* Posts by M Gale

3500 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2007

UK.gov admits porn age checks could harm small ISPs and encourage risky online behaviour

M Gale

With the difference being that Canute was a crafty fellow who was trying to show the advisors who thought the sun shone out of his arse that he's just a human being and doesn't have a god's power.

Current government, perhaps somewhat the opposite.

UK drone collision study didn't show airliner window penetration

M Gale

If you're contemplating attacking anything with quadcopters, you're probably not worried too much about local regulations beyond not getting caught.

M Gale

Doesn't everyfuckwit's favourite brand DJI geofence airports anyway?

Drone regulations in the UK: A solution looking for a problem. Go run in a wheat field, May.

Is it possible to control Amazon Alexa, Google Now using inaudible commands? Absolutely

M Gale

"not the sort of thing one can sneak into a room easily"

https://www.amazon.co.uk/20Vrms-Ultrasonic-Transducer-Sensor-Detector/dp/B00P0BD6PA

https://www.amazon.co.uk/MakerHawk-NodeMcu-Development-ESP8266-ESP-12F/dp/B071S8MWTY

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Value-Charger-Adapter-Quadcopter-XC317/dp/B01F6YUGLW

https://www.amazon.co.uk/XCSOURCE-Battery-Lithium-Charging-TE668/dp/B01N2Z24VL

I'm sure this would be difficult to sneak into a room. It must be all the size of a moderately voluminous matchbox.

Pixellation popped: AI can ID you, even after PhotoShop phuzzing

M Gale

Obviously too many pixels then. Increase quantization until the AI (and everyone else) can't classify Jack from Jill.

Isn't some quantization part of how some convolutional neural networks work anyway? Easier to work with a 64x64px image than a 6400x6400px one.

Special delivery: Activists drop 100,000 net neutrality complaints on FCC

M Gale

Re: Be careful...

So instead you get Netflix and Youtube slowing your stock trade down instead of some random cat video shared on a smaller video site or self-host?

Of course if you're carrying out the kind of HFT that depends on super fast connections to the transaction servers, you'd deserve everything you get for trying to do it on 50:1 contended domestic broadband.

So, what's happening with LOHAN? Sweet FAA, that's what

M Gale

Re: UAV Madness

So long as I get the stylish hazmat suit to go with it, shouldn't be a huge problem.

Twitchy Google GAMES YouTube – hits 'play' on MULTI-BEELLION dollar market

M Gale

No ta.

Twitch works, and (unlike Youtube) doesn't require a Google Plus account to be useful. About the only thing Twitch doesn't do right now is let any old Joe have transcoding options. You have to be a "Twitch Partner", or the only thing your viewers get is source quality.

Life in prison not appealing to Silk Road boss Ross Ulbricht – appeal filed

M Gale

Re: He doesn't want life in prison? Shocker.

Gold and silver mining?

Electroplating?

Or, you know, poisoning someone you don't like.

Welp, PEAK GIF is upon us! Facebook now supports animated images

M Gale

>Whatever happened to MNG and ANG?

webm happened, is what happened.

Badges for Commentards

M Gale

Used to have a silver badge. I know I haven't changed my name. Guess it goes if you don't make 100 posts a year!

Windows and OS X are malware, claims Richard Stallman

M Gale

Re: Shut it you tedious old windbag

>Source code released under the BSD licenses is not FOSS, unlike GPL.

At this stage I wish I could embed the lolwut pear into this post as an img tag.

It's free. It's open source. It's free and open source.

All copyleft is FOSS, but not all FOSS is copyleft.

New Windows 10 Build 10122 aims to fix file association hijacking

M Gale

Re: Joe Belfiore said there would be adware and spyware in 'start menu'

http://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/3681_micus0004299_nyt_v3feb1.jpg

But Bob, they're not spying on you! They're putting people first! Only Google spies!

Microsoft would never do such a thing!

Ignore the man behind the curtain!

Hacker data dumps scrape to make huge grey marketing database

M Gale

Re: Company makes new search engine.

>pilfered

Published. You know: Made Public.

>providing it to marketing people without my or the data owner's consent.

Welcome to the Internet.

M Gale

Company makes new search engine.

Commentards go batshit.

People continue to publish every detail of their lives on the web.

Nothing changes.

New Windows 10 will STAGGER to its feet, says Microsoft OS veep

M Gale

"Windows as a service"

Not even once.

BOFH: Never mind that old brick, look at this ink-stained BEAUTY

M Gale

PS2-USB adapters.

And 5-pin DIN-PS2 adapters.

I have 'em all. They're rarer than gold dust, and about as valuable.

GitHub jammed by injected JavaScript, servers whacked by DDoS

M Gale

Re: Losing face

Nope.

