Posts by David Edwards

MoD battles copycat hackers

Teams title

Did anyone see that this is hosted by the appropriately named "British army web exploitation team"!

GCHQ goes Google

DV cleared indian PhD Grads ?

Not sure about that one....

First tube station to get Wi-Fi next week

Wifi....like the internet only less secure

These days I am increasingly worried about rogue wireless hotspots. No way id use any wifi point for anything as its so easy to set one up an go slurping. Maybe we need certificates like Verisign for wifi that Joe Public can grasp.

Botnet-harbouring survey fails to accounts for sinkholes

Headline first.....analysis......errr....

As mentioned by an @AC popularity may well be the cause. I just looked at the about page on 1-1 internet and you can see that they host a MASSIVE proportion of EU sites (ok they may have omitted some other players in their stats).

No one reading this with any valid concept of cyber crime will be thinking that the crims are hosting botnets on servers that Mr.Criminal has paid for, so they are merely finding vulnerable sites to host them on.

I see a growing trend in bloggers (even so called respected ones) to point out bad, with little context or analysis.

Thieves jam key-fob lock signals in mystery car thefts

Beeps have a downside

If you drop your keys in a car park, its then very easy for anyone dodgy to find said car by pressing the button and listening/watching for lights etc.

If I were to design a secure system it would not have obvious arm/disarm indication. Same reason its not the best idea to have the make of car on the keyfob. Maybe so cars have this?

Archos announces five Android tablets

PDA Re invented

So a smart phone without a phone is now a Tablet. Wernt these PDA a few years ago? Is the Plam 5x in my desk draw an early "tablet"?. Is an IPod a Tablet? How good or Bad do the AV functions have to be for it to be a PMP.

BTW. The first A4 size device that you can write on with a "pen", will be the one that I go for provided it runs Evernote (or very similar)

Apple patches 13 bugs in OS X

Escalate Priv's to move Apps

As a recent MAC user I was surprised to have to enter my password every time I moved some of the apple pre installed apps like Garrage band, into a different fodler.

You only have to get this kind of thing every now and again to become blase about entering it (I know I did, I know its bad, I am ashamed)

Just Like with rogue android apps where users diddnt ask "Why does this wall paper App need access to my phonebook"

Simply saying ARE YOU SURE, does not equal secuirty.

Microsoft Windows glider crashes

Attempt to "cheat" ?

I dont think the rods were supposed to fly. Id guess the glider was supposed to come off the launch tower (10ft rods) at the end of the pier, thereby starting higher and haiving better chance of going the distance. This is either:

Clever ?

Cheating ?

Non of the above as it diddnt work!

Cops cuff man who exposed holes in 'perfect' voting machines

Reporting angle/Headlines

I have seen a few headlines on the net about this and finally got round to reading the story. So why was I surprised that he was arrested for having a stolen voting machine in his possession (Stolen becuase they are Govt property and they diddnt saction the release, or have very strong reason to suspect thats the case)?

Exposing vulnarabilities on websites is one thing, knicking kit to expose vulnerabillities is aosmething else (dont be surprised if you get nicked!)

HP confirms 'Palm pad' to ship early 2011

Right result, wrong reason

Whist I agree, in terms of sales that the consumer market will be a apple v android battle with the others as also rans. The article says that HP is using PalmOS for its consumer devices, so your comment about windows slate is pointless. If HP make windows slates for corporates, thats a different kettle of fish, where application compatibility (for legacy stuff, think IE6 woes) etc is a bigger issue.

I used Palms happily for years, but they ran into a black hole and (in my opinion) Apple picked up the ease of use friendliness that the old Palm Pilot had that made them so popular 10 years ago (while Apple were floundering) Palm OS was too late into the phone arena, but it may be a contender (albe it not the most popular) in the tablet space.

People have no bloody idea about saving energy

Knowledge vs Desire

regarding those who "care" being less able.

Perhaps its because (huge generalisation alert) the Green types are often the sort of hippy-lovey-fluffy-kitten class of person who tends to avoid subjects such as science/maths (chemistry/biology/physics) etc that give you the raw mental materials to work out or understand these types of issue. They instead do life skills, media studies and music.

Meanwhile those of us who know about KW of electricity and efficiency (or photosynthesis that uses that toxin know as Co2) etc are too busy building racing cars and super computers (+ the odd death ray).

