* Posts by frymaster

385 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Feb 2008

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Heaviest Virgin Media downloaders face new daytime go-slow

frymaster

re: assholes

This is re: both of the people with that subject

Throttling lasts 5 hours once applied; if you're experiencing slow speeds 5 'till midnight then it can't be due to throttling (would either be 5 till 10 or 5 to 3am)

Thus, your slow speeds are something else. Perhaps it's because of high contention? Therefore, throttling will slow down other people, enabling you to get higher speeds.

If your speeds are "slower than dialup" and the slowest VM connection gets throttled to 1 megabit/sec, then throttling is not your issue. Get tech support involved, see if there's high utilisation in your area (and if so, when they think an upgrade will be, though these are laughably inaccurate) or if there's another problem on your line

US protests to WTO over EU 'IT' tariffs

frymaster

@Well what a surprise? (not)

Yes, because I'm sure the expenses paid to MPs would have to go down if these tariffs were eliminated... not

MPs expenses are, compared to the government as a whole, nothing. They should still be well regulated (probably better than they are) mainly because if the MPs can't run parliament well then how can they be trusted with the country?

But saying they want tarrifs in order to increase the money that goes into their pockets? Nah.

MPs want more money in order to spend it on things that they think taxpayers will want, in order that taxpayers will vote for them and their party. This may or may not be in the best interests of the country. It also means the system can be ineffective and wasteful without requiring every MP to be evil (they may stay for otther reasons but I suspect most MPs get into politics out of a genuine desire to change their country for what they think is better)

Personally I find this to be more depressing than your own theory. Choose your cynicism with care, conspiracy theories are so last century.

Ballmer and Gates defend Vista, drop Windows 7 hints

frymaster

I got a high-end computer a year ago

...and XP ran great. Up until the point where I installed graphics drivers, flash plugin, etc.

contrariwise, I've just bought a lapop with vista pre-installed, with specs lower or equal to my desktop machine - specifically the FSB is lower and CPU is marginally lower and gfx card is definately lower - and vista's performance is fantastic.

Things seem much more /controllable/ than XP as well - there's a lot more you can tweak, and a lot more of the behind-the-scences data can be got at.

It's not the fantastic leap that 98->2000 was (and half of the stuff that made 2000 good was in ME anyway), but it's a strong incremental increase versus XP, and as soon as I have a day to have my desktop machine out of commission I'm firing up the MSDN-mobile and getting vista for it, too

Irregular heart rhythm? Try a Taser

frymaster

@Simon Neill

"But to all you who hate the tazer....what do you propose we do? go back to shooting them?!"

Agreed, the tazer is an excellent alternative to shooting someone as it is provably a less lethal alternative.

The problem is police are using it in less dangerous situations where in the past they would not have considered using a gun. And the tazer is most definately NOT provably non-lethal.

I suspect part of the problem is also the public's perception. If you were drunk and angry, might you not give a cop pointing a taser at you the same respect you'd give a cop pointing a gun?

Petrol stations deploy anti-theft stingers

frymaster

@Ash

Yes, absolutely, I demand the right to steal from garages if I think the prices are too high. Because it's 100% the fault of the retailer when the supplier raises prices. And my convenience is worth more than the livelihood of others.

Next Ubuntu LTS in 2010, unless Linuxes synchronize

frymaster

@jeremy

Why SHOULDN'T someone be able to use a graphical tool to perform common tasks? linux config being mainly text files is good becasuse a) it's easier to migrate settings than windows registry, and b) it's easier in how-tos to use terminal commands rather than endless screenshots of GUI windows, c) It's easier to control over an ssh connection. None of those applies.

And while some unlikely combinations might require hand tweaking, this should be a rare case, not a common one. Every version of ubuntu I've installed on my home machine, I've tried to get by with only using the GUI tools. Every time, I've been thwarted (mainly by x configs). it is a traversty that in this day and age you still can't tweak your monitor settings without the distinct possibility of needing to un-mangle your x config afterwards.

