* Posts by ratfox

3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007

Weight, what? The perfect kilogram is nearly in Planck's grasp

ratfox

Re: Kelvin?

Precisely, it involves pressure, in that the pressure is precisely defined… And since 0K is pretty much defined to be absolute zero, you don't need anything else. What do I miss?

ratfox

Kelvin?

I thought the Kelvin was pretty much well defined by the triple point of water?

Volvo to 'accept full liability' for crashes with its driverless cars

ratfox
Go

I believe doing this will be far more difficult with driverless cars. To begin with, the driverless car will be far more adept at avoiding the collision than a normal driver. And even if you manage it, the driverless car will have complete records of the accident, including the suicidal behavior which caused it.

Google uses humans as Matrix-style ‘data batteries’ – Open Xchange CEO

ratfox

As far as I understand, Google already encrypts data from client to server, between servers, and at rest. They started doing this soon after the publication of the NSA slide which noted with a smiley that Google decrypted data as soon as it was on its network.

But that only makes it difficult for the NSA to hack user data. They can still get a secret court order (aka national security letter) and have Google hand it over.

FBI boss: No encryption backdoor law (but give us backdoors anyway)

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Die Gedanken sind frei…?

The government has not made it mandatory to submit to examinations by mind-reading machines who will delve into your mind and read your every thought, despite the obvious advantage this would be for national security.

The question is, is the reason they haven't done it that they don't think the government has the right to do it, or is it only that these machines do not exist — yet?

What's not up, Docs? Google Docs goes titsup in time for Friday beers

ratfox
Trollface

Re: Ah...the Silicon Valley Ivory Tower

Fine, but be sure to also drop a control group, fully equipped with their own servers in their backpacks. And check which ones get out of the desert fastest, or at all.

Israeli lander FOUND ON MOON (in 2017)

ratfox
Megaphone

It goes too far

This selfie craze must be stopped!

Assange™ offered 'plans for escape by flying fox to Harrods'

ratfox
Trollface

Apart from "everyone's out to get him". He seems to need to give interviews from time to time just so that the world doesn't forget about him.

Safe harbour ruling: RELAX, Facebook and Google will be FINE!

ratfox

Re: Keep Calm and Carry On

They don't even need to ignore it, they have DCs in Europe… Haven't they gone through this with Russia already?

Read our lips, no more EU roaming charges*

ratfox

Re: Mmm...

You're lucky. I pay 2€ for every MB in data roaming. I can get it cheaper by buying 200MB for 100€. Nice, eh?

Want cheaper AT&T gigabit service? Move to a Google Fiber city

ratfox
Headmaster

Re: As AT&T found out years ago

Salaries are costs, too! Well, maybe not that of the CEO.

ratfox

Autonomy ex-boss Lynch tells of poisonous life within HP in High Court showdown

ratfox

Re: Despairing....

Quite a lot of people would say that this is a feature, not a bug. Would you rather have the workstation salesmen undermine their own unit by pushing an inferior product, just because it is made by the same company?

At best, this would be inefficient; at worst, it can land you in regulatory trouble: See Microsoft and Internet Explorer.

Apple CEO Tim Cook: Email keyword sniffing? We'd NEVER do that!

ratfox

Re: If I paid £600 for a handset

Google doesn't sell £600 phones; Apple does. You get what you pay for and all that, I guess.

How to evade Apple's anti-malware Gatekeeper in OS X and really ruin a fanboy's week

ratfox

Yeah, I'm not sure what is that "much more secure" base OS X starts with.

OS X is mostly "more secure" because there are so few of them that malware writers have not bothered much to find vulnerabilities. By that stick, Linux is even more secure.

It's BACK – Stagefright 2.0: Zillions of Android gadgets can be hijacked by MP3s, movie files

ratfox

Carrier pushback

Carriers certainly have a history of putting conditions for selling Android phones. E.g Verizon Galaxy Nexus phones were the only ones not to have the Google Wallet feature, because Verizon was trying to push its own payment solution.

It's hard to believe now, but at some point in the past Android was an underdog, and Google had to convince carriers to sell Android phones.

FBI: We unmasked and collared child porn creep on Tor with spy tool

ratfox

Re: Could someone let Director James R. Clapper know...

The most likely explanation I can come up with is that Reg officials have a more powerful UI without such limits.

ratfox

Re: Could someone let Director James R. Clapper know...

It's a bit curious that he was able to display a gimp icon while posting as AC. Some kind of bug?

