* Posts by Ken Hagan

8137 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007

Dear America, best not share that password with your pals. Lots of love, the US Supremes

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What happens if...

"What is the practical difference between letting someone use your password, on the one hand, and logging in and selecting a film and then letting someone else watch it?"

To you, very little. To Netflix, there is an increased risk that the password will be re-used by the other person (perhaps without your knowledge) with the reduced chance of the other person actually buying their own sub. If they (Netflix) are grown up about this, they might consider letting a third party watch a free film is a form of advertising and so it is debatable whether they suffer any financial loss. They are much less likely to treat password-loan as a form of advertising.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: What happens if...

"How does this square with the possible existenc of formal documents such as Power of Attorney "

It squares perfectly. If you have Power of Attorney then you would have the authority to act as that person and the T&Cs are overridden. However, the vast majority of cases where "my spouse and I know each other's bank passwords" are not PoA cases and so would be a breach of the bank's conditions.

Look at it the other way. If you lend someone an object and a few weeks later you discover that it has been loaned on to others, are you miffed? You might be, even if the object is undamaged and back in your possession when you requested. There's a breach of trust and a level of risk that you didn't bargain for.

It's 2017... And Windows PCs can be pwned via DNS, webpages, Office docs, fonts – and some TPM keys are fscked too

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: 2XXX

No way will we need that third X. Microsoft have no new products that look capable of sustaining their historic position within the industry. They've given up on "devices" and they've largely lost on servers. They survive on desktops on the strength of their ability to run programs from a decade or so ago, but the result of *that* is that the current version of Windows is almost crushed under its own weight of back-compat crap.

They aren't dead yet, but in 2025 we may look back at 2017 and say "Yeah, the signs were already there.".

And to the naysayers who point to the cash pile I say just that it is all virtual money and another company (probably not Apple, Google or Amazon, although they are probably big enough) will eventually have a big enough pile of its own to *buy* Microsoft for its IP and promptly shut down the day-to-day operation as an act of mercy.

'There has never been a right to absolute privacy' – US Deputy AG slams 'warrant-proof' crypto

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Francis Walsingham

So from a two-sentence summary of the case against back-dooring encryption we have now progressed to a two-word summary. (Our friend FW may actually be the only case in history of this sort of thing and the resulting society is a text-book example of what the Founding Fathers didn't want for the US.)

Blade Runner 2049: Back to the Future – the movies that showed us what's to come

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Typos

Wee all ready has won to cheque spelling, butt its crap.

Microsoft silently fixes security holes in Windows 10 – dumps Win 7, 8 out in the cold

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: You think that's bad?

Um, no, even *that* has now died. From https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/18581/lifecycle-faq-windows-products ...

"Windows XP Embedded is a modular form of Windows XP, with additional functionality to support the needs of industry devices. It was released separately from Windows XP and provides a separate support lifecycle to address the unique needs of industry devices. Devices running Windows XP Embedded will be supported through 2016."

Another W3C API exposing users to browser snitching

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"I wonder if somebody could add this "functionality" to the websites of the conservative party?"

That would depend on whether they have control over anything that the website displays. Then again, if you included such unpleasantness in adverts, you could presumably pollute the browsing history of anyone who doesn't use an ad-blocker.

Oracle VP: 'We want the next decade to be Java first, Java always'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Design-by-committee languages suck

"Somewhat like JavaScript, but I digress."

You don't, actually. Both languages were designed for quick-and-dirty executable content on the client side. Once they had been adopted by the great unwashed of hobbyist programmers and lame educators (because they were free and available everywhere) they started to get used on the server side and for larger projects.

Linux kernel long term support extended from two to six years

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "bleeding edge" is overrated

Since this is Android we're talking about, the whole of user-space still lives on the bleeding edge. If phone makers really wanted to support their devices properly, they'd put something like Debian Stable on them and publish enough detail about their dodgy hardware to let someone else write the software.

But the hardware guys are quite happy for you to upgrade your phone every two years. This announcement is about Google's embarrassment that Apple support devices more or less for as long as they last. Whether Big G is actually big enough to push this one through is something we still have to discover. Since even *they* can't extend the life of their own branded kit beyond two years, I won't hold my breath.

BYOD might be a hipster honeypot but it's rarely worth the extra hassle

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"I don't know anyone with any relevant experience who thought BYOD was anything other than stupid."