"don't know nearly as much as you like to think you do about computers or networks" Yeah, because knowing how to configure NICs in linux is fundamental computing or networking knowledge?

Son of 419 victim contacts El Reg

frymaster

@Jonathan McCulloch

Oh, I bet there are _lots_ of techniques for cheating honest men... it's just no-one's ever had to develop them, and the alternative is easier!

These kind of scams trade off a certain arrogance towards countries seen as "backwards" - that with a small injection of bribe money you can embezzle millions. The question is whether the supply of arrogant greedy predjudiced people is going down or not - I wouldn't have thought so.

It _must_ still be working, else why would people still do it? My mate got one through the post last year, another mate's dad got one the year before - unlike with the email spam version, this must cost real money to send. I know someone who had an aquaintance caught out by one of these about 15-20 years ago (ie before they were well known.) He failed to convince her that it was a scam. At least these days it doesn't take much research to find that out.

DWP still sending out passwords and discs together

frymaster

Genius

Genius. It's not difficult, really.

1) Generate random password using tool provided by your employer

2) Encrypt data using tool provided by your employer

3) Send data through the post

4) Just bleedin' email the password already. I mean, let's assume the email is intercepted, what are the chances it'll be intercepted by the same person that gets mis-delivered the data? Nil, essentially. If it needs to be more secure, leave off some characters from the beginning or the end and telephone them through. But it doesn't.

Vista security credentials tarnished in malware survey

frymaster

@Richard

Ubuntu is quickly becoming more popular than it was, but I don't think you can say it's becoming more popular than windows, really.

In my house there are 4 windows installations to 3 linux ones, and that's only if you include the wrt54g. I suspect the average business has a higher windows-to-linux ratio than that, and I bet the average house certainly does

DoJ beats up tech firm for H-1B only job ads

frymaster

re:bad economics

realistically these aren't the responsibility of the company, HOWEVER the issue wasn't that they couldn't find a skilled worker who was resident, it's that they didn't want one. It pretty much screams "exploiting migrant workers" and "discriminating against permanent residents"

also note that this wasn't about immigrants (who _are_ part of the native work force) but about visa holders

US beak pecks at RIAA's 'making available' filesharing attack

frymaster

@Jason Harvey

assuming the RIAA are right in the "making available" argument, the proof would be that they were, er, making the files available :P This is trivial to check in any current popular P2P system. Fortunately it would appear there argument is flawed :)

HSBC plugs hole that exposed site directory

frymaster

@AC re:security by obscurity

depends on your definition of "work". It means any flaws are hard to find. This is a good thing. It gives you more time to find and fix flaws, and means some flaws might never be discovered by baddies at all.

What it is NOT is a substiture for fixing and finding flaws. It's a barrier that will keep out rifraff and cause more determined attackers to take more time and possibly be more noticable. These are all good things.

The "security by obscurity" mantra only really applies where people use attempted obfuscation INSTEAD of other methods. and in some fields (cryptography) it is much more beneficial to expose your alogrithm to scrutiny to hammer out the bugs - but you still hide your key, don't you? ;)

Archos takes TV+ box up against Slingbox

frymaster
Happy

To be fair...

Opera will be charging _them_ :)

It works if you realise the archos ISN'T amazingly cheap, it's just modular... with all options and gizmos it costs the same as competitors. The advantage is, you just pay for the ones you want.

eg I have no interest in random apple-sponsored codecs, I transcode all my media before transfer and save myself the licensing fee

MS patch system poses 'significant risk', say researchers

frymaster

re: Other OSs

Wasn't there quite a severe (as in: actually exploited heavily) problem with either apache or ftp, where one middle-level paper-pusher involved in a distro pushed out a fix in advance of the agreed-on-with-other-distros time, resulting in the other distros getting severly hacked?

