Posts by Jim Morrow 246 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2008
What makes you think Tesco deserves to make this work? They don't have an automatic right to make everything they do a success, even if it sometimes feels that way. Tesco run supermarkets for fuck's sake. It makes about as much sense for those greedy fuckers at Tesco to be a telco as it would for those greedy fuckers at BT (spit!) to sell groceries.
What about a BT-run supermarket: now there's an idea whose time has come.
Too true. It's a fucking mess. It's full of tat which wouldn't be allowed at a car boot sale. Although the volunteers are doing their best with very little money, it's an embarrassment. There's no coherent vision of what the museum could or should be. It looks as if they let anyone dump all the WW2 era house contents that was in their nan's attic whenever they cleared out her house after she died.
The computer museum is filled with irrelevant junk: removable disk drives/packs from the 1970s and ICL mainframe cabinets. There's no historical context either to computing in general or if the exhibits had any lineage to the UK's pioneering work in computers durning and immediately after WW2.
The rebuilt bombes and Colossus are all very well, but there's no explanation of how they worked and you don't get any sort of feel for how hard it was to crack the ciphers, intercept the signals or pass on the decodes to Whitehall or the field commanders. You don't even get an idea of the scale of the wartime operation: how many people worked there, how many buildings were used, what the Station X people lived on or where they lived, etc, etc.
Making space for GCHQ's propganda is just shameful. And WTF are the wrecked Harrier jet and bits of aircraft fuselage all about?
it simply isn't true that it's illegal for 'citizen data' - whatever that is - to be sent to india or the usa. think about it for a moment: how else would uk companies be able to outsource their customer service to places like bangalore?
Personal Data can be exported outside the eu/eea provided it goes to countries that have equally good data protection laws. india does. the usa doesn't. but that's not a problem either. a data processor in the usa just has to commit to a contract that means they follow eu data protection regulations.
paris icon because she can't keep her data personal.
>> Personally I'd sign up for one right now (even though I'm 40, don't drive and don't claim any tax credits).
You are either a troll or the world's biggest idiot. Or both.
If you want an ID card, go and fucking well get one. The ZanuLab arseholes responsible for these will be ecstatic to find another gullible moron to add to the number of gullible morons willing to sign up for the lunatic, unworkable and downright dangerous scheme. Don't come crying to us when you find that the guvmint has lost your personal data. Or sold it to the anyone who asks. Or when the ID card database says you're a tax-dodging, welfare scrounging, kiddy-fiddler. Or Osama bin-Laden.
"Having the .xxx domain as well as the current ones, and NOT forcing porn site administrators to use it, simply means that there will be twice as many, or more, of the sites currently out there.
no. you really don't have a clue. the number of smut sites won't change (much) if .xxx goes ahead. they'll just have more names. the domain name pornsite.xxx just gets added alongside pornsite.$tld and they all point to the same web pages/site. there might be a small increase because of the novelty value of the new tld, probably too small to measure.
there's a finite supply and demand for porn. it's called market forces. that demand and supply isn't going to be influenced significantly by the presence or absence of a porn-specific tld. demand isn't going to double because .xxx is created. so supply isn't going to double either.
the notion that a new tld will somehow double the number of sites is just stupid. the only way this could be true for .xxx would be if half the world's porn suppliers were prevented from getting on the net because .xxx didn't exist. that's clearly not true. if you ran a porn business, would you be saying "wait! i can't start trading because i can't get vigilantesmutfest.xxx."?
"This proposal would only be worthwhile considering if there was also a rule forcing porn domains onto .xx "
iiuc the guys behind .xxx say they are the responsible part of the porn business. so the sites under .xxx are supposedly going to have enforcable codes of conduct about using willing participants, nothing involving minors, etc. if this is correct, then there is some merit in .xxx. unlike the zillions of ideas that are being suggested for new tlds.
this must qualify as the most stupid thing said here.
the bbc didn't move out of london during ww2: you know, the time when the nazis carpet bombed the city on a regular basis. they will already have bomb-proof studios and broadcasting facilities for national emergencies. these must have been upgraded during the cold war as part of all that civil defence bollocks. so the idea that the bbc or the could be shut down by a terrorist attack in london is beyond stupid. the same goes for other critical national infrastructure, like the phone system.
the reason the bbc has expanded its bases in manchester and glasgow is simple. they have to be seen to be a national institution. so they can't have everything done in london and have the rest of the country pissed off because everyone who works for the bbc lives in hampstead or notting fucking hill.
