* Posts by frymaster

385 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Feb 2008

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OpenSocial, OpenID, and Google Gears: Three technologies for history's dustbin

frymaster

@AC re: advantages of single account

First of all, my premise is that the vast majority of people will try to use the same username (and definately the same email address) and password for every web service they use.

Assuming this, if your username and password are leaked, people can try them on every service on the web, take control, and you have to try to recover each and every account.

On the other hand, with a single account, not only can you enforce a bit more complex a password, but if it gets hacked you only have one account to recover.

That's the theory anyway...

Griffin pitches out-loud music without wires - or speakers

frymaster

Ye cannae break the laws o'physics

"Griffin reckons the AirCurve’s sound amplification"...

...if it's doing any kind of amplification i'll be most impressed. Also, if so, James Randi wants to talk to them about the 1 million dollars that's burning a hole in his pocket...

All it can do is change the shape of the output to allow for a louder sound over a smaller area. The total energy output will be the same (will be less due to more components introducing more inefficiency)

Firm threatens action against CCTV whistleblower

frymaster

4 days to expect them to isolate, patch, test, and distribute?

I strongly believe that in the cases where exploits are in the wild, or vendors refuse to cooperate, that public disclosure of vulnerabilities is in the best interests of users. There's no evidence of either of these here. It's very possible that the company wouldn't have given a toss without public disclosure, but we'll never know, will we? This guy has given this company enough rope to hang HIM by, all for want of a bit of patience and probably the desire for kudos. Posting an exploit is a lot sexier than pointing to a patch and saying "I found that issue"

Parents plant spyware to snare sex predator

frymaster

Re:Snooping vs raising

The problem is that this is all theoretical. You're saying that if they'd done things in a certain way (that had less chance of sucess than just finding it out for themselves) it would have been a more moral and a better solution. Problem is you _can't_ know if discussing things would have worked, because we can't rewind time to find out.

From the fact that there seems to be some previous history to this, I think the parents might be justified in acting that way, and they certainly have the right to.

Ubuntu zoo preps for new arrival

frymaster

I predict...

Kooky Koala

Open source release takes Linux rootkits mainstream

frymaster

re: need admin access

Are you on the security mailing list for your linux distro? Exploits to allow standard users to run as root are not as uncommon as you'd think

Microsoft breaks IE8 interoperability promise

frymaster

@Two issues

To deal with your questions in reverse order:

There already _is_ a difference between intranet pages and internet pages. Relying on complete stability of platform, intranet page designers have in a lot of places ignored standards and correct ways of doing things all over the place, as long as it worked (or appeared to). And why shouldn't they? There is no business advantage for them to do otherwise.

Conversely, for an internet page there are definite advantages to making the page work on as wide a variety of browsers and platforms as possible.

The fall-back to IE7 instead of IE 8 mode for intranet pages is NOT part of the rendering engine and does NOT require editing your pages to fix - all that's needed is altering one setting in one place ONCE for the entire organisation. I don't see this as going back on a promise at all.

Oh, and @C re: oh the irony.... without having actually looked into it, my guess is they have some wierd CSS hacks on the go which don't all work in IE8. Kudos for the (mostly) in your statement, people who equate Firefox or Opera with "standards compliant" and then code to their implementations annoy me very much :D

....which is another point... as of now, IE8 passes ACID2. So everything from that can be used in webpages and will work in the latest versions of all browsers (once ie8 is actually released, that is.)

But _no_ browser passes ACID3. So why would anyone write wide-audience webpages relying on things it uses? If it were only IE8 that had problems, the grumbling could be understood... (which will probably be the case in a few months)

frymaster

In fact...

