* Posts by Milton

880 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2016

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Blighty's buying another 17 F-35s, confirms the American government

Milton

Re: I'm in the mood for being a downvote magnet

The politicians who approved the F-35 POS have much to answer for. But of course, Lockheed was ever so friendly, and generous. It made sure to spread the manufacturing and services over as many congressional districts as possible, turning the pork-barrel into pork-carpet-bombing.

The saying goes that it's hard to persuade a man to believe the truth when he's being paid to believe something else.

And so those behind the F-35 chose to ignore the stark lesson of the F-111—the last time some benighted idiot thought a single airframe could somehow perform all tasks better than all predecessors. They also chose to ignore the lessons of single-engine combat aircraft: they are lost way more frequently than twins (some imbecile Canadian minister, asked what would happen when an F-35 engine failed up in the high north said: "It won't"). And they chose to ignore the lesson of the F-4, sent into combat over Vietnam without a gun because—obviously!—with missiles available, all engagements would be at long range, so you'd never get into a close quarter turning dogfight with a hungry MIG after your AIM-9s had run out. No missile used in combat has ever achieved even a 50% kill rate: missiles get better and more sophisticated, sure, but so do countermeasures. And complexity is an excellent way to diminish reliability anyway.

If Russian or Chinese enemies had wanted to poison American defence procurement and harm its military capability for the next two generations, it's hard to see what they would have done differently if given control of Lockheed and Congress. They must be delighted ... and happy to postpone any future war until the F-35 has supplanted its teen-series predecessors.

Milton

Re: I'm in the mood for being a downvote magnet

"I reckon the F35B will be pretty spectacular, once it's RFS. Perhaps more effective than the Eurofighter."

I guess your tongue was in your cheek ... there's really no objective reason to expect the F-35, especially the absurd -B version, to be anything except a monstrous, failing waste of money. "Can't climb, can't turn, can't run" wasn't even the half of it. Rear view is basically non-existent, and won't be compensated any time soon by the unachievable super-helmet, which, even when its code is finished, is still likely to make pilots sick, break their necks or force them to switch off most of its jumble of functionality in order to be able to think. The ordnance loadout is pathetic, the range is crap and the turnaround times are realistically going to be days once they begin to see real-world use.

All of which wouldn't matter if this jet's purportedly amazing stealth really would allow it to stand off from great, safe distances and shoot down enemies like potting fish in a barrel. But the Russians and Chinese have worked assiduously on a number of highly effective measures to counter so-called stealth, and the F-35 itself is stealthy only if it carries very few weapons and hasn't picked up a pebble scratch off the runway.

If the US is planning to fight a significant war against any adversary which is not restricted to pickup trucks, RPGs and tea-towel headgear, it had better do so before it has to rely upon the F-35: because if it waits 10 or 15 years to pick a scrap with China, or Russia or even Iran and has to depend upon the F-35, there's liable to be grave embarrassment.

Biz overlords need to give a stuff about what they're told by IT crowd

Milton

Why that won't happen

"Biz overlords need to give a stuff about what they're told by IT crowd"

To oversimplify, while retaining the essential truth of the situation:

* The "IT crowd", broadly speaking, have a mathematical, engineering or even scientific way of thinking, reasoning and approaching problems and solutions. They tend to live in an evidence-based, fact-based, logical world. They are, generally, intellectually honest.

* The "biz overlords", also broadly speaking, tend to be more concerned with style, spin, appearances, sales and marketing, money, quarterly trends and profit, bonuses, cheap, short-term bandaid fixes, money and cost-cutting if it provides any kind of brief gain or relief. Oh, and money. They are, in short, political creatures—therefore, intellectually dishonest.

We have the entirety of human history to demonstrate that the latter listen to the former only when hearing what they like, using all the intellectual contortions and excuses that a fundamentally greedy, lazy mind can dredge up. Whereas, when presented with evidence , no matter how solid, that disagrees with their preconceptions or motivations, this will be ignored, dismissed, spun, concealed, lied about, suppressed—even unto the sacking the bearers of unwelcome facts if necessary.

If an organisation like NASA—NASA, without even the greed factor, for Offler's sake!—can not once but twice manufacture catastrophe and needless death because managers, choosing political behaviour, prefer to ignore engineers while tying themselves in knots of sophistry to justify the unjustifiable, what chance that industries motivated primarily by money can avoid it?

As countless studies have shown—for those who cannot simply observe what happens around them—the kind of people who are greediest for position, power and money are the absolute last ones who should ever be allowed to make important decisions. (The picture-perfect example of such avarice, foolishness, incompetence and dishonesty is the current President of the US, after all.)

This is the tragedy of human vice and weakness writ large in 100,000 years of death, oppression and exploitation—and writ small yet perfectly preserved still, when you ask "Why don't bosses listen to techies?"

Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

Milton

Re: "But was this a story about a driving licence or visa application type copy cat site?

"Aibu - if you have to ask the question, the answer is yes."

That is glib tosh. "Am I being unreasonable?" is a perfectly reasonable way of offering an opinion while displaying some humility, in recognition of the fact that what seems reasonable, even blandly uncontroversial to one person, might outrage another.

Two decent, smart people can hold views which are polar opposites, each initially regarding the other's opinion as "unreasonable". That's why honest debate, evaluation of evidence, looking at another's rationale are so important to civilisation. Those two decent, smart people can talk to each other (not the same as shouting past each other) and may end up still disagreeing—but doing so while at least understanding why their interlocutor reasonably holds differing views.

I think it's called being a grown-up. Admittedly, in the modern Age of Stupid, epitomised by the rise of such cretinous children as the current "leader" of the free world, this appears to be in short supply.

But let the rest of us please not fall into the traps of simplistic, glib dismissals of others' views.

No laptop ban on Euro flights to US... yet

Milton

implemented in software

In other news, top evil mastermind coder Terror al-Bstard has decided that his minions will carry unmodified, bombless laptops on planes in the hope that these will be stashed in the hold. Al-Bstard's code will wake the devices at 37,000 feet and put them through tough benchmarks for several hours in anticipation that sooner or later, one will overheat.

The laws of averages await ...

'The last thing I want is a software dev taking control of my craft'

Milton

We approach an inflection point

“We’re not talking about putting 300 people in a 747 and emptying the cockpit, we’re talking about things that might be capable of delivering books.”

It sounds very mordant, and it's a horrible thought all right—but the truth is this debate, currently confined to lots of woolly fiddling and theorising and typical government ignorance and inaction, is going to change gear utterly as soon as one of those "things ... capable of delivering books" flies into the intake of a 777 climbing out of Gatwick. We have to pray for a good flight crew that day; it is survivable: but it is the moment *everything* changes.

