* Posts by Mike 16

1439 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009

Haunted by Europe's GDPR, ICANN sharpens wooden stake to finally slay the Whois vampire

Mike 16

Re: Secure?

Precisely! Normal people will be unable to get any relief from unintentional DOS or check the (alleged) provenance of possible scammers, but "authenticated" (either by a secret court or a envelope of cash) users will still be able to stalk you.

The problems of Whois will not be solved by changing from plain text BS to BS wrapped in a typical modern "don't fall in love with the protocol, as it will break when new emoji are added" protocol.

Mike 16

Re: You Decide

And, at least if you have a landline with AT&T (formerly known as SBC. You know your rep is bad when you buy the deathstar for a better image), you _pay_ to not be listed.

We read the Brexit copyright notices so you don't have to… No more IP freely, ta very much

Mike 16

Take Back Control?

When in all history has a politician saying they will "take back control" ever meant it would be _you_ taking back control, rather than them?

Deus ex hackina: It took just 10 minutes to find data-divulging demons corrupting Pope's Click to Pray eRosary app

Mike 16

Precedent

https://www.medievalists.net/2015/12/i-robot-saint/

Pretty much what you'd expect from the last bit of the URL, minus the data-slurping, as even 2G coverage was spotty in the 13th century.

Mike 16

Tri-state Boolean?

That was Boole himself, IIRC. The original form of "Boolean Algebra" was (radically simplifying and paraphrasing) about probabilities and their combinations. Think of something like a precursor of Fuzzy Logic. It was much later when the computer-nerds redefined it to only zero and one for their own purposes, like Baud, Byte, and "Fitness for Purpose".

Babbage and Lovelace may be thought of as early practitioners of Computing, but surely Humpty Dumpy was the inspiration for modern terminology. :-)

Guess who's dreaming of facial-recog body cams now? US border cops: AI tech sought to scrutinize travelers

Mike 16

Re: Can't wait for this

--- Imagine their indignation at being constantly taken aside and 'treated as a criminal' ---

Well, I was amused and a bit peeved when pulled aside for extra vetting at a major amusement park, twice in one day, when attending with one of my children who was an employee of the park owner.

I think the middle class is already pretty familiar with the type, if not the degree, of hassle the Powers That Be can unleash at will.

Mike 16

Other advantages

"skip the line" cards are also useful to sleeper terrorists. All they have to do is note when their card is rejected, indicating that their "affiliations" have been noted.

As for facial recognition, a friend's uncle reported to work at a (allied) shipyard during WWII with a photo of Hitler spliced into his badge. Guards just waved him through. Never met him so I don't know how much he resembled the chancellor, but I'd have to wonder if anybody told him to shave. Yeah, robots won't be so lazy, maybe, and of course the lowest-bidder software will never be compromised.

Pack your pyjamas, Zuck: US bill threatens execs with prison for data failures

Mike 16

Step 3.5

When it is found that the corporation was acting on orders in a secret National Security Letter issued by a secret hearing by FISA, a quiet word is had with the board of commissioners (off the record, of course, but including a lovely photo album of all the family and friends of those commissioners). And there are no steps 4-8

Good news – America's nuke arsenal to swap eight-inch floppy disks for solid-state drives

Mike 16

Rollover (Re: So)

----

but a timer put in 1/10th of a second before rollover, to fire a few 10ths later, for instance, would never fire since the clock rolled back to zero.

----

This is opposite to my experience with early Linux. I was astonished when reading the Linux drivers docs to see that in the example you mentioned, the time would fire instantly, since a timer scheduled to fire after the rollover would be "wrapped" to be _far_ in the past and so need immediate attention. I went in to ask my boss (who had been porting Linux to a MIPS-based system) if this was the actual behavior. He assured me it was, as he had discovered because that system was 32-bit and had a 1kHz timer. The symptom is that whenever the current time (in timer intervals, aka 1/Hz, not seconds) wraps, _all_ the timers would fire. This will at the very least cause a dramatic pause, and quite possibly crash.

In one of those odd coincidences, as we were discussing this issue a Win95 box on the next bench went TITSUP. The soon-released analysis/patch indicated that it was essentially the same issue, exacerbated by having a 16-bit timer (time within day), and mitigated by having an 18Hz timer interrupt. (or some such, I don't do DOS). Possibly also mitigated by being just one hiccup among the herd. :-)

Mike 16

Re: Nostalgia

We'll try to stay serene and calm

When Alabama gets the bomb.

(Tom Lehrer, "Who's Next")

Mike 16

Re: Decisions, decisions ...

