Posts by Cheshire Cat

Don't pay for the BBC? Then no Doctor Who for you, I'm afraid

I'd happily pay the license fee to access BBC from New Zealand

I - and many ex-pats - would be quite happy to pay the BBC license fee, if it meant being able to legally access the UK broadcast channels on demand. Sadly it is not possible to do this.

People who complain that their license fee is used to fund Eastenders, Top Gear and other tat, while applauding the occasional documentary and drama series, should be aware that it is in fact the Eastenders viewers subsidising the documentaries and dramas. If everything were funded proportional to the number of people watching them, Eastenders and Top Gear is all you'd have. The TV License funding model is why the BBC can risk funding on less popular or new series, dramas and documentaries. If funding were proportional to the number of viewers, then it would soon be goodbye to anything innovative or highbrow, and you'd have TV like they get in the US...

To Russia With Love: Snowden's pole-dancer girlfriend is living with him in Moscow

Re: "worked as an occasional exotic dancer"

"For your next furneral, why not hire one of our exotic dancers!"

You think this is a joke -- but in Taiwan, this genuinely happens. Regularly. Seen it myself...

Girl gamers sexism row: Top e-sports federation finds reverse gear

Doesnt look like equality to me.

Playing computer games is not dependent on your physical strength, and so there should be no difference between the capabilities of male or female players. So why have separate tournaments? Fewer females win because fewer enter. Fewer enter because fewer are interested. Making a separate tournament for females is highly patronising and implies they are less capable of winning than a male player. Having a 'female only' tournament without a separate 'male only' is even more patronising, in addition to being by definition sexual discrimination.

By having two competitions, they are keeping female playes out of the 'real' tournament, decreasing the liklihood of a female reaching the finals, and propping up the myth that gender has anything to do with an ability to push buttons on a gamepad.

'Yahoo! Breaks! Every! Mailing! List! In! The! World!' says email guru

DKIM abuse

So, further investigation reveals that what they've done is to (a) use a DKIM signature that includes the Subject, Reply-To and Received headers, meaning that the moment it passes through a mailing list or redirector the DKIM signature becomes invalid, and (b) use a DMARC record which specifies that 100% of messages failing DKIM should be dropped into the bitbucket. They also implemented this straight off without gradual implementation or warning.

In addition, they've set up their own mail servers to bounce any imcoming dkim-failed messages, which means that any mailing lists to which a yahoo.com address has subscribed will receive a bounce message, and will then auto-unsubscribe said user...

Mail admin FAIL I think.

NZ bloke's drunken poker bet ends in 99-letter name

Re: Well

If my Mandarin is still working, then "Beauty Blossom" would be rendered as "Mei Hua" in Beijing. A perfectly valid name not expected to raise eyebrows (but then, "Y Pong" is also a valid girl's name in Mandarin, so...)

Our kids' Mandarin names are "Joy of dawn's first light" and "Harmonious intra-personal relationships". They're more snappy in Mandarin, though.

French youth faces court for illegal drone flight

Prosecution seems a bit of overkill

This would seem to be to be a case where it would have been better for the gendarmerie to have a quiet word with him that this sort of thing is illegal - no matter how well-produced his film is - and that he should refrain from doing it again. Only if he then gets awkward should they start to arrest him and charge him. Otherwise, how is it in the public interest to wreck his future with a police record?

Of course, maybe that's actually what happened, and he only got charged because the quiet word resulted in an attitude.

Hell is other people ... Thousands play same Pokemon game on TV. Mayhem ensues

Instead of simply passing all commands on as button presses, I would have coded it to look at all commands attempted within a certain heartbeat interval (eg, 0.2sec) and then pass on the most common command, resorting to random choice in the event of a tie. That would seem to be a better way to get optimal playing...

Imprisoned Norwegian mass murderer says PlayStation 2 is 'KILLING HIM'

Re: He previously complained bitterly about the lack of hand lotion.

"Which is another way of saying you wouldn't have the balls to take revenge against your murdered child. That says a lot about your sort."

You appear to think that murdering someone for revenge is a brave and praiseworthy act, and that it somehow makes you better than the person you killed.