We keep hearing about drone near misses with commercial airliners. Drone sales continue to rise. Drones in the air continue to increase. The proportion of frakkin' idiots in the population continues the steady rise begun in 1983 or thereabouts. Beyond a few weak measures, drone flight remains a free-for-all. Some of the aforementioned idiots will try to get cool footage of jetliners taking off, muttering "It'll be fine, I'm a good pilot" (no you ain't, the software is), so they can bathe in fame on one or other of the multitude of fatuous social media wankfests. They'll get their fame, sooner or later ... but won't like it.

I submit this debate is essentially marking time until the day after a serious incident, when government, with its retarded, ignorant laziness will suddenly act—the usual useless politicians up on their hind legs saying "How could this happen?" and "Why wasn't this predicted?"

Forgive me if I sound jaded a little cynical about this—and no, if it needs be said, I am not wishing for a tragedy—but I'm not taking all this think-tanking and imagineering very seriously, for I suspect it will be overtaken by events and blown away like leaves.

Robot lands a 737 by hand, on a dare from DARPA

Milton

BS detector activated

Sorry, I have to call BS on this, and I don't suppose I'm the only one. The physical bot-in-the-seat (let's call him Otto?) must have at least as many inputs available as would any built-in system. It must be able to make at least as many outputs (control actions) as a human pilot, but why would you limit it to human-only capability, when built-in software can do so much more all at once? And Otto's software cannot be less complex than a built-in system: it has to be more complex because it requires extra code for running otherwise pointless servos and pressure sensors and wotnot. Plus, if it even needs to be said, why waste an entire seat for machinery, when you can have built-in systems and two seats available for humans?

And let's not enquire what happens when Otto sees—if he even can see—a runway incursion ahead, where a human pilot would hit TOGA as a brainstem reflex?

So logically this makes sense only as a "dare", per the headline, with perhaps some peripheral learning opportunities. But no one with half a brain would create and install Otto as a right-seater when you can build in better (and cheaper, I'd guess) embedded systems. Perhaps the real exploration is looking into general-purpose robotic systems capable of replacing humans for certain highly rules-based tasks? In that context this fanciful test might make a little more sense.

Unless, of course, the F-35 program is in such dire trouble that ancient, pre-software planes are going to be dusted off for service? It'll be something to see: squadrons of alpha-version terminators clanking as they board old century-series fighters in the desert ...

It's a question worth asking: Why is the FCC boss being such a jerk?

Milton

Inconceivable!

"To Republicans, especially on the far right, this was everything they had been complaining about for the previous six years. It was direct interference in a largely independent organization. It was government regulation writ large. It was Obama. It was just plain wrong."

You could have shortened that to the key point: "It was Obama".

Republicans simply could not overcome their visceral antagonism to the thought of a black man being President. They couldn't say that, of course: like many other loathsome instincts nurtured by those folks, it had to remain silent but for the usual dog-whistle racism that adolescent twerps like Trump have exploited so well. A black President? Inconceivable!

And if having a black man as Prez was abhorrent to those people, then, by heaven, it looked as if they might next get a ... woman! It could only have been worse if she had been a black woman! The pasty plump lizard-men of Republican politics could not stomach the idea of a woman as Prez either. A person without a penis, as President? Inconceivable!

So, Hillary being a poor candidate (she was admittedly utterly lousy) despite being white, her failure to tote even a tiny Republican-sized wiener rendered her so unacceptable that America elected the worst imaginable person as President: a psychotically egotistical pathological liar, multiple bankrupt "expert businessman", racist, misogynist, self-confessed sex assaulter, who can barely read or spell or punctuate, whose ignorance of nearly everything would put a nine-year-old to shame ... but he does at least have, allegedly, a willy: though the jury is out on whether it's even as big as his paws.

In this environment of "Stupid is as stupid does", an odious clown like Ajit Pai fits right in.

Well, hot-diggity-damn, BlackBerry's KEYone is one hell of a comeback

Milton

So—why not a flip?

This just deepens my puzzlement about why the flip (clamshell) form factor hasn't returned bigtime.

Yes, I know that for a decade manufacturers and marketurds have slavishly followed Apple's vulnerable-slab-of-glass approach, but Samsung's half-hearted efforts aside, no one seems to have stood back and said: "Wait a mo: we could do flip-phone really, really well now".

The advantages remain obvious:

* Protecting the single most expensive vulnerabilty, the screen, when not in use (and even when in use for making those old fashioned phone call things, if you like)

* Double the amount of available console (input+output) area in an instant—in this case, the keyboard could have been nicely sized without compromising the screen, but the possibilities are almost endless

* Miniaturisation has come so far that everything from feature- to really powerful smart-phone could be implemented in a wide variety of sizes and overall designs

* Supplementary user aids include flip answering/closing calls; having a low power notifications display on the exterior; using voice/BT/whatever to make and receive calls without even touching the phone, let alone opening it ... lots of opportunities here

* Most important, you can make it innately more robust than anything with a screen smeared all over its exterior, which, if you think about, its a bit daft.

Make sure you add a headphone socket, removable battery, memory card slots etc, and you have a potential set of winners that you could spread across a broad range of physical sizes, features, screen sizes etc—and for the market segment that wants it, a good way to implement a really oustanbding keyboard.

Why not?

PS—Maybe even a market for VR-specialty flips: using both inner surfaces as HD+ screens, the (potentially vanishingly narrow, if Samsung were on the case) bezel in the middle rendered irrelevant with a goggle attachment ... reinforcing my frustrated point that flip offers vast possibilities and flexibility, and is nowhere to be seen while the lemmings keep pumping out Apple clones.

Webroot antivirus goes bananas, starts trashing Windows system files

Milton

But what if we invented the internet all over again

I've decided that I'll bite: let's ask, What if we invented all this shit now, instead of letting it grow like cancer for the last 30 years?

A reasonable person might agree that for any device you own:

1. You'd complete a preferences questionnaire about which private data about yourself you are willing to share, with whom and under what circumstances. So "Share my family photos with everyone" would be a NO, whereas a YES might be "Allow retailer to keep my credit card on file if I click YES for their certified site". "Send loads of usage data including contents of my documents to an OS vendor" would probably be a NO.

2. A modern anti-malware system would take those preferences into account, and if it were a *true* learning system, would observe that some software tried to appropriate and export data that you don't want it to. It would determine that some software providers were untrustworthy and block access to data, and then disable functionality if necessary. It would be acting according to your express wishes.

3. In that respect, a product like Webroot is doing exactly what we would want it to: identifying data theft and stopping it.

If anti-malware software gets clever enough—moves from blind signature-based recognition to a more learning-of-intentions based approach—my guess is that Windows would have to be excluded as an entire unit from any checking, else it would constantly be blocked as malware.

Ambient light sensors can steal data, says security researcher

Milton

Ask my permission

I cannot see why websites or apps or any other logic running on my device should be able to do *anything* without explicitly asking my permission.