Is that an excuse though?

Nokia boss smashes net neutrality activists

M Gale

Re: Are people even reading the comments?

>I can't think of a single instance of this ever.

Didn't read that Oatmeal strip then? I know it's hardly a scientific journal, but then neither is the Reg. You'll find at least one example right there, and I'm sure you'll find more if you actually look.

Also, replying three days after everyone else has stopped bothering to look at the thread? Cute.

M Gale

http://theoatmeal.com/blog/net_neutrality

Rajeev Suri, please read.

The BBC wants to slap a TAX on EVERYONE in BLIGHTY

M Gale

Culture is defined by the people of a country, not by some fuckwads who can't get off the TV tax and can't bear the thought that someone, somewhere might not be paying for them to spew out more shit, regardless of whether that someone is even watching it.

Fuck you, Tony.

SpaceX lofts two all-electric ion-drive comsats to Clarke orbit

M Gale

Re: Curious

They're communications satellites. Doesn't say who's communicating with who.

Also: Wut? Iain Thomson, you might want to check your doubleposting.

German music moguls slammed for 'wurst ever DMCA takedown spam'

M Gale

*coff*

Uhm, Kevin MacLeod's work is all CC-attrib-required. I suppose I should have elaborated there, but you're free to use the whole library (and indeed many people do), so long as you give attribution (you may want to check the README.TXT that comes with Kerbal Space Program for instance).

Scott Manley's work is very much all-rights-reserved ask-permission-first stuff, which makes his problem even more silly. Someone violated his copyright and then had the cheek to claim it as their own and that he was infringing their copyright. Uhh... whut?

And you might want to check before recommending the GPL for everything. The GPL/LGPL is best suited toward software, not videos or music. CC licenses are best suited toward videos and music, but not particularly software (which doesn't stop some people).

M Gale

It gets a bit sad when Kevin MacLeod has to spend his time trying to stop people having their Youtube videos taken down for having his royalty free music in them, because some idiots are making copyrighted content and claiming his music as their own.

Scott Manley had a similar problem when he made a very informative video about asteroids in the solar system, which was then used (without permission) in another video, which got loaded into the Content ID system... and resulted in his own original content being flagged until he could sort the issue out.

Go here, skip to 9m40s, and put some cushioning on your hands so you don't knock your own teeth out with the epic facepalm.

M0n0wall comes tumbling down as dev throws in the trowel

M Gale

Re: Financial models matter

"Now look at things..."

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2015/01/15/january-2015-web-server-survey.html

Same as a few months ago, nginx seems to the the up-and-coming server. Apache still has a huge lead on web sites that aren't spam and domain parking pages. IIS lost its brief total-sites-including-crud lead due to one of those crud-hosts going under.

Just saying.

Amazon's delivery drones shot down by new FAA rules

M Gale

Re: Issues

Cameras. Radio.

"Funny, the drone saw you."

Plus I could see drones like this being an awesome B2B or office to office thing. Rooftop to rooftop, an inter-office delivery service that costs nothing but a low cost maintenance contract and the couple of pence to charge 'em each time.

I suggested this during year 1 of the degree course, the "computing and society" module. The prof really didn't like the idea. Funny how here we are not 4 years later, seriously discussing drone delivery services, Google Balloons, all the stuff that was being discussed during that module and shot down (har, har) as "not feasible".

I consider myself vindicated.

Is there ANOTHER UNIVERSE headed BACKWARDS IN TIME?

M Gale

Re: 24 the ultimate answer

Huh.

And there's me thinking that God's computer was, and is, a custom-built IBM mainframe.

Hold the front page: Spain's anti-Google lobbyists lobby for Google News return

M Gale

Re: Money

"Has anyone *not* skipped the ads when watching a video on YouTube?"

Well, there are the unskippable ones. Now if there's one way to burn your brand image into my memory as something to avoid, it's making me sit through a full advert whether I'm interested or not. If your product is that brilliant, 5 seconds is more than enough to sell it to me or at least tell me where I can find out more.

Of course it'd be great if a few of the more prominent youtubers decided "text ads only until the unskippable ones fuck off", but the chances of that happening are about the same as the likelihood of Satan ice-skating to work.

Pirate Bay towed to oldpiratebay.org

M Gale

Re: NO.

Compromise?

On DRM?

Yes, I compromise DRM every time I buy a disk, shove it in the machine and a certain... foxy bit of software unlocks it for me. No pointless copyright warnings, no "COMING SOON", no "you wouldn't steal a car", and definitely no "this disk is not playable in this region". Half an hour of crunching and it's on the HDD, the optical media to be shoved in a cupboard and forgotten about until it's needed again.

