Posts by Karl Lattimer

Greenpeace slams next-gen consoles

Anyone else sick of being told what you can't do

F**king hippies, f**king anti-smoking lobby, f**king anti-alcohol lobby...

Why don't all of these organisations come together and issue a public health warning against any form of fun.

'Heavy' handset challenges all comers to prove its mettle

If it doesn't blend...

I'd thermite it!

+60 nutthin' I'll get me some good ol fashioned 2600 degrees on it!

That is, if the challenge to break it offers money :)

HMRC coughs to more data losses

Committee lessons learnt hmm

In the 40s this country was aware of cryptographic systems, we built machines to decipher the ciphers for which we had no key. In the 50s we became even more involved in crypographic systems and (as the story i was told goes) a young 21 year old mathematician working for GCHQ/MI5 finally solved the key management problem. Which was, that for all our data was secure, two separate journeys had to be made, the first transported the key, the second the data itself.

When MI5 implemented what has since become the RSA algorithm (yes that's right you americans it wasn't Rivest Shamir Aldeman that developed RSA first, we did and kept it secret until the release of files in 2001/2, so ner ner) the problem of data security became non-existent.

So why, after our triumphant history of keeping things secret do we still seem to have issues with the transportation of data? when security is as simple as;

C = M ^ e mod N

There was a time that you would be proud to be british with our amazing british thinking (see Al Murray: http://youtube.com/watch?v=o4vPPBRyHew) we were ahead of the game for so long. Now our civil service is full of chimps trying to drive a car.

Microsoft accuses kids of bullying Santa into sex chat

Switch off the learning mode!

Simply put, after you've spent months training a "santa bot" AIML MSN thingimy bob. It isn't wise to leave the learning system switched on for two reasons;

1) It will eventually churn out unrelated crud to all who try to have a conversation with it when the confusion factor gets large enough

2) People can teach it new and exciting things like oral sex tips for bots

Asus dropped hard disk from Eee PC at eleventh hour

urgh lay off the find/replace

so they did this before releasing the manual;

Find: Hard Disk

Replace With: Solid-state Disk

case sensitive search: Off

Urgh! Did anyone proof read it before they published this!

Is Apple coding Leopard to run Windows apps natively?

Re: Hmmm & Karl Lattimer

To be clear I do not contribute directly to wine, some of my contributers also contribute to wine. I develop an on the top solution for wine which takes the pain and anguish out of meandering through the rough and ready world of native,builtin dll hell. It also has desktop integration which is nice... ok end plug.

In response to your question though (I suppose I'm still qualified for that), apple would most likely follow the route of taking the code from codeweavers which is bad for open source and baby deer or contributing upstream changes to WINE which is good (bambi is safe). Apple have helped out existing FOSS projects before (Webkit/KHTML, Apache, Samba to name a few), and in some cases purchased the projects soon after (CUPS).

It isn't unlikely that apple will assign developers or contribute funds to help the wine project the the boost it deserves. As long as they comply with the LGPL and don't start acting shark like I'd welcome the introduction of Apple into the wine community, more users means better wine after all (this cannot be said for all wine, i.e. Lambrusco).

I'm still tilted toward the notion that its part of a virtualisation plan, WINE offers all of the PE/DLL stuff as part of the launcher binary, all you'd really be doing is shifting ALL of that into kernel space and putting on top of it a bunch of DLL files which might not be ahem... secure.

PE/DLL in the kernel is a bad idea IMHO, I remember the WINE project discussed a kernel module to perform some of the loading for them but they were very apprehensive about it at the time, with a walled garden kind of approach.

Very interesting...

Sounds to me like this is part of some dastardly scheme. Apple wouldn't re-implement Win32 API into OSX, as the WINE project have already proven that takes a lot of time, a lot of effort and a whole hell of a lot of developers and testers. This leaves 3 realistic reasons behind apples inclusion of PE and the Dynamic Link Loader.

1, Apple are planning some WINE magic sometime in the future, using the WINE implementation of the Win32 API. This isn't that far fetched as WINE is rapidly maturing and becoming something that I use everyday (OK I'm biased because I develop wine-doors but still I actually NEED wine daily).

2, Apple are planning on licensing the intellectual property and source code from Microsoft for the Win32 API, in which case they'll end up being in bed with the beast, I'd say this is less likely than 1.