> the question is just what purpose does its exemplary investigative journalism serve?
that should be fucking obvious. a hack on the local rag was able to spend a couple of days in the office looking at porn *and got paid for it*.
is the paper hiring? free smut on company time should attract a good pool of applicants.
paris icon because she's yet to feature on hull's porn sites.
This story is ridiculous. The underlying reason why Britain's economy is fucked is because of the collapse of manufacturing and the move to service-based jobs. Most of those McJobs don't generate wealth or are economically useful other than to keep people off the dole. Today, it's almost impossible to think of any British manufacturers that are world-wide household names apart from Rolls Royce (aero engines) and GSK (pharma). Compare that with the nations that compete and are now way ahead of us: Boeing, Sony, BMW, Seimens, Samsung, Apple, Xerox, Bayer, HP, Cisco, Hitachi, Philips, Yamaha, Intel, Canon, Bosch, Pioneer, Volkswagen, etc, etc.
50-60 years ago, Britain was still just about the workshop of the world and produced well over half the world's ships and locomotives. It had a successful car industry too. And made most of the world's motorcycles. It had an amazing aviation industry. Now that's pretty much all gone. Instead people work in call centres and non-jobs in the public sector.
This country would be a basket case if it wasn't for North Sea Oil. And that's been pissed away. Compare how the Norwegians have used their oil revenues with how it's been used here. Once the oil's gone, this country will be as economically significant as say Egypt.
"Meanwhile, 11,000 lines of code are added to the kernel each day" - HOLY SHIT!!!
Once upon a time the whole UNIX kernel was under 10,000 lines of code for *everything*. The 4.2 BSD kernel, the one that brought TCP/IP to the masses, was around 85,000 lines. That has pretty much all the OS features anyone needs, apart from NFS and the virtual file system concept.
What the fuck are the monkeys with typewriters contributing to the Linux kernel and is any of it doing anything worthwhile?
Paris icon because although she gives a little, it does a lot.
> The problem, as always, was that OO was made and run by software guys who have almost no idea of what an office suite is supposed to do in the real world
.... and this differs from redmond's office how? those fuckers don't have a clue about what an office suite is supposed to do either.
once upon a time, the typical office stooge could do all their word processing, spreadsheets and database stuff on computers that had floppy disks and less than a meg of memory for everything. their needs today are still the same as they were in those days. but now these so-called office productivity tools -- now there's a great lie -- are encrusted with bloatware and pointless features that make them as productive as kicking a dead whale across a beach. and they need 3Ghz multi-core processors, terabytes of disk and Gigs of ram to be able to churn out a simple letter before the onset of the next ice age. ffs the average mobile phone has more than enough horsepower to meet the needs of just about anyone who works in an office, if only the application suites weren't overblown, bloated piles of shite.
>> Considering that the fuel tanks were ruptured and it's pretty amazing there was no fire
why? it's not that easy to set fire to jet fuel. the stuff' is kerosene-based. it's pretty much identical to diesel wrt ignition point, volatility and so on. don't believe everything you've seen in bruce willis movies about jet fuel exploding.
paris icon because she knows a thing or two about how to make things go with a bang.
The media hype is beyond ridiculousness. The new thing from Apple looks as if its going to be an iPhone with a bigger screen FFS. What a fucking bore. And as for running the same OS as the iPhone, is this supposed to be news? It would be news if Steve's new toy *didn't* run Mac OSX.
If this thing is going to be called Tabloid, I hope one of the models gets called Sun. Because the reporters and editors responsible for this hype think the sun shines out Steve's arse.
> I don't think sex is a human right. If it were, prisoners would be allowed to bring spouses with them to prison.
why? even without their spouses, prisoners have sex all the time. as knuckles and his bodybuilding chums will be happy to prove when they make you their bitch the next time you get banged up.
besides, there are many films of lesbians having sex behind bars. you must have seen some of these documentaries.
paris icon because i think she's featured in some of those films.