It's wonderful. Oh, totally legal too, unless you're in one of those funny countries that considers "DRM circumvention" to be illegal. Strangely enough, I have yet to turn into a shady market-stall distributor of unauthorised copies. Funny how that works.

Docker, Part 2: Whoa! Spontaneous industry standard! How did they do THAT?

M Gale

almost nobody says "Android Linux."

And that's because once you add on the Dalvik/ART stack and everything else that goes with it, Android is about as much Linux as Java or Mono/.Net is: It isn't.

Does anybody say "TiVo Linux"?

Star Wars: Episode VII trailer lands. You call that a lightsaber? THIS is a lightsaber

M Gale

Leaked screenshots show next Windows kernel to be a perfect 10

M Gale

Don't give a damn about the number.

Can I get rid of that crap at the bottom of the screen, unpin all that shite from the taskbar, and does it shove me into happy-clappy-bouncy-animated-icons-your-PC-is-now-a-phone land when I press the start button?

Also can I use it and keep it up to date without a Microsoft account?

If I find the answers favourable, I might get it after various people have made a WGA un-fucker for it. If not, oh well, I'll stay with 7 until end of life, and then the Linux partition becomes the permanent primary.

Judge: Terror bomb victims CAN'T seize Iran's domain name as compensation

M Gale

Re: Bizarre in many ways

The UK should obviously be able to seize all the USA's domain names as compensation for the USA direct support of the IRA.

From what I'm aware though, that wasn't so much US.gov as much as it was a few fucking idiot Americans. "Oh them poor Irish under the thumb of the evil Imperial Bastards" or something.

Never mind that a good portion of people in Northern Ireland actually like things the way they are, thus meaning that even if UK.gov washed its hands of the whole thing and said "there you go, it's yours", there would still be a bunch of pissed off people.

Irish Assembly is about the best solution that could have happened out of that clusterfuck.

M Gale
Thumb Up

Re: Bizarre in many ways

"But the IRA were never terrorists, they were just criminals (although now completely innocent)

That's why we didn't need to have all our phone calls recorded and which TV shows we watch tracked."

ISWYDT

Well done.

M Gale

"In other words, because an internet registry does not exist as its own separate entity, like a car or a house, it cannot be assumed to be an asset that can be seized."

So a bit like various siezed domain names then?

Oh I can understand the diplomatic reasons for not just yanking an entire TLD, but at least be consistent in your reasoning!

LARGE, ROUND and FEELS SO GOOD in your hand: Yes! It's a Nexus 6

M Gale

Re: Replaceable batteries for all!

Genuinely curious to know. How many people actually replace the battery or carry a spare?

My "spare" takes the form of four different external USB packs. However, I've also replaced totally dead batteries that refuse to charge. It's nice to not require a screwdriver, paperclip, guitar plectrum, soldering iron or blood sacrifice to the god of sharp pointy bits in order to do so. That and it's absurdly satisfying to yank a battery out and make off mean fucking off.

Also nice to be able to make a 16GB device become a 32 or 64GB device without paying the £stupid-per-gigabyte premium. And without buying a whole new device, of course.

M Gale

Re: Because someone had to say it...

I'm sure you could if Microsoft would let you. They won't, though.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

£2k burning a hole in your pocket? Let this 'advanced' DRONE relieve you

M Gale

Re: One BIG weakness ...

Bluetooth is a bit of an odd choice.

But then DSM2 is patented up to the hilt, and your phone can't exactly speak DSM2. Shame, 'coz dual-channel redundancy is a very very nice idea for stuff that might plummet out of the sky and onto/into someone's face.

Country flyer myself. I'd go "clubbing", but the nearest friendly one is quite a few miles away, and the nearest one is.. erm.. well I think "clique" would be a good term.

Philae comet probe got down without harpoons

M Gale

And if you want to track the state of the link...

You could do a lot worse than clicking here.

As of the time of posting, it looks like the link has gone kaput. It was downlink-only earlier, at some slow speed. Wonder if they can bounce the signal off other spacecraft in the DSN?

ISPs are stripping encryption from netizens' email – EFF

M Gale

Time to do it all in the client then?

Can't exactly "strip encryption" easily when the only thing the ISP gets is uy&*5r*%76f*^%fIYTFR8I&TFi78%^FI&6r(I&^tf*(^ri7R8765rUI%E7£7%^FikY&^TGFjytgcvKU<yg.....

BEHOLD Apple's BENEVOLENCE! iMessage txt BLACK HOLE finally fixed

M Gale

Re: Hangouts is Googles iMessage

Hangouts is part of G+ though. So thanks but no thanks.

If I wanted a Facebook account, I'd have a Facebook account.

