Posts by Tony Luck

Fraud shop OVERSTOCKED with stolen credit cards

Odd strategy

Hmm. Have appalling security so tens of millions of cards get stolen. Now prices for stolen cards are plummeting, so perhaps it won't be worth the time & effort to steal more.

Buying a petabyte of storage for YOURSELF? First, you'll need a fridge

11.4 years of 24x7 hidef video

Assuming bluray-ish quality of 10GB/hour. But people need to sleep, and maybe go to work once in a while to earn the money to keep this petabyte array running, so maybe only 4 hours a day to watch?? That means you have enough video for almost 70 years.

Forensic snoops: It doesn't take a Genius to break into an iPhone

What's on the outside of the phone

The Faraday bag seems to assume that all of the evidence of interest is digitally contained inside the phone. What if there is something useful (trace chemicals, blood etc.) on the outside of the phone? Dropping it into one of these "reusable" bags will mess that up.

Intel joins The Document Foundation, pushes LibreOffice

Re: Re: If only it (LibreOffice) didn't have such a terrible name

Yup. Linux kernel names are way more sensible. Looking at the current version:

$ grep NAME Makefile

NAME = Saber-toothed Squirrel

Hmm. That's odd. Let's look at some older ones ...

$ git checkout v3.1 -- Makefile ; grep NAME Makefile

NAME = "Divemaster Edition"

see - that's not silly (bizarely not connected to operating systems, but not silly)

$ git checkout v3.0 -- Makefile ; grep NAME Makefile

NAME = Sneaky Weasel

Oops - silly again

$ git checkout v2.6.39 -- Makefile ; grep NAME Makefile

NAME = Flesh-Eating Bats with Fangs

Hmmm - Ok - perhaps Linux kernel versions *are* silly.

Amazon's Silk looks creepily Phorm-ulaic

It sounds like silk would disable any client ad-blocking software (since the cloud server will pick up all the pieces and render the page) - but on the flip side, it means that the advertising companies don't get direct access to the data on who is looking at a page (since all the fetches will come from Amazon's cloud). Now Amazon will most likely sell that data to anyone who writes them a cheque - but I wonder what this does to the business model of pay-per-view ad-supported sites. Probably all bad for them - while pay-per-click is still OK.

Kernel.org Linux repository rooted in hack attack

Perhaps you are thinking of MD5?

It's been shown that an MD5 hash value can be duplicated with different data (though I think that it is still not possible to do this and make the changed source file look like reasonable code - you need to include a lot of random looking gibberish).

Some weaknesses have been detected in SHA1 - but there are no known practical attacks. So your guess that "something has been submarined into the Linux code base, and the respective files have been tweaked to ensure that the SHA1 hash matches" is almost certainly wrong (more likely that I'll win the lottery by finding a winning ticket lying in the street on my way home).

If/When there is a credible attack on SHA-1, git can be fixed to use a new secure hash (at the cost of re-building any repository using the new hash).

Google: Go public on Profiles or we'll delete you

what use is a profile with just {First,Last,Gender}?

If I want to look up my good friend "John Smith (male)" - I'll get ~45,000 hits just in the USA

Apple iOS 5 and iCloud examined

No sales tax on digital downloads

I thought that the other news on Lion was that it was only going to be available via the Mac App store. Right now, there is no sales tax on downloaded items (at least not in California ... I don't know about other states).

Brits unleash world's hottest chilli pepper

1,176,182 is a lot less than infinity

So expect some product labeling lawsuit when someone buys these "Infinity" chilies and discovers that are finite.

Poor planning too ... what will they call next year's even hotter chili? The "2xInfinity"? The "Aleph-1"?

NYT scribe: No bailout for Tesla-buying 'centimillionaires*'

How much solar energy from the roof

Article says:

A "typical" 20 square metres of home solar panels might generate as much as four or five kWh each day.

That would depend where you live. Tesla motors is located just a few deka-miles from my house where I have 34.8 m^2 of solar panels which yielded 9180 kWh in their first year of operation (average 25 kWh/day) and 8403 kWh in their second (average 23 kWh/day ... reduced yield partly caused by a broken inverter for ~3 weeks in February, and also by the local wildfires filling the sky with smoke for many days in July and dropping a layer of ash on the panels).

Scaling down the crappy 2nd year figures to 20 m^2 still gives an average of 13.2 kWh/day

HP to reduce PC energy consumption by a quarter

I just saved 30%

The fan in the power supply of my home desktop system started making some ugly noises just before Christmas. So I looked around for a new one with "efficient" and "quiet" as my two primary criteria. I bought a Seasonic S12 II SS-330. Since it has a honking great 120mm fan, I disconnected a case fan while I was installing the new PSU.

Result: at the wall A/C power consumption is down by 30%

US HD hardware sales 3:1 in Blu-ray's favour by year end

Still waiting till one format wins

I don't care which one wins, but I'm not buying either until one side throws in the towel.