* Posts by Madeye

56 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2008

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NSA bloke used backdoored MS Office key-gen, exposed secret exploits – Kaspersky

Madeye

Re: Turning it off

Ok, so you've made a great big zip file with your source and your binaries of the NSA tools. You've taken them home in a single lump for convenience. As a result this single archive, which probably runs to hundreds of meg if not gigabytes, matches a known signature. So you are stating that it's ok for Kaspersky to upload this file to their servers without asking? Does it do this for ALL files that match signatures or just those that match NSA signatures?

My point was that just because they identify binaries that match signatures, it gives them no right to upload unrelated items. Or upload anything without asking. Makes no difference if it's in an archive or as separate files on the file system.

PS. I have no view on Russia vs US. However I do have a dim view of all anti-virus software companies and refuse to use them. Their software is only marginally better than the viruses themselves: you can pay them in dollars and don't have to fish around for bitcoin

Madeye

Re: Turning it off

Absolutely. The hashes for the source code will be totally different to the hashes for the software in the wild (which Kaspersky has a legitimate interest in and will have seen before). There is not way to tell the code is related to the binaries without compiling it. So if Kaspersky takes this source code without asking, it probably takes ALL source code for good measure. Or maybe only if it says TOP SECRET in the header

Rejecting Sonos' private data slurp basically bricks bloke's boombox

Madeye

Re: Crap like this...

Too damn right. For the price of a Sonos you can buy a bluetooth receiver, old school analogue amp/speakers and a cheap Chinese tablet to control it all with money left over to cover a Spotify Premium subscription.

Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

Madeye

Re: Turning it off

That AMP-I-am

That AMP-I-am!

I do not like

That AMP-I-am

Do you like free Reg and spam?

Facebook fake news: Sort it out yourself, readers

Madeye

Re: "Together we can limit the spread of false news".

They are avoiding the use of the word "fake" in case someone notices that Fakebook would actually be quite a catchy nickname

Forget anonymity, we can remember you wholesale with machine intel, hackers warned

Madeye

Re: Hmmm.....

FORTH would be a terrible language to hack in

The language is fundamentally mutable and relatively obscure which means each author would most likely leave a clearly identifiable fingerprint.

We can't all live by taking in each others' washing

Madeye

Goddamn it! You are killing the only column in The Register that actually arouses passion (although Andrew Orowski sometimes succeeds). I still can't decide whether I love Tim Worstall or loathe him. I can't even decide whether I agree with him or not but you can be damned sure if I read 2 articles in a week on this soon-to-become-tawdry news organ, they are his.

On its way: A Google-free, NSA-free IT infrastructure for Europe

Madeye

Patents?

If we take at face value that European versions of existing US based services will need to be created to address the European market, where does this leave the matter of patents? Some services are only realistitcally created in certain ways. If a US company holds the patent on this method, how can a European company create a similar service? Does this require a re-evaluation of the patent issue or do we accept that such a service will not be available in Europe?

OnePlus 2: Disappointing Second Album syndrome strikes again

Madeye

Speaking as someone who just traded in their Samsung Galaxy S2 in for a grey-import Oneplus 2 I have to say I am absolutely delighted with it. However in view of the age of my old phone you could probably have handed me 2 coconuts tied together and I would have clapped excitedly. It did improve immeasurably once I'd flashed the latest OxygenOS over the grey-import bloaty crapware it came installed with. Despite Andrews early assertions, I can't say I've noticed that having 5.5 inches of bamboo in my pocket has made any difference either way to the ease of getting laid.

Total War: Warhammer, Blood Bowl and other Games Workshop table-to-screen delights

Madeye
Coat

Blast from the past

Regicide looks somewhat reminiscent of Electronic Arts' last good game, Archon

Brown kid with Arab name arrested for bringing home-made clock to school

Madeye

Re: Hysteria

The terrorists, like the bomb, are mostly make believe. They, like the bomb, are only there to validate the institutional racism of the police in the US and, increasingly, elsewhere.

If he's black, he must have a gun

If he's brown, it's a bomb he'll be carrying

Dare we live in the hope that the US will get it's house in order before they spread this poisonous doctrine to the rest of the supposedly free world?