What utter bollocks! First, these body scanners are next to useless. Even Home Office Overlord Assistant Reichsfeuhrer Alan Johnston says there's no better than a 50-50% chance they might detect a nutter with a bomb. Which probably means their effectiveness is even worse than that. Next, the current security theatre (pantomime) at an airport has yet to catch any terrorist or find explosives. [They confiscate plenty of nail clippers and a lot of duty-free though...] Third. there are plenty of other attack vectors for terrorists to use against aircraft. Or getting round the ridiculous limit of no more than 100ml liquid per person: with or without body scanners. This month's Cryptogram has a few suggestions. So has the recent article here by Lewis Page.
You are right about El Al screening/profiling passengers on its flights. It won't scale however. Try doing that with the 80M-odd passengers going through LHR every year. Oh and AFAIK El Al don't x-ray passengers with these body scanners either. They approach the job of security properly and thoroughly. Which doesn't depend on hyping the latest gadgets the security industry is desperate to sell to fuckwit politicians.
If you are stupid enough to believe that body scanners will "improve security", you might as well be claiming that the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- hallowed be his noodly appendages -- is equally effective as a countermeasure. I say a prayer to the FSM every time I fly. It works. I've not been blown up. Or had the security goons reach for the rubber gloves. This is a proven fact. And those prayers to the FSM haven't needed to be backed up by x-rays and body scanners.
paul showering says "If the "free" OS's like Linux and such really cost less overall, Windows would have died decades ago.".
in a word, no. it doesn't work like that. price is not the only consideration. although their fare for a london (ish) to stockholm (ish) flight can be a fraction of ba's or sas's, ryanair don't get everyone's business.
open source loses to windoze for a bunch of reasons. these include advertising and marketing; redmond's stranglehold on distribution channels; developer support; availability of third-party applications; fucked up and ever-changing linux APIs and GUIs; vendor lock-in; a well established network of lobbyists to influence key decision-makers; availability of system administrators and IT support; training; documentation; etc, etc.
suppose you supplied commercial software, say an accounts package. if you were to develop a linux version, would it be for GNOME, KDE or raw X windows? would you take the risk of some pasty faced youth changing an API or "upgrading" one of the libraries in the linux distro that your software depends on? which flavour of linux and package manager(s) would you choose? how would you get your software bundled with the distros or get the likes of dixons (spit!) to stock it?
"Talk Talk ... STILL don't understand how reverse dns works!".
what do you expect? they're a fucking phone shop with a telco operation tacked on. talk talk won't have anybody who can even spell dns. remember that the people who work for the likes of talk talk are the ones who can't get jobs at bt. or got downsized by bt.
heyrick says ITV digital failed "because it carried the ITV branding". Bollocks!
ITV digital failed because (a) the content on offer was utter crap, even worse than the worst of ITV at its worst; (b) equivalent shit was already available from Sky (and is still on offer there for those who want it); (c) nobody was prepared to pay a monthly subscription to watch endless repeats of Crossroads and Stenhousemuir v Port Vale football matches.
>>>> Funny, the government didn't seem to give a toss about the mining industry, the ship building >>>> industry, the car industry, the aerospace industry...
prag fest, it was the tories who fucked these industries. nu labour have fucked whatever was left. as well as fucking everyone who has the misfortune to live here.
paris icon 'cos she knows a thing or two about getting fucked.
>>> There is a good reason we don't and can't have super high speed trains in the UK - we're a very small and densly populated country.
bollocks! are you a mouthpiece for the incompetent fuckers responsible for the country's trains?
the main reason there are no decent trains in the uk (high-speed or otherwise) is because there's no political will for that. the utter spinelessness of transport policy for the last 50 years is another. instead of investing in rail, like france, germany, japan, korea, spain, italy, holland, etc this country spends its transport budget on lawyers dreaming up bureacracy and disasters such as privatisation. oh and the subsidies to beardie and the like are far more than was needed for the old british rail. even though br was a mess, they at least knew how to run choo-choos.
btw, japan is another "very small and densely populated country". it has an extensive national network of high-speed trains. they're not just fast. they're clean. they *always* run on time. the tickets are cheap and the staff that work on them are polite to passengers. it can be done.
whatithink said I suspect that the people who work for the Identity and Passport Service are neither "very stupid" or "nasty" WTF????