When they upgrade to alphanumeric codes, I'd guess "Peace on Earth" or "Purity of Essence".

Ask RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake.

2001 fiction set to be science fact? NASA boffin mulls artificial intelligence to watch over the lunar Gateway

Mike 16

Re: Surely this is just a variant on autopilot software.

Let's hope they spring for the extra-cost redundant Angle of Attack sensors, and the further charge for detecting (_and_ displaying) discrepancies.

Mike 16

Re: Portal?

You mean like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4drucg1A6Xk

(Live action film set in the universe of the popular game)

Euro ISP club: Sure, weaken encryption. It'll only undermine security for everyone, morons

Mike 16

Re: Safe?

Would that be a definition of "safe" that includes "Just a bit of grievous bodily harm resulting from 'enhanced interrogation'"?

Mike 16

Getting re-elected

Once the backdoors are in place (and Internet voting is mandatory) getting re-elected will be a doddle.

People sitting up and taking notice will do nothing once the levers of power are in the "right" hands.

Frog-boiling, anyone?

Remember the millions of fake net neutrality comments? They weren't as kosher as the FCC made out

Mike 16

Re: Citizens United and Southern Pacific

If you dig a little deeper, you see that the sentence about how corporations are people and thus deserving of the rights normally accorded to a person was not part of the original decision, but was added by a clerk "cleaning up" for publication. Sort of like how "some staffer" made a 'typo fix" that resulted in the legal definition of "work for hire" changing from defaulting to the performer owning the copyright to the publisher owning it, in the absence of explicit wording in the contract. Thus effectively changing the terms of many contracts after they had been signed.

But of course these sort of "mistakes" would not have gotten through the courts and congress if they did not have support among the folks best placed to whisper in judicial or legislative ears.

Boffins build a tiny nanolaser that can be inserted inside our cells

Mike 16

Re: Clickety-clack

For Clickety-clack, you want to look into (listen for) the computer on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

I swear one scene showed a step-by-step telephone switch. The console was recycled from EMERAC, a prop built by IBM for the movie "The Desk Set". (That feels to me like GM building props for "Unsafe at Any Speed", intentionally).

Anyway, "Because this was in a submarine with a big glass window" for all of you wondering

"What's the Elasmobranchii Angle?"

Emergency button saves gamers from sudden death... of starvation

Mike 16

Burrito Delivery

And here I was expecting news of a transatlantic extension of the famous Alameda/Weehawken Burrito Tunnel:

https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm

You better get a wiggle on then: BT said to be mulling switching off UK's copper internets by 2027

Mike 16

Re: Don't forget...

-- Most remote premises have overhead electricity supplies that fibre can be wound along with relative ease. --

That should remove one possible cause of confusion, by making sure the power to the phone goes off at the same time the signal is dropped, just like in the old days with a tree branch taking out POTS on Cu.

Mike 16

POTS to VOIP adapters?

I'd love to hear from folks who have that sort of gear how well it works with real analogue phones. My voice will never be described in terms of dulcet tones, but I'd love to be able to keep a dial-up modem on line. Nothing fancy, just 300 baud full-duplex. My experiments with mobile phones seem to indicate this is not a solved problem. In particular, the "echo suppressor" control is apparently non-existent.

Won't somebody think of the Teletypes? :-)

The results are in… and California’s GDPR-ish digital privacy law has survived onslaught by Google and friends

Mike 16

Federal action to preempt (neuter) in 3.2.1...

Unless, of course, the current administration hates the Washington post, and hence Bezos, and hence all tech companies more than they hate the damage done to their other major contributors (e.g. RT, I mean Facebook). Tough call...

World's oldest human was a 122-year-old French smoker after all

Mike 16

Re: She gave up smoking when she was 117

I would guess that an establishment full of over-100s has a fair bit of Oxygen in tanks or plumbed through the walls, and that would add to the hazards of smoking.

Magnetic cockroaches, dirty money, wombat poo and posties' balls: It's the Ig Nobels 2019

Mike 16

Re: Wombat cubes!

-- poop and sausages aren't the same thing ... --

Well, they share some inputs and means of production.