The fact is most functions can work perfectly well in meeting their purported purpose with a minimal supply of specific data and inputs, and most people are able to see that (for example) "Pteranodon Acme Sketching App" DOES need limited access to the file system and does NOT need access to Contacts, Call Logs etc. (And indeed, Peteranodon should really only have write access to a single directory and sub-directories, if we were doing things properly.)

I'd like to believe that first, websites will be absolutely required to announce their spying and gain consent before doing it, and second, browsers will have explicit controls to block use of any inputs beyond keyboard and mouse on a global or per-site basis.

This is something you should have to positively opt in to—if only to make people actually ask themselves, "Why the frak would a sketching app need access to my current location?"

(If there is such as thing as "Pteranodon Sketching", my apologies, I simply made up a name to use as an example: but t'internet is full of surprises. Many of them, unpleasant.)

Will the MOAB (Mother Of all AdBlockers) finally kill advertising?

Milton

An article for El Reg to be ashamed of

If you were expecting a sensible description and some thoughtful analysis of the Princeton work ... I guess you'll look somewhere else. The article contains a brief non-explanation, an almost context-free screenshot and then a bunch of woolly pseudo-criticisms that smell exactly like a bloke propping up the bar saying "If I don't understand this technical stuff, it can't be any good". Shoddy "journalism".

AWS v Oracle: Mark Hurd schooled on how to run a public cloud that people actually use

Milton

Over-reliance on single nodes ...

... is always, always, always an amateurish, blinkered, cheapskate, short-sighted, fundamentally stupid thing to do. It is, as such, the almost exclusive province of the inexperienced, bean-counters and senior management (and of course, politicians, who somehow manage to embody all the vices and weaknesses of humanity in one shoddy package).

And yet, when you are as old as I am, a kind of wry despair sets in as you watch each new generation sprout its own collection of boneheads who, when not eagerly snuffling after the latest vacuous fad (be it cloud or CRM or AI) and proudly strutting their "knowledge" of "innovative new thing" via endless Death by Powerpoint, confidently assert their brilliance by cutting costs—two of the most fashionable tactics being, One, to discard experienced, knowledgeable staff, and Two, to cut away the "dead wood" of backup, redundancy, testing, failover, recovery, distributedness, re-resting and all the things one might classify as "engineering common sense".

The amateurs should never be allowed to make decisions, but as I'm sure El Reggers are well placed to know, IT is infested with cowboys. The UK is a particular problem—Germans tend not to tolerate this kind of nonsense—and the US isn't far behind. The proportion of arrogant bullshitters spouting terms they read in the trade press yesterday is positively frightening.

Bean-counters ... well, ugh. When you love beans, I guess they are the only thing you care about, and it's a short step to seeing the world only through the rails of an abacus. Perhaps they are the one group we should have some sympathy with; they can't help the blinkers, and probably feel more comfortable with them on: saves having to deal with messy, smelly human beings.

As for senior management—here is where most political vices accrete like a kind of evil booger, and the higher up you go, the ranker the canker. A combination of dishonesty, greed, varying levels of sociopathy and the political DNA that values style over substance, propaganda over fact, is the most fertile possible ground for mendacious short-sightedness and eventual disaster.

The same mental and moral weakness is visible again and again. All part of the spectrum of folly. Whether it's DC-10 cargo doors; Shuttles killing entire crews; idiots advocating adding yet more runways to already critical airport nodes like Heathrow; or a mild enough example from this bonehead at Oracle ... people just never learn. At least Oracle's transparent moonshine won't kill people; let's be grateful for that.

eBay threatens to block Australians from using offshore sellers

Milton

Inevitable, in Oz and elsewhere

We may (legitimately) question the fairness of imposing local sales tax on goods bought from places that are manifestly not local, or bought locally by non-citizens who will gain no benefit from said tax, but there is one absolutely massive advantage to imposing local sales taxes on everything sold within a given jurisdiction: it is very hard to evade, and loopholes are not that difficult to close.

We're all familiar with news about major multinationals avoiding tax on absolutely vast earnings, often by the most egregious means, such as different bits of the same corporate group "loaning" each other money and then charging unrealistic interest on the sums to effectively negate real profits and transfer P&L from one tax region to another. This behaviour is disgraceful, but the reason it can happen at all is because—

1. Some countries simply don't play fair on tax, and use it as a means of competing with others (as the UK has so shabbily threatened to do after Brexit)

2. Most countries have tax codes so insanely complex that no one, literally no one, fully understands it all any more. Complexity, as all good techies know, is a recipe for failure, because that's where things slip between cracks. In tech and engineering, it's Murphy's Law; in tax, it's Lawyers Law: they'll find a way to help rich clients avoid their social obligations, which is what it all comes down to. (And it does seem that the people who do this can still look in a mirror every morning, which suggests that some humans do indeed have no shame.)

A complex tax code is ripe for abuse. No sane person thinks complex tax codes are a good thing. Unfortunately, bureaucrats love their little empires of staff and budget and have no incentive to create and run simple, effective systems. And the complexity they create makes it harder for taxpayers to argue with them, so there's also the value of the "catholic" approach: speak incomprehensible dead languages, confuse the listener, and thereby evade responsibility for speaking simple (and challengeable) facts.

Sales tax, like property taxes, cuts through the crap. If DonoevilFruitBastardsCorp refuses to meet its obligations to the species on a $6.7tn turnover and $500m profit by avoiding taxes with transparently deceitful machinations, they can do this because complex tax laws allow it by providing loopholes—but they can be stopped dead in their tracks if governments simply insist on collecting a proportion of every sale to every citizen: end of.

My guess is that more countries will adopt a sales tax approach, which will spread rapidly as an antidote to multinational tax avoidance when politicians realise that the revenues rolling in speak louder than the brown envelopes*¹ previously offered by DonoevilFruitBastardsCorp's lobbyist reptiles.

*¹ Campaign contributions; fact-finding junkets in exotic locations; well-paid sinecures on the Board after the next election: you know the routine ....

Mac Pro update: Apple promises another pricey thing it will no doubt abandon after a year

Milton

Deja Mac

If you want a really capable desktop machine then you care more about its power and reliability than whether it's shiny and bears a half-eaten-fruit sticker. So you can buy or easily assemble an arbitrarily powerful and highly expandable and upgradeable machine for way less money than the fruit machine. The savings on sticker price continue for years because of that flexibility, as you add memory, storage, even cores as you need them.

So unless you really need a style statement, or a bank statement, under your desk - why would you ever buy the wastebin machine?

Apple got sucked into the untaxed billions it could make by peddling the increasingly dead-end rectangles with rounded corners to the same people who like to advertise Abercrombie on their chests in six-inch letters, and is now in the final stages of losing the market for serious techie workers.

And there are sufficient good alternatives that it doesn't even matter any more.

