Posts by Andy

Man faces $52k bill after voicemail breach

The ubiquitous...

52,000 Canadian - that's about 20 quid right ?

Why the IWF was right to ban a Wikipedia page

Futility and stupidity

The idea behind the IWF is fine (in theory) but the trouble is in the implementation. This album cover can be viewed on many sites - should every single URL be blocked ? If the IWF were to apply their criteria properly then yes.

This would mean blocking Google, Yahoo, Amazon and most search engines that display images - as well as blocking specific pages from other sites (eg a certain site that has this album as #1 worst cover of all time !).

Blocking the Wiki page has had VERY unintended side effects - inability for UK editors to amend pages - what might happen if Google / Yahoo pages were blocked ?

Also we have the issue of only some ISPs being blocked as others appear not to be signed up to the IWF's list.

The attempt to ban the image from the UK , while fine in principle, has not worked. Nor can it work without banning the sites mentioned above by all ISPs. Without too much effort I could probably find 100 unique pages with the album cover on it - there are probably many hundreds - ban them all ?

The idea of "ban a page if it might possibly be dodgy" is ill thought out. Don't get me wrong - the basic idea of the IWF seems fine - but in this case it seems it cannot possibly ban all pages that contain this image. Therefore it should ban none.

Did I go and have a look at the image ? Yes.

Does this make me a criminal now ? I really don't know - that might depend on which site I saw it on, which ISP I happened to use, whether I use a proxy server etc. It seems woefully messed up.

What did I think of the image ? Pretty tasteless - even for heavy rock 30 years ago in Germany !

UK e-tailers scurry to scrap dodgy Heavy Metal covers

Futility and stupidity

Dammit - I posted my comment on the wrong page !

I accidentally put it on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/09/iwf_wikipedia_ban/

It was meant to be here...

The idea behind the IWF is fine (in theory) but the trouble is in the implementation. This album cover can be viewed on many sites - should every single URL be blocked ? If the IWF were to apply their criteria properly then yes.

This would mean blocking Google, Yahoo, Amazon and most search engines that display images - as well as blocking specific pages from other sites (eg a certain site that has this album as #1 worst cover of all time !).

Blocking the Wiki page has had VERY unintended side effects - inability for UK editors to amend pages - what might happen if Google / Yahoo pages were blocked ?

Also we have the issue of only some ISPs being blocked as others appear not to be signed up to the IWF's list.

The attempt to ban the image from the UK , while fine in principle, has not worked. Nor can it work without banning the sites mentioned above by all ISPs. Without too much effort I could probably find 100 unique pages with the album cover on it - there are probably many hundreds - ban them all ?

The idea of "ban a page if it might possibly be dodgy" is ill thought out. Don't get me wrong - the basic idea of the IWF seems fine - but in this case it seems it cannot possibly ban all pages that contain this image. Therefore it should ban none.

Did I go and have a look at the image ? Yes.

Does this make me a criminal now ? I really don't know - that might depend on which site I saw it on, which ISP I happened to use, whether I use a proxy server etc. It seems woefully messed up.

What did I think of the image ? Pretty tasteless - even for heavy rock 30 years ago in Germany !

DoS and distributed hacking tools finally criminalised

Oh dear

wget --mirror is now illegal !

Small, awkward and looking for love: Delphi for PHP 2.0

Spaghetti code

I messed with version 1.x and, although it was ok to use, the code it produced was vile. Hopefully version 2 is somewhat better but I doubt it would be able to be edited in a "normal" editor as AC suggests.

I like Delphi, in fact most of Borland's stuff has been pretty good ( used to use Turbo Pascal back in me college days ). But unless they can achieve better separation of JS / HTML / PHP then "Apps" built using D4PHP will be practically unmaintainable.

EFF and chums sue Feds over border laptop inspections

Mass protest

Everyone planning to travel to ( or within ) the States should put a folder slap bang in the middle of their desktop called "Terrorist plans" with a few well chosen file names in there.

They can't lock everyone up. Can they ?

Text-to-pee service launched

Yeah - this'll really work well...

If you have an anonymous mobile - as I and many others do

How green is your business, exactly?

Where are the "denier" options ?

No buttons to tick if you think most of the hoo-hah is just a great big cash cow for the Govt. After all, what are they going to do with the dosh ? Plug the holes in the ozone layer with fivers ?

Senior officials now in frame for HMRC data fiasco

How did they fit all the data on 2 CDs

Ok, so nobody has yet specified whether the were "ordinary" CDs or not. But you'd have to go some to fit 25 M records onto 2 CDs. Rough calculations seem to suggest that each record would have to be between 50 and 160 bytes ( this is back of the envelope stuff ).

Presumably, since it wasn't encrypted, it also wasn't compressed so a small record with name, address, NI number, DOB, bank details might be :

fred bloggs,23 the road,truro,cornwall,tr5 4tr,ab123456b,020304,12345679,010163

That's 79 bytes - many records would be bigger than this and that's just CSV ( no allowance for file format /separators etc ).

Did they /really/ get all the data on 2 CDs ?

On a less cynical note - don't they have the intarweb in Govt ? If someone wanted a gig of secure data off of me I'd fire it over a VPN or something ( after encryption ! ).

There's no chance these muppets will /ever/ be able to run an ID card scheme securely !