after combing every line of the supplicant configuration on Linux - ouch!) before going to a Lenovo page and discovering there was a wireless on/off switch. Might have been an X200 or something...

Bad laws (or contracts, or policies) -> hard cases

[The law applies ... where] "computer workstations" are "permanently set up by the employer in the private area of ​​the employees."

So, do laptops count as "permanent"? No? What if there is a docking station?

"Set up by the employer"? Does a PFY have to visit before this clause is triggered?

I'll chalk the "private area" bit to Google Translate...

NextSTEP (pun intended)

Make M1 laptops work with more than one external monitor of any kind. Preferably in such a way that it will "just work".

Delaware as an acronym

Allegedly Delaware gets so much revenue from various fees corporations pay it does not need to tax out-of-state fees. There are also non-tax-related benefits of incorporating there. With all that, I don't suppose the state is dubbed “Dollars and Euros Laundered And Washed At Reasonable Expense” for nothing.

To be fair, the UK is not without blemish, either...

Meanwhile, in a country far (enough) away from the one Dabbsy has hay fever in ...

... I am about to check a box to digitally request a periodic prescription for essential medication I've been taking for almost 25 years.

That will work well enough - from a computer, in a browser. The medical service provider also has a smartphone app that they keep telling everyone to use but that I (and, judging from reviews, quite a few others) could never make start on my phone. To be fair, it probably starts as far as the operating system is concerned. The UX, in Dabbsy's words, is that the phone screen goes black and the device becomes really hot, until I powercycle it - multiple tries taught me to do it before it becomes too hot to handle. Never mind - the web site does work, and I am fairly confident the GP will issue 3 prescriptions for the next 3 months that will automagically appear in a database used by computers at the (provider-branded) pharmacy chain.

From (bitter) experience through the years since the provider went all digital I know to ask the pharmacist for all the 3 months' worth of meds in one go. If I decide to do it month-by-month the first two times will be fine, but on the third try the pharmacist will tell me that "the computer says" that I need a new prescription. To me, it is obvious that there is some kind of an off-by-one bug (in a loop of 3 iterations!), but no matter how many times I complained in the past it was never fixed. I started asking the GP to print out the prescriptions and I started printing out the PDFs that the website helpfully provides, and I started taking the printouts to the till as proof that there should be another prescription, but it turned out that the provider had gone "completely digital" (is it a new euphemism of some sort meaning something or other?) and the printed documents were not actual prescriptions but only records of what the GP's PC, or the web server, or maybe the printer thought should be in the pharmacy's database at the time of printing. At the till inside the pharmacy it does not matter one single bit - "I don't see your prescription in the system sir..."

The queues are managed a lot better here than at Dabbsy's pharmacy though. You enter and press a button on a little device dispensing a paper slip with a number. The next customer's number is announced on a tannoy and displayed on large TV sceeens on the pharmacy's walls. I broke down when I saw a full screen "Error in error message" message (sic!) on those TV screens one day (talk of BORK!BORK!BORK!) and asked the pharmacist if I could keep a 3 month supply of my meds in a fridge safely. He said yes, and I stopped dealing with the loop termination bug there and then.

Now, here's that checkbox in the digital prescription request again...

cult-escape.com

"... a new level for us ..."

Indeed, brother...

Better metric?

I understand they do what they can without duration data, but a better metric, IMHO, would be something like the product of outage count, duration, and average daily/monthly/whatever unique users to address the impact. Maybe throw the average time a user spends on the website into the mix, too.

FB may still win the context...

Chatbots' difficulty with cultural nuances is overrated

Is "piece of cake" easier for AI than "Bob's your uncle"? And does it depend on which side of the pond the AI gets trained?

Interesting questions for research. In my (admittedly limited) practice, however, supposedly AI-driven chatbots fail well before we get to this stage. Last time I needed a document from my bank I tried to call. The person who answered the phone couldn't help but insisted that the easiest way to get it would be to use the "chat with a banker" features on the website as I'd be able to get the document directly. The chatbot offered to start a conversation on any of 3 or 4 topics, regardless of which one I chose it said I should "press a button" to be transferred to a human. There was no button I could see... I don't think any AI was involved in the process. Definitely no idioms where involved (well, apart from me talking to myself...).

Visiting the branch across the road from my office resolved the matter in under 90 seconds. Piece of... Sorry, Bob is... Never mind...

Will history repeat itself?

Historically, China doesn't have a good record of managing novel forms of payment.

Consider the following rough sequence. Nearly worthless (and thus difficult to use) bronze coins and "strings" thereof from a few hundred years BC till something like the 12th century. Then Song dynasty paper money backed by (still nearly worthless) bronze. Then Song and later Yuan dynasty fiat paper money allowing exporting bronze. Then hyperinflation of paper money. Then new Ming dynasty coins only to discover that copper mines were nearly empty so that the coins were more expensive to produce than they were nominally worth, hence counterfeiting. Then more fiat paper money with more inflation. Then the government banning their own coins (!), multiple times (!). Then successive rulers declaring the predecessors' money invalid (that worked out well - money good in the morning becoming worthless in the evening by government decree).

Throughout all of that turmoil silver was considered valuable, except by the government(s) - commodity money has some advantages over fiat, notably inflation-wise, but governments are wary because they can't control the supply. Finally someone in the Ming dynasty decided to adopt silver for government transactions (including taxes) as well. By that time China was the world's largest economy (anyone who gasps at the prospect today - take note), but it had no usable silver mines. Americas had lots of silver though, and so Spanish galleons literally supplied the means of payment to China via Manila. That worked out really well for the Chinese government monetary policy, as everyone can imagine, for a few hundred years.

Fast forward to the 21st century, with only partially convertible and pegged to the dollar renminbi (US dollar today, not Spanish dollar as in the late 19th century, granted). I think I am going to sit back to watch how this new new thing will work out - I may not live to witness the final curtain, but it will be interesting nonetheless.

Silver lining?

My understanding is that these guys do not intend to make actual cars, leaving it to the likes of Voilkswagen and Toyota, presumably. For some reason it sounds more reassuring to me than his Muskiness's machismo.

Market reaction

So, just to be clear: what pushed TSLA's market cap over $1tn - the FSB beta or the fact that they pulled it?

Define "algorithms"

I am having a problem with the notion of "algorithms" developed by an organization that lead to an observable result that a team of experts working for the same organization cannot explain. Of course, AI is incomprehensible magic and finding bias in inputs is too hard a task, even if you have all the information you need for that since you work for the same company and with the people who developed the "algorithms" and wrote the code and compiled the data set and divided it into training and testing and whatever other parts, and tuned the parameters...

Given this situation I am skeptical about the possibility that an outside team can reproduce the research or shed light on the results using a reduced set (possibly with additional undetected biases thrown in for good measure). Even the Commentariat's chances of doing it on the basis of common sense alone are pretty slim, IMHO.

Sorry, but the first thing that pops into my nasty suspicious mind is a variant of "policy-driven statistics": look what our completely objective [but unverifiable - khem, khem...] research found - now we need to apply corrective bias to become more balanced! Success - a narrowing of the gap, possibly to zero - will be confirmed by future research.

Cynical? Moi?

Verified purchase

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- Tim Cook

2FA is a bigger problem than the one it purports to solve, except at work

I studiously avoid setting up 2FA with any personal web service for this very reason (well, any kind of problem with the "second factor", not just a bug), as I explained in an earlier comment.