Shopping mall mulls Supreme Court bid to back no-speaking ban

If you think this through, its obvious

what this is about is the right of people to access a space and interact, BUT

Im fairly sure you'd expect that if someone wanted to do customer research, collect for charity, give our free samples of product x. They would need permission form the mall/store management ?

If you were at a mall/store and got stopped every 5 ft by someone doing research, collecting for charity, giving out free samples etc, you may complain to store management because you don't want to be harassed while shopping?

So really this is about limiting/managing people who go to the store/mall to interact with people but have no intention of shopping (possibly hence the term 3rd party access form).

Now as with every other area of stuff in life there are grey areas, e.g. a few school kids collecting info for homework etc, but thats life, you just expect people to deal with this in a sensible way. Maybe this guy was not being dealt with in a sensible way, but maybe he was popping out from behind things saying "hey id like to talk to you about god!" and being a jerk.

But what this isn't about, is two shoppers having a chat.

UK.gov awards managed services deal to lucky dozen

Classic example

Sorry but thats the managers fault not the suppliers ESPECIALLY in a government environment (where wireless may be prohibited by design).

What is and isnt to be expected?, CD/DVD writer (think external drives on some), Blueray, firewire, how about external USB ports (we dont have those at work for a reason)

How about mobile phones, most have cameras, but thats a pain in some secure sites where you are lot allowed to take a camera on site.

BT Tower to open for first time in 29 years

Site security Status

Active (Secret)

Inactive (Secret just in case)

Old (Nobody cares)

Historic (Ok, lets have a think about it)

Most sites go through this for farily obvious reasons. Views/restaurants aside looking at old comms kit is a fairly limited market and takes some thought to make interesting for many, however I have been to the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum and its really really good, wife and kid were not bored as there was a lot to play with.

There as something on TV about the tower with chris Barrie recently, most of the kit was still in place, quite fascinating looking at all the hardware required to do its job.

Army Bases

Army bases are not usually marked on OS maps.

Its bloody confusing when you are driving and can see a base next to you, but the map shows a big blank space!

First SMS Trojan for Android is in the wild

Successfull Walled Garden ?

Games consoles.

As far as I know, mass adoption of a programmable device by "consumers" and no malware/viruses?

Discuss.

(Becuase they dont hold anything of any value maybe)

Bad analogy

There are a huge number of greens and road saftey campaigners working very hard indeed to make your statement into transport policy. In fact it pretty much is.

THINK!

Look, clicking YES to "are you sure" requires no Technical Savvy.

Understanding why you should or shouldnt Does.

Cemeterys are full of people who were "clever enough to bypass the saftey features" and "knew what they were doing"

Google experimenting with spy drones, says German maker

Try that in the Countryside Google.

One word.

PULL!!!!!!!

Now gerroff my laaaannd!!

The Camel: Nokia unveils user designed phone

Homer Simpsons Car Design

Classic Episode, Homer meets brother who owns car company. Brother listens to Homer as voice of working man and allows him to design a car.

Russians quizzed over parasailing donkey

Simple misunderstanding.

The misunderstood the brief. The creative director said.

"I want a hot girl in a bikkini with her ass in the air"

Apple swaps good iPhones for bad, say fanbois

Hold a press conference

There is a comment on that Reuters thread that says.

Hold a press conference "What if they don't hold it correctly?"

V.Good.

Tube data feed shut for being popular

Capacity Planning on Open Data

Its a headache, if live data is open to all without any registration etc trying to do any meaningful capacity planning is a nightmare. Simply saying the government should respond is demonstrating a lack of understanding.

How are they expected to estimate capacity

Should they just keep adding as usage goes up

Do they just cough up for capacity costs and assume its "for the good of the public"

How do they know if an app/site is to be launched with huge fanfare etc.

How do you account for badly written code that hammers the service unnecessarily

How do you cope with DOS type issues

Possibly ie suggest some form of threshold based scheme, anything over X requests per day/hour/min whatever requires registration including capacity estimate (and they get better service e.g. emails re downtime, advice on new facilities, request to add data etc). Unregistered requests over that threshold could be blocked or throttled. (that assumes they can detect it e.g. from a server hosting the mash up, not the client)

New surveillance-CSI method: Beverage hair-isotope trail

Read the can

Its brewed in the UK

Buxton and Malvern

Crime capitals of the world, must be some huge mob meetings going on there or something.