...to expand on my earlier comment, having tried IE8 for a whole hour now, an astonishingly high number of sites _don't_ trigger crufty quirks mode yet have errors or serious bugs when viewed in IE8 mode vs IE7 compatability mode. My online banking, for example, uses a drop-down box to show login options. Unless I click the compatability icon this disappears as soon as I mouse over it. I begin to see a) Why MS keep going on about backwards compatability, b) why that icon is there

frymaster

Oh the irony

all the text on this site is far too small unless I click on the compatibility icon :D

Internet Explorer - now with 35% less FAIL

frymaster

@Brent Gardner

Netscape was a steaming pile of fail and the main reason I favour IE today is due to habits learned by using it to avoid dealing with netscape at all, if I could help it. If it wasn't for that I'd probably be a firefox or opera user, but now I'm just too comfortable with the way IE does things.

(Yes, I'm one of the people who uses IE by choice. Unless I'm using elinks.)

BT slams bandwidth brakes on all subscribers

frymaster

@dervheid

I agree with pretty much everything you say, but you have to admit that if all non-port-80 traffic is being restricted/bottlenecked (by whatever mechanism) to 5% of the port 80 traffic, that it's pretty stupid

share bandwidth equally among users, YES, prioritise some services and relegate others, YES, make one TCP port 20 times faster than all other internet access whether or not the traffic happens to be real-time or bulk-download, NO

I use VOIP online, I play games online, I chat online... I'd like these to work

frymaster

possible (improbable) explanation

...maybe BT just prioritise port 80 traffic and just share out the spare bandwidth equally?

I don't think that's especially likely, and it would still mean BT is ludicrously over-subscribed

it also discriminates against low latency applications like VOIP, gaming, non-port-80 streams, email, ftp...

they haven't thought this through, have they?

Hard 'core'? Birmingham City Council's net filtering

frymaster

In their offices, they can ban what they damn well please

Employers have a duty to provide services such as toilets. They do NOT have a duty to provide free internet access to staff. Some sites will be banned for illegality, some for productivity, some for malware, and some BY MISTAKE. Yes, these can happen!

Again there is the view that "X is not perfect, the alternative to X is doing nothing (which is worse), therefore we'll do nothing"

As long as filtering doesn't interfere with someone's job (ie unlike the person who couldn't access drug addiction support sites) then I don't see a problem with it. And it might cause problems for staff using their (permitted) personal access during breaks - but tough. It's not a right, would they be happier with a "no personal browsing AT ALL" rule?

Now libraries etc. are a different matter...

Apple reneges on Black Hat security talk

frymaster

@fixit_f

To be fair, none of the systems were compromised until it got to the "assume a user has just browsed to your website, with flash enabled" stage of the competition, and all of the machines were vulnerable to the flash exploit.

Although this is just another way of saying ubuntu is quite secure; unlike XP (and possibly the mac), ubuntu doesn't ship with a firewall on, which can wallpaper over vulnerabilities (a firewall only protects you up until you need to actually _allow_ anonymous access to a service)

Open Wi-Fi network wraps Mumbai man in bomb blast probe

frymaster

@Ru

>Because secure wireless really are unhackable?

>

>Sure, in this case the people who did send it probably just wandered around til >they found somewhere suitable. But there's nothing to stop them cracking an >inadequately secured neywork, and then you're going to have to spend some >time explaining yourself to the police and judiciary, trying to convince them that >evil hackers did it. And we can all guess how tech-savvy they're likely to be.

I never wear seatbelts - sure they'll protect me from a lot of crashes but there's nothing to stop a heavy enough vehicle simply crushing my car.

There seems to be a viewpoint in computing that goes "A is not perfect thefore A is useless. There is no alternative to A, so use nothing". Sure home wireless can be cracked, but securing it properly will drastically cut down on your exposure.

Chinese to censor Olympic press net access

frymaster

or even a simple ssh sever out on t'internet

...and use putty as a SOCKS proxy

Apple skewered over missing DNS patch

frymaster

To be fair...

...the reason everyone else got a patch out in such short time is everyone got advance notice (hence why it came out on patch Tuesday)

Do we know if apple also got advance warning? If not, fair enough. If so (and I suspect they did get warning) that's even worse!

still, holding off judgement until I know for sure

MS products just too cool to comprehend, say MS geeks

frymaster

The answer is in the question

"So how come my girlfriend's dual core 2gb vaio pre-installed with vista runs as if it only had 256gb of Ram?"

