Posts by veti

Re: Please no

From the sample given, it looks as if all it does is take the first sentence from the source material, then switch into some predetermined prose. So it doesn't really matter what you start it off on.

Re: What if he doesn't have the docs?

In that case, he's actually OK. All he has to do is make a statement "I never took any docs, I don't have any docs, I haven't communicated any docs to anyone", and he's in the clear.

Unless someone can prove he's lying, of course.

This is arguably where Uber's excessive dickishness comes in. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that he really is completely innocent of these charges - and yet he is, quite rationally, afraid that there might be something else that he could be stitched up for. Possibly, some charge that neither he nor his prosecutors have even thought of yet.

That's exactly why the Fifth Amendment exists, it's to protect people who think they might fall into that category, and that's what Uber - not the court - is forbidding him to use.

If you can figure out a way to send Wells Fargo to jail, I'm all ears.

"Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like." - said a British Lord Chancellor. In the 18th century. How far we've come.

Re: @Robert Helpmann??

How exactly do you arrange transport for someone who is not ready to travel yet, and you're not sure when they will be? And you're not on particularly good terms with them, and don't know their phone number, or whether they use Uber or Lyft or old-fashioned taxis?

Call a taxi to arrive at the cinema in an hour's time? Then how would the driver identify the fare (who wouldn't be looking for him), and how do you know the fare would even leave as soon as the movie's over?

Re: Here be snowflakes...

One of the benefits of being in the EU was precisely that these kinds of regulations were developed trans-nationally, i.e. there'd be one body of people doing it for 28 countries, rather than 28 bodies all doing it separately and then comparing notes.

Of course you can do it the latter way. But it's demonstrably at least a couple of orders of magnitude less efficient.

Even allowing for massive waste corruption at the EU level, even if 90% of all resources the UK contributes to EU standards making is squandered, it'd still be a bargain.

Parallel example: New Zealand maintains its own technical standards. But for nearly all purposes, it also accepts Australian standards as valid. Australia, for its part, generally (i.e. across most markets) accepts either US or EU certification as sufficient to allow a product to be sold.

The UK should simply rule that anything legal to be sold in the EU is also legal in the UK. The converse doesn't have to be true, though. If manufacturers decide they don't want to sell to the EU market, I don't see why they should be required to.

Re: We chose not to open the PDF file

Objection! The numeral 1 in Arial is quite distinctive, nothing like the lowercase L or capital I.

But Arial is also the venue of Microsoft's biggest crime against typography, and that is "zero thought put into kerning". Which means that in a lot of MS-derived software, it's impossible to tell the difference, visually, between 'd' and 'cl', or 'm' and 'rn'.

Re: Plenty of blame to go around

@Doctor Syntax: in your car analogy, there was a "recall". But lots of customers flatly refused to bring their old cars in for repair or replacement. XP was retired 3 years ago, there was plenty of publicity about that at the time, and all currently supported versions of Windows had the flaw patched 2 months ago.

Question: if the brakes fail in my Ford Model T, manufactured 1920, is it fair to blame Ford for that?

If not, then you've accepted that manufacturers aren't responsible for supporting their products ad infinitum, and all that remains is haggling about how long the period should be.

Re: @mage "User training and common sense"

@Version 1.0:

If the NSA/GCHQ/etc. really want to read what's on your computer, they will. Don't kid yourself otherwise. This has been the case since you got that first 33.6 kbps dialup modem.

But they're unlikely to encrypt the contents and demand bitcoin from you. That's not their MO. Far too revealing, for one thing.

Re: Ransomware is ...

... already easily stopped by patching your Windows machines, unless of course they're running Windows XP in which case either pay Microsoft to support them or cut the f***ing internet cable with an axe.

Either way, Sophos is useless.

Re: It's what the people want

@codejunky

They dont want any of that. Unfortunately the alternatives are worse.

True. And if you put these questions to referendums, they'd (probably) be rejected.

Unfortunately, or perhaps not, that's not how democracy works. We don't all get to vote on every separate issue, we vote for a professional cadre of people who will deliberate and wheel and deal and make all the individual decisions for us. That means we have to accept a package deal (and why referendums are stupid, because they undercut the whole system by pretending that one issue can be decided in isolation, without ramifications for everything else).

If you don't like the package, there are things you can do about it. Go meet your MP. Organise protests. Join a political party. Or form a new one and stand for election yourself, it's not particularly expensive (in the UK, at least - very different in the US). But all of them require some investment of time. If you can't afford or can't be bothered to do that, then you're stuck with the a la carte.

Re: Waiting....

If I were a hijacker, I'd be telling the crew member "either that cabin door opens, or your spine does, so think about that before you get clever with any 'duress' code or something".

I'm none too sure how much "security" that would add to the whole setup.

Re: Calling Amazon support personally

Sounds like Agile development to me. Deliver a half-assed product, then add more features to it when you get time.

But Amazon being Amazon, of course, they see no reason not to launch the product to the public while it's still thoroughly half-assed. They probably call it "beta testing".

And yet, not only Rosenstein's letter, but also Spicer's and Trump's combined efforts at laying out a justification, have all signally failed to mention this story.