Farewell Nokia: First ever 'Microsoft Lumia' set for Tuesday reveal

M Gale

Re: Why not just Lumia?

slower GPS lock

My old Arc S was one of the first phones released with a dual GPS/GLONASS chipset. That's right. Before Apple. Before Microsoft. It typically acquires a positioning lock of 3-5m accuracy about a minute after turning it on from a cold start. That's if the phone tower or wifi positioning that happens within a couple of seconds isn't good enough for you.

So if the "slower GPS lock" is hopeless bullshit, what about the rest?

Zuck on The Social Network: Nobody wants to watch my REAL life for 2 hrs straight

M Gale

Had they not had the app, the copper-haired, be-hooded one said he might have ended up in the cinema alone.

Uhm.

What's that app running on again?

Preview redux: Microsoft ships new Windows 10 build with 7,000 changes

M Gale
Facepalm

Re: @M Gale

That line was from the wind-up post with the trollface.

Nobody except pirithous took it seriously.

Never post when low on caffeine. It's not a good plan.

Ho hum.

M Gale

Open standard filesystems don't belong on a closed proprietary system.

Just a quickie:

Why not? I mean assuming no GPL-alike "thou must makest the whole product FOSS" stuff (and given that a GPL driver, which an Ext* filesystem would most certainly be enabled through, doesn't have these viral properties to the rest of the OS), why does an open-standard (GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT, WTFPL, etc, etc, etc...) filesystem "not belong" on a proprietary OS?

My copy of ext2fs seems to be working just fine.

Chipmaker FTDI bricking counterfeit kit

M Gale

Re: Odd reactions

Don't get me wrong, I don't like what FTDI did, but I am surprised that no one has done it before.

Sony BMG.

It didn't work out so well.

Google+ goes TITSUP. But WHO knew? How long? Anyone ... Hello ...

M Gale

Re: Why is everyone so down on Google Plus these days? @Fink-Nottle

Apparently Google+ will get rid of all those trolls on Youtube. Apparently.

Except now instead of being merely "bad", I would say that the Youtube comments section has slid past "terrible", whistled by "El Reg comments", gone hurtling through "Speak Your Branes" and landed slap bang in the middle of batshit troll 4chan city, and most of it from comments that say "from Google+".

So I guess that worked out real well.

And it seems I still can't moderate the comments on my own damn channel without signing up to Google Minus. Ho hum, not like I've uploaded a single damn thing since the integration. Content is king. Don't like what G+ did to Youtube? Starve the fuckers. Plenty of other video sites out there.

Doctor Who and the Dalek: 10-year-old tests BBC programming game

M Gale

Re: hold on...

You shouldn't learn to program by starting with C or C#.

C# is not C. Nor is it even remotely C++. Microsoft calling it "C"-anything was probably more of a marketing decision than anything based in reality. They could have called it "Microsoft Java" and been far more accurate.

Anyway, last time I saw a class split into two, with one half learning C first and the other half learning VB first, the C-firsters took the switch to VB halfway through the course incredibly well. Duck-to-water well in fact. The people who did their first couple of months with VB and then switched to C basically shat bricks.

'Cowardly, venomous trolls' threatened with two-year sentences for menacing posts

M Gale

Re: obviously using your logic

Bit too late now. A small minority have ruined it for the rest of us.

Given some arseholes the excuse to ruin it. Get it right.

Windows 10: Forget Cloudobile, put Security and Privacy First

M Gale

Enforced career changes

See now, fortunately I know how to get up to my elbows in dangerous equipment. On top of previous experience, being on the wrong side of the economic downturn means I've had the lovely opportunity to spend a month doing bonded labour a mandatory work placement for a nearby plastic recycling firm. I already have plenty of that kind of experience anyway, amongst the retail stuff. Even got the little certificate with "Excellent" written across all performance metrics to prove it.

However I have to wonder how some 18 stone, neckbearded, doughnut-munching "admin" would cope with a job where the 25Kg single-man limit is more of a guideline, where 50 hours a week of brutal graveyard shifts dragging crap out of trailers is the norm, where your shins become more bumps, bruises and scrapes than skin, would cope?

I have seen people come into these sorts of jobs and leave the same day. They simply cannot cope with the workload. And people here are are suggesting "just change careers"?

I suggest these people go work in a postal sorting depot, in a recycling firm, in a distribution warehouse, in any number of other crap jobs for a month or two. Let alone 6, 12,18 months or more.

I'm wondering how many of those people would be crying out to be forcibly buggered than deal with it any more? I'm wondering how many of them would just be crying themselves to sleep every night. Or every morning, as the case most likely would be.

I'm pretty sure it would be a non-zero number.

As for me, I'm trying to get out of that crap. I've done my time, thankyou very much. Can I have a job that pays some real money and doesn't have me risking life and limb every single damned shift, please?