Laptop + pre-installed OS = a metric shitload of crappy OEM utilities.

I've used XP on my 2-year-old machine, and I've used Vista, and vista performs better for a user perspective, imo. I'm quite sure intensive benchmarking may show it is worse for certain classes of intense number crunching, but what I want from my computer is for the UI to respond fast. Vista does this*. It's also more stable, has a better security model (even if you don't _use_ UAC the fact of its existence will force companies to write software properly), and a lot more intuitive. I wonder how much of the perception of bloat in vista is due to people misunderstanding memory metrics...

*So does gnu-linux-ubuntu-KDE, but I don't have to grovel in text files to get 3d-accelerated desktop with multiple monitors in vista.

Eye of newt: Inside Google's AdWords auction

frymaster

@Lol Whibley

'You give us this much and you'll get that much.. or thereabouts.' Standard sales proceedure writ large..

This is the point - they _aren't_ saying what you get for your money, and some people are getting better value than other for poorly defined reasons*

OK, normal advertisers do preferential treatment as well, but in a way that seems more logical

UK ISPs agree to menace their filesharing users

frymaster

Problem with a kick-people-off scheme...

... is that they _will_ get some wrong. Assuming they're still going down the "BPI gives us IPs and times" route, it relies on the BPI being rigorous enough (checking the downloads are what they say they are, checking the person is actually uploading, checking their uploads aren't mince), and the ISP being rigorous enough (apparently BT's IP-to-user script is a joke, and what happens with cloned cable modems on Virgin?)

I think this is what VM were trying to achieve with the pass-along-letters-but-do-nothing scheme - hoping to assuage the govt without actually taking action ;)

North Americans just don't steal handsets, apparently...

frymaster

@Eddie Johnson

This is different to the UK how? All contract phones are subsidised, the cheaper models to the point of being free (like those on that list soaklord posted; actually like much better phones than that)

Rogue SF sysadmin coughs up passwords

frymaster

re: Wrong guy is in jail

"The city manager and head of IT should be in jail, not this guy. They are responsible for the lack of security and procedures which allowed a single BOFH to change admin passwords without being noticed."

Agreed, because one person's incompetancy excuses another person's willful damage.

...oh wait, it doesn't

Not disputing that in the aftermath of this, the IT manager should be investigated and at least reprimanded if not sacked or sued, but I don't see why that means the other guy gets to go free

If your SSD sucks, blame Vista, says SSD vendor

frymaster

RE: Why linux is different

"The difference with Linux is that swap is only used when it has to be, i.e. when you run out of physical memory"

So does vista. My page file use hovers around the 0 mark. Not completely zero; I don't think vista automatically swaps data back in in there's free pages availble in physical memory (which makes sense; if a program isn't going to use that page again for an hour, say, i'd rather the page wasn't constantly being loaded back into memory until needed; just use it for disk cache instead)

As noted by mage, XP and Vista _will_ run without any page file at all - they'll just chuck program pages out of RAM instead. So if you have enough on the go, your RAM will be full of potentially-hardly-used data while your disk thrashes loading in your programs 64k at a time. Bad if you have a fast inner loop straddling two pages.

Which brings me to:

"Why bother with sectors, file fragmentation etc filesystem crap on a storage that is just flat memory address space? To tax the OS more than is strictly required?"

Because memory hasn't been used like that in a long while :) File fragmentation is irrelevant in memory, which is totally fragmented into chunks as it is, because there's no seek issues like with hard drives.

Registrars turn blind eye to sites selling illegal steroids

frymaster

GoDaddy tried this before and got slated...

http://nodaddy.com/mystory.html

"We believe web site content is the responsibility of the site owner (registrant) and (if that fails) hosting or bandwidth provider. If the whois contact data is valid, registrars shouldn't be involved without a court order. " (From the nmap webpage)

And I agree, if the owner of a website won't deal with the issue, you contact the host, not the domain registrar. If you much about with the domain registration, all you're doing is potentially making it harder to track the owner of the site*

*Yes, I know most of them will be fake details registered with stolen cards, but still :P (Ironically, fake details registered with stolen cards _is_ a legitimate reason for a registrar to get involved)

EU accidentally orders ISPs to become copyright police

frymaster

Consumer rights

The spokesman was obviously talking bollocks about that part of the law having anything to do with consumer rights. Producer's rights, now that's a different thing ;)

It depends what is meant by "co-operation". I don't think details of ISP's customers (ie tying an IP to a name) should be handed out to _any_ third party without a court order or warrant or similar.

