Posts by Tony W

Mystified

As an ordinary user I am completely mystified by this. If I look in forums I find vociferous arguments about whether it's safe for me to leave UPnP enabled on my home network. There is no apparent consensus, just a lot of people shouting "Just turn it off" and others saying it is useful and low risk.

I am also told that disabling it may break my Chromecast and Chromecast Audio, and possibly Skype which is vital to my family (for work.)

The router supplied by BTInternet has it enabled by default in the advanced menu. The only comment is "We recommend you keep 'Extended UPnP Security' turned on to make sure your home network is secure." It's on, so that's all OK is it?

How can I make sense of all this? Please don't say turn it off and see what happens. I already have more than enough things to check if I get an obscure network problem.

More solutions looking for problems

There is more music out there by good composers than any normal person has time to listen to. There is music by lesser composers inspired by the great composers if you want that. Machine generated music, done in this way, isn't even interesting scientifically as if won't help us learn how music actually works. So why?

Please tell me how to do this!

RSS is like cleaning materials that are cheap basic chemicals. People don't know about them because it wouldn't pay to advertise, and in the end the cheap product becomes hard to find because there's 'no demand.'

I used to use RSS and really liked it. For me it was the only way to keep up with a very large number of sites without wasting lots of time. Then several readers stopped working for one reason or another ("upgrades") and every time I had to change reader it was to a worse one and I lost all my bookmarks. In the end I gave up, but I still miss it.

Of course sites have also been removing their RSS feeds, or making them hard to find. There is no large-scale future because If it did become popular, advertisers would surely make it a condition that feeds were removed.

Strong denials

The standard for adequate denials has been raised. If future denials are in less strong terms conclusions will be drawn.

Which is not to say that even the strongest denials should necessarily be believed. History is full of strong denials that were complete lies so I am very cynical about all organisations, public and prvate. Any organisation will lie through its collective teeth for its own advantage if they believe that they won't be found out.

But if several apparently independent organisations tell the same story, it seems more likely to be true. So in this case I would bet on Bloomburg's story being wrong, but not a lot of money.

The pressure is on Bloomburg, as their reputation will have a long shadow cast on it unless they can show that they behaved reasonably. If that Bloomburg story is in doubt, why not all their others?

What do you want from a translation?

Personally, when I ask for a translation, I want to know what the original says. I don't much want to know what statistically an ambiguous pronoun is more likely to mean, I can work that out for myself. Maybe I am unusual in that. Do other people want a translation that reads easily even if there is a good chance it could be wrong?

That might mean an awkward construction. So what, if the meaning is clear? Machine translation should not be for unedited presentation to the public.

This is part of a bigger problem. Google comes up with a single translation even if there are many possibilities, and almost never confesses to failure. Just as Google Maps will always come up with a definite destination even if the input is ambiguous. They hate to make it appear that they might be wrong.

The Google apps are so useful that we've learnt to accept this as a foible, but it would be a lot better if they could admit to their lack of perfection - which is actually very obvious to all frequent users.

How did they find it?

My experience with bicycles is, finding that you have a slow leak is one thing, finding the leak is another. Immersion in a bucket of water doesn't seem to be an option so I winder how they did it.

And if Kapton tape is not a sufficiently long-term solution, do they have another puncture repair outfit ofr some sort?

More than NICE to have

NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) has guidance and standards on infection prevention and control. I believe most hospitals have a person responsible for ithat.

But I couldn't find guidance for infosec (looking under several relevant terms) on the NICE website. If it's there, it's not obvious. Does it need a disaster first?

Building blocks of life is not life

With all of humanity's resources and knowledge, we still have no theory that has convinced the scientific community of how life originated from natural processes. So we don't know the conditions required for life to form. That being so, I can't get very excited about the prospect of life existing elsewhere just because the building blocks are available.

Also on Earth it took a long time after the formation of simple life for complex life (cells with nuclei etc) to emerge, so that might not be a common occurrence even where there is some form of life. It's difficult to imagine intelligence without life more complex than bacteria.

It would be truly astonishing if Earth had the only form of complex life in the universe. But at the moment it seems very premature to think that we will find other life, and especially complex life capable of intelligence, near enough for us to detect.

At least you know it's rubbish

Google often "translates" my Japanese friend's Facebook posts as a word soup of unintelligible non-English non-sentences from which it is impossible to extract any meaning whatever. So at least I don't waste time trying to understand it.

When it does make something like English sentences, the fact that it doesn't take account of context is painfully obvious. For example it frequently translates what should be "My husband" as "Your husband." That also shows its ignorance of a basic point about the language it's supposed to be translating: in Japanese the default pronoun (when omitted and not obvious from context) is the first person.

After all that fuss ...

All you see is a little "i" in a circle. I noticed it only because I was looking for it.

It's still nonsense, as when I clicked on the symbol I was told not to enter a password in my BT router. How can I control it without a password? I supose all such equipment will have to have secure connections in future, with extra cost for certificate renewal and dreadful warnings when they get it wrong.