Tear teardown down, roars Apple: iFixit app yanked from store

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Don't get it

What's the violation? Do Apple actually have T&Cs forbidding developers from opening devices and taking pictures?

Hands on with Google's Nexus 5X, 6P Android Marshmallow mobes

ratfox

Re: Still don't want Chinese Kit!

You'll have problems these days finding a phone that wasn't built in China.

And if we're talking about software, Nexuses are pure Google, so as American as can be.

ratfox

Finally

I'm in the Android faction, but rather than saying "a good thing", I'll say "it's about bloody time".

Android had to be nice with developers in the beginning to make sure they had enough apps, but this has stopped being an issue for years.

Uber's double Dutch moment: Cops raid offices a second time

ratfox

Agree. I have no ethical problem with not respecting a stupid law; but you have to be prepared to pay the price for not respecting that law. It is only if enough people are prepared to pay that price that the stupid law will be repealed.

Tesla X unfolds its Falcon wings, stumbles belatedly into the light

ratfox
WTF?

I don't buy that these doors can open in tighter spaces. Normal doors can open 30cm and let you squeeze through. These cannot, unless you fancy crawling on the ground.

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Why the silly^W fancy doors? I can understand that for some kind of sports car, for which practicality is not the most salient point; but for an utilitarian car sitting seven people, isn't that a bit uncommon?

Yahoo!: Who! cares! what! US! taxman! thinks!, we'll! spinoff! Alibaba! anyway!

ratfox

Indeed, Yahoo! is Purple Palace, which does appear in the article!

ratfox

Re: They takes their chances

I think Yahoo has just decided that they needed to get rid of their shares of Alibaba, one way or another, with or without being taxed for it. So they might as well go ahead and do it now, since all preparations have already been done.

The IRS doesn't seem willing to decide fast, and Yahoo doesn't want to wait the possibly years it will take, when anyway it wouldn't change their decision.

You want a 6% Google Tax? Get lost, German copyright bods told

ratfox

Money goes the other way

The Spain experiment shows that publishers are actually benefiting from news aggregators rather than the reverse. In fact, if I remember correctly, publishers who want their articles to show up on Yahoo News actually have to pay Yahoo.

Considering Google's whole profits come from getting paid to show links to websites, they probably have a very good knowledge of who profits from what. It is understandable that they refuse to pay up.

US watchdog POKES STICK at Google's Android over rival-blocking allegations

ratfox

Indeed

Apple used to be able to say they are not dominant, and therefore do not need to give access to rivals.

However, with iOS at 43% for Android's 52%, that is a defense they might not enjoy for long.

PETA monkey selfie lawsuit threatens wildlife photography, warns snapper at heart of row

ratfox
Paris Hilton

So where are the IP lobbyists?

I seem to recall that there are a couple of well-funded organizations who often defend copyright holders, lobby for extending the duration of copyright, and fight piracy on the internet. How come they are not helping this guy?

iOS 9 security blooper lets you BYPASS PINs, eye up photos, contacts

ratfox
Paris Hilton

He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her

Strange how complicated the world is, that nobody is able to write software without security bugs.

PH for title.

You call THAT safe? Top EU legal bod says data sent to US is anything but

ratfox
Devil

Re: the US has never been safe

As if data stored in the EU is safe from the NSA…

Cyber crims up the ante with Google Play brainteaser malware

ratfox

Re: So the second attempt sat there for almost a week

Large companies get slower, not faster.

Total War: Warhammer, Blood Bowl and other Games Workshop table-to-screen delights

ratfox
Devil

I had to stop playing Blood Bowl because I was getting too attached to my players. Still, I proudly remember my best catcher, who had attained the level of Legend. He had gained so much agility that he could easily intercept within the tackle zone of two enemy players, then just walk away and score a touch down.

My last match, against a Chaos team, had me losing 1-0, the only goal just before the end of the game, and right after the KO by fouling of my last player still present on the field.

Who probes the Google probers? EU Commish in watchdog's sights

ratfox
Paris Hilton

They didn’t consult us about the settlement, despite saying publicly that they had asked everyone

I've been following the whole story for a while, but I can't say I remember reading about Interactive Labs. Does anybody knows what they do? A cursory search did not return much, which is probably due to Google deliberately removing them from the results… Or the fact that there are bazillions of web pages containing the words "interactive labs".

Get that OFF dot-com, hysterical France screeches at Google

ratfox

Re: Geo-blocking?