These people ARE very stupid and nasty. Of course it was that bastard Bliar and the rest of Satan's little helpers who wanted ID cards. But it was the IPS people who turned that vision into the very stupid, nasty, unworkable and ridiculously expensive non-solution that's supposed to be deployed. And of course it was the IPS people who invented the stupid and nasty ID scheme in the first place.
Sure, that'll fucking work. We can all relax because David Ramsay's MP has promised to scrap ID cards and the NIR if re-elected. It's not as if politicians lie or spout whatever bullshit they think will get them re-elected, is it? And how precisely will you keep your MP to that statement? What will you do when the Cameroons decide that these ID cards and NIR are really jolly useful and need to be made compulsory because the Murdoch press and the Daily Hate thinks they will protect house prices or stop asylum seekers sponging off the state?
meanwhile, in other news.... intensive research reveals the pope is a catholic and bears shit in the woods. WTF?
so some sad bastard signs up for a yet another waste of time sad social networking site. saddo gives said site their contact info. they probably don't know or care what the web site can and will do with that data. web site lets that data leak. waddo whinges. why is any of this news or even vaguely interesting?
conclusions:
1) don't put your private contact info on a web site, ever.
2) avoid social networking web sites. get a life instead. go to the pub. have a shag. watch noel edmonds on the telly.
FreeBSD is not "Unix-like", Kelly. It *is* UNIX.
The various BSDs -- FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD -- all share the same parentage. They are derived from the BSD4.4 release produced at the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1990s. Those UCB releases extended the original version of Unix from Bell Labs.
almost everything posted here so far is from the clueless and ignorant.
the DNS protocol has always been 8-bit clean. UTF isn't involved in internationalised domain names either. they start with unicode which then gets normalised and encoded as ascii strings. so テスト(test in Japanese) gets translated to "xn--zckzah" as an IDN. a web browser or mail program can in theory then take a domain name like fubar.xn--zckzah and display it in the appropriate script for a Japanese user.
buffer overflows don't come into it either. the length of an IDN still has to fit into the DNS protocol limits. besides, there have been no buffer overflows in BIND9. (look at the vulnerability matrix on the BIND web site.) the software's written in a way that makes these almost impossible.
next, ICANN is planning to introduce IDN versions of country codes. other top-level domains might come later. the first IDN domains will be for the likes of china and korea. these will probably map everything under .cn and .kr respectively to their xn--* IDN equivalents.
kasparator says "re-educate them by forcing them to watch Trainspotting until they can speak Glaswegian."
Good plan. This will take forever. Trainspotting was set in Edinburgh. The people there don't speak Glaswegian.
Paris icon 'cos she knows a thing or two about using tongues.
WTF? Some of the comment here are the usual idiotic little englander rants about the EU. Did I miss the meeting when El Reg became a portal to the BNP's/Daily Hate's (same thing really) web site?
The problem here is yet another fuck-up by the BRITISH government and the Home Office in particular. No surprises there....
Clarissa - good Daily Heil name that! - makes the usual nonsensical claims about loss of sovereignty. And as usual these little englander rants don't stand up to a microsecond of actual thought or reason. Fact: the UK government passed a law "without interference from others", just as it always has done. Fact: those responsible for that law did not properly check for overlaps or contradictions with existing laws. This is supposed to happen when any new legislation is introduced. So this DOMESTIC fuck-up cannot be blamed on Brussels. Except in the fantasy world of little englanders who believe everything they read in the Daily Heil.
Richard33 burbled:
"When do we get to vote out the ICAO? Right, you can't - they're an unelected quango."
The International Civil Aviation Organisation is not a quango. It is an International Organisation: an agency of the United Nations. Its members are nation states. Quangos are a largely British invention. If the UK was to withdraw from ICAO it would have no say or influence over things like air navigation standards, accident investigation protocols and the format of machine readable passports that ICAO oversees. Paris icon 'cos even she knows that and how ICAO's work helps her get about a bit.