3, Apple are planning to integrate some kind of whizz bang Paravirtualisation technology whereby some of Win32 from a VM interacts with the XiNU kernel directly allowing windows applications running in virtualised environments to load (part of?) windows drivers into the kernel for instance. This would be useful for something like graphics hardware and by extension gaming. This is about as likely as 1.

I guess we'll have to wait and see either way, but simply including PE and DLL they're moving into some kind of brave new territory.

Acute virus outbreak hits Tristan da Cunha

sounds like a lucky escape!

The Explorer was apparently supposed to stop there for a while, it sank, therefore a lucky escape from what could have caused a possible pandemic virus!

Quarantine ensues... best get out the gingham dress and Mr Flibble!

Brits declare Paris most pointless celeb

Interestingly

When you google images search most of the tarts it comes back with nuddy shots (I don't use safesearch by default)... I didn't actually know who any of them, apart from the obvious brits and paris were!

For the record, it doesn't actually take talent to take your clothes off. Which explains the list

MS Word edit history snares Scottish Labour on donations

who monitors them?

The government are quick to accuse us all of being kiddie porn users and want to block all such content by means of monitoriing etc... but they get up to this kind of thing. Nobody monitors their activity, maybe we should erm... have a committee for watching the politicians and making sure they don't break the law.

Mozilla rubbishes IE Firefox security study

Statistics...

They are of course only counting the vulnerabilities that microsoft owned up to and fixed. Not the bugs that exist that still sit there unfixed because microsoft haven't acknowledged them yet.

Mozilla have a different issue, this is, all or at least almost all of the bugs on the bugzilla come from users and security researchers outside, as well as ones inside.

This means that mozilla in being more transparent has shown more fixes, looks to me that they're doing better than MS more bugs, more fixes in the same time period means mozilla is working harder. That's generally how software works!

Toshiba to sell trees with laptops

Obviously trees are the way to go

Because they're so much more capable of soaking up CO2 and making O2 than say, I dunno, the worlds soylent!

/sarcasm

Serious questions: How many years does it take for the tree to offset the CO2 from manufacture? In that time how many laptops are sold? Last question... How much space is there in cumbria?

Talk about a non-impact solution while jumping on the "climate change" bandwagon.

Wonder if it'll sell laptops...

Melting ice kills polar bears, say boffins

You can quote me on this...

Let evolution take care of it, I don't feel the sudden urge to go out and save every beast that might be in danger. We do live in this whole evolve or die type world, so either the seal pups will have to evolve or the bears, or both. Either way in a few short millennia they won't look anything like polar bears and seals.

btw for those of you who can't figure out the quotable tid bit... "Let evolution take care of it" is the choice phrase of the future.

/watching nature in action

Linux desktops grow and grow and grow

RE: Load of tosh

I'm trying to deliver dreamweaver to the masses :) CS2 will follow shortly, and CAD should be do-able.

Check out http://www.wine-doors.org

We are still battling a few bugs, and are going to be refactoring the code base to be more solid soon. In the future we hope to provide a far better experience but we've already gone way further than winetools and it's easier than standard wine.

Luvvies get temporary reprieve

Surely signals aren't that strong!

I would have thought that wireless mics would operate at such low power and would therefore be fully contained by the 'almost' faraday cage status of most buildings.

If a building has normal wiring, then in most instances rf won't penetrate out of the building at sufficiently low power, but would be strong enough inside of the building to be functional.

Seems they're erring on the side of caution, when there's little need.

When is Java not Java?

But Java IS!

Java SE and Java ME are now covered (for the most part, if not completely) by the GPLv2, if it escaped the reg's attention... Java is open source, so why does google need to dodge what license?

I think some fact checking is in order, Dalvik != Open Source, Java == Open Source

Filed under Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD)

Drink rats' milk, suggests battling Heather Mills

A few points about these hippies

1) There isn't enough actual land to feed the world by plant mass alone, durr, that's why animals are an important part of our diet.

2) Palm oil and soya production are two of the largest contributers to greenhouse gasses, they think meat is murder justifies them killing my planet?

3) WE HAVE CANINE TEETH! WHICH MAKES US CARNIVORES!

4) My species has spent a hundred thousand years getting to the top of the food chain, bring out the steak!

Bloody hippies.

Amazon's $399 folly book reader

e-books would be great if

they adopted a subscription model, gave the device away free to subscribers, bundled a few thousand free e-books...

