Posts by Robert Carnegie

Re: "Where's "here"?"

Ok, another alternative plan, legalise hacking to demand money... if the government does it. Try this: if the tax office can get malware onto your company computers and perform encryption and denial of service, then they're entitled to demand extra tax from the company in return for releasing the encryption. That will motivate the finance director to support keeping your systems secure and also well backed up, to not pay even when the government successfully breaks in. And this will keep out other bad guys as well.

Although I suppose there are quite a lot of foreseeable problems with this scheme...

Re: Ahh what is it with Crispin Blunt????

Most of the candidates for new Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister seem to have taken drugs at college and then tried to keep it quiet. Google for "Crispin Blunt" turned up a Daily Telegraph article (paywalled, and I haven't paid) on that topic - because he wrote it. "But at least they will be properly representative of the country they hope to lead," he said, in the free-view section (presumably it gets much more naughty later).

I can't readily think of drugs names (because I don't know many) for the rest of them apart from Jeremy Skunk and Andrea Hadsome (both... substantially... as alleged), but you get the idea.

Esther Wahey?

Matt Hand-Cut?

Re: Time

Does your navigation system have up-to-date mapping? An old box won't know about new roads, but you may be able to get an update to load into it.

I think that the most fancy systems get current information about road repairs and even accidents that obstruct your journey. That may be worth being told about.

Re: Run for it!

Your alternative to a recursive algorithm is a recursive algorithm.

If you knew that your alternative to a recursive algorithm is a recursive algorithm... is that another recursive algorithm?

Just speculating, but I should think that if a blind or visually impaired person wants to use voice control then it can be set "always on" in accessibility. Or... they can look at the screen, they just can't see it when they do that.

Re: Nice write up! Excellent fact checking!

I thought that - that the value of Audi.uk is not great if you're not Audi, and Audi probably can stop you. Especially if you're Honda.

On the other hand, a careful... blackmailer?... will take longer to trace and punish. And not every case of a domain name resembling yours will be pursuable. Look at the long weary story of s e x dot com.

Re: careful wording...

I think you don't ever know with more certainty than 99.99 percent.

I bet a fake pizza deliverer (or a real one) could go round asking customers for their password on the doorstep and would have a better than 0% success rate. Even if it's their Facebook password.

If you want to implement a "Hello World" program from scratch, you must first create the universe. (20GB? Surely you exaggerate.)

Re: Do ray me

I wondered "did she really ask for more intonation".

Was it here or elsewhere that I recently mentioned a fictional incident in rather-older-than-I-thought sci fi novel and publishing satire "Cyberbooks", where incidentally a voice-activated door lock requires the user to lose his temper and scream at it since that is the voice print that (presumably with some difficulty) he had set to unlock it.

Re: Autopilot is itself Incomplete

Please hold human drivers to the same rigorous standards, and permanently ban any that make one stupid mistake. What do you mean, "does that include you?"

Re: you can set your own locale regardless of the software language

You can set your search locale and language, and UI language, in your Google account separate from your current location - which of course it knows. I haven't tested this, but it should address your issue.

For instance, I typed "hello" into British Google, and I was offered a song by Adele and a photo-magazine about celebrities - British versions. I presume that in the U.S. you will see... maybe Lionel Ritchie? Or does that make me awfully, awfully old? How about dear Margarita Pracatan?

Re: Islington...

Will not roads crumble less if vehicles slow down a bit?

Re: It's a hard problem

A novel I read recently, "Whispers Under Ground" (2012), has at one point an authorized (presumably) use by London police of a possi ly fictional car tracking gadget said IIRC to cost about as much as a holiday in Ibiza: it's magnetic and about the size of a shoe polish tin. So our hero just strolls up to the vehicle and reaches down to clip it on on the most appropriate place.

At which point, a story complication appears, as there is one there already.

Long story short, he puts his own one on a different part of the vehicle, and who else may be tracking the suspect is never officially admitted, but heavily implied.

Translate

Type "Translate" into Google, select English and French languages, type "What a surprise." Observe no accent, metaphorically related to making the statement with no emotional emphasis whatsoever. Poll for up or down votes: up to agree that you could just as well say it in English, down if you think French has je ne sais quoi and le mot juste.

Re: Fab

An RHS web page mentions something apparently called a "Bug Clear Gun", which sounds like taking the issue pretty seriously.

I think the popular saying is a fallacy - that if Bill Gates walks past a wallet in the street, he loses money if he stops to pick it up, because it is taking time out of his existing activity of getting richer and richer every day. Actually, he gets richer even while he is doing something else. That is capitalism; ordinary people are employed by, in effect, a big pile of money. The big pile of money, and the person who owns it, are enriched by your laboring; the benefit to the person who does the work is secondary.