Startup remotely 'bricks' grumpy bloke's IoT car garage door – then hits reverse gear

Milton

Pointless complexity and unnecessary dependence

As so many have pointed out, and is so true of so very much of the Internet of Shyte ...

... there is simply no need to use back-end servers, services and cloud-y rubbish for this. Many decent domestic routers support various kinds of access thru to devices on their LANs and if manufacturers continue (under increasing pressure from the security industry and organs like El Reg) to improve security it is relatively trivial to interface thru the firewall with IoS gizmos.

If you can buy a Pi based controller for less than ten bucks it's certainly possible to build and code a device to control a garage door. In fact I'd guess a Pi is more powerful than the computers that ran Apollo missions.

Don't buy into this subscription nonsense. From Windows to Adobe to IoS it's designed solely to hold your wallet hostage. More strength to the company which offers an appliance and software and a 5-year guarantee and says "Here's instructions and a setup utility, here's a free helpline, fill your boots". (And whether they go bust or you irritate them, what you paid for, ONCE, remains yours. Heck, you could even sell it on. An entire industry is trying to turn owners into renters to wring money out of customers and this should be resisted.)

Reg now behind invisible HTML5 Bitcoin paywall

Milton

At least El Reg can try its luck ...

Apparently Fox News cannot take the risk of publishing April Fool stories, because none of their "readers" can distinguish them from the, um, real news.

The story was headlined "China infiltrating millions of Americans' family homes with cyborg dogs", which alleged that "Chinese agents, disguised as Hispanic immigrants to avoid police attention, have been dognapping family pets and replacing them with undetectable robodogs programmed to spy on every aspect of Americans' lives". It went on to explain that "The stolen pets have been disposed of in Chinatown enclaves all over the USA, accounting for the rise, noted first by food hygiene agencies during 2015, of ultra cheap meat in oriental takeaway and delivery meals. The FBI had dismissed 142 previous reports as 'fake news' until a Republican congressman in Arkansas reportedly choked in a Chinese restaurant, regurgitating Mystery Chow Mein and a collar marked 'Bruno'."

The story was spiked by a senior editor on the advice of Sean Spicer, who said "Trump would go nookular."

Steve Bannon was last seen scuttling away with a pad of blank Executive Orders, muttering "A wall, a wall, a yooge great wall ... we must keep the dogs outside the Beltway. Watch the kennels! ..."

UK.gov confirms it won't be buying V-22 Ospreys for new aircraft carriers

Milton

Doesn't matter any more?

I'd suggest it really just doesn't matter whether these ill-conceived, mismanaged "aircraft carriers" have Ospreys, Merlins or Fairey Swordfish. The procurement has been so atrociously screwed up that the only remaining question is "How much more money, to the nearest billion, will we piss directly into the sea?"

The F-35 is arguably the most transparently disastrous combat aircraft project since F-111 (and shares many of its philosophical and implementational failings, starting with the eye-wateringly stupid assumption that you can design one common airframe to perform many different missions). The F-35B, the V/STOL version, which somehow manages to be even worse than the -A and -C variants with its pitiful range, ordnance loadout, and common failings ("Cant' climb, can't turn, can't run, can't dogfight" etc), is of course the one chosen by UK MoD, meaning that the carriers don't need CATOBAR: so their ability to project any kind of useful striking power or to maintain CAP was thrown away almost immediately. Having realised ithe stupidity of this decision, later UK gobment proposed to fit CATOBAR and then realised it couldn't afford it. So we're guaranteed a small number of very expensive inferior combat planes ...

... Except it won't matter, because the number of escort vessels—the surface ships, and some subs, which actually keep a carrier battlegroup alive—has been slashed beyond the bone. In a serious war against a remotely competent foe (e.g. Russia, which just qualifies as remotely competent) the carriers' life expectancy is well below 24 hours. So they either go to the bottom with Ospreys, or go to the bottom with Merlins, but even THAT won't matter to the very few F-35B pilots who actually survived a turning dogfight against previous-generation fighters, because they'd already burned too much fuel to get home to mama anyway. (All F-35B pilots will be trained in landing on handy cargo ships with bingo fuel.)

Of course, if the purpose of these very expensive targets was really to get steel rolled in the constituency of the One-Eyed Scottish Idiot, and thereafter, as with Trident, to blag a seat at the Big Boys' Table for epicene, self-important British politicians ("Look at my great big carrier, it's bigger than Donald's hands!" "I say Theresa, come look at the length of my missile")... well, suddenly all the stupidity makes sense.

And a bonus for the future will be the opportunity to use $150m aircraft, at a laughably low sortie rate, firing missiles costing £250k apiece at two-hundred-dollar 4x4 clunkers full of bearded chaps sharing ancient RPG-7s and dodgy AK-47s—if not a nice little MSF hospital or wedding party: they're all guilty of *something* after all— thereafter to get the Daily Hate's "journalists", not one of whom ever served in uniform, to brag about the important strategic blows struck against {Enter Pitiful Enemy's Name Here, while somehow comparing it to the Nazi war machine circa 1939}.

In short, it's yet another episode of almost insane incompetence by generations of politicians who (since about 1985), appear to have the mentality and character of dim and rather nasty 10-year-olds.

Why do GUIs jump around like a demented terrier while starting up? Am I on my own?

Milton

Opportunities for mischief

Poorly written algos to calculate time remaining seem to be a M$ specialty. But admit it, this leaves the cultural door wide open for those of you developers afflicted with a functional sense of black humour—which means anyone competent who' survived more than seven years working for any large corporate (or other bunch of self-important cretins, e.g government).

Twenty-plus years ago I had (ahem) colleagues who couldn't resist including some code to display "Out Of Cheese Error", or "STOP: Not A Typewriter".

So I feel sure that even today, now you're all grown up, there must be some code out there which will, at appropriate yet rare moments, flash up "Time remaining: Until You Are Dead" or "Installation will complete in 10²º seconds".

The spirits of Pratchett and Gaiman (and Dilbert) are among the necessary antidotes to incompetent halfwits and corporate management, insofar as there is a difference.

Microsoft delivers secure China-only cut of Windows 10

Milton

Kto kvo?

Ordinary citizens get a version of Windows "secured" to limit any attempt to be anonymous or burrow through the Great Firewall and to ensure the Chinese government can maintain surveillance.

The Chinese military and security services will not touch it with a bargepole, using their own Linux and sui generis systems.

Microsoft makes some money selling its increasingly shitty and exploitative OS and continues to roll out the same excuses as Google and a host of other greedmongers, as if to pretend that China doesn't routinely oppress and murder its own citizens.

There is something darkly amusing about the use of the word "secure" in such circumstances.

Error prone, insecure, inevitable: Say hello to today's facial recog tech

Milton

The Usual Idiots

Predictably, this is driven by the same vested interests who brought you mass surveillance (so "mass" that agencies are drowning in so much data they cannot analyse it usefully) and a vast assortment of other wonderful technologies whose false-positive rate is so high as to render them not just ineffective but downright counterproductive.