The whole e-paper technology is great, but the cost is enormous, realistically that's the only thing standing in the way of their world domination.

Crypto guru warns over random number backdoor

Bruce - Harder than Chuck Norris

Bruce Schneier decrypted the Bible. The plaintext read, "Bruce Schneier"

Bruce Schneier doesn't need facts. With one roundhouse-kick he can generate a formal proof for whatever he needs.

P = NP in Bruce Schneier's very presence.

Only one security god has a surname with three adjacent vowels.

SSL is invulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Unless that man is Bruce Schneier.

When Bruce Schneier clicks "Random Fact" the outcome is never random.

The spacing between Bruce Schneiers ribs forms an Optimal Golomb Ruler.

Bruce Schneier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret.

German amateur code breaker defeats Colossus

RE: Bull5hit!

You should really sort yourself out, first of all, a von neuman machine (a modern computer) cannot perform the kind of operations colossus did as colossus was a dedicated non-deterministic number cruncher of extra-ordinary design. In fact I believe it was designed by a postal worker, the same postal worker that designed the first automated sorting machine, the implementation was based loosely on a turing bombe. The only machine today that can realistically process data in the same way is the Cell BE.

Emulating colossus is therefore not possible, the universal turing machine emulators can process a colossus program, however it is massively slower than running on a dedicated turing machine (as are all turing programs).

Using the method he did, he managed to crack it quickly, well done to him, I doubt it resembled the original method of cracking as von neuman machines didn't actually exist when colossus was built, and further investigation into the codes since the war would have given some more efficient methods of cracking.

Either way, one inaccuracy that has been reported over and over, Churchill did not order the destruction of all 10 Colossi in fact, only 9 were destroyed. A tenth is apparently at GCHQ to this day, possibly still in operation... Who knows!

The reason one machine was kept? I'd imagine just in case someone started using Enigma/Lorenz or a similarly constructed cipher, the machine would still be available if required.

Neuroboffins develop mind-reading computers

very interesting but this could be cooler

Why not use a back propagation artificial neural network to classify the signals, that way he could sit with something to detect his eye movements and train the device himself. I'm sure it'll take less time if he can just practice on his own, save the doctors time etc...

Experts cast runes on Google phone security

why not both?

"Interest is focused on whether or not Android will be totally open or adopt an (arguably more secure) system of signing approved applications."

the N770,N800 and N810 devices can install apps which are signed by nokia via the nokia software channel, or they can install apps from third party repositories which are also digitally signed, and nokia provide hosting of third party apps via the garage which nokia digitally signs.

I think focusing interest on whether the platform is open vs. ONLY allowing approved apps would have been a more accurate statement to make. Digital signatures aren't relevant to the statement, approved apps ONLY is.

Nintendo sounds Wii-free Xmas warning

considering... ebay

I'm considering selling my wii on ebay about 2-3 weeks before xmas, putting a reserve price of around £500 then buying a brand new one in the January sales :)

Chances are you'll sell at that price, parents a effing nuts when it comes to stuff like this, and will pony up the lease for their house if it makes their kids xmas day.

Brown announces new counter-terror plans

Hmm...

"saying on BBC radio that he remained to be convinced of the need for longer pre-charge detention. An hour later, after a chat with Mr Brown, he was entirely convinced."

I wonder where brown keeps the brain slugs then.

Dutch teen swipes furniture from virtual hotel

Beware dutch coders!

HACKING IS NOW A CRIME!

Now, unlawful entry into a computer system is one thing, but hacking can mean coding, writing the kind of journalism the reg is famed for or chopping up a log with a large axe.

Someone should educate them before they continue to make these kinds of retarded errors.

Windows random number generator is so not random

heh

/dev/random all the way baby YEAH!

Government rejects retreat on e-voting

This is piss easy...

It really is easy as pie to write a secure, reliable vote counting system based on computer tech.

E-voting isn't hard! The problem is, if you hire a company who doesn't have a clue where to start, then your end product will end up like "How to make e-money from the public sector", hire a lone hacker to write something that "JUST WORKS" and just does what you tell it to, and locks down anything else you may want to tell it to do, then you'll get a product of this type in about oh I dunno, I could probably write it in a week in python...