GCHQ wants to set your passwords. In a good way

Madeye

What, no scrypt? Oh wait! It's advice from GCHQ

Stop forcing benefits down my throat and give me hard cash, dammit

Madeye

Now if the government were to return this £100+ billion a year to us who gave it to them, we might be in a position to be more charitable to the less well off. However, similar to the employers described in many of these comments, the government is uniikely to do the charitable thing: any surplus from dismaantling the welfare state will likely be funneled to vested interests. To use a Registrism, it will all be spaffed on Capita.

Are you a Tory-voting IT contractor? Congrats! Osborne is hiking your taxes

Madeye
Happy

Re: The Joys (and not) of Contracting

Interesting inverse correlation - my car is 21 years old and my dev lab stretches to 4 machines that wouldn't disgrace a minor university

Madeye

That's not just a feature of the public sector - I worked as a permanent employee with 3 different companies 2001-2009 for exactly the same salary throughout (and a consequent drop year on year in real terms). In 2009 I returned to contracting and found myself paid exactly half what I was earning as a contractor in 2001 (but significantly more than I was paid as a permanent).

So it goes.

But... I... like... the... PAIN! Our secret addiction to 'free' APIs

Madeye
Trollface

Re: Not an OO world

*strokes beard thoughtfully while sucking on a Werther's original* Abstraction of interfaces to avoid hard dependencies on third party software is a concept that predates OO by some considerable time span. It is as applicable to attempting to make an application run on both X and MS Windows in 1992 as it is to switching web apis in 2015. It's just that the latest crop of young whippersnappers are too lazy and too caught up in instant gratification to craft around such pitfalls..

In some ways, dating apps are the anti-internet

Madeye

*grin* That looks like an atempt use the Vulture staple of sex and scientists to steer the conversation away from discussing your algorithm for choosing topics for new columns

Madeye
Trollface

Market economics

"But women will educate us in what works and once the lesson sinks in that asking 50 random strangers “Hi, wanna jiggy?” doesn't actually work, then our approaches will be tamed down to those that do work."

Is this not just the mantra of "the market will prevail" applied to human relationships? If I were a cynic, I'd suggest that quite a few of Tim's recent columns involved the application of this precept to matters not traditionally covered by economics.

Vodafone didn't have a £6bn tax bill. Sort yourselves out, Lefties

Madeye

Re: "Branch" line

@Codejunky: If a company is not obliged to have a "branch" in any one country that it operates, could it not refuse to have a branch in any country and thus reasonably claim to be exempt from tax? I suppose all it takes is one country to declare itself corporation tax free, and all companies would move there. Such a country could support itself with, say, advertising instead of tax revenue. We would all be happy to accept that Microsoft et al were no longer well-known Luxembourgian or Irish companies but were say Bhutanese

@Tim: Common law is by it's definition mutable. What you have stated is thus convention - it can change with legislation or sufficient case law. Incidentally, what is the original purpose of the corporate veil? Is it still genuinely relevant or is it a convenient hold-over from an earlier time?

Madeye
WTF?

"Branch" line

I find it surprising that none of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple have a branch in the UK. They have 1000s of employees between them, hundreds of offices and storefronts yet have no branch in the UK? I can't imagine it's because they cannot afford a "branch". Perhaps that is the solution - to mandate businesses with operations over a certain size in a country maintain a "branch" in that country.

Google gets my data, I get search and email and that. Help help, I'm being REPRESSED!

Madeye
Pirate

Re: It's the owner of the website using Google to track you.

This gives me an idea - as there is no formal agreement between the customer and Google in the case of Google Analytics there is no requirement to submit the correct GA cookie. It wouldn't be that hard to write a browser plug-in to swap GA cookies randomly between signed up parties.

This would reduce the value of the data held by Google proportionally to the number of people taking part. Just leave your cookies in a bowl by the door on the way in ... and wait for the vicariously juicy and exciting advertising originally intended for someone else.

Jet-powered DRONE-maker slapped for illegal exports

Madeye
Coat

De-obliteration as standard!

From the sales blurb: "The design of the aircraft and its low cost makes it an attractive training UAV that can be recovered for multiple use."

That's actually pretty clever for a target drone.

Waiting gamer slams no-show show: E3 – was that it?