This is another reason for a monthly cycle - so everyone knows exactly when to update their machines(although the other - to help IT departments have a more regular testing cycle - is kinda at cross-purposes to this)

BBC should not pay for fibre, Ofcom tells MPs

frymaster

@all the people who don't understand how the internet (and residential broadband) works

the people saying "i pay for a certain amount of bandwidth, i should get it" don't actually understand how residential broadband works. It has _ALWAYS_ been up to blah speed in _bursts_, no full-on.... if you squint hard enough, you could consider even dial-up's phone-to-connect model as an extension to this. And who seriously expected ISPs to have one modem on the end of their phone line for every single customer subscribed?

My ISP is virgin media, which perhaps has less excuse, but as far as BT wholesale ISPs go... I believe the prices set by Ofcom mean that a 155Mbps link from BT's phone network to an ISP costs them more than a 10 gig link to Amsterdam... so while the BBC is paying for the "cheap" end of the link (datacentre end) the ISP is paying for the expensive end.

at the end of the day, if people insist on using a far higher proportion of their line than before, the only response by ISPs (apart from the finger-in-the-dyke traffic shaping moves) will be massively higher prices

Data pimping catches ISP on the hop

frymaster

what Phorm does

according to the leaked presentation, Phorm is also meant to only detect your opt-out after it gets to their server. ofc. if they then USED that data, even to collect nationwide info, they'd be in deep doo-doo (so Luther Blisset's assertion is wrong)

however, as has been pointed out, that isn't really the point. I don't want my data passing through their hands even if they cross-their-heart-hope-to-die promise not to look at it. Without bothering to look up which ISP of the 3 mentioned has done it, I believe Carphone Warehouse, as well as making their system opt-in, have been scrambling around redesigning the flow of data so that the opt-in/out cookie is read before the data is redirected to the profiler.

I'm on Virgin; I don't have a clue what they've decided to do yet because apart from a half-step away from Phorm ("we're very strongly considering it" as opposed to Phorm's "they're implementing it") nowt has been said yet. If it _does_ come in i'll be moving ISPs sharpish

Pirate Bay-probing cop on Warner Brothers payroll

frymaster

@mectron

OK, so you come across like evey other tedious blinkered activist ever, but if you practice what you preach then fair enough, I respect you. Except you don't. Point 3 is where you fall down.

"I don't like what I have to do to enjoy the fruits of someone else's creative effort, so I'm going to steal it"

Even if you are "sending money to the artists" it's still stealing. Distributors have to live too, y'know.

The thing that increasingly annoys me about digital piracy advocates is that their argument essentially boils down to "it's up to someone else to solve the problem we've created"

P2P searches touted as tool against child abuse

frymaster

@Charles King

Thank you, I was just about to write a rant along the same lines :)

@myxiplx: Congratulations, you've just reduced the efficiency of the bittorrent network by 6-8 times. More effort along those lines and there won't be a need for people to want to monitor it anyway.

On the subject of filenames... you can't go on content, or else you'd be arresting people who thought they were downloading disney animated classics and instead got the rickroll's older and nastier brother. But I would hope they'd ALSO download the file completely (or enough to check it anyway) to confirm the dubious contents.

Ballmer bitch slaps Vista

frymaster

To be fair...

...the list of reasons why SP1 might not be available in general seems to boil down to "you're using crap drivers / have monkeyed about with your system, and although you were lucky enough for it not to break so far, the changes in SP1 expose the latent crappiness"

re: SP1 "break"ing sophos... having used that....charming....piece of software before, i'd bet that it was always broken, it just didn't know it before

Microsoft teases mobile developers with 'big' Silverlight deals

frymaster

I've used flash, and I've user Silverlight...

...and I know which one I'd rather use

Hint: it is not available from adobe's website.

SQL string in URL exposes sex offender data

frymaster

The real WTF is...

...people talking about sanitising data, especially the AC who wants to call some J. Random escape_data($_GET['var']); function.