You are incorrect. It does, however, explain a lot about the sorry state of the USA at the moment (but please correct me if I am wrong about you be from that country)

China's censors censor press censorship report

Hoorway for the Kiwis

New Zealand, homeland of the BoFH, is in at 9th. Take that, Sweden.

Yes, the BBC still uses FTP. And yes, a Russian crook hacked the server

Re: If it's not broke...

The problem with the "If its not broke, don't fit it" attitude is that, when it infects management, it is used as an excuse to deny or delay all preventative maintenance, patching, and so on. Resulting in, eventually, system failures and security breaches due to outdated, bugged, and vulnerable versions of software or sub-optimal configuration. Management would often prefer to have failures they can blame on software bugs or attackers to having a failed modification or patch being blamed on their own department.

Yes, FTP is a relatively lightweight and efficient protocol, but you still need to keep up with the patching and improve security (such as switching to sFTP or FTPS as you mentioned).

MPs: Ancient UK Border Force systems let gangsters into country

Having emigrated out to NZ ten years ago, and made a few trips back to the UK since, I can confirm that the NZ Customs/Immigration are vastly more efficient than those of the UK. A far shorter wait here, despite there having to be more checks for biosecurity. Priority lines for people with small kids who find queueing difficult, and working ePassport gates. Not to mention that the airport terminals themselves are cleaner, less crowded, more efficient, and more spacious - and the public toilets are not vandalised.

When I occasionally return to the UK, everything there now seems so shoddy. Still, you have the BBC and cheap internet, so some benefits I suppose. I think I'll stay here, though...!

British spooks seize tech from Snowden journo's boyfriend at airport

Re: Care? Do something!

Actually, certain header lines (including Subject, To and From DO get included as part of the S/MIME signature on a digitally signed email, specifically to prevent this sort of thing.

They don't recognise us as HUMAN: Disability groups want CAPTCHAs killed

Although I hate using catchas....

Although I hate having to enter captchas, as a support forum admin I have to implement them.

Before I had captcha on the registration process, the forum was being spammed into oblivion every day. Having email confirmation was next to useless as the spambots could automate it; they would hit the board with hundreds of spams in less than an hour.

It reached the point where I disabled the board entirely, before enabling a rather vicious captcha. Spam still gets in, thanks to the cheap-labour issue mentioned before, but a mere fraction of what used to hit.

I can understand that it makes life difficult for people with visual impairment etc, but the fact is that without it, there would be no forum at all for people to register on as I could not contain the levels of spam. Until something appears that works as well (or better) without the disadvantages, then this is the only option.

Using encryption? That means the US spooks have you on file

Re: Steganography?

I think you're referring to the old UseNet "NSA Line Eater" trick of adding "food for the line eater" as your first post line. The original reason was to circumvent a bug in netnews that deleted the first line of a posting; later it was changed to put words like "russia", "nukes" or "kibo" into the line to trigger grepping routines.

BB because...

MI5 test for Mandarin-speaking snoops 'just too easy'

Re: Voice recognition + Google translate?

@Inachu -- "Your arse is bad"? At least, that's what I make it out to be. Not that my Mandarin is much better than that of my 6yr old daughter, from whom I have obtained most of my more interesting vocabulary... Pi hua! Ni zai shi da bun dan!

Any storm in a port

Reversible USB exists

Just use cables from these people: http://reversibleusb.com/

Costs more but if its too much trouble for you to flip the plug over...

China 'enhances' Great Firewall, teaches it to choke off VPNs

Tunnelling over 443 wont work...

They most likely kill tcp/443 connections after a few seconds, on the grounds that anything generating a large amount of data on that port is most likely a VPN. SImilarly, all other SSL service ports can also be limited. Known VPN ports blocked, other ports checked for VPN protocols in the initial packets on connection. As long as you have the resources available to you that the PRC do then this would be feasible...

Actually, I had wondered how long it would take for them to start blocking VPNs.

Outlook 2013 spurns your old Word and Excel documents

Re: Outlook kitchensink. Also, Question S/MIME

Oh great, yet more smime issues with outlook.