The Usual Suspects are -

1. The marketurds who help to hype and sell expensive tech and gadgets like body scanners, radiation detectors, facial recog and the rest.

2. Security and law enforcement agencies who willlingly swallow this crap because even if it doesn't work, it inflates budgets and builds empires.

3. The politicians whose childlike credulousness seems to grow from one year to the next, who nod meekly every time they're asked for cash by the previously-mentioned, and who, after all, are much happier to take dollars that might help ordinary people (say, for education and health) and use them for controlling or killing them instead, via surveillance and weapons programs. It appears to be a brain-stem reflex, though I use "brain" cautiously ....

So you end up with mass rollout of facial recognition which is so pitifully easy to defeat and deceive that it isn't even funny. I won't go into all the scores of simple tricks widely known for fooling recog systems - anyone who knows their functional principles, which will include most Reg readers, can figure it out - but we're already into the next generation of the arms race with systems attempting upgrades to recognise minor prostheses, various types of contact lens, hair tint, nose/cheek inserts, and even digitally designed reflective makeup ... things will get worse for a long time, until someone eventually realises (as if for the first time) that it's much more cost-effective to deploy focused good-ol'-shoe-leather humint and police work than to keep relying on lazy, expensive and ultimately self-defeating technological magic bullets.

The contractors and military "test" things like anti-missile systems or spectacularly incapable trillion-dollar stealth fighters by offering up ideal unrealistic scenarios almost guaranteed to issue a "pass". Facial recog and mass surveillance fall into the same category and we shouldn't be surprised when it turns out that when you most need these magical technologies - they're pretty much useless.

Google's stock rating downgraded as YouTube ad boycott contagion goes global

Milton

Never seen by sentient organisms

"Inappropriate matching isn't the only mortal threat to Alphabet's cash cow. By the company's own research, 52 per cent of its ads are never seen by humans."

And presumably, where YouTube is concerned, only 2% of ads are seen by humans with an IQ greater than 85, falling to 0.0001% of ads actually resulting in a purchase.

Because no one, surely, can have failed to notice that the vast majority of internet ads are cheap, crass, annoying trash?

Personally, I dare to hope that internet advertising continues to slowly commit suicide, destroying the malign influence of parasitic entities like Google and Facebook which do little more than repeat or link to others' content, and we end up having to pay for the content we actually deem worth paying for. Because "free" clearly means "sh1t".

Now UK bans carry-on lappies, phones, slabs on flights from six nations amid bomb fears

Milton

Idiocy - but hardly a surprise

For this panic to make even the slightest sense - and it's slight indeed - there must have been chatter about explosive hidden in a tablet or laptop. The electronic capabilities of portable devices simply don't vary enough for this to be about hacking or interference with avionics. Even the terminally stupid TSA know this. So it's about a supposed physical threat.

The devices going checked therefore has two rationales: first, opportunities for deeper scanning; second, many luggage containers are now reinforced to cope (to some extent) with small explosions: a pound or so of C4 detonating in the hold will no longer necessarily cause a cascading aerodynamically-assisted airframe breakup as was the case with PanAm 103. But a suicide bomber could choose to move to a part of the cabin most likely to be vulnerable to an explosion before pulling the plug (and there are plenty of those if you've studied the design of your particular plane).

That said, the threat need not be credible for this ban to last for many pointless years. Consider the ridiculous "two phase liquid bomb" plot which was no more than a wild idea by a bunch of idiots who didn't even have plane tickets or passports: a hysterically overblown security reaction to which means I still can't take liquids onto a plane ... unless of course it's two litres of inflammable spirits just purchased at Duty Free. Common sense is trumped by "security" play-acting and the usual childish politics.

The curse of all this ill-considered flailing is that real threats will get overlooked. So far we have relied upon the low-tech incompetence and poor opsec of terrorists for their failure. But show me a single determined, disciplined, smart one with A-level or better knowledge of electronics and chemistry and the ability to figure out export bureaucracy, and if he wants to blow a plane up - he'll do it. And he won't even need a ticket.

The reliance upon glamorous, flashy nebulous sigint at the expense of good old slogging humint is going to kill a lot of people before politicians learn any lessons.

Iconic Land Rover Defender may make a comeback by 2019

Milton

Re: Belgian Guns

The SLR (yes, a semi-auto variant of the Belgian FN-FAL; and full auto if you did the naughty trick with the matchstick) had its advantages as a full-power battlefield rifle, but even those who loved its extraordinary ability to reach out and, um, very permanently touch the enemy, even though he might be under the sad delusion that a brick wall or the side of a bus would protect him, would have to agree you couldn't carry large amounts of the 7.62 bombs around with you. And it was loooong. And pretty heavy too. A previous poster pointed out that it was a liability in FIBUA situations in the Emerald Toilet, because the rounds could pass clean through a block of flats full of civvies. The Little Yellow Card didn't explicitly mention that but the risks were horribly obvious, and even in the bandit country of South Armagh the lessons from Bisley of yore were also known to most: miss the butts with a 7.62 round and you could break a butcher's window in Woking.

So even SLR fanbois, fond of its reach and one-hit-stopping power, have to admit that something was needed that was more compact, had full auto capability, worked at typical battlefield effective ranges (more typically 300m, not 1,000m) and let you haul more ammo. In Norn Iron the Regiment were able to use M-16s, and it wasn't hard to see the benefits, so it's no surprise that something with 5.56mm was ultimately chosen. The SA-80's bullpup configuration was an intelligent choice if you wanted something with the longest barrel for the shortest weapon—the Slur was a pig to manage in trucks and especially 432s.

The SA-80 was an unreliable POS until (was it HK?) came to the rescue with a refactoring package, but since then it's performed pretty well. Left handers will never love it, and no, the UK probably should have just bought a better item OTS, but as a mature individual weapon it seems ok these days.

As ever, you need the weapon for the environment. It's paradoxical to recall that apparently (I've no personal knoweldge of this) Auzzie troops preferred the 7.62 round in Vietnam, over the M-16's 5.56, because the former had greater penetrating power through foliage.

That's why a properly equipped infantry battalion has a mixture of steel, from 5.56, assault rifles, minimis, GPMGs and, often as not, a few chaps with AIs or similar for those occasions when the enemy is uncooperatively distant but still has to be neutralised. Horses, as they say, for courses.

Facebook shopped BBC hacks to National Crime Agency over child abuse images probe

Milton

Re: For all we know...

For all YOU know, I think you meant ...

... but, beyond the witless trolling, there is a point here: compare Facebook, a mere regurgitator of almost entirely infantile, worthless drivel, lies, bragging, bullying and endless crappy adverts, with a public service broadcaster and producer which has been producing original, creative content, spanning every genre from news through comedy and drama and scifi, for nearly a century, selling its best work for tens of millions of pounds to audiences of hundreds of millions across the world.