In the same way that if I provide an ISP with details of, say, a spammer, I don't expect anything back from them other than "we'll look into it"*, I don't expect them to say anything much different to, say, the BPI.

So, sending out "educational" letters to filesharers, fair enough. RIAA-style divulging of details and customers being sued, please no.

*Not that I ever even get that. Apart from orange, and some dedicated server provider. Universities, AOL, forget it, they're not interested :(

Research: Wind power pricier, emits more CO2 than thought

frymaster

@It's a systems problem and others

very good point... what is probably needed then is a way of exploiting capitalism's advantages (rapid evolution to favour maximum profit).

one idea: per-day electricity pricing, set, say, a week in advance. That way, if you're a consumer (and especially if you're a big company) you can plan hefty 'leccy usage (for the consumer, things like washing machines and especially dryers) for "cheap" (presumably windy) days. Tie that into a 'leccy resale system (ideally a non-profit system that only takes as much commision as needed to cover its own costs) and it's very possible ideas we haven't thought of will come tumbling out of the woodwork. Depending on your level of environmentalism, certain methods of generation could incur higher taxes on the business, encouraging more innovation

Are the ice caps melting?

frymaster

@responsibility, please

"the article commits the very same errors itself in critiquing those scientists"

agreed, both sides concentrate on "coldest year" or "hottest year" type stuff when individual years are meaningless in the context of climate change. No matter what else is going on, the climate is always going to be wheels-within-wheels interlocking cycles of rise and fall, with a ludicrous amount of random thrown in for good measure. But that doesn't mean our now-noticable-on-a-global-scale changes our world don't have an effect, it just means you can't write nice headlines :)

ironically, i've seen a report that suggests a warming effect would be more noticable if it were not for high-altitude polluting caused by air travel reflecting some of the heat... it claims there was a distinct rise in global temperature after 9/11, when a lot of planes were grounded.

Judge grants Viacom 12TB of YouTube user records

frymaster

@Alan W. Rateliff, II

Depending on your ISP, it can be even worse than that... I admin some multiplayer FPS servers, and the standard tool for remote player management (HLSW) takes the IP can tries to match it up to country and ISP. It one case, ISP field was the guy's _name_ (the first name matched his in-game nick) because his name was in the RIPE record. So for some ISPs, automated tools can match static IPs to personally identifiable information using publically available databases.

BT starts threatening music downloaders with internet cut-off

frymaster

Oh good god people, learn to read

@about half the commenters

"the BPI can't say p2p is illegal"

they didn't

"the BPI can't tell us to uninstall my P2P software"

they didn't, thay told you to stop sharing copyrighted files and recommend uninstalling as a way to achieve that

"so I should stop downloading linux now? lulz"

if someone gets one of these letters that mentions a linux iso I will be highly amused and all the chickens in the country will be needed to supply the egg BT and the BPI would be applying to their faces. but I doubt it

"they're reading my packets!"

it even mentions in the article why interception is not needed

"they should change their business model"

your options are buy from them, or boycott. Moaning about how crap their business is while simultaneously stealing their stuff is a bit hipocritical

"it'll never stand up in court"

which is why it'll never _get_ to a court. it's an AUP violation, not a legal takedown

"i depend on my internet access"

then I would make sure it's used responsibly. drink-drive and you can lose your license, whether you need it for your job or not. let your brother / SO / sprogs whore your internet connection, expect to reap what has been sown...

"the person could be sending unrelated crap"

which is why bittorrent has error correction built in, to stop people poisoning the torrent. assuming they download the complete thing and listen to some of it, that is.

which leads on to...