Things like un-tamperable flat log files rather than databases for logging votes, and DSA signatures of files on each specific machine to verify that they haven't come from some other source while accumulating the individual machine logs. So that's the security pretty much handled. Of course you need a UI with "The fat guy" and "The smarmy guy" buttons, but thats complete pish...

So after erm, 5 minutes to think about a basic method of achieving this while instituting some security (of course not covering all the bases), why is it so difficult?

Well, you have the company that wants to make e-money from an e-government initiative. You have a government who is hoping that the company you've contracted is dumb enough to leave a trail of security problems that can then be exploited to win an election.

It stinks of corruption, the whole damn thing!

Beseiged Bavarian village preps anti-millipede defences

Sounds like...

Someone at least is renewing screaming lord such's policy on national defense, albeit in a smaller way...

His idea was always to erect a foot tall wall all around the UK so at night any nasty invaders would trip over it.

US man blasts stubborn wheelnut with shotgun

This is why...

americans are simply too dumb as a nation to have the right to bear arms.

We constantly see schools and colleges getting shot up by crazed lunatics desperate to exact revenge on the system that robbed them of any humanity.

So I simply say, it isn't guns that kill people, people kill people, so lets ban americans.

Cyber-jihad fails to materialise

dammit you gave away the plot...

and here's me waiting for die hard 4.1 to see if they've made any improvements.

Woman bites boyf in wedding tackle

erm...

<< Seriously?

IndiaTimes website 'attacks visitors'

newsflash - people exploit unknown flaws

Typical non-sense surprise should be avoided when talking about exploits of this nature. Most exploits out there only become public after they've caused some damage. In fact, MS patch tuesdays are generally the cut off point for exploits of this nature, especially if MS fix them.

Nobody cares about exploits which don't work anymore, and people will pay good money for exploits which do work, that MS has no idea about and can grab a whole hell of a lot of people.

The only _TRUE_ solution is to get a mac or a linux box and say bye bye to redmond :)

Home snoop CCTV more popular than Big Brother

CCTV is already too much...

Sounds to me like something from nineteen eighty four.

"Smith, Winston - Try to keep up"...

A particularly bad idea in the current climate of suspicion and fear that the government introduced with some of their "reforms"

16,000 namesakes cry foul over US terror watch list

Oh dear

Lets not go to 'america'... it is a silly place

-- Paraphrased from the holy grail...

I see Godwins law has been firmly applied http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

I do however agree that having some privately held list of miscreants isn't doing anyone any good, especially when its patently obvious that the americans couldn't find their arse with both hands and their left hand doesn't know what their right hand is doing.

This is what happens when you dumb down an entire nation through the use of mind numbing media nonsense like Paris Hilton, of already half inbred morons... I recon we all need to get firmly behind John Cleese and revoke this independence thing before it goes any further.

BTW: There's your paris hilton angle... If it wasn't for dumbass television with dumbass non celebrity slut-cum-bags like paris hilton america may have been 5 IQ points higher on average and that would have led to some common sense being applied.

Sony goes green with... er... leopard skin look laptop

Oh well...

says one sony exec to another... "If we can't run their brilliant new operating system, lets put a leopard skin print on our laptops too... that way when someone says leopard they'll immediately think sony"

I think the words in the board room that day were.

Microsoft hopes to patent 'automatic goodbye messages'

not patentable

there is prior art, gaim 1.3 I believe had a plugin to do just that.

Babbling net software sparks international incident

babel loop

Its superficial lower whole number is belongs to us

http://tashian.com/multibabel/

Sony rolls out Walkman handset duo

Something feels familiar

Oh, look reflections under the images of their device, I wonder where I've seen that...

Kylie Minogue launches social networking site

Sounds like...

narcissistic validation to me...

What's the matter kylie don't have any facebook friends?

Obviously this is a poor attempt at marketing her music, which is poptastic apparently, although I don't subscribe to the same kinds of musical taste as 13 year old girls and boys the world over.

MySpace ads zero in on user data

who cares?

Nobody ever heard of adblock plus?

"Hmm, so whey you use facebook you see adverts? hmm I don't..."

So I use the ostrich principle, if I don't see it, its not really there. Sure they're getting data on me in dribs and drabs and building a marketing profile of me, but if I don't see them they have no affect.

Lost CD may put pension holders in peril

I seem to remember...

that a trio of fellows did solve this problem... rivest, shamir, adleman, I believe their work is quite famous.