Richard Kay said "Higher level zone key signature trusts will have to be cached for at least several days anyway, or AINA/Verisign or whoever else compiles the root zone simply wouldn't be able to handle all the lookup traffic.". This is profoundly stupid. A signed root is not going to make a significant difference to the query load on the world's DNS servers. DNSSEC-aware resolvers will get signed responses (which will be bigger than unsigned ones). However they will not be performing extra lookups to do DNSSEC validation: the data to do that validation will be in the responses to DNSSEC-aware queries. [Extra queries would be necessary if validation had to be done against an alternate trust anchor instead of a signed root zone.] And in any event, the validity of a DNSSEC signature over a delegation is likely to be of the order of a week or a month: far longer than the TTL for the actual delegation itself.
Oh and the DNS infrastructure for the root zone and the responsibly run TLDs already handles billions of queries a day. The overwhelming majority of those queries have no reason to go anywhere near those servers. So if DNSSEC was to add to the query load (which it doesn't) that traffic would be lost in the noise of the 99.9% of the crap and DDoS attacks that those important name servers get.
Tony Hoyle said "They hand over the keys to verisign. That means dnssec keys will cost $$$ to buy, meaning only corporates will use it.". This shows how little he knows about DNSSEC.
DNSSEC works on a zone-by-zone basis. It's up to the zone administrator to decide whether to sign their zone or not. If they use it, they add DNSSEC resource records -- keys, signatures, etc -- to their zone. In principle this is no different from how they'd add a new A record for a host or an MX record for mail delivery: they'd just use new tools to generate those keys and signatures. The zone administrator generates their own DNSSEC keys by whatever means they choose. There's no reason to buy them. in fact it would be unwise to buy DNSSEC keys from a third party, assuming anyone was stupid enough to sell them, in case those keys were weak, poorly managed or otherwise compromised somehow.
Paris icon because she knows a lot more about this subject than Tony Hoyle.
Sarah Bee says Can I offer a small plea that we stop using 'Papers, Citizen!' or 'Papers, Please!' as a sign-off? It's irritating.
OK. How about "Ausweis bitte!"? That was what the Gestapo used in Nazi Germany.
Paris icon because her identity is known to all because of her widely-viewed films.
Anonymous coward said "If terrorists assassinated all flight personnel on board (bar the pilot), and amputated both of the pilot's legs and one of his arms, he could still fly the plane."
Fuck me! If a terrorist wanted to incapacitate the pilot, why would he hack off the pilot's limbs but leave them with one arm to fly the plane? What evil terrorist masterplan would that achieve? The terrorist would more than likely just kill the pilots outright. And how could a terrorist get anywhere near Airforce One, let alone get on it? AC's been watching too many dumb Hollywood movies.
Paris icon because she's been in a few dumb movies.
>>> why not lift the limits on liquids and replace it with a "please quaff" rule for any liquids that passengers wish to bring on board? I'm assuming that most components for liquid bombs would have a deleterious effect on the imbiber, of course
You are a world-class imbecile. Do you think a suicide bomber is going to be deterred at the prospect of the damage to their health by being forced to drink a mouthful of Tang? Or even hydrogen peroxide?
Paris icon, because even she's not as stupid as you.
"Actually, BIND was written under a DARPA grant in the early 1980's, so it really is nearly 30 years from then. Maybe a slight exaggeration on the part of the original commenter but not as inaccurate as yours. Early suggests PRE-1985, which gives us an absolute minimum of 23 years prior, and a maximum of 28."
i think the original poster was right. rfc1035 came out in november 1987. even though rfc883 was published 4 years earlier. bind was not included with the 4.2bsd release which came out in 1983. it's possible ucb had a darpa contract to write a dns server in 1983/1984. bind was part of the 4.3bsd release which came out in 1986 and mainly went to universities. so unless the guy claiming 30 years of bind experience actually wrote the earliest bind code at ucb the most he could have is just over 20 years. assuming he worked somewhere that had 4.3bsd and was on the arpanet in 1986 or theresabouts. development versions of bind won't have left ucb until a beta test of 4.3bsd in 1996. pre-release versions of bsd were only made available to a select few.
>> Whether or not 'my' DNS server is patched, if it queries an unpatched server for the IP of an unknown domain and the unpatched server has been poisoned for this domain then surely 'my' DNS cache becomes poisoned too.
