Posts by The Other Steve

Cambridge boffins draw map to Free Our Data

@Red Bren/AC + @call me scruffy

"As the Free Our Data website states, the Ordinance Survey is a commercial entity that receives no direct tax funding."

And it goes on to say that, in fact, since it obtains 50% of it's revenue from Public sources it is in fact heavily tax subsidised, and all it's profits go straight back to the treasury. OS doesn't have shareholders. Its domain is .gov.uk

"So if they start giving away this data for free, who is going to plug the gap? Joe Taxpayer."

Well, that's the point exactly, yes. Giving access to data to UK businesses will drive the development of plenty of useful geoloc stuff, sales of which go to the treasury. There seems to be some cynicism amongst reg commentors on this point, but that's OK, since it doesn't matter, because :

In any case. since you've just done away with the crawling bureaucracy, you could still keep paying out the same amount of treasury cash and it would probably cover the costs in entirety. Bureaucracies are _really_ expensive.

So, pay the same money out, only without the friction, whole lot goes to OS et al. So far, no one notices the difference, except now, for the first time ever, UK GIS developers can get access to (e.g.) the highest quality UK mapping data that exists.

So tell me, who's not winning here ?

@call me scruffy

I agree to a certain extent w/r/t to the Land Registry, for instance, but there's no reason it can't be done with proper controls to limit the amount of inference that is possible, for instance the way things stand, if I wish to find all properties owned by a person, one of the following criteria must be met :

The applicant is either the owner or has the owner's written consent to search

The applicant holds a Power of Attorney in favour of the owner of the properties

The applicant is a trustee on behalf of the owner of the properties

The applicant has a Court Order authorising him to apply for the search

The applicant has obtained a Bankruptcy Order against the person owning the properties

There's no reason why such criteria can't still be enforced while removing the charge (£90).

Some other searches can be done by anyone, like finding the registered owner of a property, given the postal address, which costs £20 and "contains a description of the property, its tenure, the name and address of the owners, purchase price, details of mortgages and other charges, covenants etc."

That's a large chunk of personal data I agree, but £20 is not really even enough to stop someone who is merely very curious (although it will limit the amount of people who want to nose at all their neighbours).

I think there are probably some interesting issues around to what extent this data is available, and to whom, but the fact remains that it is, by law, a matter of _public_ record, and therefore the public ought to be able to see it.

Personally I think using cost as the limiting factor in access to public data is a bit dodgy, people with fat wallets can still lay my life bear, so why should people with a restricted budget be left out of the game ?

Lifting the financial barrier to access may even raise public awareness of just how much data is available*, and make them start wondering whether it should be so.

For a full list of such info that you can get your grubby mits on, see : http://www.landsearch.net/fees_eng.asp

* Please note that I do _NOT_ in any way think that the argument "there's already lots of data on people available, so they should STFU whining when we start trying to collect more" is a good one, unlike Phorm and their PR sock puppets. Quite the opposite.

BBC races away with five-year F1 rights deal

@Decline not due to safety rules

Hmm, I'm afraid I have to take issue with that, I for one lost interest when the number of participants killed or maimed fell below the level required to hold my attention.

And I want MORE jiggling bimbos, not less.

Virgin Media in premium rate U-turn

In all fairness to the script monkeys

It isn't their fault, though they are irritating.

The lovely shiny brochures, and the lovely shiny people, sent by the big offshore CRM players would have you believe that you can procure from them staff who speak English like natives, who understand regional dialect, who have excellent technical backgrounds. Prices start from only X rupees/day.

And it's all true. Only what you get for you "Prices start at" is some poor dufus they just pulled of the street. It turns out that, oddly enough, well spoken, technically competent people who speak multiple languages well, are quite expensive wherever in the world you try and source them from.

I once briefly worked for a very large (and I mean REALLY large) outsourcing shop who resisted offshoring for a long time because the cost benefit is only applicable when you are not concerned with the QoS.

We had a few mega global Blue Chip big bolox* clients who were certainly always prepared to negotiate on price, but never, ever, on quality. Because _their_ clients demanded it. And given that one of our banking clients' customers once overflowed our transaction routines because he purchased an island using Italian Lira, you're talking massive amounts of money per customer head if they take their business elsewhere. It pays to keep them.

Upshot was, there was no cost advantage to offshoring, as similar quality would have been almost as expensive per CSR head, plus all the administrative overhead from IT systems, flying people backwards and forwards to Elbonia or wherever, and so on.

Unfortunately, our £20 month doesn't carry quite so much weight, so it's the minimum wage script monkey in whatever country is cheapest at the moment.

Question though, do you think you would be getting better service from minimum wage script monkeys based in a UK call centre. Personally, I doubt it. In fact I know it's the case, since not all our clients were in the same league as the above mentioned.

* I can't say who, so I have added extra emphasis, they really were enormous, the clients, not the bollocks.

Police tech agency rewinds on smartphone CCTV

@Alex Hawdon

So, to clarify, you think that because your local authority are not competent to operate the surveillance system that they already have, they should therefore install a much bigger, more invasive, and much much more expensive one ?

I fell off my push bike. Should I therefore be given a Ferrari ?

Perhaps your LA needs to look at it's existing processes before it starts writing blank checks to security equipment manufacturers.

Or perhaps it's just that putting people under 24/7 surveillance doesn't actually have that much of a deterrent effect, full stop. Watched much Big Brother ?

BBC Micro creators meet to TRACE machine's legacy

Oh the memories...

The days when I wandered around with a school bag full of boxes of 5.25" floppy disks, a stack of fanfold printout, and a copy of the BBC Mater (Next after the model B, with software in ROM and numeric keypad) manual, and probably an Usbourne coding book or two.

Picking the locks on teachers desk to get the NetNurse disk, judiciously *unproting, watching the keyboard buffer remotely to get the admin password, getting super user status. Getting caught. Getting kicked out of school. Oh yes indeed my friend, those were indeed the days.

Being allowed back in, abusing the modem to dial into MicroNet over premium rate gateways, getting kicked out again...

Fond fond memories.

Phorm agrees to independent inspection of data pimping code

I don't care if it's legal (it isn't) or anonymous (it isn't)...

I don't care if Phorm's CEO gives me his first born son to hold in escrow as a guarantee of his promises.

I don't care if my ISP offers a water tight privacy contract signed in the blood of their customer service department who are consistently ignoring my complaints.

I don't care if they get the resurrected spirit of Jesus Christ to audit the source code.