But phishing sites will get the green padlock of approval (with a nice free cert from Letsencrypt). Anyone who notices will get a false sense of security.

Forgetting password is very rarely a disaster

If you are really you, there is usually a way to get it back, so long as the organisation has a working email address for you on record.

But someone else getting your password can be very nasty.

Therefore it is more important to keep your password from others than it is to make sure you can always find it yourself.

The real problem comes when your descendants try to deal with your account. But people who think logically don't worry about that.

(As I have recently found, for sensitive sites your registered address should match your "From" address. One that you use only for receiving can cause people to be suspicious when you reply from a different one.)

Obvious way to differentiate?

Not long ago, nearly all cars more than a few years old were rusting away. Manufacturers thought that the buyers of new cars disposed of them after at most two years, so their customers wouldn't worry about obsolescence. Then Japanese makers introduced long non-rust guarantees and ran away with the market, until the rest followed.

Now almost all phones more than a few years old are a significant security risk. Who will be first to sell phones with guaranteed updates for five years, at a competitive price?

Can anyone explain this please

in terms understandable by an ordinary engineer reasonably conversant with electronics?

Learn from our mistakes, you bet.

They always say this and I always laugh.

The cover-up was no mistake, it was clearly intentional. Being found out was a mistake that I'm sure they'll try to learn from.

The whole episode confirms that white collar crime pays, and part of the reason is that companies will pay criminals to avoid big embarrassment. It's not a new lesson but I suppose there will always be some new people learning it.

Apart from that, surely it's a bit naive to suppose that criminals will destroy the data just because you've given them some money.

Bullshit

The lecture series "Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data" (available on YouTube) Is very good on why this is going to go wrong.

Why don't they shock themseleves?

An article in Popular Science based on this question gave the answer that basically we don't know. It certainly isn't explained by the equivalent circuit diagram given here. Any ideas?

Microbial life?

Microbial life is life. Although it's a big step from that to complex life.

Malicious software removal

If Google Play Store can nag me every week to update Twitter yet again, it should be able to warn me when an app I have installed has been removed from for breaking their T & C.

Accents

Humans learn to adjust for accents which mostly make consistent changes in vowels, so I expect AI will eventually do the same. Dialect is another matter, it took me a year to understand broad Potteries.

But I wish some of this expertise could be applied to systems used on the phone by organisations like BT and British Gas, Both these systems (made by the same company I'm sure) consistently fail to recognise when I say "yes" even on repeated attempts, and my accent is pretty ordinary London. Maybe I should say "Yep", "Yup" or "Yeah".

Maybe having a big price hike wasn't such a good idea

when their prices are already at the top end of the market.

Nuance

The Internet does allow very fragmented groups of people to get together and reinforce each other's views. But demagogues and dictators got elected before the internet. What they did have was the backing of forces with money and power, which will use the Internet just as they do other media. You don't need to invoke the Internet even to explain the Brexit vote, when there were years of misleading propaganda from several popular mainstream newspapers.

But advocating killing people because they belong to a particular group is not just part of ordinary discussion and debate, and I would be happy to see that stopped. Can that be done without losing the freedom of discussion that is essential If society is to develop? That debate is part of a long continuing conflict between freedom and stability that has gone on at least since the arrival of the printing press.

So you can't bring any confidential info into UK

... so it appears, whether commercial, legal or personal. At least, you can't bring it through the border post. Luckily there seem to be ways to get the info into the country without actually taking it through immigration, otherwise a lot of business would stop. Why even bring a laptop, you can buy one when in the UK, wipe it and install OS of your choice. Or if you're really paranoid (or if they are really out to get you), build a PC from parts.

Antivirus?

I assume most or all of the infected PCs were running some form of anti-malware, at least MS Security Essentials. Do these things do anything useful?

Permission system is not much use as anti-malware

If the user has installed an apparently useful app, then they will probably also give it permissions. So having to click to give a permission is probably no safeguard at all to the average user.

The fundamental problem is installing the malware, not giving it the permissions. Many legitimate apps need permissions that would be very dangerous if the app were malware (starting with virtually all of Google's own apps.) This permission would seem reasonable for any app that gives "important" notifications, so most people would just grant it.

Having said that, of course Google was still wrong to deliberately bypass their own permissions system, specifically in order to allow an app to behave very intrusively. And more wrong to withhold the remedy from most existing users.

Someone you know still uses them

I have read that the NHS is a huge user of fax machines.

Self-serving organisation

Pretty much tautology.

Rules are for other people

I see this belief in action on the roads every day, and I've no doubt it's common at the top of all organisations including governments. Those at the top probably got there by ignoring some rules anyway. Clinton will rightly never be allowed to forget this, but any further penalty is probably disproportionate.

Would this be detected on check?

As others have pointed out, quite a lot of legitimate sw produces unknown publisher warning. I scan all exe and zip downloads before running though. I also use Scotty that detects changes to startup programs. Am I just getting a false sense of security by doing this?