"how good is their evidence?"

Good point. If it's anything like the RIAA's it's laughable. One assumes they have proper procedures and BT have vetted them...*chokes trying to restrain laughter*

But, again, you're being kicked off your ISP. Not a helluva lot you can do about it, really, unless you're rich and like taking imagined insults out of proportion.

Thanks to the blessed few trying to inject sanity into this

frymaster

removing P2P

it's only "recommended" you remove filesharing apps, and if we assume the clueless demographic, that makes the most sense. The geek demographic can presumably remove the copyrighted stuff without going to that extreme (or will, more probably, simple switch ISP :P )

@bertie bassett:

This is why BPI and ISPs are going down this route. If the BPI were to sue people they'd need to prove those things in a court of law. You don't need to a court of law for an ISP to kick someone off for AUP violation. This would be a concern if there weren't so many ISPs :) ( it actually may be a concern for me, coz I'm on cable, but I'll burn that bridge when I come to it)

Virgin Media rubbishes P2P throttling rumours

frymaster

@The Cube

That's absolutely what's going to happen. VM is going to install hardware to track every page you go to, and if it's a website that uses Phorm advertising and doesn't see a request for the appropriate ad image within a few seconds of you accessing the page, you'll be throttled. It'll cost an absolute bomb and VM doesn't and wouldn't make money on page advert views so there's no profit in it, but they're just Evil(TM) enough to do it just to piss you off.

Does anyone else find the world a depressing enough place as it is without the need to indulge in paranoid fantasies?

Oh, and if there's a problem with your connection speed, I'd moaning to tech support might get more results than moaning to El Reg.

Rare Mac Trojan exploits Apple vuln

frymaster

What is true for all main OSs (in desktop user form anyway)...

... is that once an attacker gets ordinary user level access, it's pretty much game over. Just about all of the linux vulnerabilities are local privilege escalation issue; no idea about windows (I don't get emails about them, I just install them every month) but I assume it's pretty much the same. And although this is a particularly large and easy hole to exploit, I bet there's more subtle ones in OSX as well.

The lesson from that pwn to own competition (no machine could be hacked just by having network access; all of them could be hacked* by exploiting a flash vulnerability) is that your vulnerability is linked directly into what you do with your system. If you're a desktop user, then things like that flash vulnerability have the potential to catch out ANY user on ANY system, without needing to click anything. On a server, the services you run and how well they're used (how exploitable is your dynamic website?) determine your vulnerabiliy.

Yes, you can customise your system to be more resistant to local-user attacks (especially if you run a multi-user system) but, pretty much, if someone gets local access it's game over.

The one thing that doesn't affect your vulnerability is OS, especially on servers. On desktops, of _course_ most people concentrate on the OS with the market share, but just coz the threat is lower doesn't affect your vulnerability.

Virgin Media collects customer banking details on CD, then loses it

frymaster

The score

plus a few marks for it being a small leak, them having a policy in place, and them admitting it and not talking about "password protection" or similar bollocks.

minus several thousand marks for it happening at all :/ I mean Jesus, it's not like you can _avoid_ knowing about personal data on CD these days.

Having worked at the sharp end of a large company, I wonder to what extent central management is culpable. I mean, it's all very well them having a "secure FTP" policy but do the plebs on the ground actually know about it? Any organisation can have blunders like this due to numpties, but surely even they should have got the message by now... anyone who works for VM and deals with data know if their policy is any good?

Ofcom swoops on caller ID-faking firm with... request for information

frymaster

what exactly do you expect?

You want ofcom to shut them down immediately, because people say they should? 2 minutes after that they'd be in the courts.

If that firm claim to have taken legal opinion then there's at least an arguable case that they aren't breaking the law, so as regulator I'd AT LEAST send a letter asking for their point of view before laying the smackdown, and no email would not be appropriate.

Assuming they were alerted first thing on Monday (doubtful) they've had two and a bit working days. From being given information to following it up, looking at the website, deciding what to do about it, and writing and sending a letter. Even if they sent the letter by the end of Monday (doubtful) and the firm replied immediately (VERY doubtful) they still wouldn't have anything to say yet.

