Posts by Jonathan Richards 1 1452 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
> solid legal controls ... a lot of commenters here wouldn't trust it anyway.
For the good and sufficient reason that "solid legal controls" is a contradiction in terms. Parliament can, has, does, and will change "solid legal controls" around citizens' rights any time that it wants to. I give you RIPA as a single instance.
Am I imagining it, or did it not used to be the case that the cinematographic genre known as "Westerns" had a trope wherein villains wore black hats, and heroes white ones? I *definitely* remember that the Lone Ranger wore a white hat: it never seemed to get remotely grubby, either.
> compressing alpha-numeric characters
That rang a bell, and nobody's doing anything useful, so I got off the shelf a 1980 diary which I used as a notebook during the subsequent year or so. On the page for 4 February I have hand-compiled a 31-byte routine for the MCS 6502 which unpacks 4 6-bit wide characters from a 3-byte package, and on the next page a 27-byte routine to do the reverse, saving 25% on RAM. I'm typing on a machine with 8,589,934,592 bytes of RAM, though, so I don't think I'll fire up the emulator to check my hand-coding!
I'm going so far out on a limb that you'll mistake me for a leaf... did the Amiga 4000 have memory-mapped video? I'm thinking of a mistargetted JSR in the disk handler that leaps into video memory and crashes, unless the pixels at a point in the clock app window give you a nice clean RTS. Or something. I'll get my coat...
> Excel, which by the 1990s was already well on its way to dominance
I had a soft spot for Quattro Pro for a long time. As I recall it came on a stack of a dozen or so 1.38MB floppy disks, so installing it was, umm, tedious, but well worth the effort.
"Quattro Pro - since sold to Corel and now part of WordPerfect Office - was a fabulous product, way ahead of its time. Certainly ahead of Microsoft's then-young Excel and Office.", quoth the Vulture [1]. Yep. What he said.
So, with a little effort I too can run the incriminating text which may or may not have yellow feathers [1] through a noddy neural network before forwarding it to the leakhole of my choice? Do you have a spec. for this NN, please?
Actually, one's natural language skills should be good enough to do such refactoring, it's probably quicker and less likely subtly to alter the meaning of the message.
[1] Canary, as in the unfortunate birds used to warn of low oxygen/high CO levels dahn t'pit.
Four cups a week? The Brits drink a hundred million cups of tea each day, we should all be bloody geniuses. And yet from the front pages of the newspapers [2], that would seem not to be the case.
[1] https://www.tea.co.uk/tea-faqs
[2] And most of the ones inside, too.
> tables on the back of the "red exercise book"
If I hunt really quite hard among the debris of decades, I am almost certain that I can find a Ready Reckoner, which, I will explain for the uninitiated, is a printed volume which simply lists the multiples of values. This is invaluable if you wish to know the price of one and a half gross of pen nibs at a penny-three-farthings each with a delivery charge of thruppence to be added. No billing in guineas, mind.
Yes, legislation is carefully written to be unambiguous and have a deterministic result. So far, like computer language, so good. But the legal code doesn't get repeatedly run through a test suite, it doesn't get alpha- or beta-tested, it doesn't get a phased roll-out, and in the only respect in which it still resembles computer code, people get hurt when it fails.
Barristers make a lot of money precisely because they can't be replaced with a parser and an I/O interface.
> it is the VCs and business types ...
They're only pushing what they can buy from technically and mathematically capable practitioners. As Dr Fry says, ethics are taught alongside medicine throughout, whereas they're bolted on to a mathematician's skillset as an afterthought, if at all.
> The MoD refused to supply The Register with a copy of the same report.
Note that the MoD publishes all the information which it supplies in response to FOI requests, though it seems to be delayed by about a month: FOI responses released by the Ministry of Defence: 2019 [gov.uk]
> wording differs in many respects from what appears to be the agreed ministerial version.
Hmm. The gov.uk document that the article references is 404. A search yields this document with an identical title, but a comparison shows that it has almost no text in common with the document that El Reg has archived. It appears more as if the archive is the Communiqué, and the government upload is the 'Action Minutes'.
If there's a policy difference between the two, I'm not sure which would have precedence.
Yes, this. In fact I could probably manage my transition away from the email domain originally provided to me by Telewest, but my son and my mother both have alias addresses on my account, and it would be harder for both of them (for different reasons), so I continue to bung large amounts monthly to Virgin Media. There's no portability of email address. Maybe there could be mandatory forwarding of mail for a fixed period of time?
Having watched the video, I can't believe that anyone could have slept through the noise of the impacts. Being jolted awake by barrel crunching, to find yourself being squeezed between lane closures and a big truck, might have required immediate change of underwear.
I'm not going to join in poster-bashing - it seems to me that sharing the near-miss information is contributing to a more safety-conscious regime. Exactly that culture is what contributes to air travel being as safe as it is.
