Posts by cosmogoblin

Re: bits of your car not working...

The Nintendo Wii's marketplace. Anything you download is for that machine only, and for you only. If you sell or give away your Wii, the license demands you wipe it first, but you don't retain the rights you've paid for.

Consider: I have a black Wii, you have a white Wii. We both have installed Ocarina of Time, and nothing else. We want to change colours, so we swap. We are required to wipe Ocarina from both of them, and then buy it a second time if we want to play it.

It sounds like the same is true for Tesla; if we swap cars, we both lose $8000 of features. Aside from artificially enhancing the company's profits, what sense could this possibly make?

Re: I really need a decent alternative to dropbox

I really love how effective their file syncing is

+1. I happily pay £100 a year to use Dropbox for two reasons - syncing across devices, and backup for when (not if, when) I mistype rm -rf ~/*. Web login is also an occasionally life-saving feature. Everything else can go hang.

Re: I have some sympathy for the "5 minute favour"

This is why, as a non-programmer, I preface all code (even some personal stuff) with a variant of "I'm not a coder. This seems to work but it's a mess and I don't know what I'm doing, line 36 in particular is just copied from StackExchange. If you're reading this, SORRY!"

Can anybody help?

I'm running Mint 17.3 (Cinnamon, 64-bit). The repos have Chromium 65.0.3325.181, which dates from March 2018; Chromium's latest version is apparently 74.

Given that I can't update Mint on this laptop (nVidia's fault), is there a relatively simple way to force an update while keeping my browser settings?

Re: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same

Arg! The article gave me a huge laugh, then this shocked it all away.

Ah well, glad you're wrong. Pretty sure you could just press a combination of buttons on his chest plate to fix him if he died, anyway.

Speaking of, does anybody know if Christopher Lee has risen from the dead yet? He's taking his sweet time about it...

Re: Jennifer Government

Jennifer Government, by Max Barry Novelist

ftfy

Re: You brought up an interesting point

sadly it's quicker in this day and age to get a company to act if you're able to publish a story about them

Agreed. I'm always depressed when individuals who've been screwed over by megacorps get justice after a major (okay, El Reg in this case, so not so major) news outlet gets involved - because I think of the hundreds or thousands in the same situation who didn't get their stories published.

Re: I'll file this in the ...

Useless? Sure, given the caveats noted.

But now, we know that it's useless. Now, we know that hard disk drives can be used in this way, but not effectively. That knowledge is valuable to the security industry.

Re: correcthorsebatterystaple

If you're worried about humans picking the words - I use watchout4snakes. Get about 10 random words, and pick 4 or 5 that make a vaguely intelligible phrase. I don't know the size of their dictionary but my random 10 just now included theorem and pedantry.

Where good password rules (i.e. none) are enforced, I use correcthorsebatterystaple. Where bad password rules are enforced, I use correcthorsebatterystaple1!. This means if I remember my password, but can't remember the ruleset, I have a 50/50 chance of getting it right first time.

Re: If that's what the law requires...

Hah, thanks - I guess I didn't get as far as page 66..!

Re: You can read my SMSs but you can take my WhatsApps from my cold dead hands

"are we really saying how we send messages affects whether or not we’re ok with them being read by big G?"

Exactly the opposite. Whether I'm okay with messages being intercepted affects how I send them.

For messages needing security, I make sure to use a secure method. WhatsApp's introduction of end-to-end encryption simply adds another method to my list, and takes away one that I had to worry about.

Re: Ignorance can be very powerful

Only 30% were factually incorrect ? Really ?

Since they only considered falsifiable statements (having removed opinions etc. from their data set), I had a similar reaction.

But I suppose some facts are so incontrovertible that even His Highness couldn't screw them up. "It's Thursday" is hard to get THAT badly wrong, yeah?

And Trump doesn't care about the truth, he's not actively trying to lie; so I suspect some of the "facts" he just makes up out of whole cloth turn out to be correct... Stop clocks, and all that.

Re: "...using methods that can be replicated anywhere in this Universe."

True enough, but there are other methods (currently, I think, even more ludicrously expensive).

A lot of news outlets have been reporting that the kilogram is now defined in terms of the Kibble balance, which is completely missing the point. The kilogram is defined independently of any measuring equipment; you just need appropriate measuring equipment to effectively use that definition, and the Kibble balance is our best current equipment.

The Kibble balance compares the weight of an object with the electrical power needed to lift that object, and therefore needs a known gravitational field strength. It would be possible to make a related device that instead of lifting an object, accelerated it in zero g; thus comparing the acceleration with electrical power, and determining its mass that way. Doing away with the need for gravity, I imagine this could be made more precise than the Kibble balance.