Note I'm not saying Ofcom WILL be useful, I'm just saying we can't possibly know yet. And if you're arguing "they've never done any good before" then I don't see how it warrants a new article. An update with their response in the original, maybe

Dissolving the plastic bag problem

frymaster

re: Can we make use of the bacteria

even if we _can't_ it's still worth it for the reduced landfill required

if we can, then woot :)

Navy sonar dolphin 'massacre' - the facts

frymaster

@Seán re: hard documentary evidence

Had the navy been using low frequency sonar this would not have been "hard evidence", it simply would mean we couldn't rule it out as a cause straight away.

No idea whether it CAN cause beachings - even if this incident isn't due to sonar it doesn't mean others might be. Or they might not. Isn't it nice to live in a complex world?

O2 prices up the latest iPhone

frymaster

@AC @ all you early adopters

To be fair, this is the same problem every early adopter ever has, and wasn't exactly hard to predict at the time

re: The Magic Telco: for what it's worth, I'm on Orange, and pay 20 quid a month for substatially more free stuff. Admitedly my phone is only EDGE not 3G... like the old iPhone :P

I still wouldn't buy one, coz I see the point of a multipurpose device I can't install unapproved software from, and I really can't be bothered with iTunes. But that's a question of taste. I'm certainly not holding back because of price, contract price, or phone features, which is a change from version 1.

Apple under the gun to master the iPhone's 'second album'

frymaster

The iPhone's stunning popularity...

...is completely non-existent in the UK

Maybe the UK has a resistance to koolaid or something, but I don't know anyone who knows anyone who has an iPhone. I can't say that about other major smartphones. Lack of MMS text messaging, price of the thing, and lack of 3G are all reasons I was given by apple "afficionados" (size of the camera is not; who out there ever gets good results out of a camera on a mobile?)

2 of those reasons are gone. The first generation iPhone was a collection of brilliant UI features in an untenable phone, and all it served to do was raise the game of the other manufacturers. The new iPhone is "possible" - it's something I'd consider when getting a new phone. Probably wouldn't get it, but that's cause I like different flavours of koolaid, not because of more concrete and immediate deal-breakers.

Virgin Media and BPI join forces to attack illegal filesharing

frymaster

@Downloading an MP3 is not the same as shoplifting

a shopkeeper doesn't care about the physical presence of his stock (he doesn't want it personally and probably can't return it and get a refund), he cares for the money he can make from selling it. If someone is stealing it, they aren't buying it, depriving him of a possible sale (the chances are small they'd have actually paid for it)

With the online situation, the argument goes that since the physical product is still there, your local record store can still sell the physical media because it's still there. Would that mean that if a store had 50 copies of a CD, and we somehow knew only 10 would be sold, it would be OK to steal the other 40? Even if you _DO_ think my analogy is rubbish, are you honestly saying there's a justification for copying copyrighted work without paying what the copyright holder wants to charge for it?

@Mark: Correct, VM cannot take you to court over your filesharing. If I own a pub, I can't take you to court if I see you beat someone up down the street. But I can certainly stop you coming into my pub, and VM can could certainly kick you off your service for using their service against the T&Cs (though they are apparently not doing that according to this article; the last one implied a 3 strikes rule mind)

"Well a company is demanding the right to dictate the actions of the rest of humanity"

No they aren't. They arne't forcing you to buy their stuff, and they aren't dictating what you spend your money on. They can try to persuade with advertising, but their sole carrot is that you might think their product is worth the price tag they've set, and they have no stick.

Why should people be allowed to dictate what pricing model a company adopts for a non-essential service? People can try to persuade with emails, letters, "x many people will buy if you do this" petitions, but their sole carrot is that they'll give the companies money if the price is right, and they have no stick.

Apart from anything else, they _WON'T_ change their pricing model as long as they can persuade themselves that piracy is the reason their profits are down; only if piracy was not an issue and their profits stayed down (which they probably would) are they likely to change their approach

frymaster

@lots of people

"Why can't the labels be force to face the consequences of their actions?