How can UK.gov spend £35m on a website?

The actual Answer (if he'd looked)

The COI report contains a the breakdown of the spend of the £35m site (business link)

in 000s

£6250 Strategy and Planning

£4388 Design and Build

£4661 Hositng and Infrastructure

£15229 Content Provision

£4472 Testing and Evaluation

All huge figures ill agree, but trying to flog an open source produce wont solve very much of those costs will it (im assuming the tool doesn't write content for you)

If I had my most cynical hat on, id say its just this sort of badly formulated research and "product X is the answer" approach that leads projects to go wrong in the first place.

Billionaire's betting exchange backs Android

Web shortcut Icons ?

Re You have to have a shortcut on your browser. The iPhone lets you have a shortcut, complete with fav.ico on your home-screen.

BBC iplayer is a good example of this, despite NOT being an App Store App. With the shortcut on your homescrene and the iPhone specific browser experience, it "Feels" like an App even though it isnt.

This is one of the odd things about the iPhone App store bubble, everyone wants an App, because "thats what you do", but in many respects its totally unnecessary when you can develop good multi-mobile-platform sites (or even a decent mobile stylesheet for you normal site).

Twitter on a ZX Spectrum

Never worked

I never got past the forrest, theives everywhere and no way out.

Apple accused of hushing up security update

Admin Fatigue

Having been playign with Mac OSX for a few weeks now I can see some flaws in the secure Admin issue. I have tried a lot of software and LOTS requires me to logon as Admin to install it (LOTS), including such trivial things as moving the Apple installed Apps from one folder to another.

This means that users soon trpe the Admin password whenerver asked wihtout thinking, so ends up being self defeating due to bad programmin/install practice. Maybe I am missing something as iv only had the mac a month or so, but so far I see opportunites for error.

Also anyone without a virus scanner on their Mac is a plonker in my Mind, if nothg else it lets me keep an eye on email trojans etc that could come in and get recirculated around the Win users I deal with.

Did the iPad just save Wired, and Conde-Nast?

Price of paper mags?

Hang on, arent most paper Mags over £3.50 month these days. I have once computer mag on my desk that was £6 (with crap cover disk, not buying again). I dont think there will be much consumer difference in term of price sensitivity between paper and Tablet especially if there is good multimedia content (INCLUDING ADS)

Lone workers will like being tracked, says Orange

Define "lone"

Its not being without other humans, its being without a colleague.

A big market for this is the social services type roles where its not being alone thats the problem, its being in close proximity to less-than-safe-other-people.

GCHQ imposes Whitehall iPhone ban

Oops

There you go then, I really should read more!

"Consumer device" issue

The big problem with the iPhone is (as with other apple products) is that it is designed for consumers and lacks business functions, Apple is highly successful in the consumer market but they miss out on some things that corporates need. Mostly.

The app store as the only route to buy/install apps. So if you want to write (or comisssion) your own app for your own company, it is available to everyone?. If you want to roll out an app to 200 users, how do you do that, Individual ITunes accounts!. If you need to lock down phones to prevent people installing rubbish that may have malware, etc how do you do that?. If you sack an employee and need to wipe thier (your business) phone, how do you do that (I think remote wipe on mobile me is user owned not corporate control)

Even assuming that the iPhone local encryption on the device is "ok" there are too many of the above questions that Apple seem to have no answer for. In that case they will only ever succeed in the consumer space and micro/SME market where people dont know about these issues, or take the risk.

I dont think Google/Andriod have an answer / Nokia maybe but I gave up on them years ago (fasion phones)

PS I like apple Kit, im typing this on a macbook pro and have an iphone, its just that I cant see how it would work for the corporates/govt depts I work for.

PPS Apples market share of consumers is rather nice, so for now they may not be bothered!

Hayabusa in fiery return to Earth

The Andromeda Strain

Bound to be on TV this week!

iPhone 4 splashes down on both sides of the pond

Keep Checking on o2 ???

Or you can click the send me info button and get informed via email.

(Supposing of course that they bother sending emails)

Bletchley Park archives to be digitised, put online

Seconded

Agree

Play BP Offshore Oil Strike

Wrong sort of strike?

You see, in the 70's british strike usually meant something totally different.

Senior IT officials among top paid civil servants

Thats the key issue

Unless we have a benchmark how are we supposed to know if thats "a lot" or not?