Re: country & western singers

My guess would be that an autonomous car gets out of control of it's AI by the latter overloaded with conflicting information and rules so that in order to ditch the lot it needs an emergency routine to follow.

Isn't that how humans work? If our cerebral cortex can't handle a tense situation, the decision-making responsibility is handed over to the amygdala, which has a small bank of emergency responses (fight-flight-freeze). The available responses aren't always appropriate, but they're usually better than mulling it over until it's too late.

If it's worked for animals over a billion years of evolution, it seems a good starting point for devices we design today.

A bit one-sided then, seeing how many extradition requests the US make against British citizens operating in Britain breaking no British laws...

Re: Copyright, Patents all screwed.

And if you believe that in the record industry, the author is usually the one to profit from their work, perhaps I can interest you in some prime lunar real estate.

Re: Which bank details exactly?

That says more about the banks' lack of diligence than it does about the inherent vulnerability of an account by virtue of those details being known.

Nothing new there. A newly-married friend, maiden name (let's say) Jane Smith, put a wedding present - a cheque for a few thousand - into her account. Only later, she realised the cheque was made out to her husband, let's say Steve Brown.

Went through without a hitch. Nobody raised an eyebrow.

Re: GDPR is ours anyway

Apparently we actually were its biggest enthusiasts. I can't see us rowing back on it now.

Why on earth not? That's precisely what Theresa May did at the Home Office with the Human Rights Act.

Re: Possible mitigation?

<not a security guy>

Sounds like something a browser plugin could do - maybe just an additional feature to NoScript, to by default block communication by scripts to domains other than their origin?

Also, isn't this called XSS, and already dealt with by security protocols?

</nass>

Re: A but not I

Intelligence is the thing that kicks in when instinct has reached its limits.

I see it as the other way round (with a fair bit of neuroscience backing me up). Intelligence, properly applied, is very powerful. Instinct is what kicks in when intelligence is stretched beyond capacity. A great example is the amygdala hijack, where the intelligent neocortex can't cope and the emotional/instinctive amygdala takes control.

Re: At Superprof we take security seriously and know how key it is to the running of our business

Yeah, there's all these stock phrases people love to wheel out, they didn't mean anything in the first place and they're even worse now that everybody's heard them a hundred times before.

"I apologise if any offence was caused"

(no admission that I was the one who caused it)

"We have implemented robust procedures to make sure that this specific case doesn't happen again"

(we lost the unencrypted CD on a train, next time it'll be a USB stick in a taxi)

"We have upgraded our systems, and the small minority who used X just need to migrate to Y"

(we have downgraded our systems, and the 40% of customers who only signed up to use X are now SOL)

... and so on. Give me a week's worth of news, and I could collect dozens...

Yup, I think the lawyer is incorrect as well.

Trouble is, until and unless something like this is tested in court, you just can't know for certain. Hence there is always legal risk, albeit low, even if your lawyers confirm you're doing everything right.

The objections have all been to the sheer quantity of data that would be stored on said card

And the fact that the list of people who had access to said data included virtually every civil servant in the country. The proposed protection against abuse, as I recall, was "staff will be disciplined if they access information inappropriately". Hardly a strong deterrant!

Re: Their Business Model

"... ultimately go bankrupt owing millions billions."

FTFY

Quite frankly, this is a pathetic argument - that obeying the law would put jobs at risk, so we shouldn't have to. It's been used plenty by truly nasty companies like the tobacco industry, and it flies as well as a penguin with lead boots.

If you have to lay off employees to pay for the cleaning up of your criminal activities, the cost of their redundancy settlements is yours to bear. Perhaps whatever fines Germany and the EU level at Audi should go to compensate those harmed by their actions - for instance their employees, and anybody who bought an Audi, or breathed in the exhaust created by one.

Re: Yeah - but if I am a "common criminal" I'll definitely find another non-indiegogo to pawn

When I first played Deus Ex, I found a helicopter that, when targeted, showed the help-text "Attack Helicopter".

I unloaded several clips into it before I realised it was a noun, not an instruction..

Re: A Thriving Market of Counterfeits

"could there be freight charges involved?"

Reminds me of the towing invoice for Apollo 13

Re: @AC

My name, job title and employer are not secret, but I still take off my ID badge before I go to the pub.

They did.

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They do say that a person's ability with computers is in direct proportion to the scale of cockups they produce ...