Making digital recordings makes making copies cheap. They knew that and that's why they wanted CD's. Consequence: we can take advantage of the cheap cost of copying (because they refuse to)."

What you are basically demanding is a right to dictate the actions of a company. It's analogous to being caught shoplifting designer goods (or anything with a high markup) and saying "it's their fault for having the prices so high, they should adapt and lower them". If you don't like a product's prices you have basically one option: boycott it. Not buying it then stealing it loses you the moral high ground.

"Making frivolous cases in court and running away before they are found out. Consequence: jailed for abuse and perjury. Etc."

I thought that was the RIAA. We're talking about the BPI.

Re: evidence won't stand up in court: lucky they aren't taking people to court then, innit? :P

Seriously, if you're going to be forced to live up to the consequences of your actions, a few letters and/or having to change ISP isn't exactly the end of the world is it?

re: How VM acted over phorm. What I seem to understand is, phorm have some technology*, VM said they'd take a look at it, phorm put their name in a press release, VM say they're still thinking about it and explicitly refuted phorm's claim they were definately going to be customers. They have implemented nothing. Given they have taken no actions, I find it hard to object to their actions. Because there aren't any. And the fact that they directly contradicted phorm's PR does not imply close working relationship.

*Which, if it's implemented (or implemented without robust opt-in), will cause me to cancel my VM broadband (and route everything over my VPN until I do). But I really don't think it will be.

frymaster

@Andy and Why

Thanks for the straight-forward explanation. This is why a) encryption is pointless (as I explain a trillion times a day to ONE FRIGGING GUY on IRC) unless you're worried about your ISP intercepting and recording your bittorrent traffic (unlike Phorm - very possibly illegal and certainly immoral, doing that would be VERY illegal and would be leaked in about 0 seconds), b) legit torrents are safe, and c) why I don't get people moaning

The argument seems to be "How dare I be held responsible for the consequences of my actions". Can someone please explain how that works? And yes, I do torrent, and yes, not all of them are legal and yes, I'm with VM (have been since the cableinet days)

Apple's 3G iPhone to launch 11 July

frymaster

cameras on phones are meh anyway

if you're sending a photo to your mate (or m8) then 2megapixel is more than enough.

oh, wait, you can't :P

I've yet to see a mobile that could do any kind of decent video recording anyway (failure to react to light levels and the Worst Sound In History are the two main problems)

I won't be getting one - I don't have a regular enough income at the moment for a big contract - but there's no denying it's MUCH more feasible than the original. I'd actually consider it at some point if it did MMS

Ofcom slaps MTV with £255k fine

frymaster

"if it offends you turn it over"

OK, I'll invent a time machine and travel back in time to before the offensive words, because I couldn't know they were going to be there BECAUSE IT WAS BEFORE THE FUCKING WATERSHED AND THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT OF IT

.

.

.

*ahem*

Agree 100% with the comment that if it's after the watershed, they shouldn't bloody bleep out the swearing. Especially for stuff like Eminem's Stan - the censored version of that is made for the american market, and blanks out all references to violence, leaving the vocal track pretty much non-existent...

Wikipedia kills Greatest Show On Earth

frymaster

I can't believe I'm saying this....

....but that wikipedia super-admin has the right idea. You can't run something like wiki based on intentions and motivations and guessing what people are there for, or relying on rumours of what they are there for. You can only slap them with the ban-stick when their behaviour is unacceptable.

Unfortunately it seems wikipedia as a whole runs on the "he hasn't done anything wrong but we have a bad feeling about him / he's done something wrong but he meant it for the best" mentality

The Reg surfs for porn with a San Jose councilman

frymaster

People have the right to unfiltered internet access...

...but I don't think they have the right to demand a public library supply it to them gratis.

If I were a library, deploying filtering and logging software would be a complete no-brainer... at the very least so sites that voluntarily tag as porn with opt-in sites get filtered.