While pondering such things, there was a documentary a while back about the airships of The Great War. One fascinating snippet was that the gas-bags (or at least their liners) were made of "sausage casing", slit to make sheets out of tubes and "laminated" by heat and pressure to form _big_ sheets, and thus gasbags. The show also discussed the invention of the incendiary bullet and the refinement of aircraft tactics on the part of the RAF, but the bit of this manufacturing method and the Wurst Famine stuck in my mind. There appears to be a (text) summary at:

https://www.history.com/news/londons-world-war-i-zeppelin-terror

Service call centres to become wasteland and tumbleweed by 2024

Mike 16

"The computer called for service"

That would have offered some variety for my mother, whose phone number was a digit-transposition away from IBM's 24-hour customer service number. Instead of the sound of raging Air-con that usually alerted her to the nature of these midnight calls, she could have had the trill of a modem negotiation.

(Those who doubt that a computer could make the same dialing mistake as a stressed human have apparently never heard of configuration files, or dealt with remote logging and diagnostics in the days of dialup)

Eighty-year-old US 'web scam man' on the run after pocketing $250,000 in Dem 'donations'

Mike 16

No .spam TLD

_yet_

(could you make do with sp.am, registered in Armenia? Yerevan is only about 3000km from Copenhagen)

Mike 16

Re: Bail Bonds

10% is indeed typical, but If I was an 80-year old, I'd be careful about giving a reason for a bounty-hunter to look for me. I did know a guy who had made a plausibly successful escape out the window when the bounty-hunter showed up, and decided it was a good idea to sneak around the corner and clobber said (large, young, skilled fighter) bounty-hunter with a bit of discarded lumber. Turned out not to be a good idea. But then, setting up a marijuana farm on land he owned and then forgetting to pay the taxes, prompting a visit from the sheriff to post the tax delinquency notice, was also not a good idea. Criminals, like all people, have their brilliant moments and their DOH! moments.

BTW: I assume the reason he targeted Dems is that there are so many running. Kinda like robbing banks because that's where the money is.

Here's a top tip: Don't trust the new person – block web domains less than a month old. They are bound to be dodgy

Mike 16

Dodgy .info?

Blocking *.info would be a real inconvenience for me. ibm-1401.info is just my cup of tea. Blocking email from there might be annoying, although not nearly as annoying as preventing my reading of the website.

Of course, I'm just a geezer, and don't have an employer, other than She Who Writes the To Do List.

Sueball claims Tesla solar panels are so effective, they started fires at Walmart stores

Mike 16

Less call the whole thing off.

@hplasm

--- Or fewer lawyers, and more teachers... :) ---

Tell that to the authors of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language :-)

Or maybe don't bring it up with an actual linguist or grammarian, as it can generate the sort of donnybrook that is normally associated with politics or football. In short, this "rule" is approximately as old as the movement to disengage those ruffians in Boston from the beneficence of George III, as opposed to the use of less for countable things, dating back over 1000 years.

As with "which" versus "that", it is typically used to signal one's superior intellect (as long as one stays away from linguists and grammarians who might have the opposite opinion).

That said, language changes, and fighting over these rules is as likely to succeed as visibly wincing at misuses of "Begs the question" or figurative uses of "literally".

Dry patch? Have you considered peppering your flirts with emojis?

Mike 16

Using the right bait

What bait you use depends on what prey you seek. My hand-written notes (on paper) were a big part of landing the lady who has been my wife for several decades. When someone sends a store-bought card with _maybe_ a couple hearts and some initials below the mass-produced message, the depth of their desire/commitment is deducible. What I don't like to think too much about are the ones who send those stickers sold in in quantity by dollar stores for elementary school kids to use on Feb. 14. What are they fishing for?

Digital equivalents are similar...

I could throttle you right about now: US Navy to ditch touchscreens after kit blamed for collision

Mike 16

Re: Blips and does nothing

If they waited until the computer was sure it had acted on the touch, you would notice how bad the latency jitter was, and we can't have that!.

The "blip on maybe a press" if a computer version of your feckless assistant saying "yeah, I'll get right on it" and then completely ignoring what you said. Or maybe the "Your call is important to us" recordings.

Mike 16

Re: Start Button

My personal recollection of a "button to start" includes that the "button" was more like a small pedal, and that it not only closed a rather hefty set of contacts, but shoved the starter pinion into engagement with the flywheel.

Yes, I'm old, but the vehicle was a bit older than I was, when I first drove it. It had been made slightly before there were _any_ electronic stored program digital computers in the world.

You can easily secure America's e-voting systems tomorrow. Use paper – Bruce Schneier

Mike 16

Some States

For "majority party", please read "party holding a majority in the legislature, and governors office, no matter what they had to do to arrange that, and regardless of the will of the actual majority of voters".