I don't care if the God of the Old Testament manifests and writes "Hey guys, Phorm is OK by me" in letters of fire upon the sky.

I will not tolerate my ISP intercepting my communications in order to treat me as a chattel. Period.

I do not want Kent Spunkbubble and his merry band of cold warriors and root kit artists installing equipment anywhere in the UK telecomms network, for any purpose, ever. Period.

In other words, Fuck off, you shady bastards.

Why would someone toss $1.35m at Wikipedia?

Well enough written

that this time I actually got a page and a half in before brain kicked in and I realised that I actually couldn't give a flying monkeys chuff.

Well done also for keeping the page count down, but I still can't help feeling that one page for a story about Wikipedia would be more than enough, thanks.

In fact, a single headline once a month along the lines of "Wikipedia : It's not like a proper encyclopaedia, and it's spelled different." would probably do the trick.

Sorry Cede, it's evident that you really do put a lot of time and effort into these reports, I just can't help myself.

Net think tank: Phorm is illegal

@Whinging

Hi HamsterWheel, still holding those Phorm shares eh ? down by another 300 so far today, bummer.

See how quickly your anonymity was stripped away there, despite the fact that you posted AC, and the reg site does not allow me to see your IP address ?

Nasty, isn't it ?

As for your pathetic points, which display your continuing misunderstandings about technology and legal issues, lets have a quick look.

BskyB :

Don't use it. That's a choice, see.

Credit Cards :

Don't have em. Choice.

Banks :

No they don't, because it's illegal, and anyway I usually use cash. Choice.

Opt-out :

It isn't as simple as opting out, I would expect someone who claims to have "seen the technology" to know better. Order yourself some Clue.

Luddites :

ROFLMAO. Even wikipedia is smarter than you.

Legality :

Kent can say he's sure all he likes, but guess what, it isn't up to him to decide what's legal in this country.

As for "I'd like to see you hack Phorm", be very, very, careful. As a Phorm shareholder, that could be taken as implied consent to do just that. Would you really like to be responsible for millions of people waking up tomorrow and having the first page they see scream "Welcome to Phorm. Kent Ertugrul is a massive Spunk Bubble. We now return you to your normal internet experience." ? Would you like to be responsible for that ? To find that since you have implied consent, it's your fault, and Phorm have no recourse at law ? I somehow doubt it.

Of course, I'm sure that won't happen, there's no need for it, Phorm are going down all by themselves. You've been a big part of that, your clueless outpourings and transparent attempts to ramp Phorm shares have helped to anger many people who perhaps otherwise would have just sat back and watched the show.

You should be proud. As should Citigate Dewe Rogerson, whose "Jack and Jane do Pubic Relations" approach has wound up so many. So props to them for their continued efforts to dig the hole that bit deeper.

Oh, I forgot your other point, about "growing up". Personally, when some bunch of shady fucktards turn up and start plundering my personal data, illegally intercepting my private communications, playing fast and loose with the Data Protection Act, labelling me, categorising me, and treating me as a product to be sold to the highest bidder, I think the "grown up" response is to shout the fucking rafters down and not rest until the beast is slain. It's called "taking responsibility".

YHL HAND.

Bad day for Phorm, good for everyone else

TBL and FIPR laying into them, negative coverage all over, shares down some more for most of the day. (Closing price down 167.50p on this morning)

BT have switched to silent running in their support boards, nary a rep to be seen. Oh and Phorm's horrid PR creature has crawled back up it's own arse, having retreated to their own rather pathetic blog*, which naturally doesn't accept anonymous comments. Or possibly any comments at all.

And we haven't even heard a peep from ICO yet.

Hello Phorm, your Shipment Of Fail is ready for you to collect.

* http://blog.webwise.com/ not one single comment posted yet, and don't you just /know/ they've had plenty ?

Scotland Yard criminologist: DNA-print troublemaker kids

RE : it's that old if you've got nothing to hide thing again

DR ? Daily mail Reader ? Crikey you go for ages without seeing any, and then two pop up at once. I presume you're a DM reader or someone of similar comprehension skills, so a repeat, just for you.

The people who filled in their religion as "Jewish" during the German census in 1939 probably thought that they had nothing to hide, and therefore nothing to fear.

Millions of them died finding out how wrong they were, no one believed it was happening, because you just don't expect states to do those kinds of things.

Never, ever, ever allow the machinery of a totalitarian state to be built just because you think that you personally have nothing to hide. What you have to fear is not something that you can decide, it's something that will be decided for you.

A quick example that may appeal to you. Lets say that at the next election, a militant gay party emerges, and takes the nation by storm. over the next few years they gain in popularity and finally form a government. Drunk with power they covertly hatch a plan to hunt down all heterosexual men and execute them. Or maybe just fine them, if you require something less dramatic.

Do you have anything to hide now ?

How about greens ? They want to punish anyone who has driven a certain type of vehicle, consumed a certain type of product ?

Do you think the state is always a beneficent actor ? Hint : Turn on your TV.

@Gregg Iceton

Dear Daily Mail Reader,

"Putting all secondary issues to one side, every man + dog should be DNA profiled. Why? We live in a world where people think it is acceptable to kidnap a young girl and hide her in a bed. I defy any of you to tell me that is acceptable. People should be scared to commit serious crime becuase they know they will be caught. Enter DNA profiling."

And I defy you to give me an example of how DNA profiling would have been in any way useful in the case to which you are alluding. Clue : It wouldn't. Better clue : Case successfully resolved, child safe, perp in custody, no DNA required.

"As for those who will bleat about invasions of privacy, you haven't got a point."

Have so.

"How is someone knowing the structure of your DNA invading your ability to maintain a private life? It doesn't."

Since DNA is the chemical template for my entire organism, I fail to see your point that having it sampled and on file is NOT an invasion of my privacy. Sure, it doesn't stop me from having a private life, I can still bum rent boys if I choose to do so. Doesn't stop it from being a vile and invasive practice though (that's the DNA database, not the bumming)

"This fear is based on complete mis-information,"

a) be careful with statements like that when you engage technical professionals.

b) what, you mean like your next sentence ?

"in a similar manner to people who believe if they eat a GM crop the might somehow absorb the modification. When asked why the same person can eat Beef and not turn into a Cow, they invariably are stumped."

Well, I'm stumped, stumped as to how you got from "Total DNA profiling is not an invasion of privacy" to "It's just like eating GM beef". And stumped as to why someone with your obviously towering intellect would hang out with such a bunch of morons, unless you met them in the Daily Mail's interactive forums, of course.