Also, interestingly, nearly everyone *did* have relevant experience because, let's be honest, how many IT staff have not at some point been asked by "the boss" to hook their latest shiny to the company network.

Apparently Gartner are the only people on the planet who didn't know this. Colour me surprised.

UK third worst in Europe for fibre-to-the-premises – report

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Help

"a map not too dissimilar to this."

Excellent, ta!

"Makes no difference to me of course, suckiing data down my 200 Mbps VM pipe."

And that is another fair point, since FTTP isn't the only way to get connected and it would be a shame to burn boat-loads of government cash bringing technology to everyone only to find that it is the previous decade's technology and all the money was wasted.

UK Home Office re-bans cheap call gateways because 'terrorism'

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: VOIP over VPN?

"How are you going to monitor that?"

Well that's rather the point. They can't monitor these COMUG thingies either, but they've banned them so now they don't need to solve that problem.

Just because it is easy to break the law doesn't mean the law is futile. Quite the reverse, in fact. The law becomes the preferred mechanism for enforcement when technical means break down. (Of course, there is also the option of "not trying to enforce" state-sponsored voyeurism, but that option doesn't appear to have occurred to them.)

Web devs griping about iPhone X notch: You're rendering it wrong

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"the illuminated surface of the phone no longer forms a rectangle"

It's not just the notch. The corners of the rectangle are rounded (and probably not a very circular rounding for all I know) and presumably Apple will scream to the courts if anyone starts producing another phone the same shape, so the only safe approach for web devs is to work in the central rectangle and just ask for a background colour (or gradient, or clipped image) to fill out the rest of the space.

If *that* isn't done by default, then lots of web-sites are going to look a bit crap and Apple will deserve to get panned. If it is done by default, then I don't see a problem. You shouldn't be depending on a particular part of your background wash being behind a particular part of foreground content.

Wanna get started with practical AI? Check out this chap's Rubik's Cube solving neural-net code

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Amazing

"You're saying this as if a human who's never seen the Rubik's Cube before can come across a scrambled cube and, completely unprompted, can figure out the purpose AND solve it. As most things go, even humans need directions."

My memory of the original cube craze is rather dim, but I'm pretty sure that 99% of the population *did* immediately figure out the purpose. Obviously only a far smaller number actually solved it, but *some* did and I see no reason to let the machines have a lower bar.

You lost your ballpoint pen, Slack? Why's your Linux version unsigned?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: rpmbuild -ba --sign slack.spec

Really? Is that it?

I've come to expect some pretty slap-dash, corner-cutting gobshite from web-based startups, but if it is that easy to sort out then their failure to do it right in the first place is hideously embarrassing incompetence and their subsequent failure to fix it in August is wilful negligence.

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Unhappy

Re: perhaps it would be simpler to implement a this-is-bullshit font

HTML5 has <body>. That's almost the same thing.

If you want finer-grain control, here are some other suggestions:

<span class="bs">

<span class="porn">

<span class="terrrist">

<span class="troll">

Programming in the Middle Ages: Docker makes a lovely pair of trousers

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: OPC

Er, whoosh?

(In fairness, had I been serious then you would have made excellent points. It is a pity that the numpty who wrote OpcEnum.exe didn't know all this. Last I looked, it was still calling CoInitializeSecurity in a way that is appropriate for DOS-based Windows and which, on NT, actually makes it *harder* to get stuff to work without using DCOMCNFG to drop everyone's trousers.)

Ken Hagan Gold badge
Windows

OPC

"and you end up making the Guest account an administrator, and it still doesn't work"

But of course not! The reason it doesn't work is that it requires authentication in both directions. Typically this isn't possible, so you end up getting stripped of identity when calling back. Consequently, you need to make the anonymous logon an administrator. Then it will work ... maybe.

OPC: A data distribution protocol designed by someone to whom actual networks came as a nasty surprise.

Behold iOS 11, an entirely new computer platform from Apple

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Is this a step backwards?

The whole point of the iPad product (and its OS) was the bonkers sand-boxing that made it almost impossible for one app to muck about with another. It was a significant impediment to malware and in combination with not letting *users* fiddle at the file-system level it made the iPad pretty safe for Joe User or indeed Joe User's offspring.