No. The only way your server should query an unpatched server is when it is asking that unpatched server for authoritative data: ie when your server queries one of the name servers for google.com (say). Even if that google.com name server is unpatched, it will be serving authoritative data that it has loaded from disk. When it does that, the data it loads cannot be compromised by a cache poisoning attack. Besides, most authoritative servers don't *make* queries, they just answer them. If a DNS server doesn't make queries, it can't be spoofed and can't have its cache poisioned. Largely because it doesn't have a cache.
I've used the Paris icon because even she knows how DNS works
Mark, you really have no understanding of science or engineering, don't you?
>>>> they stated then that it could survive a Jumbo crashing and exploding into it because of it's revolutionary new design.
I doubt any professional engineer/architect would ever give an unqualified statement that a building could survive an explosion without knowing more about the nature of the explosion: what sort of explosive, how much, where it was detonated, etc, etc. Of course a clueless PR or marketing fuckwit (as if there was any other kind of this pond life) would say that sort of thing. Fortunately they don't get to design buildings or do anything that really matters.
FYI, the force and kinetic energy of a big plane hitting a skyscraper is nothing compared to the force exerted on them by the wind. Think about it. You've probably experienced the force of a light wind on an umbrella. Now imagine how much force would be exerted by a strong wind on the surface area of a skyscraper which would be of the order of thousands of square metres. Each tower barely moved when it was hit by a couple of hundreds of tons of aeroplane going at 500mph. BECAUSE IT WAS DESIGNED TO COPE WITH MUCH GREATER STRUCTURAL LOADS THAN THAT. If the towers hadn't been designed to handle that load/force, they would have fallen over in the same way as you would if someone pushed you.
>>>> The design of the building as a concrete skirt meant that the iron skeleton wasn't structurally *necessary*, though its loss would mean that the buildings were then vulnerable.
This is profoundly stupid and has no basis in fact. Concrete is not a viable material for tall office buildings or apartment blocks. A tower block using concrete for its structural strength would need to have walls many metres thick. Iron's not suitable either, it's too brittle. The only way to construct large buildings is to use a steel structure and then use something like glass or brick for exterior cladding. This cladding carries no structural load. The weight of the building and the things inside it are carried by the steel frame. Which also explains why the steel goes up before anything else when the buildings are constructed.
Oh and the WTC did not have a "concrete skirt". It had a steel frame that had glass panels and concrete cladding. As you can see by studying photos of the towers when they were being constructed. Unless of course there's been a global conspiracy to doctor these in all of the world's picture libraries since the towers collapsed.
>>> so the building failed its' design goals
This is true. At least you got something right in your idiotic rant Mark. The architects and structural engineers did not design the twin towers to survive the consequences of thousands of tons of aviation fuel catching fire in the top floors of the building. To be fair, they didn't design the buildings to withstand a thermonuclear explosion either. Or a Vogon starcruiser landing on top of them.
> Weren't IPv4 addresses meant to run out sometime before the end of the last century?
Yes. Which is why CIDR and more conservative address allocation policies were introduced in the mid-90s. They made more efficient use of the remaining address space, which bought the Internet a decade of breathing space.
> And again sometime early in the present century?
Isn't 2010/2011 early this century?
> In any case, many large organisations now shield their entire internal network behind a very small number of gateway public IPv4 addresses, and use the 192.168 or 172.16 private netblocks internally.
So what? Even with increased use of private IPv4 address space and NAT, there simply isn't enough public IPv4 address space to go round. It can't last forever and it *is* running out.
> I'm guessing that this story will keep on re-appearing at five-year intervals
Guess again. Go and read what IANA and the RIRs are saying about this issue. And read the OECD report. The exhaustion of IPv4 was a serious and very real concern. Which is why this OECD report has been published and why the Internet numbering authorities have been raising awareness of the issue for a while.
> I suppose they could also ask the post office to open, and scan every letter and parcel just in case the end user or sender (who would have to provide passport / photo ID and finger prints to post the letter) might write something dangerous or send a photocopied item of literature which could be subject to copyright... Or, heaven forbid, a CD-R
Hey, that's a great idea! This would have stopped the Revenue from losing those Child Benefit CDs. And it would also put an end to terrorism, drug dealing, illegal immigration and benefit fraud. Not to mention curing cancer and stopping global warming. Why isn't the Daily Mail screaming about this and why isn't the government introduced this yet? Are they waiting for ID cards?
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