California has a fairly rigorous procedure for redistricting to forestall some of the most blatant abuses, but this is not because the legislature, in its benign majesty, set those rules. It is because California also has the referendum, where a sufficiently large number of voters have signed a petition to get a measure on the ballot, and a sufficiently large number of voters have approved it once on the ballot.

All is not rainbows and unicorns, and some fairly pernicious referenda have passed, and been locked in because they set a larger majority for their repeal than they were approved by in the first place (still a few bugs in the system), but some legit reforms (the purpose for which the referendum was designed) have occurred.

The major issue in the U.S. is that getting a even a slightly bent state government to allow its voters to limit its power is a non-starter. Even more so with SCOTUS disinclined to interfere with that particular form of States Rights. Don't go looking for a corrupt state to allow its voters the referendum if they don't already have it, and don't be surprised if states that do have it make "modifications" to rules to limit those pesky citizens actually accomplishing much.

Even with the best of intentions, the party that allows fair elections in its state has unilaterally surrendered some power to its possibly less scrupulous opponents, and between senate rules, electoral college, and a hands-off SCOTUS, this is unlikely to end well.

They say piracy killed the Amiga. Know what else piracy is killing? Malware sales

Mike 16

Re: This reminds me on Son May

@juice:

---

As such, the original concept of copyright was as a mechanism to protect the original expression of an idea for a "limited time",

---

IIRC, that was the stated goal, but the actual goal of the Statute of Ann was an end-run around the issues surrounding the previous "Licensing of the Press" act

(1662, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne with usual caveats on accuracy of wikipedia)

That is, it was a replacement for an out-and-out "We will prosecute anybody with a press (including you) that publishes stuff we don't like, and in return we will also prosecute anybody who publishes a copy of your books" law, by changing the stated goal, but leaving the "copying and publishing need to play nice with the crown". Aka "Think of the Children" and "Saving you from terrorists" of today.

So, the original concept of copyright was in the same league as that of The Patriot Act: A spoonful of artificial sweetener to make the medicine go down. Yes, it also vested copyright in the author, rather than the publisher, and actually had a definition of "limited" that made some sense, but those "glitches" have been effectively fixed for centuries, as publisher power has grown, until quite recently. (See "Courtney Love does the math")

Lyft pulls its e-bike fleet from San Francisco Bay Area after exploding batteries make them the hottest seat in town

Mike 16

Re: Crotch area?

I suspect that the author was trying to imply that he had, erm, big _hands_.

Meet ELIoT – the EU project that wants to commercialize Internet-over-lightbulb

Mike 16

Alternative uses

A friend was curious about the "universal remote" capabilities, and stumbled across a source of fun.

Seems that some (many?) of those scrolling LED signs used in many businesses are controlled with some sort of IR comms. This was during the period that there were bank branches, and enough folks who used them to have lengthy queues.

As usual for "connected thingies", there was no security, so he would while away his time in the queue by changing the signs on the wall behind the tellers to something like

"Ask about our .1% 30 year mortgages".

Mike 16

Re: IrDA

Not sure it was exactly IrDA, but I recall when every hallway was infested with people "beaming" stuff between Palm devices. Not long distance, but capable of traversing at least two sheets of glass, as seen in the Palm "Train Ad": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bcTc8e2-6U

It's official: Deploying Facebook's 'Like' button on your website makes you a joint data slurper

Mike 16

Re: Just say no to FakeBook and the rest

Totally agree that a responsible website owner should use this. Of course, it is more profitable to sell out your users.

Bruce Schneier ( https://www.schneier.com/ ) uses a fork of this. There is no (good) reason for a website not to, other than wanting to abuse the trust of their readers. More info at (gotten by clicking the 'I' button in the line of grayed social-sharing icons) :

http://panzi.github.io/SocialSharePrivacy/

UK PM Johnson spins revolving doors, new digital minister falls through

Mike 16

Hand knitted code?

It appears that the PM of a land once famous for its textiles does not know the difference between knitting and weaving.

That said, he appears to have something in common with chaps who wove the ROM for some early British computers (back when Britain had quite a lead in that area). An analysis of errors in these memories turned up an interesting pattern of error density increasing in the parts made after lunch down at the local. Shortly thereafter this task was designated "Women's Work".

Darkest Dungeon: Lovecraftian PTSD simulator will cause your own mask to slip

Mike 16

I.T. Angle?

For starters, I could swear one of my bosses had his MBA from Miskatonic University.

And then there is The Lurker in the inter-record gap:

http://www.textfiles.com/humor/record_.gap

Enjoying that 25Mbps internet speed, America? Oh, it's just 6Mbps? And you're unhappy? Can't imagine why

Mike 16

Re: No @#$&

8-inch hard-sectored floppies?