You are clearly rather confused. About several things, including why you shouldn't allow the machinery of a totalitarian state to be erected around you while you blather on about "Nothing To Hide, Nothing To Fear" with your fellow DM reading pond scum.

The people who ticked the box labelled "Jewish" on the German census of 1939 probably felt the same, and it didn't work out particularly well for them. And lets not forget that their plight was ignored for a long time, because no one, even the people who were engaged in a bloody great brutal shooting war with them, believed for a minute that the German state could do something so utterly horrible.

Your argument is intellectually bankrupt and incoherent, please try again.

BT admits misleading customers over Phorm experiments

Due diligence my hairy arse.

"We have carried out significant due diligence in this area"

Really ? And which part of the due diligence process suggested that it would be a fine idea to illegally intercept and redirect peoples traffic, then tell massive whoppers about it ?

Which part of the process suggested that it would be a great idea to do business with Kent Spunkbubble, a man so sleazy that when you look up the word 'sleazy' in the dictionary it has a picture of his face, and who heads up a company well known for invasion of privacy and is universally loathed by the technical community ?

Which part of the process suggested that it would be a great idea to bet the farm on the novel and untested legal concept of "implied explicit consent" ?

And which part suggested that it would be a really cool idea to fuck things up so badly that you would have to implement your corporate stock buy back policy in order to prop up your share price ?

Clearly, BT have a very unique definition of the word 'diligence' .

"and informed consent from our customers will satisfy the necessary legal requirements."

It's far from clear that this is in fact the case, or that so far, BT are defining 'informed consent' in a way that would be recognised by normal human beings as being reasonable.

I believe that BT have already received several large shipments of Phail. There are plenty more where those came from. Bastards.

Gibson and Activision duel over Guitar Hero

@Steve Foster

" I bet I'm not the only one who thought "Mel" "

Oooh, I bet you are. The rest of us were keeping our Geek cred up by thinking "William".

Security firms split over Phorm classification

@AC

"what does a Phorm cookie look like? What's in it?)"

http://webwise.bt.com/webwise/webwise-off.html

http://webwise.bt.com/webwise/webwise-on.html

<tinfoil hat>

Also, Kunt Spunkbubble says your opt-in cookie is a 'random' number, but how are we to distinguish between a 'random' number, and an encrypted set of key value pairs ? *

Oh yeah, because we trust him.

</tinfoil hat>

* Which is easy peasy stuff to implement, GIYF.

Top security firm: Phorm is adware

@ Lol at investors

"how come the better posters here and elsewere didnt join that thread and put these so called investors right?"

1) There is a 48 hour delay on activation of forum accounts, a speed bump, if you will.

2) Technical arguments will not work on the technically illiterate.

Keep watching the skies ;-)

@Stonewalled by BT

Nope. Got ticket and everything. No response from them at all, in fact even their canned response suggests that they can't be arsed :

"We are currently experiencing a very high volume of emails due to increased demand for information and ordering of our range of Broadband products."

In other words, don't hold your breath, your call is not important to us, everything is just peachy.

Cockbadgers. I made my formal complaint on Tue 4, so they've had plenty of time to get round to it IMHO, and tomorrow the serious foot stamping will begin.

Still also waiting on a reply from Trading Standards w/r/t variation of contract Ts&Cs, and a response from my fat lazy useless MP, although since he is basically a NuLabour sock puppet, I'm not expecting much from him. You never know your luck though, and if enough people write to their 'representatives' perhaps at least one of them will find the balls to ask a question in the house, like to see what that would do to Phorm's share price.

US firm demos 'thought into speech' neckband

Potty mouth!

I'm a habitual user of foul language, spoken, written and indeed thought 'louder' than normal thinking. I can't imagine being involved in any accident severe enough to FUBAR my vocal chords putting in any better a mood either.

For me, this would be a disaster. In fact, having one strapped to me under any circumstances would be like some terrible kind of punishment, if not for me then for the countless people who'd have to endure a never ending diatribe of Dalek swearies.

"OH NO! NOT THIS FUCKNOZZLE AGAIN! ABORT ABORT!"

Cuba lifts ban on computer sales

Top Notch!

Now there's no reason not to emigrate there in order to live under a less oppressive regime ! And while I'm there I shall plot with the Cubans to mount a military campaign to bring Democracy to the UK.

Re - fucking - sult.

CPW builds wall between customers and Phorm

Auntie Beeb laps it up

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7289481.stm

Beeb simpletons still drinking the Kool Aid.

Most hilarious quote :

Kent Ertegrul, chief executive of Phorm, told the BBC News website that he was confused about why the issue of opt-in versus opt-out was causing so much controversy.

"There is no way of not knowing that this is switched on. There is a clear choice offered to consumers and I am surprised that there has been so many questions about this. I find it a bit bizarre," he said.

Most dangerously inaccurate quote :

"Phorm works by placing a cookie on a user's machine that contains a randomised identifying number. That cookie tracks websites visited and draws conclusions about a user's behaviour in order to target more relevant adverts."

Ouch.

EU investigates DOJ internet gambling tactics

@Michael J Welker Jr

"What liberal or uninformed bias!"

Yes, what liberal or uniformed bias ?

Perhaps you could help me understand that sentence by defining what you think "liberal" means.

Assuming you are using it as a noun, Websters thinks you mean :

1. A person who favors a political philosophy of progress and reform and the protection of civil liberties.

2. A person who favors an economic theory of laissez-faire and self-regulating markets.

What is it that YOU think you mean ?

I'm guessing you think you mean "Some unpatriotic communist homosexual NRA refusenik who thinks it's a dumb idea to allow anyone who can spell their own name to stockpile automatic weapons and leave them where children can gain access to them." Which is quite different.

Please feel free to educate me if I'm wrong.

Dear ISP, I am not a target market

@Citigate Dewe Rogerson

> Hi, I'm from the Phorm Tech Team

No, you are a PR team working on behalf of Phorm.

Citigate Dewe Rogerson

3 London Wall Buildings

London Wall

London EC2M 5SY

> Privacy is a real concern for people ...

Yes it is, which is why we oppose the idea of our ISPs making deals to sell our data to a former spyware distributor with a patent for quite the most intrusive internet monitoring system since carnivore. Privacy is SUCH a concern that we'd rather our ISPs didn't do business with Phorm at all

> There are three main hallmarks to the system: we don't know who you are,

Phorm will build a profile of individual users, linked to an identifying cookie, when this cookie is passed to any OIX domain for the purposes of serving me an ad, Phorm will have both the cookie and the user's IP, even if they haven't already collected it . You have said in many other of your of copy 'n' paste 'jack and jane do PR' emissions on the web that Phorm regard this as PII.