If they are now relaxing all that with a proper files app and letting folks use the thing more like a real computer, perhaps that is a retrograde step. Worse, perhaps it is not a big enough retrograde step, since anyone who actually wanted a "proper computer in a tablet format" already has quite a few options that have gone the rest of the way.

UK Prime Minister calls on internet big beasts to 'auto-takedown' terror pages within 2 HOURS

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Couldn't she....

I think that was an aberration. Her usual formula is less impressive:

"I am Prime Minister"

"Boris is Foreign Secretary"

"Strong and stable"

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: How about...

"...to learn some of the basics of computing before making ridiculous demands."

To judge from these demands, she's never even *used* a computer, let alone learned about one.

Still ... that's probably our way out. We simply say that "Yes, it has been done and it is now impossible to upload terrorist content. Obviously there will be a few false positives, why is why the Conservative Party website has been taken down, and a few false negatives, which is what the Daily Mail *would* be ranting about had their website not also been taken down. But apart from those, it's all done and dusted Prime Minister.

RIP Stanislav Petrov: Russian colonel who saved world from all-out nuclear war

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Scary times indeed

Curtis Lemay (by then pretty much at the top of the USAF hierarchy) advocated a impromptu ICBM test during the Cuban Missile Crisis, explicitly arguing that it would cause the Russkies to panic and start WW3, which he considered a Good Thing because "better now than later".

'All-screen display'? But surely every display is all-screen... or is a screen not a display?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Why do we need bezels ?

"There would only be the requirement of being bezel-less on 2 edges."

For rectangular (rather than square) screens, you would need two different handed-nesses of screen to tile 4 of them together and if you are going to restrict yourself to foursomes then you might not reckon it was worth the bother.

Chrome to label FTP sites insecure

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: FFS, stop the nannying

"For a start, FTP is still perfectly fine for downloading public files or documents or images or PDFs."

More generally, both FTP and HTTP are the preferred choice (over their encrypted relatives) for anything that is digitally signed, because the plain-text protocols are amenable to caching whereas the encrypted ones are not.

Rise Of the Tiny Machines: Boffins cook up autonomous DNA sorting robot

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Coming for your jobs?

"I would not want to be under 40 now. Your job outlook is bleak and that could be an understatement."

As with just about every generation since the mid 1700s, the younger generation will be employed doing something different from their grandparents. They won't be idle, but they might be more comfortable. Put another way, I'm a little disappointed to be over 40 now. I worry that my children are about to zoom ahead without me.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Astonishing. Sorting without energy.

"If that were true, it would mean that this is a perpetual motion machine!!!"

It wouldn't. This isn't Maxwell's demon. The motive propulsion is coming from thermal motion and is therefore random. No useful work is extracted from the device without energy input.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Astonishing. Sorting without energy.

Nit-picking your title, the article explains that the actual sorting consumes energy. It is just the random walk across the surface that gets by on thermal fluctuations.

Would you get in a one-man quadcopter air taxi?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

It's OK folks...

"A network operations centre will monitor these aircraft in case of trouble, we were told."

Serious legal question: if your last words were "Spend every fucking penny of my estate on suing these bastards out of existence!!!!!!", would that be enforceable?

'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: OC

"If an intransitive verb is one without a direct object, then "The painting was displayed in the Louvre" surely counts as intransitive? "

I don't think a linguist would agree. That's just a passive construction and the active equivalent is "Unspecified-subject displayed the painting in the Louvre< which has a direct object.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: OC

Randy cocks display to hens. I imagine that's what the author must have been thinking.

Microsoft fixing Windows 10 'stuttering' bugs in Creators Update

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Fast startup? No thank you

"Turn off Fast Startup and this doesn't happen. Until the next forced update from MS turns it back on again."

I had a machine that borked the 1607->1703 upgrade, several times, until I switched off Fast Startup.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Sigh, Poor Ordinary Folks

"What better QA testers would you suggest than actual real world users?!"

1) Someone with a contact on the development team to whom they could report bugs.

2) Someone who has documentation for how the software is supposed to behave.

3a) Someone who is actually paid to do it full-time.

3b) Someone who isn't trying to do some other full-time job in order to pay their bills.

4) Someone who has been trained to anticipate likely errors in implementation.

But of course, that would cost money whereas just shipping shit apparently doesn't, so ...

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Sigh, Poor Ordinary Folks

"Ok troll, here's your daily bread:

Since Vista, we've been able to disable auto-updates through the services panel."