The comparison makes you realise how pathetically juvenile, shallow, tacky and superficial operations like Facebook really are.

BBC: "We use real talent to make original stuff, to entertain and inform"

FB: "We use computers to endlessly repeat other people's trash and then manure their eyeballs with marketing sewage"

Seems to sum up the fundamental, mindless vacuity of the digital revolution rather well. I can see why BBC employees might feel proud of their work, for all Auntie's faults. But I realise now that I cannot imagine why anyone working for Facebook or Google or most of the other digital giants—little better than organs of regurgitation—would feel anything except slightly ashamed and embarrassed ... perhaps the same way you should feel ashamed if you worked for a distiller producing poor-grade, cheap liquor, knowing perfectly well it was purchased only by those with alcohol problems. Quite distasteful, isn't it?

Li-ion king Goodenough creates battery he says really is... good enough

Milton

The happy sceptic ...

... is aware that battery tech that doesn't suck has been just a few years away for several decades, rather like fusion power, true AI, colonisation and mining of the Solar System—and the flying car I have felt is due to me ever since I watched Gerry Anderson's TV serials in the 60s.

That said, I'm obviously not the only one who is really encouraged by the fact that Prof Goodenough is apparently still doing valuable work at 94. We should all be so smart and so lucky. It's refreshing to be reminded that, for every toxic waste of oxygen like a Trump, the world includes many more worthwhile, admirable human beings like the Prof.

Confirmed: Facebook shifts away from AI… and like a miracle, the bots start working

Milton

Two lessons this week

Lesson #1 was that just because the fundamental concept of "computing devices accessing and depending upon a central, complex, high-powered core system" has been renamed from "1970s mainframe computing" to "fog", "mist"*¹ or "cloud", doesn't mean that single points of failure have not also returned, big time, and are just waiting to make your life miserable and lose your businesses millions. Believe the marketurds. Take the lazy route. Forget why the internet used to be so robust (clue: failure tolerance across many nodes). Put all your valuable eggs in that lovely basket. Rue the consequences later.

Lesson #2 is that it's beyond time to see people calling BS on all the AI hype we've had our senses manured with over the last five years. Corporations like Facebook, Oracle, Microsoft and the rest will say absolutely ANYTHING to get your dollars—FFS, capitalism has been based on selling polished turds to gullible consumers since the first "shop" opened in London in the 17th century—and if they think that mindlessly slapping an "AI" sticker on rustbucket code will get you or your boss to click 'Buy', they will do it without a heartbeat of hesitation.

It's like politics and voting choices. Don't believe what the hucksters and liars and hypocrites say. Not a single word of it. Instead, watch carefully what they can actually do, and deliver, and make your choices with cold logic.

*¹ — "Mist" probably considered particularly appropriate by our German-speaking readers.

Passport and binary tree code, please: CompSci quizzes at US border just business as usual

Milton

Amateur night at CBP

Apologies if someone's already mentioned this, but I noticed years ago that some US immigration employees appeared to be trying to ape the Israeli approach to partially-directed interrogation of suspect passengers. I used to visit the States a lot, especially when consulting for a large UK transatlantic airline, and even before 9/11, despite my regular visits and well-documented reasons for travelling, my unusual (Central European) surname obviously attracted attention—presumably because US immigration folks don't seem able to pronounce any names much beyond "Jones", Brown" or in a pinch, "McDonald".

The Israelis had developed, decades earlier, a common-sense but clever system whereby trained officers would ask a series of non-hostile, overtly casual questions of potential El Al travellers, simply following up each answer with a friendly-seeming curiosity. "Oh, computers, huh? Oracle, hm? The Bracknell office, I guess? Do you get into Reading much—my aunt lives there? ..." The point being that potential ne'e'er-do-wells will have some cover story prepared, but usually very little depth: so pretty soon they start sounding uncertain, hesitant, shifty or simply giving daft answers. The beauty of the system is it doesn't require vast domain knowledge (which would make it unstaffable and unworkable), it simply needs folks who can think on their feet, adopt a disarming demeanour and are acutely observant for the signs of evasion and invention—something to which they can quickly drive a dishonest suspect.

US immigration became something of a running joke among colleagues for the clumsy "conversations" initiated by nitwits who'd obviously seen a cartoon version of the El Al PowerPoint and thought they'd become instant experts. You'd get a sequence of increasingly desperate, clueless questions from some uniformed stomach and end up mischievously saying "Yeah, I specialise in the Gates Rebarbative Development Technique" and watch the expression of completely fraudulent understanding spread like a puddle of dog pee on the poor schmuck's face. It became boring after a while, but as it turns out, looking bored is the best way to get through fast anyway.

The only hiccup was periodically having to convince some exceptionally earnest slob that no, despite having a Crotobaltislavonian father, naturalised British, I did NOT speak the language. It's a horrible language. The country is nice, but too small to matter. I never bothered. I was born in the UK. Really, no, not a damned word. May I go now?*¹

So I suspect that CBP are as cack-handedly clumsy and poorly trained as ever they were, still broadcasting American Officialdom in the obese glory we've all become so fond of: ignorant, self-important, loud, incapable of disguising resentful hostility towards foreigners, especially ones who speak better English than they do (ok, most foreigners), and—once you've escaped their little Keystone-Kops-channelling-Kafka fantasy world, always good for a laugh.

*¹ — I never volunteered the fact that I do know Russian; and spoken, not written, Arabic: somehow it wouldn't have been in the spirit of things, would it?

The day after 'S3izure', does anyone feel like moving to the cloud?

Milton

Go ahead, put all your eggs in that basket

... but don't pretend to be surprised at the consequences when it is dropped.

"Cloud" has always thrived on marketurds' BS, and for all its strengths of flexibility and agility, the giant-mainframe paradigm has the same weakness now that it had during the 1970s: when the centre fails, everyone loses.

The dominant cloud providers want your money much more than they care about the continuity of your business. You can figure out the rest yourself.

LOST IN SPAAAAAACE! SpaceX aborts Space Station podule berthing

Milton

In space ...

In space no one can hear you shout at the wife "Why did you say left if you meant right!"

Radioactive leak riddle: Now Team America sniffs Europe's skies for iodine isotope source

Milton

Occam's Razor

Suggests that despite the opportunity for some tongue in cheek fun, this leak is probably exactly what the experts suggest: a fumble at a lab producing medical isotopes.

It couldn't be from an old sub wreck - graves like USS Thresher and USS Scorpion are routinely monitored and you wouldn't get isotopes like this coming up through 10,000 feet of ocean.

It's fun to speculate that Vlad The Emailer is brewing up some fresh polonium for his growing array of antagonists, but it won't wash I'm afraid. Distribution is wrong, and the signature doesn't fit.