Also, as stated above, in the patent, taken out by Phorm, which we must assume covers the technology they are deploying (since it says so on their website), says : "As explained above, the context reader may be configured to more than just keyword and other contextual data pertaining to a given web page. The context reader may also include behavioral data (e.g, browsing behavior), other historical data collected over time, demographic data associated with the user, IP address, URL data, etc."

The 'context reader' is part of the profiler. While you muddy the waters with regards to Phorm's responsibility for this, the fact is that it is designed and supplied by them. Are we to believe that this capability will not switched on ? Are we to take the word of a company that specialises in spyware ?

> we don't know where you¹ve been

See above

> and participation is always a choice

Only it's not, is it ? First of all, every one is opted in by default. That isn't a choice. Then the customer will be misled into believing that Phorm's 'service' is a security feature, which it is not. Then, they will be misled again if they do opt out, because even if they do, their HTTP data stream will still be redirected through the profiler.

There is NO WAY to opt out of the profiling.

> we are fully confident that our system complies with the Data Protection Act, RIPA and other applicable UK law.

Why ? Who has judged this to be the case ? The ICO has not issued any statement other than the one that can be found at :

http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/pressreleases/2008/phorm_statement.pdf

which basically says "We will comment in due course". There has been no test case. In one of your companies(CDR, not Phorm) posts it even states that the "Home Office" have approved Phorm. Who at the Home Office ? And why were they even involved, since it has nothing to do with them.

Please let us know why Phorm, or CDR, or whoever is responsible for making these statements believes that they comply with UK law, what supporting evidence do you have for this position ?

> There's more info on all this at www.webwise.com.

No. There isn't, there's just more of the same fluffy bunny PR speak. And frankly it doesn't matter very much, even if it was chock full of technical documentation, no one is going to take the word of a PR company working on behalf of a spyware company. The very idea is laughable.

> Or you can drop me an email: [e-mail]

I have sent a copy of this comment to that very address, you seem unwilling or unable to answer these issues in public forums, perhaps because you are to busy googling for your client's name and then pasting this same press release into the forum threads, perhaps you will find the time to answer them by e-mail ?

@going down

Yeah, I've been watching that to. I wonder if that's why their PR socks went quiet. I'd be looking for a new PR company if I lost more than a third of my market cap in one day.

RE: Re; When in doot, pollute!!

http://www.dephormation.org.uk/

"The Dephormation Add On ensures that your decision to opt out of Phorm profiling cannot be undone.

Optionally, the Add On can also alert you to sites using Phorm/Webwise/OIX profile based advertising.

With each page you view in your browser, a Phorm 'opt out' cookie is set automatically, and the Phorm UID cookie is randomised. Even if you delete all your cookies regularly.

But Dephormation is not a solution. Its a fig leaf for your privacy."

Nice, and bloody quick.

And I was just thinking...

That Phorms PR vampires had gone quiet, and then the astroturfing begins in earnest.

@So what??? [Phorm Tech Team, and boy are you doing this in the wrong place]

Ads are not the issue. The issue at hand is that ISPs are about to begin intercepting, reading and analysing all your HTTP traffic. Every word in every web page will be read. All your traffic will be proxied via the 'profiler' weather you opt out or not.

They will then sell such data as they feel they can get away with to third parties, in this particular case a company responsible for a really unpleasant piece of spyware, details of which you can find here :

http://www.spython.com/spywaredetails.aspx?id=A9B29AA0-FAC6-44DF-96B6-9768244A40C9

So again, Ads, not the issue. ISPs getting into bed with scumbags. Issue. ISP selling data on my surfing habits to said scumbags. HUGE ISSUE.

@ Vote with your feet

Thing is, until this, I liked my ISP. I realise that this makes me fairly unique in a world of cynics and freetards, but they give good service for a reasonable price, don't bug me about download limits on the occasions when I find myself downloading 15GB of Service Packs, Dev tools, SDKs, source code and all the normal shite in the course of a week, and although their tech support is reputedly pretty awful, I cant actually remember the last time anything went wrong enough for me to have to speak to them. They've been my ISP for, well, since I stopped dialing through local universities to get net access, anyway. I have NEVER had an issue with them. Until now. Which is why this pisses me off so much.

If they go ahead with this, I *will* be off, no question, even if I have to put up with a more rubbish service. I'll be voting with more than my feet, I'll be voting with my feet, my solicitor, my friends and family, and anyone else whose ears I can reach. As is suspect will many others.

But OTOH, if they see the error of their ways and stop acting like cnuts, I am willing to reconsider. Quid Pro Quo. I have made them aware of this position, weather they take any note of such customer feedback I have no idea.

Excellent technical info here

http://www.politicalpenguin.org.uk/blog/p,295/

Including information from Etregul's patent, which at least one of us ought to have thought of, oh well.

Juiciest bits from the patent, because I know you'll all love this, but go have a look, it's a truly excellent piece. See if any of this sounds familiar...

"Furthermore, though the present disclosure discusses HTTP traffic in many examples, it will be appreciated that other types of protocols and traffic may be employed in connection with the targeted advertising system and method described herein."

Woops.

"Context reader 40 is not limited to acquiring keyword or other contextual information pertaining to a given web page. Indeed, the browsing information may be collected so as to also include historical data pertaining to the browsing performed "

Ouch.

"Based on analysis occurring at the proxy server, the proxy server may modify client-requested data it receives so that a targeted advertisement appears on a web page requested by a client"

Oh dear.

"As explained above, the context reader may be configured to more than just keyword and other contextual data pertaining to a given web page. The context reader may also include behavioral data (e.g, browsing behavior), other historical data collected over time, demographic data associated with the user, IP address, URL data, etc."

Oh Phorm, have you been telling us some MASSIVE porkies or what ?

The patent (linked at the above blog) is pretty dense, as you would expect, and contains plenty more of this kind of stuff. No doubt Phorm's hapless spinmeisters will be around to tell us that this isn't the technology they are going to implement NOW, and who knows, they might even be telling the truth*. But Phorm have lodged a patent application for technology that does indeed do all the things they have just assured us that they definitely won't do, ever, honest, we promise, cross our hearts.

Phail !

Props to Political Penguin for digging this up, looks like a smoking gun to me. Why patent a technology that you aren't going to use ?

* Really, they might. After all they did have Simon Davies look at it.