Literally braking news: Two people hurt as not one but two self-driving space-age buses go awry

Mike 16

Re: outside city centers?

If you are _in_ a city center, you are in the domain of demonically possessed bicycle riders, bros on e-scooters, and those Uni-Segway stunt-riders, sometimes performing synchronized pedestrian-hunting.

Have a nice day.

You'll never guess what US mad lads Throwflame have strapped to a drone (clue: it does exactly what it says on the tin)

Mike 16

Recoil

Well, if you fitted it with rockets left over from the 4th of July (or 5th of November) at the post-holiday, erm, "fire-sale" of unsold goods...

Mike 16

Slippery Slope?

That would be the Napalm, especially if you are wearing gum-shoes.

Meanwhile, could someone experienced in deepfakes gin up a segment with one of these things taking out some usurpers while Mother of Dragons stands almost off-screen holding the controller?

Arrested development: Cops dump Amazon's facial-recognition API after struggling to make the thing work properly

Mike 16

Bandwidth? Surprising?

Not if one is used to "broadband" in the U.S., where "up to 50Mbps" means "8, on a good day, with a tailwind, for a while, if you are lucky"

Also.. When did the habit of using 'K' for 'C' in identifiers of "bad guys" get re-purposed to allegedly "good guys"? Next you will be telling me that 'X' and 'Q' have wide use outside the tech namespace (well, ignoring Quaker, although shooting breakfast cereal from guns was probably considered a tech breakthrough back in the day)

We don't mean to poo-poo this, but... The Internet of S**t has literally arrived thanks to Pampers smart diapers

Mike 16

Request: Can they add temperature sensors?

To _possibly_ alert parents when junior has been locked in that sunny car for over 30 minutes while they "dashed in" to Starbucks.

Further: Will Pampers sell the logs (data, not _that_) to a "child" that has become 18 or so, for use as evidence in the settlement phase of the child/parent "divorce"?

In the US? Using Medicaid? There's a good chance DXC is about to boot your data into the AWS cloud

Mike 16

Re: Going to cost who?

You can bet it won't be any of the folks making this decision, and it won't come from the smoking hulk they leave behind unless you can engage a top-notch Turnip Phlebotomist.

US border cops' secret racist Facebook group a total disgrace, says patrol chief. She should know, she was a member

Mike 16

Fire in a crowded theater

Just checking: Hands up those who know that (roughly) that phrase was used to justify prosecuting folks who spoke against the draft during WWI (AKA, Great War, Chapter 1).

Wikipedia also notes that the common formulation omits some bits in the original "falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic", but why let facts get in the way of a good all-purpose excuse to silence your neighbor?

Yeah, it's still not clear to me that saying something on the order of "this war thing may not turn out well, so what exactly is the benefit of letting oligarchs and royal-wannabees send everybody else out to die?" is an actual terrorist act, as it would be deemed today.

Sort of how "Think of the Children" is used to justify mandating NOBUS encryption and mandating that you laptop gets infested with malware every time you cross a border.

Usenet file-swapping was acceptable in the '80s – but not so much now: Pirate pair sent down for 66 months

Mike 16

Green Card Lawyers

No just every group _you_ subscribed to, but IIRC pretty much every group, period.

Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel )

claims "at least 5500" groups.

Then they published a book telling others how to get rich by spamming.

Someone had a tee-shirt made up with an image of a hand full of green cards busting (Alien Style) out of a globe, with the legend "Green Card Lawyers, Spamming the Globe since 1994", and they apparently responded with a "Cease and Desist" letter claiming Trademark on "Green Card Lawyers".

https://totseans.com/totse/en/zines/cud_a/cud685.html

(NSF people living in some jurisdictions)

Man, I wish I had one of those shirts

Oh, lovely, a bipartisan election hack alert law bill for Mitch McConnell to feed into the shredder

Mike 16

Authorized Hacking

Has existed for at least a Century in the U.S. I know that doesn't sound all that long to a Brit, but then 100 Miles doesn't sound that long to a Yank.

Anyway, it is inherent in politics that those in power will do whatever it takes to stay in power. All else follows simply and logically.

IBM torches Big Tech's get-out-of-jail-free card, says websites should be held responsible for netizen-posted content

Mike 16

Easy solution

Just mandate compliance with RFC 3514 for all internet traffic.

How this gets tacked on the to various IPV6<->4 hacks is left as an exercise to the reader.