I'll still look around for furtive-looking ubiytsy in badly cut box suits before tucking into my soup, though ...

Amid new push to make Pluto a planet again... Get over it, ice-world's assassin tells El Reg

Milton

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Because that's what this "argument" puts me in mind of: a bunch of evangelists arguing about something that really just does not matter.

Like many Reg readers I'm keen on science, and as such I would have thought there were at least 1,000 things about The Body Known As Pluto which are worth finding out, not a single one of which depends upon whether some accidentally evolved crania full of blue mush six billion miles can't agree whether to label it as a planet, dwarf planet or scubble-wang-doo.

"A difference that makes no difference is no difference"

Zuckerberg thinks he's cyber-Jesus – and publishes a 6,000-word world-saving manifesto

Milton

Predictably facile and sophomoric

Zuckerberg neatly demonstrates that skill in one area (he made a website once, I think?), even coupled with fair though unspectacular intelligence, doesn't qualify you to pontificate on matters you do not really understand.

He gets ever closer to the mistake made by most politicians - mistaking his own prominence for inflated expertise and wisdom.

It won't wash. Facebook is doing some good in the world, and a lot of damage as social media creates a culture of superficial infantilisation. We don't need an increasingly egotistical need to spout half baked tosh - we need a return to adulthood.

No crypto backdoors, more immigration ... says Republican head of House Committee on Homeland Security

Milton

Watch the sky ...

I thought I was a bit rattled by further revelations of Team Trumpty's cosy relationship with the Russkies, but now ... good heavens, a *politician* ... an *American* politician ... a *Republican*, American politician ... actually talking well-informed sense on a topic??

I would advise the exterminators to take a look in this guy's cellar. I reckon there's a hideously slimy alien sac nurturing its eggs in there—no, it isn't Steve Bannon—and the chap we're looking at is some kind of biological replicant. Nothing else, I declare, can explain this outburst of honest sanity from such an unlikely source.

Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies

Milton

Re: Well, maybe we should not put software in everything

Your car's software will absolutely, soon enough require some form of net access. For self-driving cars to work to their full and safe potential, they will unquestionably need to talk to and listen to other cars in the vicinity ("Hard braking 170 yards ahead, pedestrian incursion: preliminary slowing NOW"); to be advised of aggregated data from cars far distant ("Road to hell is very slow for 30 miles northbound: take THIS alternate route"); and oversight traffic management systems ("Do not enter Central London at this time, a bomb scare is in progress").

Building an extremely secure hack-resistant system is of the highest importance. And yet another example of why strong crypto, i.e. without idiot government's "good-guys-only back doors", is absolutely critical. If your car's gonna take the alternate route to that important meeting, you need to be able to trust the information it's based on.

IBM's Marissa Mayer moment: Staff ordered to work in one of 6 main offices – or face the axe

Milton

"... there is something about a team being more powerful, more impactful, more creative, and frankly hopefully having more fun when they are shoulder to shoulder. Bringing people together creates its own X Factor."

What amazing bullcrap. The quality of teams is about the people in them, and their leadership—it's got very little to do with whether they have to smell each other's sandwiches or get to have meaningful moments around the water cooler.

I assume there is some real reason behind this—perhaps to encourage some folks to leave, without having to make them redundant?

Mayer's series of disastrous decisions at Yahoo notwithstanding, there is something truly hilarious in tech companies—tech companies!— insisting their staff cannot do remote working.

Here's a little hint for IBM: when your business is a mess, don't waste your time looking for scapegoats among your workers or their practices, tempting though it always is to pick on those who are easy targets. Instead, look at your management: are they leaders, politicians or bean-counters? If it's not the first, there's your problem. And you won't solve it by pissing off your workforce.

Vizio coughs up $2.2m after its smart TVs spied on millions of families

Milton

Re: Although i profoundly dislike the death penalty...

"A dislike is not enough. The death penalty is utterly wrong, simply because miscarriages of justice - which are intrinsically unavoidable - can never, never, never be corrected."

I'm curious. Why would anyone—anyone at all—downvote the above statement? (2 thumbs down and 3 up, at my time of writing.)

Do downvoters think it's ok for a few innocent people to get fried, so long as some guilty ones do? Do you think it doesn't happen, perhaps? If, so DNA has some big news for you.

Or is it that you cannot imagine it will happen to you, or your brother or son? That being convicted and sentenced to death for a crime you did not commit only happens to other people, who don't matter?

In the DNA age the USA has seen a slew of exonerations of people who were either on death row or had been convicted of capital offences. Does any sane person need a better reason not to support the barbarism of the death penalty?

PS There's no evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why. Murderers fall into two categories: premeditated, planned and therefore not intending to get caught anyway; or uncontrollably angry spur-of-the-moment actions, which obviously precludes any thought of consequences. No society can sanely say "Killing people is wrong. To show how wrong it is, we're gonna do exactly that." Even if that weren't morally bankrupt, it's madness because it just doesn't work.

Guess who's suffering an email outage. Go on, it's as easy as 123-Reg

Milton

Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

"I don't think Google are altruistic at all - I'm just happy with the service I get from them and am willing to get that at the 'cost' of them pilfering through my emails to send ads my way (and whatever else they do)"

If the post office offered to send your letters free, provided they could read them, and make copies of them, and use whatever they read for any purposes, including building up a profile of you and your correspondents, so that with every delivery you also got a mass of advertising stuff you didn't ask for, supposedly tailored to your interests (but almost always, hilariously wrong and out of date) ...

... you would tolerate that?

I'm beginning to realise there are a lot of people, presumably younger folks, who do not value their privacy at all. You absolutely amaze me. I wonder what rights you'd give away next, just to get free stuff?

Trump decides Breitbart chair Bannon knows more about natsec than actual professionals

Milton

Trumpty Dumpty's Men: Beyond Parody

Since the presence of a ... man ... like Bannon at anything more important than a redneck barbecue is beyond any kind of parody, almost any truly ridiculous answer is as good as any other.

Therefore I nominate this searing piece of investigative reporting as the clue:

http://www.theonion.com/article/white-house-staff-reminded-place-lids-firmly-trash-55168

Yup: they needed an excuse to keep him away from the trash.

Devonians try to drive Dartmoor whisky plan onto rocks

Milton

Whisk(e)y?

Just be glad it isn't still spelled "usquebaugh".

I wouldn't put ice in a good whisky, the chill kills the nose, which as others have remarked, is important. A touch of water often helps bring out the full flavour.

And yes, the best glass is one like a snifter, because so much of the "taste" actually is smell.

President Donald Trump taken on by unlikely foe: Badass park rangers

Milton

What can possibly go wrong?