Ok, fanboi, here's yours. Since Windows 10, you have only been able to defer upgrades for a few months and then only if you have paid for some corporate licence.

D-Link router riddled with 0-day flaws

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"Did I get that right?"

No, I think you missed the bit where he gave them six months to pull their fingers out on eight other vulnerabilities but they just sat there hoping he would go away.

Everyone loves programming in Python! You disagree? But it's the fastest growing, says Stack Overflow

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: "Fastest Growing"

"When Python was brand new and went from zero users to one, that's an infinite rate of growth."

I think I'd argue that the initial number of Python users was one, not zero, since it is a bit silly to assert that there are no users (yet) of a language that doesn't exist (yet).

This approach also means that languages designed by committee experience slower initial growth than languages created by individuals, which strikes me as karma in operation right from the start.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Usefulness

You can automate the re-formatting on checkout and checkin and if you work in a team that makes this a requirement then you wouldn't be much of a programmer if you didn't automate it.

The IOCCC contest is also of social interest but I'm not aware of anyone working professionally who writes that way. Likewise, if you deliberately indent something in C or C++ to align with the wrong block (the equivalent of adding space in Python) it will compile fine but you can expect a visit from your colleagues on the next dark night. Demanding that whitespace indentation corresponds to the actual block structure is an informal-but-rigid requirement in every (text-based) programming language I've ever used. Python actually bothers to enforce it, but even C and C++ enforce it if you have lint-like warnings on your compiler.

As regards external libraries, perhaps you missed the bit where re-formatting was automated. If it bothers you, reformat it, but actually I suspect that you will get used to all the styles that are common in your language and switch seamless from one to the next as you step through the debugger. The rest of us did at some point in our careers.

No-one is suggesting that multiple styles should be mixed within a given section of the codebase. (I bet that's what the "studies" were looking at, though. I've read plenty of "studies" in my time that I wouldn't wipe my arse with.) To assert that consistency is required across *all* code would be a much less plausible study result. It would, for one thing, be a compelling argument for never using more than one language in a project, which is certainly a proposition that people will dispute. It would also be an argument about never writing Windows programs in C or C++, since the Win32 and CRT house styles are different.

In the real world, outside of academia and internet flame wars, "readability" is not a matter of formatting or any other stylistic metric. It is about whether things have identifiable names, whether the algorithms are clear, whether things are done in the obvious order, whether violations of the first three are properly justified in an obvious fashion either in the code or in documentation, and whether those comments and that documentation are actually kept in step with the code. Your compiler can't check that, but by god it's important!

Ken Hagan Gold badge

"perhaps that means that it's too complicated"

Ease of programming is not necessarily a good thing.

When engineering a physical object you have to pay attention to tolerances. For simple objects, or with very clever engineering, those tolerances might be fairly generous. For the most complicated objects, the tolerances will usually vary from one part of the object to another but will often be very tight in the critical areas.

In programming, sometimes it is really important that you say exactly what you mean and definitely do not say anything that you don't mean. That's like an intelectual tolerance. Some languages are fairly relaxed and will execute almost anything you can type and will attempt to "do the right thing" based on heuristics. Others are fascist straight-jackets that demand bowing and scraping in the appropriate places, but which can then be trusted to do exactly and only what you have (finally) specified.

Obviously it is possible to have the worst of both worlds, with fascist syntax and DWIM semantics. However, I doubt it is possible to have the best of both worlds. At some point, you have to knuckle down and get particular.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Usefulness

"The poor fuckers who have to maintain your pile of shite code after you've been sacked, that's who!!!"

Matters of formatting can be sorted by automatic tools. Matters of implementation style are no more subtle in python than in any other language. The fact that the python community has coined the word pythonic when few other languages have coined anything similar is interesting from a social point of view but of no technical importance. I concur with the OP: Who cares whether it conforms to the "right" way of doing it.

EU court must rule on legality of UK's mass surveillance – tribunal

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: The Sooner...

Brexit has nothing to do with this. It is a simple matter of holding everyone to account under the law and referring cases to whatever appropriate courts have jurisdiction at the time of the case.

I don't recall any referendum on the question of abandoning those principles. Was there one? Did I lose?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Just in time..

Surely the ECJ will simply turn around in 2019 and say "we no longer have jurisdiction" and punt the case back down to the UK where the receiving court *will* now have the power to make a binding judgement ... on whether the law that will (by then) have changed had been broken (now).