Excellent article

Sums it up very nicely I think. I don't hate ads, I hate the idea of my ISP selling me to some scumbag spyware outfit like Phorm I hate them for even thinking that this is OK. And I really hate them for trying so desperately to muddy the issue, especially with regards to consent. It's arrogant, underhanded, devious, and at best only borderline legal.

These are the kinds of tactics I expect to see from some dodgy, many times bankrupt business listings firm. Not the UKs major ISPs

Phorm launches data pimping fight back

@ Slimeballs (Phorm Tech Team) - Informed Consent

Firstly, stop cutting and pasting, and answer some points properly.

Secondly, you keep hiding behind the idea of choice, and more importantly from a DPA point of view, consent. Lets get this cleared up a bit, the DPA requires "informed consent".

Truly informed consent would be every user receiving a letter from their ISP phrased thusly :

"Do you [name of contract holder], consent to having every single web page you visit proxied through a piece of software written by ex Soviet cold war hackers, profiled, analysed, and then passed to a company whose last project was a massive effort to install intrusive spyware onto peoples machines without their consent in order to spy on their web browsing habits, sell the data to marketers and open pop ups advertising porn, gambling and dodgy pharmaceuticals to any user of said machines, including, quite often, minors. PS, they promised they won't do these kinds of things any more, and we believe them because they offered us money.

Optionally, you may also chose to see relevant advertising based on this profiling and analysis.

To consent to this, you must also accept a change of Terms And Conditions which abandons our existing privacy policy and effectively allows us to sell your data to all and sundry, opening the floodgates to a whole new future of web use where we make money from profiling our customers without their consent or knowledge because it says we can in our new contracts.

If this sounds like the kind of thing you would like, please complete the attached consent form, and send it by registered post to the Data Controller at [ISP]."

Sorry, but anything short of that is NOT informed consent from where I'm sitting. What users will get is a web page saying "CLICK HERE TO SWITCH ON [ISP]s NEW ANTI PHISHING SUPER SECURITY SERVICE IT'S GREAT (oh, and some ads).

CLICK HERE NOW."

Then they get a mutable, expiring, easily deleted by accident, couple of bytes of data on their machine. And guess what, if they DO delete it by accident, or they have a software failure, or have to reinstall their machine, or they switch browsers, you opt them back in by default without their consent AT ALL.

Bull Shit. You want informed consent, get it in writing from the Contract Holder, or end up in court. No informed consent, no interception for purposes other than those necessary in the course of the provided service. If ICO had any teeth, they would already be chewing your arse off. Get one of your legal droids to actually read the DPA. And stop spewing the same godawful dissembling copy'n'paste shit around the web. Get some REAL technical people on the front line with some REAL answers.

SSL proxy naysayer, think again

Somewhere back up there, someone mentioned something aout how difficult it would be to proxy SSL, and how SSL would save us. I can't recall who, and I forgot about it until just now.

Just so you know, you're way wrong. I've proxied SSL before to watch the traffic between apps on my machine and their 'call home' base during auto-updates, registration, etc.

You can do it fairly transparently.

Some links, because I know you won't believe me.

Some software, for to play with, not what BT would use in a high volume switch, but fun nonetheless, and useful if you're serious about knowing WTF your machine is up to, because it's easier to sniff the wire than follow packet data in a debugger.

http://www.delegate.org/delegate/mitm/

Embedded hardware, for to build in to your high volume, low latency, switch. This one is the real deal.

http://www.intelcommsalliance.com/kshowcase/view/view_item/e196c4babb11fae7163621c24804daf53086f015

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Netronome+Introduces+Highest-Performance+Transparent+SSL+Proxy-a0158904664

"Unlike existing SSL proxies, the SSL Inspector is deployed as a "bump in the wire" and is completely transparent to both end users and intermediate networking elements. It does not require network configuration, IP addressing or topology changes, or modification to client IP interface and web browser configurations."

So, don't be relying on SSL to keep your data out of the BT/Phorm gestalt's filthy, grasping hands.

Black helicopter, obviously.

@Phorm Tech Team

Stop dissembling. Stop spinning. We don't care. Your description of the opt out mechanism has changed, AGAIN. Fail.

The fact that the 'profiler' will be owned by my ISP is irrelevant both to me personally and to the law, I do not, and will not give my consent for my data to be processed in this way.

Any attempt on your part, or my ISPs part, to use such a flawed mechanism as cookies to protect my data is insufficient, and will fall foul of the DPA. Fail.

Even if you somehow manage to persuade my ISP and any statutory bodies that this is somehow OK, you will not convince me, nor the majority of internet users, and they will desert any ISP you have a deal with in droves. I doubt that a trickle of ad revenue will make up the difference in lost revenue. Fail.

Along with many others, I have registered my displeasure with this scheme to my ISP, OFFCOM, ICO, Trading Standards and my MP.

You, and my ISP will shortly be receiving by registered post notification of my explicit prohibition of any of my data being processed in this way, and my explicit prohibition of webwise, phorm, OIX and any other associated domain from placing cookies on any machine on my network, and the first time one comes down the wire, my next call will be to the police to initiate a prosecution under the Computer Misuse Act.

Your pathetic, slimy, twisting PR offensive is not convincing anyone except the simpletons at the BBC. You are filthy parasitic scum. We know it, you know it, the press know it. Our ISPs know it, and when they finally realise that we have figured it out, they will hang you out to dry and try not to get any of the mess on them.

And there's going to be a lot of mess. Come Monday morning you're going to be up to your necks in shit, and I hope you drown in it. Bastards.

I hope the members of the "Phorm Tech Team" have their CVs all up to date, and valid passports, because considering how much you have pissed off the technical community in the UK and how hard your employer is about to fail, you're going to be job hunting overseas very soon.

ESA's space truck heads for ISS

Disposable

It can't re enter the atmosphere. So every time you want to make a delivery, you have to build a new one.

Who thought that was a good idea ?

Police raid CeBIT stands

Tiny licence fee ?

http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/

Try 75 cents per unit for decode only, and five dollars per unit if you want a full codec.

Not so tiny for high volume/low margin manufacturer.

Of course, you can avoid this gouging by paying a USD 60,000 one time fee, which is nice.

Stroustrup and Sutter: C++ to run and run

Style/Taste

"You can write ugly inefficient code in C++ if you lack good style and taste"

In all fairness though, you'll write ugly, inefficient code in most any language if you lack those things. (Or if you don't know what you're doing, or hate the person who will have to maintain the code, possibly just by extension from general misanthropy.)