When the world's most militarily powerful bankrupt nation, armed with thousands of nukes, is taken over by an ignorant, lying, bellicose, childish, homophobic, lying, simplistically-minded, arrogant, egotistical, lying, thin-skinned, insecure, racist, self-confessed sex assaulting, lying, sexist, lying, misogynist, serially bankrupt, lying liar?

Trumpty Dumpty sat on a wall ... you can guess what happens next.

UK.gov still drowning in legacy tech because no one's boarding Blighty's £700m data centre Ark

Milton

Fundamentally, a leadership issue

It's easy to blame civil servants for cocking up IT contracts, projects and provisioning, but they are generally better qualified and more knowledgeable than their political masters (I know: that's not hard).

The core problem is that politicians utter these grand verbal farts like "Do this big job all at once and save tons of cash" and "Don't bother me with the details, after all, how difficult can it be?" knowing that they'll most likely be moved to another ministry before they've even learned anything worthwhile about the current one. And because they are all style, spin and mouth, without substance, they are *never* the kind of sensible people who understand details or even why details matter.

So they leave one disaster after another behind them - and because IT is visible and measurable and hard to lie about (unlike, say, disability benefits testing) the catastrophes become embarrassingly public.

In government as in corporations, the eternal rule applies: bad management, like shit, rolls downhill.

Chevy Bolt electric car came alive, reversed into my workbench, says stunned bloke

Milton

Properties of a Parking/Emergency Brake

1. No matter how automated and electrically controlled the vehicle may be, the brake of last resort must be fully manual with no dependency on anything except a good physical effort.

2. It must effectively lock the rear wheels sufficient to prevent rollaway on a 1:3 incline (they do exist, rarely).

3. The assembly including lever must employ enough mechanical advantage so that a small adult female can yank it to effect.

4. The lever, like the hazard light button, and fuel pump cutout[1] must be accessible to passenger as well as driver, for driver-incapacitated events or where assistance is needed. So it must be a lever in the centre.

It is amazing that this isn't a legal requirement.

[1] Yes I know that many cars don't have a fuel cutout switch in the cabin. And that some place the hazard light button in the stupidest places (which idiot puts it on the column behind the wheel?!)

Boffins ready to demo 1.44 petabit-per-second fibre cables

Milton

Those vulnerable cables

The people who own navies are pretty much the only ones who can cut undersea cables. Unfortunately they are also the ones most likely to feel the motivation. While there are a few individual decent people in governments, the latter as a whole behave like paranoid sociopaths - and that's even before the Orange Idiot came along.

I think I'd like to see more cables, over a variety of routes, plus more methods for carrying web traffic by other means.

Example: If the cretin in the White House blunders his way into trouble with China over Taiwan, and if China decides on a partial (withdrawable, deniable, de-escalatable) blockade of Taiwan, don't you think the latter's cables will be severed pronto?

Rap for crap WhatsApp trap flap: Yack yack app claptrap slapped

Milton

Ah, the Grauniad

Once renowned for its typos (back in the prehistoric days of print-only), the Graun is by and large a good newspaper—indeed, compare it to the infantile, asswipe drivel from the likes of the Mail and Express and it's positively brilliant—but it does indeed have a weakness with technology. The most obvious symptom is the 'Ask Jack' column, which is embarrassingly feeble: so bad that you wonder if they still indulge the old practice of maintaining a vanity column to keep old hacks in cheap whisky while they wait for their prostate to fall out. And there's Simon Jenkins, wonderful in so many ways, who can't resist publishing ill-informed rants against math and science, a classic "If I can't understand, it can't be important" sneer that resounds so cheaply from such a smart guy. I suspect most Guardian readers, spying a technology article, move quickly to below the line, where they will find informed comment and corrections.

Still, though we may hope for improvement (it can't be *that* difficult to fill out a P45 for Schofield), even without it, the Guardian does good work. You may not agree with them, but they'll always make you think.

Oh—PS, they absolutely despise the Trumpecile, so a round of applause for that if nothing else. I'm holding out for an article on the US presidency in three months' time: "One Hundred Days, One Hundred Lies" ... but I worry Trump will blow his entire quota of porkies before the end of February.

Facebook bans Russia's RT ahead of Trump's Inauguration Day (then changes its mind)

Milton

Golden Hypocrite Award

I know, it doesn't have quite the glamorous ring of a Golden Cleric—but we need some way of celebrating companies and individuals who manage to be even more ethically bankrupt and hypocritical than the people who did so much to set record low standards: politicians.

The citation for Zuckerberg's Gold Hypocrite (he'll be accepting it on behalf of everyone at Facebook whether they want it or not) will read in part—

"... not content with attempting to lower the mean IQ of the human species by 30 points through an aggressive distribution of purposeless clicking, endless time-wasting, advertising drivel, trite photographs, regurgitated "jokes", marketing, pseudo-news, kittens and the cheapest friends an internet user can bulk-buy, Zuck has sustained the decade-long and growing reputation of Facebook for truly repellent moral cowardice, all in the name of healthy full-fat high-octane American greed ..."

IT team sent dirt file to Police as they all bailed from abusive workplace

Milton

Re: Uhhhmmmmm

"'While working as a waitress in a....'

Guess what tune is now in my head."

Something by Brad Fiedel?

Milton

An innocent question

How does El Reg verify these submissions? For some reason I find myself curious.

Linux is part of the IoT security problem, dev tells Linux conference

Milton

Not dumb enough

There are three key parts to the Internet of Shyte problem:

(1) Many IoS devices, and ideas for devices, really are just solutions looking for problems. Nobody needs an IoS kettle or lightbulb, not really. Every oven already has a delay start timer. Thermostats with timers have worked fine for 100 years. The marketurds have gone wild trying to sell unnecessary crap.

(2) Even the useful devices become too vulnerable by being too smart. It is NOT necessary for a CCTV camera to host a complex *ix OS. Basic CCTV systems have been working securely and stupidly for six decades.

(3) Governments, dumb as ever, have failed their duty by not understanding the problem and then regulating for it. We should already have regulation for IoS devices controlling security, software quality, privacy, and penalties for unfit products, just as we do for electric blankets, medicines and food.

Why Theresa May’s hard Brexit might be softer than you think

Milton

This audience knows better

An audience consisting heavily of IT professionals is probably the very last one for May to waste her breath lying to.

Among all people on Earth, we *do* know very well the chasm of factual difference between "vaguely worded and often contradictory aspirations" and "detailed, realistic plan".

It was hilarious yesterday to hear that idiot David Davis, who'd previously promised a detailed Brexit plan, saying that May's speech *was* the plan. Well, perhaps such stupidity fools tabloid readers, politicians and the brain-damaged?

Search the speech for specifics - thin pickings indeed - and you find an unrealistic wish list; foolish and unconvincing threats; and the signature deceit, hypocrisy and cowardice.

Shoddy, shabby stuff, but pretty much what you'd expect from people whose mediocrity is exceeded only by their panicked desperation.

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