This isn't about information that is wrong or defamatory. Nobody has the right to force website to take down the data. They only have the right to tell Google to stop showing it in their results.

ratfox

The law does not force the website to remove the information. Some of them may even official government websites which are legally mandated to make the information available forever. This goes counter to the idea that irrelevant information should not be displayed.

The idea of the EU is that you can both have your cake and eat it by keeping the data on the website, and telling Google not to display these results in queries for personal names.

ratfox
Paris Hilton

IP geolocation?

I'm pretty certain Google roughly knows where the user is in the world (or at least, it tries to). Why don't they simply filter the results whenever the user is in Europe, and display everything otherwise?

Ahmed's clock wasn't a bomb, but it blew up the 'net and Zuckerberg, Obama want to meet him

ratfox
Happy

Good kid knows how to do the V sign

The proper way, for the police.

Why the 'Dancing Baby' copyright case is just hi-tech victim shaming

ratfox

Carry on as before

It certainly seems true that nothing much has changed with this ruling. Whether fair use is a right or an affirmative action, there is no particular constraint on how much copyright owners need to give it attention before filing a claim. Much ado about nothing.

Infosec lady flings sueball at Microsoft over 'gender discrimination'

ratfox

This certainly puts in perspective the very visible efforts at our company to insist on non-discriminatory treatment of minorities, encouragements for women to go for promotion and so on.

It seems that at this point, any large US company that is not publicly and ostentatiously pushing for gender equality at all levels opens itself to this type of lawsuit. I would had assumed that Microsoft had enough internal efforts to cover its ass, but maybe this lawsuit will prove me wrong.

Uber is killing off iconic black cabs, warns Zac Goldsmith

ratfox

Is that a tragedy?

I doubt people come to London to visit its iconic black cabs. Now, if the double-decker buses were to disappear, however…

Twitter sued for 'reading' private direct messages

ratfox

Re: Next up

Yes, short URLs are fairly dangerous, as you never know where you're gonna end up.

BAN the ROBOT WHORES, says robot whore expert: 'These AREN'T BARBIES'

ratfox

Sure, sure. I just wanted to point out that the argument that porn objectifies women is extremely common.

This bland assertion to the contrary was not unlike coming in a discussion about global warming and state that humanity has obviously no influence on the climate.

ratfox
Coffee/keyboard

Luckily it's very easy to separate porn etc. from reality so I can't see it harming views on women

*Cough cough* …I think you'll find this view is controversial.

*Cough*

Unique astronaut job perk: Create a SHOOTING STAR by having a dump

ratfox
Coat

Twins and space travel

I know how this ends: The twin who comes back is much younger than the one who stayed on earth, right?

Should take down mean stay down? EU’s Big Internet quiz leaks

ratfox
WTF?

Google has developed its ContentID music filtering technology to identify songs as they’re uploaded – but it refuses to turn it on.

Huh? Isn't ContentID famous for being not only turned on, but also trigger happy, and even abused by some media companies?

There was the time where it identified NASA footage of curiosity as being "owned" by a small TV company who hadn't bothered to remove it from their automatic uploads.

There was the time where half the let's play videos got flagged despite nobody having complained about it.

And a quick search finds many testimonials of how difficult it is for video creators to fight spurious claims from media outfits that are either by laziness or by dishonesty blindly confirming every single contested claim.

'Hey Siri, it's Obama, what should we do about Iran?'

ratfox
Happy

Re: Leave your browser running

"Where do I work?"

Indeed, Google Now answers properly to "Directions to work", but can't answer "Where do I work"…

I'd say the programmers never thought that somebody would ask such a question. There's no good answer for "Who am I" either!

Apple drinks Putin’s Kool-Vodka, shoves Russians' iCloud data into Russia – report

ratfox

Hang on a minute

Does the law say "private data should exclusively be kept in our country", in a funny attempt to keep it safe from prying governments which I'm sure is making the NSA roll on the floor laughing, or does the law say "there should be a copy of the private data in our country" so they can have a look at it themselves?

Witness Apple's iPhone-iPad extravapalooza here in our no-hate zone

ratfox
Coffee/keyboard

This bigger screen iPad Pro lets you touch documents, watch movies, play music. CHECKMATE ANDROID

You owe me a new keyboard!

Drunk Japanese warrior cuffed after NINJA STRIKE on shop robot

ratfox
Terminator

Terrible aggression

We should create new laws to punish this type of hateful behavior towards Basilis^Wour more advanced brothers.