I also note that when then-candidate Trump told it, last October, he described it as Clinton giving money to the wife of the official who was already investigating her.

So which is it? Can't be both, the stories are mutually contradictory.

I also note that McAuliffe is also a significant politician in his own right, he's the governor of a major state, and no doubt gives money to many of his party's proteges. He has had no particular connection to the Clintons since 2008, though doubtless they're still friends, and there's no actual evidence to suggest that this money was in any way Clinton-related. Just insinuation.

Oh, what am I say, of course that is evidence. In Trumpistan.

Re: For the phone scammers ...

@Hollerithevo: the thing is, sociopathy is a spectrum. Sure, it's often pointless to try to appeal to something that's not there. But not every crook is like that.

There is such a thing as a crook with a conscience, and you never know when you might get lucky enough to run into one. The thing is, on the phone, you can afford (if you choose) to take time to find out.

@strum: well, that's nice for you, but in my world: spam is a problem, pollution is a problem, congestion is a problem; deforestation, desertification, climate change, network congestion, world banking and insurance - all these things are problems because costs are being externalised. That's all the TotC means, and I don't see how it's deniable.

Well, that's been my approach for over a decade now.

But it's not realistic for everyone. Some people legitimately need to go there, for business or whatever. What I suggest in those cases is, don't take a computer.

1. Tell your hosts at the other end that you'll need them to lend you a PC of some description. Specify as many requirements as necessary

2. Put all your required files/information in some cloud storage facility.

3. When you arrive, put the two together.

4. When you get home, delete the cloud account.

Of course, this requires you to trust the party you're visiting. But if you don't trust them, you probably shouldn't be doing business with them anyway.

Re: Bank security is a complete joke

If your password was guessed and you don't know it, then a malicious actor has already done whatever they're going to do to you. The value in changing it periodically "just in case" is greatly undermined by the added cost of remembering it/entropy added by that requirement.

Number of passwords the average person is expected to maintain? About 20. Number of passwords a lay user can realistically be expected to remember? About 3, I reckon. Any more than that, I'ma gonna write down on a Post-it note and stick to my monitor.

Re: Comey was caught lying under oath. So Trump fired him. -- opportunely.

Well, I've been to the lengths - extreme, I know - of reading all the correspondence I could find attached to this story. Including Trump's and Sessions' letters, and Rosenstein's much more interesting and detailed opinion (on which the other two both hinge). And then I checked out Comey's original statement from July 2016.

I advise you to look at that last now, today, because there's a good chance it'll disappear from the record pretty soon. Here it is, as of right now.

And if you take time to read it, you'll see it doesn't say what Rosenstein's character assassination piece imputes it as saying. Rosenstein's memo is like Blair's dodgy dossier - it's transparently a justification for something that his boss was determined to do anyway, rather than an honest account of the reasons for doing it.

In the first place, El Reg has never pretended to be objective. About anything.

In the second place, "objective" doesn't mean you can't tell the truth just because some politician somewhere doesn't like it.

Re: Only one rule needed

Speaking as a professional, journalism-trained editor:

There's a lot of misunderstanding about that job. Remember: a journalist's job is to persuade as many people as possible to read something. (Or view something, or listen, or... you get the idea.)

That's it. The only metric that matters is "How many people read what you wrote today? Yesterday? Tomorrow?" Everything else is gravy.

Because the key word in your definition is "professional", i.e. "this is what they do for a living". Payment depends on eyeballs. Unless you can find some way to change that equation, then clickbait will remain the highest and purest form of journalism.

They would know if they were the ones who provided it to you. Which, if you read the article, is the only kind of encryption that's actually covered.

Re: drunk posting again

The Mail's coverage of this story includes the headlines:

"Young adults less likely to drink, official figures show"

"Boozy over-65s drink more than the Facebook generation: Older people are only age group to increase consumption ... "

The Mail gets a lot of stick, but personally I've found its reporting to be mostly accurate. Pro tip: you need to separate "reporting" from "comment", because the papers - all of them - will no longer do that for you.

Keep in mind that most of those 1.86 billion "users" never actually post anything. I forget the exact fraction, but it's very large.

Identifying Facebook users wouldn't prevent these sorts of abuses. You think the police/authorities have any real difficulty identifying a Facebook user who posts a video of themself committing murder? I don't. "Evading arrest" is not part of their agenda, they're just angling for their 15 minutes of fame. That's how sick our culture is.

I think Facebook should (1) stop hosting video content entirely, (2) aggressively filter photos, and (3) impose a delay (of at least 30 minutes) between an update - any update, including pure text or links - being posted and it actually being visible online. I think that would change the psychological dynamic of posting something shocking.

Re: So how are these aging systems going to handle

@MonkeyCee: I don't know about you, but my passport says I'm a British citizen, not a European one. Since, in order to be an EU citizen, you need to be a citizen of an EU member state - it's not clear that "EU citizenship" is really a thing in itself, rather than a derivative property.

Seems to me it should be fairly straightforward to withdraw EU citizenship from British citizens, while leaving their British citizenship intact.

Big John: if your aim is to "apply a little balance" and "object to the tactics being used by proponents", then you really need to tailor your attacks better to the content of the piece you're actually responding to. Because strawman attacks aren't going to balance anything.