Icon: TTTR - Teach Tesla To Read
> A law that effectively makes secure open source apps illegal
This is where (if I understand correctly) the rock meets the hard place in the form of the US Constitution (as amended). A codebase which generates "illegal" strong encryption with no backdoor is almost certainly protected free speech in the USA. You'd think an Attorney General would appreciate this truth. Therefore, AG Barr probably has designs on weakening that aspect of the US Constitution.
> The two bodies eventually met and smashed into one another.
I know it makes for exciting prose, but given the density of matter in a galaxy (to a first approximation, there's nothing there...) it's much more appropriate to evoke two clouds of thin smoke gently coalescing over unimaginably long timescales.
Yeah, the words Citizens Advice scam charity, in that order, make for an unfortunate double-take at best, and a ghastly misunderstanding at worst.
Introduction to the Citizens Advice Service [citizensadvice.org.uk] for anyone who doesn't know.
+1, I call this the Magneto Principle. Light aircraft used to have (maybe still do, I don't know [1]) the very simplest engine equipment, because: fewer things to go wrong. For ignition there would be two redundant magnetos to generate the HT spark. Part of pre-flight would be to run up the engine and switch off each magneto in turn, to ensure that they were both working well enough to support ignition independently.
[1] It seems unlikely, though. The first pageful of search results for 'magneto' all refer to an X-Men comic character of whom I've never heard. Mumble grumble.
> piracy involved ships on the high seas
Regrettably, your use of the past tense is in error. There were 201 incidents of piracy and armed robbery against ships logged by the ICC International Maritime Bureau in 2018 [1]. It may be spoilsportish, but I can't get into the celebration of piracy as a quaint custom of yesteryear. I have also looked up how to carry out an efficient yard-arm hanging.
[1] IMB piracy report 2018: attacks multiply in the Gulf of Guinea
> on a quantum level, certainty is replaced by probability
Einstein was appalled by the idea of quantum uncertainty, hence writing to Max Born:
"Quantum theory yields much, but it hardly brings us close to the Old One’s secrets. I, in any case, am convinced He does not play dice with the universe."
My problem with this way of doing business (by RMDR) is about trust. They would, if the scenario had been played out to the last, have taken receipt of "decriptor" software from an unknown source, logged in with admin privileges to their client's systems, and run that dodgy software. Yeah, they might have run some AV tests on it first, but you still wouldn't know whether it would (a) work within or (b) degrade, damage or destroy, the target system. I'd want to know some details of RMDR's liability insurance before I shelled out the ransom+tip, and gave them the admin credentials.
Also, why not just be transparent with the customer? 'Conor Lairg' could easily have told his customer that there was no white-hat decryption available and they recommended ransom, with an agent fee and insurance cost. In looking up Emsisoft, I found their about page, which says "Emsisoft is convinced that treating our customers in an honest and respectful manner is the foundation of sustainable business." Yup.
> Reading The Slides Out Loud
Well, that's better than almost silently and with barely visible lip movement, I guess. I would characterize the cardinal sin as "Turning your back to your audience to look at the screen and then reading the slides out loud". Sadly, I've seen it done far too many times.
The best presentation advice I ever saw was to treat your material as a story - it has a setup, an exposition, a moment of drama (or at least hopefully some sort of revelation, otherwise why bother?), and a resolution. Story-board it like a movie short, and then create five or six slides with no more than ten words on any one.
I reckon that real "consumers" of images don't critically study for anything like as much as six seconds before accepting what they see, so this protocol is actually quite a tough test. If one looks at a published photograph, the question should be "how much has this been altered from a raw capture?", not "is this real?"
While the means of manipulation have become ever more sophisticated, the hollowness of "the camera cannot lie" meme has been noted for well over 120 years.
> webspace
Indeed. Internet Service Provision used to be the whole thing. Connection, credentials, email account and a server slice with (assigned not chosen) domain name and some protocol support: http and ftp at least. You could be part of the 'net, not just a consumer. Now, it's just the connection.
Having said that, there are a lot of reliable low-cost hosting providers.
This is what worries the USA, not the threat to security (at least not electronic security of 5G networks). I don't understand the concern for 5G security - this is going to be the public communications network, isn't it? That hasn't been properly secure since listening in on telegraph wires was a thing. Every time it gets a bit more so, the intelligence services whine about not being able to crack it easily.
Intelligence shared between the UK and the USA shouldn't ever be anywhere near the public network, and of course we wouldn't build secure networks with dubious hardware. Thus I conclude that Mr Pompeo's invoking of Iron Ladies [1] is more about damaging Chinese commercial opportunities than it is about protecting his secrets.
[1] Was drawing of pentangles on the floor involved?
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