Madeye
Meh

Total Immersion

"What to make of Sony’s Morpheus and the Oculus Rift – VR headsets that, let’s face it, probably won’t make it into most gamers’ lounges. Certainly not in the near future, at any rate."

Having played a reasonable chunk of Half Life 2 on an Oculus, I'd say the above statement is short sighted. You are getting total immersion for a small fraction of the price of a large TV. When asked to guess the price after a demo, people generally go with £800-£1500. On finding it out it's significantly less, most walk away with that wistful look. I think these are going to sell and sell.

Why won't you DIE? IBM's S/360 and its legacy at 50

Madeye

Re: Excel enables the next Holocaust!

@Arnaut:

While I can't argue with your observations on Mao and Stalin, I do question your last paragraph.

The Germans took the personal details of all those interned in the death camps and recorded them on the punch cards. The details recorded fell into 3 broad categories: their undesirability (Jewish, Communist, agitator etc), their useful skills (machinist, baker etc) and their current state (sick, unproductive etc)

They would use the tabulating machines to run queries such as "find me the most undesirable people without currently useful skills who may well die in the next 3 months". Those returned by the queries would be lucky to see out the day.

I would say the Nazis were far from inefficient at identifying the individuals with whom they could most easily dispense. You are, however, right in that these skilled workers could have been far better utilised by a non-genocidal regime.

Madeye
IT Angle

Re: Excel enables the next Holocaust!

@DestroyAllMonsters:

You are effectively telling me that size matters, such that Mao and Stalin's purges are more noteworthy as they killed more people. Leaving aside that this is highly debatable, it is a question of efficiency (interesting use of the word "better" btw ;-) )

Suppose we asked IBM whether it would prefer to be the largest tech company in the world or the most efficient. Even pre-'93 I expect the answer to that would be "most efficient", because efficiency will lead to growth (well, unless your competitors all club together and start shooting at you, as happened to the Germans).

In truth, the situations are different. Neither Stalin nor Mao were facing a war on 2 fronts at the times of their worst excesses. They had no need for the people they purged. On the contrary, the Nazis needed to make efficient use of the workers in the death camps and they made a telling contribution to the war effort. How much sooner would the war have ended had the Nazis not had access to IBM tabulating machines?

Important though this is, is it relevant to this thread? Possibly. Is it relevant to this site? Certainly. Who were operating the machines? I was chilled to the bone when I understood how the IT consultants of their time were so complicit in the deaths of millions. Previously I had always considered my profession to be mostly harmless.

Madeye

Re: Too early for a Godwin?

The key difference between IBM and Norway is that the Norwegian iron ore was, for the most part, used to annihilate combatants. The IBM/Dehomag kit was used to tabulate civillians with a view to calculating when their usefulness to the Reich had expired. The book "IBM and the Holocaust" by Edwin Black makes the case that the Holocaust would not have been possible on such a large scale without IBM tabulating machines.

I take your point that an article on the S/360 may not be the place to raise this issue, unless you were to take the view that the later mainframes were a derivation of the earlier tabulating machines. They did largely the same thing, after all, just substantially faster.

Madeye

Re: The Mythical Man-Month

The key concepts of this book are as relevant today as they were back in the 60s and 70s - it is still oft quoted ("there are no silver bullets" being one I've heard recently). Unfortunately fewer and fewer people have heard of this book these days and even fewer have read it, even in project management circles.

Facebook turns 10: Big Brother isn't Mark Zuckerberg. It's YOU

Madeye
Alien

All your Face are belong to us

The opinions outlined in the comments here are very interesting. The Vulture community has a much higher proportion of technoliterati than the general population, yet all who have spoken out are speaking out against Facebook. Are we not expected to love that technology, our metier, has wrought such social change? Although I might be hamstrung by the fourth dimension on this one, not a single person has commented that Facebook is a universally great thing.

Were I not mired in apathy, I would be tempted to rewind and visit the comments section around the time of the birth of Facebook. I feel sure that at least one or two of the nay sayers today would have very different opinions about Facebook being the next great thing.

So why is it we have all turned on Facebook? Is it because it hawks all that we hold private? I think not - that was always on the cards. I'd say it was because everything that set us apart as a group - from OMG and LMFAO to checking our message stack every 10 minutes - is now utterly mainstream thanks to Facebook. How is it that "online" is now the 9th most uttered word on radio*? Never mind that Facebook has eaten our privacy, it has commercialised our geek identity.