Likewise, taking time to drive the kids to school does not retard growth of Bill Gates' pile of money; it does it by itself (with help from various human beings who are not important, as I explained).

Re: 2 letter TLDs if the UK split up?

I like your "saltiere" suggestion, but typo squatting for the national cause is an undignified position.

Re: Thank you for advertising your opinion.

"The Register" is "the advertising industry", too. Thank you for visiting.

I see I previously typed "came" when I meant "card", which is odd.

I don't know the American system, but this action seems broadly unjustified, so can it actually be challenged? Like Trump arbitrarily but apparently officially designating inconvenient organisations as "terrorist" in order to invoke established sanctions against "terrorists"... however, those decisions appear to be allowed to stand. Martin Niemöller's theorem may apply.

Giving everyone their own tartan could be a bit expensive, we all have different ones. (It is a bit dubious.)

Re: Shakespear optional...

I say no. Ordinary text has about one bit's worth of variation per letter. And most password inputs would require that you are word and punctuation perfect. I'd predict you fluffing it even in a Shakespeare sonnet. "My mistress' eyes are nothing, like the sun."

My method is to take random generated letters and then invent a mnemonic for them. That makes them more memorable but not less random. Too bad if you get all X and Z, but you have that risk in Scrabble although there aren't so many of the tricky ones.

Re: A lot of commies in here

I think someone recently explained that the private tax companies' pet legislators were instructed to prevent attempts to simplify the tax laws into something that an ordinary person can deal with. It being complicated is a big part of how the tax software people make their money.

Batman

"Nice try, but I arrived five minutes ago."

For instance.

Precedent

Have you seen anything of "The Man Who Was Thursday"?

I think it also appeared in a Private Eye cartoon and possibly real life - the subversive group whose members were ALL policemen assigned to investigate the subversive group.

Re: Of course the FCC is doing nothing

The FCC is not actually a cricket club... I think??

It's not precisely a telecoms industry regulator either, although I think it's meant to be.

Re: The CLI is not your friend, in such situations...

I have to use several different terminal emulators (...apparently) which have an inspiring array of different responses to copy-paste keystrokes or left and right mouse clicks. Such as right click = paste immediately. If you're expecting to drag-select text and then right-click to copy, the immediate paste comes as a disappointment.

If I overlooked someone mentioning "Write your destructive code so that it includes testing the condition that it is running where you intended it to run, before performing the destruction" - i.e. test server name, directory name, etc - then, excuse me. And anyway it's usually too much trouble, unless you can automate that.

1 out of 100

says that 99 other drives stayed good.

Re: Clarity needed here

The key words to look up basically seem to be "John Deere" and repair. Like the iPhone, it appears that if you try to fix your own tractor, its computer detects interference and refuses to work at all. "Right to repair" therefore apparently means that manufacturers would not be allowed to include a self-destruct function of that type in their product. (You can still set your own iPhone to overload if you are captured by the Talosians, of course.)

Re: The funny thing is

Suppose if A N Other web site also requires you to log in by saying "My voice is my password". Then... well, it's the same password obviously.

I wonder if it works if you say "My boss is a (cussword)" instead? And do it consistently.

And yet voice identification security worked fine in Gerry Anderson's "U.F.O." television series back in 1980. (Set in 1980, made in 1970.)

A minor detail in recent (...1989??) near future satirical science fiction novel "Cyberbooks" (someone invents an e-reader with colour and moving pictures; the paper publishing industry panics) was somebody's voice-print door lock that repeatedly and consistently doesn't recognise him until he loses his temper and starts yelling at it, which presumably is how he felt when he set it.

Re: Can a grownup, please...?

No evidence, but by me, "special" symbols are worthless in a password. They're harder to remember, harder to type, and occasionally not accepted at all. Each can be substituted with a hexadecimal code, for instance 0x21 for !

So, all my passwords are some upper and lower case letters and some numbers. For instance: Mow22fll (which isn't an actual password, for a start) is composed of initial letters of some words in an e-mail I just wrote (this actually isn't very random: there are better methods). I convert the letters into memorable words that I can mentally convert sack to the password text: The numerals just come along. Like the capital letter, they're mostly there just because some system security compels me to put them in, and if I always do then I don't have to remember where they're required and where not. And if some stupid system still says this is not passwordy enough, then I add... 0x21. And if you also block that then I WILL find and kill you. :-)

Re: Landing robots

"This is a huge opportunity to land sizable robots with adequate solar panels and a lot of instruments on an asteroid"

For some reason I'm imagining a sun lounger going up there. (Is it going that way?)