If the data was encrypted properly, they wouldn't have any need to tell their customers.

Buffy mastermind returns with new TV series

firefly wasn't just westerns...

The frontier thing in it was a stroke of genius, but it was much more than just frontier style television, a little more than just rawhide with spaceships. The way they portrayed the decay of language and the imbalance of power and technology between the alliance worlds and the non-alliance worlds was something of a political statement I think possibly referring to the dumbing down Fox is well known for.

TheTrainline.com fixes web security derailment

surely this should be....

visa

"along with logos for Verified by Vista and MasterCard SecureCode."

Chalk that down to a Freudian slip.

Cops expose cross-dressing Catholic school principal

why is it...

in the states its always the christians, and in the uk it's always the MPs

I've you're gonna be a pervert, be overt about it...

VMware douses open source with waterfall of nonsense

erm hold on...

"What we want to do is fund ourselves to be able to build new stuff. If you're purely open source, there is no way you can do new stuff."

David Reveman - Novell - Compiz - Xgl

'Nuff Said.

Ubuntu laptop clan trapped in hard drive hell

@Simon Painter

well done JP Strause

I would also like to add;

what a fucking cock!

Half-petaflop IBM BlueGene supercomputer plan announced

WOW

zOMG someone wrote a neural network that can self organise and match the processing power of half of a mouse brain. This is unbelievable!

Actually, if someone had actually written the software to do that, I think we'd hear more about it.

The reality is, they managed to simulate the interaction of bio-chemistry for about half a living mouse brain, big computational task but largely irrelevant for the field of AI, and mostly irrelevant for investigating brain disorders like parkinsons, as you need to know what you're looking for to design it into the "cortical simulator".

Moreover a mouse brain is fairly trivial to simulate I could in fact probably get an entire mouse brain crammed into an app for PS3, which would mimic a mouse behavior almost exactly, and thought pattern pretty well. Which I think is far more exciting than throwing enormous resources at building vast von neumann machines which have the ability to simulate the interactions involved in tissues.

Remember a turing machine built in 1942 could still outshine von neumann machines running in the hundreds of megahertz which is millions of times faster than the clock speed of the turing machines in question at the time, running at only a few hundred, maybe a thousand cps.

Classical computing is dead, more cores does mean faster but its also still following the von neumann design too closely, and that design is wasteful. Thats why Cell BE rocks! It isn't quite like these "other" computers :)

How just thinking about terrorism became illegal

Well then, that settles it

/me runs off home to begin concocting heinous schemes to murder thousands of people, purely as research for my upcomming book. How the British police became the thought police.

/me thinks externally "Oops I forgot to post that anonymously, I wonder if they'll come knocking my door down looking for the aforementioned plans."

--

I used the joke alert image but really I'm deadly serious. I can think of at least 3 books I've read where the authors would have had to do extensive research into manufacture of WMD, and in writing the book would have had to put a plan together in massive detail, the first that springs to mind, which wasn't a particularly good read but I remember a good couple of scenes around erm... page 165 IIRC was Plague of Angels. In the book the author had the plot running that a nut case christian albino (sound familiar? Dan is soooo derivative) plots to murder members of the UN using Spanish Influenza.

So who's with me, lets overthrow the government!!! To help in this quest we have a face book group called "evil geniuses for a better tomorrow".

Reg lexicographical Shock Army liberates mobe

It appears...

Lester has been abducted by aManFromMars, who has since stolen his identity and is now using it to provide articles to elreg in order to confuse us prior to the attack of the lizard Alliance.

Never fear NLRA members will prevail!

Sun: MoD has Bond/Potter/Klingon cloaking device

@Martin Gregorie

I heard the story about a year after the B2 was announced around 1990/91, I was only young so all the details are sketchy, maybe it was the TV signals rather than the galactic background, I remember specifically it being the B2 as I was pretty fascinated with the aircraft at the time, being a super-cool flying wing and all, and me being a young boy. Someone of course came and shattered my dreams of invisibility way back then...

Anyway by 1999 when the serbs shot down an F117 the story was old news already, and I infact was telling people this story to explain the major flaw in stealth technology at the time, as nobody could understand how it was possible. If they implemented the same method then bully for them, but I'm pretty sure the brits got there first. As I was told, they politely called up the US military commander in question, and said something polite like "Hello there, this large triangular thing that keeps flying over us, could you please fly it elsewhere"