No software is perfect (and if I were configuring it I'd prefer false negative - prornn gets through - then false positive - legit sites get blocked) but no thing is perfect, and nothing is substantially worse.

Google defends open source from 'poisonous people'

frymaster

Names in code

(I think there's still erroneous references to small bus factor when you mean large)

Having people's contributions recognised (Developed by blah with help from blah and blah and blah; Thanks to blah for blah) is one thing, and is Good. Even if the code someone used has been replaced entirely, they still contributed, and deserve recognition.

Tagging authorship directly in sections of code is quite another. For a start, people will start emailing those people directly instead of using exisitng channels (which can mean potentially policy-affecting code gets written without being discussed with the maintainers / head devs and/or the dev community at large. Secondly is the "my code!" aspect, where anyone touching the date parser gets flamed by the author because that part's got his name on it. Thirdly is the situation where the code DOES change a lot but still has this person's name on it, meaning the attribution is no longer correct (and ties back into the directly-emailing-instead-of-addressing-the-dev-community point)

Optical boffins cut the cost of quantum cryptography

frymaster

i know nothing about this

but I think the extra time delay this causes alerts the receiver to the interception

UK electricity crisis over - for now

frymaster

Cruachan

iirc it's pumped storage - essentially a very large battery where they let water flow downhill to generate electricity (and sell it to the grid at peak times), and pump it back up at night (using electricity bought from the grid at off-peak rates)

maybe it was already in use at the time? Or was empty?

Heaviest Virgin Media downloaders face new daytime go-slow

frymaster

Burst speed != sustainable speed

"To my mind this is a bit like buying a car which is sold as being able to do 100Mph and then finding out an hour down the motorway it will only do 25Mph......"

They're called "traffic jams", they happen when the number of people wanting to use a resource exceed the capacity of that resource

There's a reason why the road network isn't upgraded to the point where everyone gets a clear road (it would involve multi-level roads, but it could be done)

There's a reason why text messaging on your mobile fails just after midnight on New Year's Day (The only reason phone networks coped with the unanticipated rise in SMS use when mobiles became popular is that they use less bandwidth than calls; torrents and iPlayer use more bandwidth than websites)

Home internet access is a contended service. Always has been. Back in the day, if you were unlucky, your modem would get an engaged tone because all your ISP's modems were in use. This is why home broadband is as cheap as it is - because the traditional usage pattern of home customers has been bursts of access whenever you click on a new webpage.

Throttling is a way to manage the contended resouce. I'd prefer something more dynamic, but I believe that Orlowski chap when he says that's not technically feasible. It's certainly a helluva lot better than monthly hard limits, which is what some ISPs do to you, or unspecified monthly "terminate the customer" limits, which is what some other ISPs do to you.

If I'm downloading a new game on Steam, say, there's no hope in hell that even at full speeds it would be playable that evening. So it getting throttled effects me not a bit - it'll still be ready before the next evening. I might even hold off starting the download until I go to bed, to keep my browsing responsiveness up (though I probably wouldn't notice the difference) which means without actually inconveniencing me VM are altering my usage pattern to take the stress off the most highly contended part of the day. Though I don't think my particular area has ever actually HAD major utilisation issues, mind.

What I find laughable is people moaning about really slow speeds and throttling AT THE SAME TIME. I mean, if my connection was in the hundreds of kilobits anyway I'd a) Probably have left VM by now, and b) If sticking around, be cheering wildly at the thought that other people would be getting a smaller slice of the pie (thereby increasing my slice)

The New Order: When reading is a crime

frymaster

@Paul Delanry

>Why would an intelligent man like Hicham Yezza not know how dangerous >downloading / posessing a terrorist training manual could be, regardless of >whose academic reading list it might be on?

>Particulary so for someone currently seeking permanent UK residency.

>How stupid can you get?

Yes, how stupid can you get for downloading university-approved reading material on a university network as a university staff member in order to help a university student? For the university to turn around and say this was a Wrong Thing is the stupid part (I doubt the people investigating him knew about the poli-sci connection at the time, mind)

Perhaps he thought he was in some kind of free country, where people aren't judged by paranoia?

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