Posts by James Smith

Engineers are troublesome 'expert loners', says prof

Collaborative Working?

Of course, anyone that works in the industry already knows that trying to get engineers to work together is like herding cats....

I guess they're not working as a team because either they don't want to or they haven't been taught how.

Phorm moves beyond privacy - except when slating rivals

Iraqi Information Minister

Haha. I'd forgotten all about him! Thank you for brightening up my day.

Brits decline to 'think outside the box'

Bull-o-meter

Does the old website that measures the management speak on other websites still exist?

EA in Spore DRM climbdown

Consoles

Everyone will just switch to consoles in the end to avoid the hassle of DRM. This kind of bad thinking will be the death of the PC gaming market.

I've had loads of problems with securom games in the past because my Philips drive meets the CD spec (cos Philips wrote it) and the secrurom games don't. Playing anything on PC usually involves a deterring amount of faffage.

They need to make games easier to install and play, that way people will pay money and buy them. Simple isn't it?

Whitehats tackle The Great Botnet Dilemma

I agree

I don't like the idea of an extended tit for tat exchange between the bot masters and the bot exterminators played out on my machine. This could get messy. Expecially when the next logical step in the arms race is to deliberately make attempted removal of the bot more damaging than leaving it be.

Best to contact the users concerned. They'll need to get involved in order to patch the vunerability that got them infected in the first place.

MySpace stripped of myspace.co.uk domain victory

Good Practice

It's good practice when setting up a business to check out the current usage of any domains you might be interested in. Usually before you've settled on a name. There's no point in starting a business called Amazon, for example.

Choosing something that's already in use and then getting uppity about it a few years later is just a bit daft. Even Paris knows better.

French sites fined for linking to privacy-invading Kylie content

"responsible as a editor"

Huh? How can you be responsible for content that's on someone else's site? What happens if they change the content from legal to not legal while you're not looking? What happens if someone hacks the site and changes the contents?

Sounds like a rubbish law to me. The link is just a reference. Referencing other works on paper doesn't cause a problem, so why on the web?

Creative climbs down over home brew Vista drivers

Good Hardware, Bad Software

I've had a love/hate relationship with Creative kit over the years. The hardware itself is very good quality. I love my Audigy Platinum, but the drivers have always been second rate and badly supported.

I've not been planning to buy any more Creative gear since a few years ago, but I might consider it if they make Daniel_K the head of driver development.

and another thing...

I've never understood hardware manufacturers attitudes to people writing their own open source drivers. There's a huge number of talented developers out there that would happily debug and fix any open source drivers if they existed, for free! But no, "any information about how the hardware works is our property and you ain't having it!" It was a real pig of a job writing an nVidia driver by reverse engineering the Linux driver, which was itself reverse engineered from the Windows one!

BT: 'We did not let anyone down over Phorm... it was not illegal'

Doomed!

I was having a chat to my about this yesterday and she thinks it's great. She loves the way that Google puts targetted adverts on her web pages, and just sees Phorm doing the same thing. I tried pointing out that Phorm will read all of her web traffic, but she doesn't see that being any different from what Google does.

Oh dear, we're all doomed!

Weasels

Ok, the facts as I understand it:

BT have trialled Phorm on part of their network which has intercepted the telecommunications of some of its customers without their consent. This is illegal under RIPA and BT have commited an illegal act as a result.

However, because the interception was done without determining the identities of the customers involved (and Phorm does not record this information anywhere) it is not possible for BT to determine who was a victim of this illegal act. It is therefore impossible to raise charges against BT because the victims cannot be identified. BT know this.

I think that the only way that it is possible to charge BT would be if someone can prove that they were part of the trial, and therefore that their traffic was intercepted. Something which BT was hoping wouldn't happen because no-one was supposed to find out!

Paper clip attack skewers Chip and PIN

Heads in the sand

I don't like the typical "that isn't going to happen" response from the banks, but ifthey admitted fault then I guess they would then be liable for the costs of any fraud. At the moment, if you're a victim of one of these attacks, the bank will just deny that it's possible and not compensate you...."you must have given your PIN away."

The technical report on their blog is worth a read. These guys seem to know what they're doing, and had rather too much fun doing it! Figure 14 is a classic!

US declares 1400-mile Pacific sat-shoot exclusion zone

Lunar Eclipse

I'm no space expert, but wouldn't the positioning of the moon affect the trajectory of the satellite? The timing is such that the moon being directly opposite would bring the satellite closer to the Earth around the point where they're going to shoot at it.

US may shoot down spy sat to safeguard tech secrets

Re: Big Blast

I do remember a ground based laser system for shooting down satellites. I liked the way it was mounted on a fast moving anti-aircraft style mounting. Just what you need for shooting down fast moving low altitude targets like... erm... satellites.