Has your shifty foreign neighbour got 16 mobes?

@But what else can you do?

Ignore them, and they will go away. And even if they don't, so what ? The the TOTAL number of casualties caused by the PIRA, the loyalists, the military and the security forces between 1969 and 2001 is estimated at 3,524 [1], with only 2,056 attributed to PIRA.

So, for the entire THIRTY TWO YEARS of actual terrorists, regularly committing actual atrocities and actual soldiers actually shooting people with guns, the total casualty figure is only slightly more than the number of people who died in fatal RTAs in 2006 [2] (3,172) A figure which itself is higher than the number of fatalities caused by the attacks on the USA on September 11 2001.

Now remind me again, why am I supposed to be worried about terrorism ? So far the *average* score for the "islamic" nutters is ~18 fatalities per year (since 2005), including bombers.

It's getting tedious to hear, I know, but you really are, genuinely, much more at risk of being run over. And you manage to integrate that risk in to your daily life without any problems whatsoever.

[1] http://www.cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/book/index.html#append, I make no claim as to the accuracy or otherwise of these numbers, direct your flames to the authors.

[2] 'latest' figures, released Feb 7 2008, the intro on the website refers to Q3 2007, but all the tables in the report quote 2006, I don't know if this is 06/07, or if just takes a really really long time to count the dead.

http://www.dft.gov.uk/162259/162469/221412/221549/227755/rcgb2006v1.pdf

@joe K - you tit.

"And even if 10,000 false alerts arise for one real lead, that is a fair price to pay"

The problem with that neat little theory is that while the keystone kops are running down 10,000 false leads, they will be to busy to do proper investigative work, or their actual job, which you, may remember is law enforcement.

And you have a fairly fucked up definition of "fair" if you think it involves 10,000 innocent people being arrested and held without charge while the state rummages through their lives trying to find some evidence that will be enough to convict them of one of the new thought crimes, like owning any book that describes anything that could be considered "useful" to a terrorist. Fail.

"if you disagree ask the families of the 52 killed and 700 injured during 7/7."

Well, I seem to remember many of those people on the news at the time saying how wrong it would be for the government to take our liberties as a result. But even if my memory is faulty, why the fuck should I care what they think ? I am entitled to form my own rational opinion without having to defer to them, thank you very much.

Now piss off back to the Daily Mail forums where you so clearly belong.

Now, back to the point, I suspect that this is just more security theatre. Probably all the calls will be ignored, but it's there to make you feel safe. The fact that it has the opposite effect on a large portion of the population has obviously escaped the Met, along with all these supposed terrorists they claim are knocking about the place but never seem to be able to find.

Networks left open to SNMP scans

@Much ado about nothing

"Go on, show me a SNMP enabled device that coughs out usernames and passwords on demand."

DLINK DSL 604+ router, for a start. Read access to SNMP is sufficient to escalate privs and pwn the router.

Why is this ? I hear you ask in astonishment. Well because if external SNMP is enabled, so is external telnet. In fact, most DSL 604 owners wouldn't even know that they were switched on, since the option that you would tick (and which is ticked by default, IIRC) is "Enable Remote Administration" which makes the admin web page available remotely. Oh, and disabling remote admi doesn't stop SNMP or telnet from running inside the network either. In order to do that, you have to TFTP the config files off the router, edit a couple, and then TFTP them back. And as for TFTP, well, tha'ts also a lot of fun :-)

And the SNMP read community name is the same as the telnet access password. And you can't stop this from being true.

Oh, and for some more fun, if you get the SNMP read community name (which is defaulted to public) you can read the SNMP write community name (althogh since this defaults to private...) out of DLINK's enterprise MIB using snmpwalk or similar, as well as WEP keys, ISP login details, etc, etc. *

So there you go, there's one. Some older 3Com enterprise kit did similar stuff, although I can't remember which ones off the top of my head.

Often lots of juicy inph0s in the enterprise MIBs if you look, and there's lots of old forgotten kit out there running SNMP.

Now off you pop and run nmap and snmpwalk on all your network attached kit. You'd be suprised what sort of stuff is running SNMP agents without you knowing it. Got a network printer ? Running SNMP. Switches ? Probably running SNMP unless you disabled it. PABX got an ethernet card so you can run remote admin on it ? Running SNMP.

Also, bear in mind that SNMP (at least <= v2, I've never had any kit that actually bothered to use v3) won't log failed auth attempts, either.

Go, have fun, enjoy. And then come back and tell us whether you still think it's scaremongering,

*Now then, what was that someone said about 'Hackers' not doing their own research the other day ? :)

Skully, because, well, yarr!

El Reg decimates English language

@P. J. Isserlis

"I hope that all these people who can not cope with the idea of, e.g., "proper" English, are not programmers. Try telling the Java or C compilers that it's not important if one mangles the syntax or abuses a keyword"

What a wonderful example of exactly the lack of education I was talking about.

The depth of misunderstanding of both human and machine languages demonstrated in your comment is absolutely hilarious.

You seem to have completely failed to notice the difference between a Push Down Automata implemented in a Von Neumann architecture to parse a formally specified and unambiguous grammar, and an unknown set of functions that have evolved inside a neural network to process a language that has likewise evolved inside such a network, which allow for vast ambiguity, and which are clearly capable of learning new ways of combining and interpreting symbols and structures.

You have also missed the fact that a) machine languages also evolve and change over time, and b) there are in fact some languages which will quite happily let me 'abuse' keywords by redefining their meaning*, and are even happy for me to chose new meanings for their standard operators based on the context in which I am using them.

So I restate my case, those (in this thread)** who argue for a static, prescribed grammar and vocab in usage are not only tilting at windmills, but are for the most part arguing from a position of ignorance. Which is sad, because I'm sure there are some decent, well informed, arguments to be made.

* yeah yeah, I know.

** The issue of /teaching/ a formal structure, as is necessarily done in TEFL, is of course a valid one, but this is a separate issue from trying to prescribe common usage.

F*ck the language Nazis

Sorry to upset you, you jackbooted protectors of a hallucinatory pseudo-reality, but in fact Language IS forever changing, and it MUST and WILL forever change.

To decry this process is a foolish position, akin to insisting that sun remain in the sky at a fixed position.

In fact, if it was a valid point of view, everyone on the planet would speak one language.

Since this is clearly not the case, and there are significant variations of grammar and vocab even within languages that share the same root, the Romance languages for instance, the argument for prescriptive grammar and vocabulary vs descriptive is a tad foolish.