* ok, I made that one up, but you get the picture

Google stabs Wikipedia in the front

Madeye

That is a variation on the theme of "Who cares that the product I am buying is sold at a loss by a company trying to corner the market? The only thing that matters is it's cheap"

Twitter: It's JUST LIKE Elder Scrolls (no it's not)

Madeye

Twitter is a game == life is a game

If anyone asks, Ken sent me

Linksys's über-hackable WRT wireless router REBORN with 802.11ac

Madeye

What's wrong with the old one?

I am still running an original WRT54GS with White Russian on it. Most of the time it lives at the back of the house where the main wifi signal does not reach. Every so often, when whichever cheap router I've bought most recently dies, it is pressed into service as the main house router.

It has never failed to deliver the goods. In fact, just last week it finished a 6 month stint front of house - not bad going for what must be an 8 year old router in a house containing several web sites handling dozens of concurrent users* (the previous brand new TP-Link only lasted 4 months total before burning out).

So, if the new incarnation has the longevity of the old, then $299 is not so much to pay. Or pick one up second hand for less.

* yes, I realise there are websites that handle more traffic than this

Star Trek: The original computer game

Madeye
Meh

Re: Forget that Star trek nonsense...

Star Raiders was a decent commercial stab at making an all-action version of the Star Trek game but was very different in character. You had photon torpedos but not phasers and generally you knew exactly where the klingons were. Consequently It lacked the tension and strategy of the original in favour of greater accessibility to the arcade generation. Still, it gave me a real thrill the first time I made Star Commander Class 1

Madeye
Pint

Wandering off topic

Hah! That is the game I first played and loved in 1981 on a TRS-80 Model 1 (the one with the 32k RAM expansion you could beat someone to death with). I have often credited this game (and hacking it's internals) with setting me on course for a stellar career in software development. More lately I've been cursing it's name for setting me on course for a unrewarding two and a half decades listening to idiots explain why doing a slovenly, half-assed job is in whichever business' best interests at the time

That icon is a pint of bitter, right?

French spies do a Barbara Streisand over secret nuke radio base

Madeye
Coat

Re: Listen very carefully

It would have been kind of hard to hide it from her as she was probably wearing most of it

How UK gov's 'growth' measures are ALREADY killing the web

Madeye
Thumb Up

Re: Indeed

Couldn't agree more - Bristol is drawling in the douchebags - it's a slippery slider from Asdal chic to poser centrawl

<emo address witheld>

BlackBerry Q10: This quirky QWERTY will keep loyalists perky

Madeye
Thumb Up

Re: Not just for loyalists

I have to second this opinion - I've been an Android afficionado since the G1 but recently I've found their sheer prevalence and genericity to be a turn-off. The Q10 will no doubt fill the quirky niche admirably while also providing all the features we expect. It's almost worth buying solely on the grounds that it will deliver a kick in the teeth to Microsoft in the so called race for bronze.

Game over for legendary 1980s games designer Mike Singleton

Madeye
Childcatcher

One of the greats

I still rate Midwinter as one of the greatest games of all time - despite his apparent lack of success in the modern industry, many of the more recent sandbox games (Just Cause 2 and Far Cry 2 to name but a couple) can trace their lineage back to the concepts developed by Mike Singleton. He was one of the true greats

'Your app will work on Windows 8 - but please rewrite it anyway'

Madeye
Coat

Re: We need need a HTML 5 web site test authority

Love the Freudian slip

'Nutjob' serves half-baked Raspberry PI scam

Madeye
Alien

What Steve doesn't know is "Eben" is in fact the Maas Neotek robot formerly known as Julia and he's just failed a Turing test

What happens when Facebook follows MySpace?

Madeye
Meh

Re: Trust

Diaspora is more open-source software than open standard - a substantial difference. Nonetheless I wholeheartedly support their mission. I didn't mention them in my comment as, despite their worthy goals, they have so far failed to produce anything tangible. The concept of an open standard in social networking is a good one despite the perceived failures of those trying to execute that concept. To mention Diaspora would have confused the issue of "what to do" with "how to execute it"

Madeye
Mushroom

Trust

As you and many of the posters here have pointed out, you simply cannot trust any online social enterprise to store your precious memories. Here today, gone tomorrow.