Bad enough that it already apparently randomly chooses to use its ms-tnef format which breaks the ability to read the clear-signed messages in non-smime-capable Android clients. Now they want to break things yet again. ANyone would think that they don't like having support for an open encryption standard...

Won't follow Apple Store rules? How 'bout an iTASER TREAT!

Xiaojie?

Her name is 'Xiaojie Li'? This is 'Miss Li' in Chinese ('xiao jie' is 'young female'), not her actual name.

The Lord of the Rings saga lies hidden deep in your Mac

Oldtimer alert!

I remember the online manual page for 'tunefs' (file system performance tuning utility) used to have in the 'bugs' section the text "You can tune a filesystem, but you cant tuna fish". Also, in the NROFF comments of the raw manual file, was an addition comment "If you remove this, a UNIX daemon will dog your steps until the time_ts wrap over".

The entry was still present in AIX3, but by AIX4 it had gone. Is no longer present in linux either (probably never inherited that documentation...). It may still be in OSX is that has tunefs...

I also remember that in the message description file (this was OS/400!) error 13 was "Insufficient user IQ" with recommended action "Upgrade keyboard/chain interface module". Error 1701 was "The engines canna take it" with solution "Reverse polarity of the dilithium matrix". I wonder if these are still in production somewhere.

Pirate cops bust LITTLE GIRL, take her Winnie-the-Pooh laptop

The most disturbing part

The most disturbing part is not so much the demands for E600 for a failed download, as their demands for agreement to secrecy. After all, if they had thought their actions were honourable, they'd have no need for this.

I wonder how many people cave in to the threats?

Watchdog halts Toyota Grand Theft Auto-esque advert

They've cut it down

The version on the Toyota channel is now cut down, with all the GTA bits removed.

The full version is still on YouTube though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLThzvsPCkI and this still has the police helicopters etc.

I don't see what all the fuss was about, myself.

El Reg acquires wildly dangerous laser cannon (with lightsabre option)

Re: Lovely.

Same here in New Zealand, due to numerous brainless jerks thinking it is fun to target aircraft on their final approach and dazzle the pilots. Probably a good thing restricting them, considering the potential for disaster caused by mindless loons.

Facebook trial: Tell everyone where you are, have a Wi-Fi peanut

Wouldnt work here

All the places in Auckland I've used free Wifi require you to get the day's password at the till after purchase... also, the new "3 strikes and you're disconnected" rule Hollywood have paid^H^H^Hlobbied the NZ government to implement has made places less willing to offer free wifi, since they will now be held liable for anything done using it.

JK Rowling's adult novel arrives on ebook full of FAIL

My ebook...

I have written a book (not quite as popular as those by JKR though) and sell it as both physical and ebook. The ebook sells for half the price of the physical, has no delivery costs, and I get exactly the same commission from both.

However ebook sales make up <2% of total sales. Barely worth the effort of providing it in that format.

Personally, I would always pay a few $ more to get a physical book, and would never pay as much or more to get an ebook. Far better to have something solid you can hold, share, and (if necessary) resell.

Kim Dotcom mounts freedom campaign

I was surprised..

I was surprised at the extent to which the local police kissed USA bum and descended on him with armed SWAT and all - massively overacted on insufficient evidence (according to local judiciary).

I'd have more sympathy with him, though, if he wasn't such an egomaniac jerk.

Scottish council muzzles 9-year-old school dinner photo blogger

Gone viral...

Seems to have gone viral; donations now over ukp80,000 and rising.

Of course the idiot who set the policy to silence criticisms like this will get off scott free, as usual. However, the council now look even stupider than usual.

Hitchhiker shot while researching 'Kindness of America'

Man goes to research Kindness in America...

Research complete. Now to draw conclusions!

Every country has its morons. Its just that, in the US, they are armed...

Ten... bits of Jubilee tat tech

Re: I draw the line at...

Well, they're OK, but only if you come once every 60 years

Report: SAP exec charged with $1,000 LEGO bar-code caper

Re: LEGO

The reason for the 'rOWter' pronunciation in Au is that, in Au, 'rOOter' roughtly translates into Real English as 'f*cker'.