It is interesting how many of the language Nazis (that's twice already, so I invoke Godwin's on myself) seem to have little or no knowledge of the phenomenon of language diversification, suggesting that they have, in fact, never even taken a fairly basic course of study in English Language (AFAIK this is still on the A-Level curriculum). Had they done so they would have been exposed to these arguments early on, and it would save them for making tits of themselves all the time.

The OED bases its definitions on common usage, if it's good enough for them, it's most certainly good enough for you.

Come on guys, the days of RP, Standard English and everyone on telly wearing evening dress are long behind us, and good riddance to them. There are far more interesting things to be pedantic about. Like the internet not having been designed to survive a nuclear war, or the true progression of windows version numbers :-)

Data pimping: surveillance expert raises illegal wiretap worries

BT privacy policy says...

" We do not use this information to:

* identify individuals visiting our website; or

* analyse your visits to any other websites (except that we do track you if you go to websites carrying our banner, but we do not identify personal details while we do this); or

* track any Internet searches which you may make while on our website."

http://www2.bt.com/btPortal/application?pageid=pan_privacy_policy&siteArea=pan

So I for one will be leaving for another ISP, citing breach breach of contract.

As for this "detailed custoner research", bollocks. They haven't asked me, although I /am/ in the process of giving them my unsolicited opinion. I somehow can't imagine any group of people answering an honest question, such as "Do you think it's OK if we monitor all your online activities so that we can then embed intrusive advertising and send you spam from our partners" with anything other than a resounding "FOAD".

In keeping with the way these things are done, I suspect it was a focus group asked something like "Is it OK if we use the data that we already have access to anyway, completely anonymously of course, to erm, give you some free chocolate ?"

Bastards.

Time for UML tools to evolve

Not a fan

of UML.

I always find myself doing diagramming in a bastardised hybrid of DFD, ERD and JSP notation*, which is basically what UML is anyway, only with those bloody annoying stick figures and all that puke inducing cutesy language grafted on.

In keeping with the spirit, although not the letter, of all the recent XP/Agile/TDD bollocks, I find it's usually best for your team to cherry pick the bits of stuff that work for you, and sod the rest.** Fully embracing UML for example, requires you to implement your process around it's concepts, which to me seems the wrong way around, but some version of those horrid playschool-esque stick figure pictures can be useful for communicating with non technical people, YMMV.

* I'm not /that/ old, it's just that most of my lecturers were SSADM fetishists and/or former COBOL programmers.

** Pair programming ? You lean over and type into any code I've got checked out and I'll chop your bloody hands off, sonny Jim.

Elonex £99 Eee PC rival to arrive in June

Low spec, but then again

It's the same price I paid for my Palm Pilot, (1MB RAM) which I still use, and better specced than my current laptop, a Thinkpad P90, 40MB RAM, 1GB hdd, no usb ports, (which I love, but bless it, it's hardware is failing) which happily runs a bastardised and oft dysfunctional hybrid linux with a full development stack.

Splash proof keyboard not just a gimmick, but handy when I'm slurping wine and tea on a train and it passes over a set of badly maintained points (anyone who actually uses a laptop on a beech should just stay at home).

I'm in love with it, personally.

7000 Leap Year Babies attack Steve Ballmer

Ashamed

As a pro codemonkey, this kind of thing makes me totally ashamed of my profession. Any date handling code should include leap years and the 29th of Feb in it's testing. It's the canonical edge case, FFS,

And Andy and JP, it's because of jerkoffs like you that this kind of thing still apparently happens regularly. Andy, because if it takes you a dozen lines of code, you shouldn't be anywhere near a computer programming role, and JP because yes, it is quite simple, and yet you have manifestly failed to grasp the essentials (as the bishop said to the actress) despite the clues w/r/t to 1900 in the article, and then ejaculated a piece of code that exhibits EXACTLY the problem under discussion, all the while staring smugly at your output and thinking "Well, that's another problem sorted, fookin genius me". Fail

I'm sorry, but you are incompetent, and you give the rest of us a bad name. Either quit now, or have the decency to admit that you are neophytes at best and go and learn your trade properly.

Sorry if this sounds a little harsh, but I've spent far to much of my career wiping drool out of people's codebases.

AI prof: The robot terrorists are coming! Aiee!

@GB

"[but it's easier to just use humans]"

Oh I totally agree, human agents of destruction are by far the easiest, cheapest, most reliable and most disposable. And lets face it, the most likely.

My point was simply that many of the technical challenges aren't actually all that challenging when you examine them in detail, certainly in the context of a bunch of geeks chucking "what ifs" about.

But I wholeheartedly agree with you about the realities of the situation. Why spend months building a shitty unreliable robo-killer when you can get some fuckwit to strap a bomb onto themselves ? Plus the psychological impact of a human sacrifice is much higher than any autonomous device short of an actual Dalek.

@Graham Bartlett

"Locating and aiming at a moving object is significantly harder though, to the extent that if you're interested in doing it, you're probably already doing it professionally."

Perhaps not as hard as you think. In the case of a stationary camera, image subtraction, a noise filter (don't forget the noise filter!), some re purposed flood fill algos and a bit of "blob counting" will do the trick, it's genuinely not difficult, to the extent that I knocked up a webcam motion tracker over a couple of rainy afternoons in the winter. There are plenty of similar (and better) projects of this nature floating about on the interweb.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&q=motion+tracking+&btnG=Search&meta=

This technique won't work unaltered for a moving camera, because the background isn't static relative to the objects you're trying to track, but I can think of a couple of nasty brute force ways to extend it just off the top of my head, and I'm sure there's already plenty of crumbs in the web.

I don't say this to be boastful, merely to illustrate that it's one of those techniques that you would think is really, really hard, but which turns out to be much less hard than you might at first think.(Quite a lot of undergrads manage it, for instance) While I'm sure doing it to "military precision"* or "safety critical" standards requires some degree of boffinry, a 'knocked up in my shed' version of the same technology, good enough for a kamikaze robot, is quite easy to do.

* Some militaries may be more precise than others, see press for details.

Space Cadet

As Lee Felsenstein once said :

"Anyone who's been around artificial intelligence is likely to be a hopeless case, they're so far removed from reality that they cannot deal with the real world."

Perhaps more apposite to our old chum Captain Cyborg, but still.

And is it just me, or is the fact that all these warnings seem to come from people actively involved in AI or robotics research just a little bit fucked up ?

I mean jeez guys, if you're so worried that robots with AI will rise up against us, maybe you should stop, y'know, BUILDING THE FECKING THINGS!