There are two needs here that you are using Facebook to address: 1) archival of important data and 2) sharing of content with friends and family

It is easier to arrive at a long term solution by separating the two.

1) can be addressed via the traditional means of offsite backups or the use of a specialized archival service (how MUCH exactly is it worth to you to keep your data? If you want it stored underground in a nuclear bunker, there are companies that provide that service)

2) is trickier but doable - it requires an open standard for social media to be drafted. This would allow people to choose their own implementation for sharing with their friends - many millions would continue to use Facebook and Twitter, while the bulk of the posters on this page would opt for hosting their own standards-compliant server. The standard would ensure that you would be able to "friend" people and "like" content held elsewhere. The biggest obstacle to the execution of this idea is Facebook itself - their value is enshrined in their users' data and any solution that would make it possible for them to move elsewhere would be resisted. However, supporting such an initiative would ensure that they would be able to hold on to SOME market share and would not end up marginalised like MySpace.

Hidden Dragon: The Chinese cyber menace

Madeye

China created more international patents than any other country in 2011 ...

Console accessories

Madeye
FAIL

Console?!?!

I have a pair of Logitech G930s and, yes, they are worth the money (though I got mine refurb at around £90) - however, I am pretty sure that they aren't PS3/Xbox but PC only (inc Linux) ... I'd love to be proved wrong on this, though, as I do still wake the kids playing Dark Souls loudly at antisocial hours

ANONYMOUS: Behind the mask, inside the Hivemind

Madeye
Big Brother

House built on sand

I am fully aware why quotes are unattributed - however I find that an article without a single attributed source is built on shaky foundations, as it is impossible to verify the veracity of any of it. In the US, such articles seem to have become the norm for anything concerning the government, or more specifically, the military. While this is a great thing for the dissemination of propaganda, it is less wonderful for those interested in getting to the truth of the matter.

I am not suggesting for a moment The Register has suddenly become a mouthpiece for the US military, just observing that this lowering of the standards of journalistic integrity is becoming prevalent elsewhere.

Madeye
Paris Hilton

There's more than 1 page?

lol I just turned up here to bemoan the lack of an enlargement, and what do I find? Serves me right for glazing over before the end of the first page, I suppose - it's something to do with articles based entirely on unattributed quotes ( I have the same problem with the New York Times ;-) ) ... so I can find a picture of Paris Hilton in a wig on page 5, right?

Can Big Blue survive another century?

Madeye
FAIL

ORLY??!?!

Back in the 1940s IBM had a truly unique product and they went to great lengths in the courts and elsewhere to ensure it remained so. So, unlike Ford et al, the Nazis really couldn't have done it without them. Perhaps I am an idiot for still giving a damn (it was a long time ago, after all) but at least I am contributing to the debate.

Madeye
Mushroom

Lest we forget

The Third Reich's bid to exterminate a significant proportion of Europe's population would never have got off the ground without IBM tabulating machines - they were really handy for counting people and their attributes. I don't see how an honest account of IBMs first 100 years can fail to mention this - it's not like they didn't get paid for them

Ten Essential... Android Games

Madeye

Abduction!

How can you not include Abduction! in any list of top Android games?! I have personally witnessed it keep 3 children quiet for over two and a half hours ....

Dutch court convicts teens for stealing pixels

Madeye
Coat

Virtua Sweeper

So they'll be spending their couple of hundred hours sweeping the streets in Second Life then?

Web cam images undo MacBook thieves

Madeye
Paris Hilton

@Steve

According to the docs, you need a valid .Mac account to use Back to My Mac. I surmise that when you fire up the network interface, Back to My Mac will register it's IP with the .Mac service, so the machine can then be accessed from elsewhere.

So your point about the IP being logged and traceable is essentially correct. The webcam part was not necessary. If I was using Back to My Mac, I'd be really careful not to plug my Mac in at my illicit lover or crack dealers house, however

A Linux equivalent would be pretty straight forward to concoct using a few boot scripts and tunneling X over SSH

Paris, because she'd probably leave her laptop on with the webcam running

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