The reason for 'rOWter' in the US is that they are simply being awkward :)

Zuck weds self to lady friend in surprise ceremony

Clever

A good way to avoid a media scrum and annoying paparazzi. He's managed to get a quiet romantic wedding after all. Had the media known, he'd have been deluged by unpleasant reporters...

Also clever of her - had the sale of FB not generated sufficient $, she could have lef thim at the altar! (Just kidding, Im sure she loves him for his wonderful personality...)

Facebook: Your boss asks for your password, we'll sue him! Maybe

Is this just a rumour?

Has anyone (here) actually been asked for a password at an interview, personally, themselves? Not a friend-of-a-friend, or a story you heard, or something you read on the internet. Anyone have actual first-hand knowledge? Otherwise, I'll assume it is just another one of those pesky internet rumour nonsenses. Surely very, very few interviewers would be foolish as to ask for login details and expect there not to be trouble.

Billions of net-ready boxes in homes by 2016

I'd pay the license fee...

Here in New Zealand, I'd gladly pay the NZ$250/year BBC license fee in order to get unrestricted access to all the advertising-free UK BBC channels -- the alternative is to pay >$1000 per year for the Sky crap, with up to 25% of time advertising, and only recycled US rubbish.

I'm always amazed how much UK people complain about the license fee, when I've seen what happens when you don't have one...

How can family sysadmins make a safe internet playground for kids?

You clearly dont know 6 year olds.

Of course a 6yr old can read; mine can read just fine, as can most of her class. And the Internet has not been mostly text for many years...

My worry is when they get onto youtube and start clicking about looking for Peppa Pig episodes, and find some abomination that some little scrote uploaded with a smug comment that "its yor own fault if yor kids see this your not suppervising them ha ha" (spelling errors included). Fortunately I was with them and stopped it quick, but when someone goes out of their way to conceal the fact that 20 seconds into the innocent clip Peppa Pig gets her head blown off it is hard not to throw your hands in the air and block youtube entirely.

A preview of SOPA: Web shut down before my eyes

Australia

@AC 11:46: "They changed flight "transit" rules so you have to go through customs, apply for visas etc just to pass through there in transit. Not like that in any other country."

You need transit visas in Australia, even if you don't leave the airport or even the plane, if you're not holding a passport that would give you an automatic visitor's visa. Here in NZ, every year at the end of term we see hordes of Chinese students queuing for Oz transit visas (cheapest route to China from NZ is via Oz)

Pirate Bay dropping torrents after magnetic attraction

Not really - since I think the original poster was making the point that, once the fictional Neighbours had filled their eyes, he had lost nothing. With your physical vegetables, the garden-owner would no longer have the vegetables.

A more accurate analogy may be that, having invested time and effort in making your garden beautiful, do you want people to treat it is a public park? Are you justified in charging for admission? Are you justified in charging people who enter without paying with tresspass?

So much of the copyright debate is muddied by one side equating copying with stealing a physical object (it isnt) and the other claiming that a film/book/recording should be free to copy as it costs nothing to do so (conveniently forgetting initial production costs).

Undervalued TiVo wins yet another legal battle

I love my TiVo

And they're going for NZ$200 (thats about US$170) here in New Zealand, including 'lifetime' subscription. I have 3 now, all networked together...

Strangely, though, their marketing sucks. They lose out to Sky+ simply because they never advertise and Sky is being pushed in all the stores.

‘Blogger not a journalist’ says Oregon court

Why can't she be a media in her own right?

She publishes a blog, surely that makes her blog a periodical publication. Why the need to be employed by a newspaper? Did they not consider that her blog is a publication in its own right?

Netflix rules out Kiwi launch

True

Internet in NZ does suck. Expensive, metered, and 20GB/month is seen as 'very large' and charged accordingly. If that were not enough, the latency to places like the US and Asia is also problematic for things like video and so on.

Its a shame since the TV here also sucks (Sky have a near monopoly on decent broadcasting, and charge as you would expect) and so an affordable video-on-demand would be great. TiVo do it, but the broadband traffic caps make it cost an extra $3 for each film you rent so no real gain.

However, on the positive side, we get to live in New Zealand. That more than makes up for the crappy Internet and crappy TV. Sucks to be you! :)

Nipples and teen lesbians sexy even when ironic, ASA rules

As a parent...