Boffins: 68 exoplanets in prime locations to SPY on humanity on Earth

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Deep Time

Life on Earth is umpteen squillion years old and has been observable via spectrographic evidence for at least a billion years. (Actually, atmospheric composition has changed dramatically over that period, but has probably been significantly-different-from-dead in various ways for all that time.)

Intelligent life on Earth is only about 10000 years old and has only been remotely observable for a couple of decades, depending on where you live. That's assuming that you can detect the radio waves. (And yes, you won't be able to separate individual stations, but you probably can detect the bump in the overall power spectrum, and if you are an alien scientist you can probably recognise that those frequencies match the transmission windows for our atmosphere.)

In another hundred (perhaps) or thousand years it is quite possible that we will be a dead planet in term of radio emissions detectable at long range. Technology changes and broadcasting at high power in all directions is a pretty dumb way to communicate so we are already using alternatives. Then there is the possibility of a completely new mechanism that we cannot guess yet. (I am reminded of the anecdote about the anthropologist asking a neolithic man about his ideal means of communication and being told "a really big drum" but all the while radio waves are passing through his head.)

Life on other planets presumably follows a similar historic trajectory, but plus of minus a few hundred million years!

In a few hundred million years time, we will either be extinct or able to visit planets and reside there without the inhabitants being aware of our presence.

So the aliens are either already here, unnoticed and reading this comment with wry amusement, so they are so far behind that when we visit their planet in the relatively near future we will not be noticed by them. Either way, the technology of the visiting civilisation will be so far advanced of the hosts that there will be no question of "colonisation" or "invasion" because the host planet will have nothing to offer except scientific interest (best served by observing incognito).

The geologists have a term for this; they call is Deep Time (capitalised) and it is the temporal version of the Douglas Adam's paragraph that begins "Space is big. ...".

What's your flava? Ooo, tell me what's your flava... of Ubuntu

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: 5 people who still care about Ubuntu

Microsoft? They've only just started to embrace it.

Please, pleeeease let me ban Kaspersky Lab from US govt PCs – senator

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Surprised?

Out of interest, have you banned RAR files as well?

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Taken to its logical conclusion

Well if all governments insisted that their IT is entirely trustworthy, they'd all insist on using software and hardware that is either designed and fabricated within their own borders or entirely open source. So Europe is going to have to build some fabs and just about everyone is going to have to start using a flavour of 'nix. (Even the US can't trust Windows as long as there are closed source device drivers and admin-level software involved.)

But try telling that to a typical politician and they just come up with a half-hearted response like this. She should grow a back-bone and insist on a fully trusted platform.

(I'd add a penguin icon, but I don't want to offend the BSD fans.)

Smart meters: 'Dog's breakfast' that'll only save you 'a tenner' – report

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: I want a smart water meter

"I am curiously intrigued to know how/where you expel waste from your body. "

He only shits at work, where there is also a shower (for folk who cycle in) and he never flushes his pees?

It's probably possible, if you can stay employed.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: It's not about saving you money, it's about enabling *green* energy

"And how do smart gas meters enable green energy?"

As he described. If you can switch the country off when the green power isn't available, you don't need to have any non-green power in reserve.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Benefits

"I like the idea of a fixed result in a democratic decision making process; can we choose the 1945 UK General Election please."

Nobody is suggesting that we can't apply to rejoin after we've left, but right now we have already left and living two final years under the rules of membership is merely to give everyone time to adapt to the change.

We could have a second referendum to choose between "the deal on the table" or "hardest Brexit possible under WTO rules", but a second referendum on the decision to leave would require a time machine. We have already left.

Crypto-busters reverse nearly 320 million hashed passwords

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: That's lovely, but

Since the OP has the correct email and password, they can go one better and actually post the violating content. Bonus points if you can get the whole site closed down.

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Hashes

"p.s. It's "in practice", practise is a verb. Cf. "in fact" and "advise vs. advice"."

Isn't that "fact" somewhat locale-dependent?

Linus Torvalds passed a kidney stone and then squeezed out Linux 4.13

Ken Hagan Gold badge

Re: Is the sky falling? Or, ...

"Silly me, I thought SMB and CIFS were part of Samba."

Mostly they are, but there's a cifs.ko that some folks insist on using and which doesn't get as much love as the user-space code.