Bitlocker hack is easily prevented, Microsoft says

@Daniel B

"A pseudo-random number generator exploit opened up the Lorentz cypher too"

Although, interestingly, the root cause of this was a very serious failure in operator protocol. As I understand it, an operator sent* a very long test message, and then sent almost the same message again after resetting the machine. The fact that the message was not quite identical** gave the allies a "depth", which allowed Col. John Tiltman to decipher large portions of the it, opening the way the for further developments (like Tutte's rather clever 'double delta' attack on the Lorenz PRNG) which then led to the automated breaking of the Lorenz cipher on an industrial scale using the Collosi and their precursors.

So in effect, Lorenz's security was originally busted by a user who didn't understand the operating protocols enough to realise that what he was about to do was really, really stupid.

It's amazing how little can change in ~67 years.

Black chopper (fnarr) because BP was on the QT

* August 30 1941, both messages had the indicator "HQIBPEXEZMUG", if anyone's interested in such trivia, or wishes to google it further.

** Had the messages been identical, they would not have constituted a depth and Tiltman et al would likely not have broken them (due to the nature of additive ciphers. GIYF)

@Andy Turner

Oh Andy, Andy, Andy.

"Why do people spend so long and so much effort into cracking encryption schemes?"

Why do people climb mountains ?

"I bet 99% of hackers couldn't do what they do off their own back..."

<sigh>

First up, that very much depends on what your definition of a "Hacker" is. I'm not going to get into that to deeply here, partly because I doubt that this proportional font will allow for a decent ASCII Venn diagram, so lets just make a simple (and largely imaginary) distinction between between, say, the Eric Raymond/Stephen Levy model, and, say, the Phrack/Cracker model* of a "hacker" and, pausing for a moment while you google that, assume you mean the latter.

If you were to read the paper describing this attack (I assume you haven't), once you've got past the "neat!" reaction, you would see that, in fact, it isn't all that sophisticated. The cleverest parts are the algorithms for detecting the key and recovering keys from partially degraded images.

Clever, but not rocket science. Basically, anyone with the relevant background in CS and math and the will to do so could come up with this. It's true that the many hapless sKript kiddies of the world who consider themselves 1333t d00dz because they downloaded the latest version of Nessus are going to find such things a bit beyond them, but unfortunately for your argument, the kind of people who craft real 'in the wild' malicious attacks are way past this level.

Lets say we assume a normal distribution for the skill level of the populace of "hackers", the point at which this attack could be crafted is somewhere to the left of the middle (IMHO). Obviously this is subjective, but at any rate, I suspect your 99% figure ifsway of the mark, let's be generous to the guys who crafted this and say <=50%, because some of it is quite nifty. That's still a big gap.

"...they all use knowledge that someone else researched"

Certainly your malicious geek will use any public sources of information s/he can get their mucky little digital paws on. But that's by no means the end of the story.

"Sure, an encryption system might have some holes in, but those holes are a *lot* more severe if someone takes the time to find them, and then make them public. Windows/Linux/OSX probably has some gaping security holes that no-one knows about and therefore no-one can leverage. It's only when some prat finds them and publishes them that they become a problem."

Some more googling for you, I'll give you the link this time :

http://www.google.co.uk/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=security+through+obscurity&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

And read this, particularly apposite as it's author is one of the foremost experts on crypto security :

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/debating_full_d.html

Again, it's a long and tedious (and far from settled) argument, but in this context, there is far more risk to the users of such a system if the vulnerability is not disclosed, since they will continue to trust a system that is not providing them with security that they think it is. Contrary to what you seem to be perceiving there are a lot of capable people doing exactly this kind of research and not publishing anything. Exploits leveraging vulnerabilities that have never been publicly disclosed appear all the time. Want some numbers ?

http://osvdb.org/blog/?p=227 **

I can see how you would have formed such an opinion, since the contemporary "Security Community" seem to be obsessed with winning their spurs by breathlessly publishing POC code***, some of which later turns up in real exploits, and there are some merits to what you say, but the situation is nowhere as clear as you make it out to be.

*These models are for illustrative purposes only, I am all to aware of their faults, so please don't bother. Been there, participated in the flame wars, got the kill files, over.

**Other opinions are available, but some of them are from Graham Clueless.

*** Some (by no means all) "security researchers" disclose to vendors first, with varying lead times, in order to give the vendors a heads up and a chance to patch the vuln. YMMV

Minister defends National ID Register security

Just, wow.

Ms Hillier, and I add my voice to those who read that as 'Hitler', clearly thinks that we're as stupid as she is. Quite apart from the excellent points made above, she seems to have stated, with concrete certainty, capabilities of a system that, AFAIK, hasn't even been /specified/ yet

She can give all the reassurances she likes, but until the system has actually been implemented (a spec is not sufficient, especially in a government IT project), they're all so much ill informed bullshit.

I particularly enjoyed her "two baskets" analogy, which demonstrates very clearly her ignorance of any technical detail whatsoever. Hint : Two databases, both of which must contain an identical unique identifier for each record (in order to JOIN them together, duh!), are effectively just one database you dumb bint.

And as for :

"How many organisations will have access to the database ?"

"Oh, to many to list" .

Oh well, that's just fucking peachy then. Thanks a bunch. Consider me properly reassured. And by the way, is the weather on your planet nice ?

Halo'd Bill, because this lot make even him and the Balmernator look like the diet pepsi of evil, and because we haven't got a suitable jackbooted facist icon yet, hint hint.

Yes! It's the vacuum cleaner mouse!

Fingernail clipings ?

If your personal hygiene is so ikky that your mouse mat has nail clippings on it, a vacuum with a dust bag the size of a 20p is really not going to improve your prospects very much !

US funds exascale computing journey

Gimpy little f'tard.

Proof, if more were needed, that Linus isn't actually some kind of demigod, but is, in fact, simply another mediocre geek who /thinks/ he is.

The really sad thing is that the Children Of Linus will now accept his gospel as the One True Way and continue to believe that the best way to do big iron computing is just to get a couple of thousand linux boxes and stack them in a big pile. A clue : no.

Of course once the exascale computing platform is perfected, they'll all say it should be running some version of gimpux. And if anyone so much as dares to file a patent on any of technology they spent squillions of dollars developing, they'll be round with the burning torches. Well, no, actually they'll just write impotent whining blog entries about it and quote Stallman and Levy just like they always do, tedious little f'tards.

Mines the one with the asbestos lining, ta.