... I would far rather my impressionable children saw a picture of two girls kissing than a picture of people being blown up by soldiers with blood flying everywhere.

But then, I'm not american...

Gay-bashing cult plans picket of Steve Jobs funeral

Religious people. They're all nuts.

If Osama bin Laden can (could) claim to be a Muslim despite all he's done, then these nutjobs can claim to be Christians despite their behaviour. Once people suspend their logic in order to believe in a sky-fairy, then its only a little jump to suspending all other logic as well.

(Hello to the NSA people who are reading this because of the trigger words!)

Chaos feared after Unix time-zone database is nuked

Not even in the US can you legally copyright a list of facts.

So... I can get a list of the dates of the Kings and Queens of Engliand, put it in a book, and copyright it. Now anyone else publishing such a list has to pay me money!

Obviously not. This is a small company looking to make money by suing an individual who cannot afford to defend themselves -- simple bullying.

Had the defendant published a large section of their document verbatim, it would be different. He didn't. He read another source to get some public-domain facts, and then restated them in another way (ie, his database format).

Why so much of the internet depends on a free source is another matter.

iPhone app tracks Android-equipped Surrey cops

That'll be useful

... for anyone planning to commit crimes. Planning to do a bit of twoccing this evening? Check no plod nearby... yeah good to go!

GCHQ losing its 'internet whizzes' to Microsoft, Google

The management dont understand the value of tech knowledge

They have no problem with paying 6-figure sums to senior management in order to 'get the best'.

However, when it comes to getting decent techs, then they seem to think one's as good as another and you can pay peanuts. Unsurprisingly, said techs all bugger off to work for a company that knows the current market value and can simply take all the cream.

In that situation, I'd go and work for Google, too. But maybe not Mircrosoft... I still have SOME scruples, after all...

LightSquared admits it will knock out 200,000 sat-navs

So we go back to +-10m rather than +-4m?

Looks like it will screw the US geocaching community as well...

NHS trust issues nurse jub flash alert

At last! I have Valuable Knowledge

Scrunchies are those elasticated fabric hair ties that girls with ponytails wear. Knowing this, you are now overqualified to work in local government.

The Dalai Lama joke is on the double meaning of "one with everything":

1. Make me one (ie, make me a pizza) with everything (on it)

2. Make me one with everything, IE become part of the infinite cosmos and universal Buddha-nature of the universe. Or something like that.

This joke I first heard in "Johnny and the Bomb" by Terry Pratchett, in relation to a burger rather than a pizza. I doubt he invented the joke, though.

Mumsnet founder: Our members are 'very keen' on PORN ...

Theres a reason

Theres a reson the UK has separate taps - I originally wondered why there are no mixer taps, too.

The reason is that the UK houses normally use a gravity-fed hot water cylinder, rather than a mains-pressure system. This means that the hot and cold water systems are at different pressures, which means that you need a special mixer tap (which has only been available more recently) to prevent the cold water going backwards up into the hot water system.

In New Zealand (and US, europe...) hot water systems are usually pressurised, so you can have mixer taps (and people usually do).

End of trivial nugget. Now you know more!

Porn found in Osama bin Laden compound

I have doubts

Considering the old goat was >60 years old, plus had three wives there (one of whom was only 29), I doubt he'd have any need for pr0n. Sounds to me like a clumsy attempt as a bit of propoganda.

PH because, well, it's pr0n.

Microsoft to Apple: 'Oh, yeah? Well, your font is too small'

Microsoft claims "App store" is a generic...

... while of course, "Word" and "Windows" and not generic at all, no no...

SCO: 'Someone wants to buy our software biz!'

I wonder if...

I wonder if this means they will finall credit me with my Open Source software that they stole for their 'supplementary' disk? I was pleased to see it included there, until I found out that (a) they had stripped out the Credits file, in violation of the license agreement, and (b) they hadn't notified me, and turned me down for an interview when I applied to work there (although that turned out to be lucky after all)

The software was 'Wanderer', a text/graphics Boulderdash clone, if anyone wonders, and was my first C program of any size written in my first year at uni.