We need to know, from an equivalent private sector org how much someone with a similar budget/responsibility/geography etc earns. Id rather we overpaid a genius than underpaid an idiot.

Met lab claims 'biggest breakthrough since Watergate'

Must pay more attention

Ooops

All sounds a bit analogue to me

Hmm, does this only work on magnetic media? it does not say so in the article, but I have a feeling that it does, if so it may be of limited lifetime?

I suppose there is digital static, but id imagine its more likley to be muted out by a recoding device, especially anything using compression?

Queuing for an iPad? Why?

hardware v software v vapourwre

Too much talk about what it does today, launch day. The iPad does and will do what ever people write software for it to do. Give or take a USB port or button 2 the "new" tablet form factor jobbies will live or die based on the SOFTWARE they run, right now the iPAD is too new for many Dev to get their heads around and have delivered much (although first looks are promising e.g Evernote).

Apple have a device, imperfect though it is, that you can buy NOW. Courier is cancelled, HP Slate back to SQ1 on Palm OS (v.interesting btw), WeTab delayed and Acer/Azus aiming too close to Kindle which feels like an 80's casio computer.

These things will make a difference once we all decide how to use them.

FOSS vendors lick chops over ConLib IT plans

Supply2Gov

Can they PLEASE make supply to gov (the government backed "small" tenders website) FREE

its absurd that we have to pay to access government opportunities from a government site (ok, I know they you can go trawl around depts sites etc, but thats a real PITA)

Internet abuzz with BitTorrent bypass code

IP Trace on P2P

I have not spent much time looking into P2P issues, so tell me.

Once the file sources have been located via the tracker sites by a downloader, a Peer to Peer connection is established between the sharer and the downloader. If a downloader ran wireshark they would see the REAL ip address of the source (or VPN end point) . Faking that Real IP address to the endpoint of a P2P would surley be impossible, or the packets would not know where to go.

So its not ISPs that send IP addresses to the rights holders, its the rights holders trawining for "thier files", identifying sharers and then asking for the physicall address relating to the IP they have seen sharing the files?????

(This is a question so no flames, I want to know how this works)

Apple unleashes four dozen free Snow Leopard fixes

As a potential Mac owner

Two observations

400+ MB is a Lot of data to shift (im on "Honest" you-have-a-limit-broadband)

Why are MAc updates FREE Updates but Windows Updates are Security Patches, how come microsfot are not reported as having "Free Software (patch) Tuesday"

Times websites want £1 a day from June

Its his fault`

Newspapers create climate of fear around children

Children dont go out as much

Children dont have paper rounds

Papers dont get circulated

People dont buy them

If I could have a paper on my doorstep by 8.30 am id think about it (you know in paper format). But I believe that this is now too expensive since the reduction in "child labor"

Google remarkets behavioral ad eyeball creep

Desktop Phorm "via cookies"

As per title, its like Phorm, without the infrastructure overhead.

Whilst I agree that target ads are better than on-targeted ads, anything to automate the dissemination of my browsing history is not a good thing.

Hows bing coming on these days........

Tesco Internet Phone rings off the hook

Try Vonage

Issues or porting your number aside. Have a look at Vonage. I use them and Im very Happy. Good customer service too. Good luck.

'Go veggie to save the planet' UN, EU plans debunked

Close down farms

Yes farming (that thing they used to do in the countryside) is NOT GREEN. Yep lets all live in cities and get our food flown in from somewhere else because we dont want UK farmers to contribute to climate change.

We can tarmac over the farms and build affordable houses as we want to help the homeless people too. Now wheres my folding bike.

Virgin Media downed by thick Leeds 'copper' crooks

Rumor

I heard that last year scrap prices were so high, and high st prices so static (due to stock turnover issues), that you could buy copper pipe form B&Q and sell it as scrap for more than you paid for it!

Sounds daft, but then again.......

(as in when oil prices were high, oil sellers (e.g car engine oil) ( had stock that cost a fortune, when the prices dropped they sold off the old cans at high price before selling the ones (form the back of the shelf) at the low price. This can work the other way as well

Computer glitch prompts 50 raids on elderly couple's home

Test St

Perhaps they live at

1 Test St?

Mr and Mrs Test

1 Test St

Testville

TE5T1NG

Say you never did that! (Ok never anywhere that mattered)