People's home-rolled data escaping functions are going to be around the same quality as the rest of PHP ie all over the place. What would be better is if there was a way to put variables into an SQL query without having to concatenate strings.

...oh wait, there is. Parameterised queries. Anyone assembling SQL queries by sticking random strings together, no matter how "escaped" they are, needs to be shot.

More generally, I tend to do only sanity checks on incoming data (is this date valid? etc.) and do content mangling (ie HTML tags) on the output. That way if my output methods change I don't have to undo whatever escaping I've stuck in in order to escape things the new way

Local council uses snooping laws to spy on three-year-old

frymaster

The difference between this council and others...

... is that this council used the relevant laws and documented what they did.

I bet any amount of money that almost every council uses at the very least "unofficial", ad-hoc, off-the-record just-going-to-park-my-van-here-for-a-bit methods to check stuff like this.

US student planned to ice Chuck Norris

frymaster

Queue / cue

It's cue, as in "the signal to perform an action"

Sarah Bee had the right spelling, just not the right definition

Carphone Warehouse stares down BPI and UK.gov on three strikes

frymaster

Re: Simplepieman

Did anyone mention ISPs monitoring information on behalf of the BPI? What I read was, the BPI wants ISPs to actually pay attention if the BPI supplies IPs and times for computers that are part of a torrent swarm for copyrighted material.

"Dunstone continued: "I cannot foresee any circumstances in which we would voluntarily disconnect a customer's account on the basis of a third party alleging a wrongdoing". So if someone posts child porn on my forums, and I provide server logs, IPs etc. they're going to tell me to get stuffed? If I find one of their IPs sending out virus spam they're going to tell me they're not interested?

All the BPI are saying is, "Here are our procedures for gathering evidence, if these meet with the ISPs approval we'd like a fast-track system so we don't have to start again from scratch every time we contact them"

The alternative would be the RIAA's way, where rather than letting the ISPs deal with it via a slap on the wrist, or make them go to one of the other multitude of ISPs, they apply to the courts, get your details from the ISP (note that under the "three strikes" system, the BPI need never know your personal details), and sue you.

Given that downloading the stuff they are talking about is, in fact, illegal, I find it surprising so many people are moaning about having to face the consequences of their actions. And I speak as a frequent user of bittorrent with virgin media as my ISP.

(I'm not saying that some of my downloads are illegal, but I don't play WoW, you only need game patches once, and how many ISOs of linux would one person need?)

Adobe to remove Photoshop pic pimping clause

frymaster

As thrilling as all the paranoia is...

...has anyone considered incompetance and miscommunication?

Adobe developers build web photo service, adobe devs ask laywers for the terms of use. Lawyer thinks "oh, we're publishing their photos, we need the right to do so", sticks that and any other related rights he thinks are, or might be, needed (he's not too sure exactly what this service does or will or might do) and punts it back to the devs. The devs briefly skim over the terms of use but don't look too closely because a) noone ever does, and b) they aren't lawyers anyway. Result: something that implies things the people making policy wouldn't want it to, had they thought about it or known about it.

Witness the Apple Safari on Windows lawyer-speak that said you could only install it on apple computers. Or what about tech support departments that don't know what's going on in their own ISPs? (Or indeed, the outsourcing of tech support and managers' belief that it doesn't actually reduce quality).

No big company EVER does anything with one mind, legal fictions notwithstanding. Personally I find the idea that this sort of thing is all down to lack of communication a lot more terrifying than any conspiracy would be

So what's the easiest box to hack - Vista, Ubuntu or OS X?

frymaster

The setup will be key

If all it's doing is sitting on the 'net - and not being used - XP SP2 is pretty secure - the firewall may not be very powerful but it's up to the job of stopping unsolicited incoming connections, until the spyware you pick up off some dodgy website punches large holes through it, at least. I can't imagine Vista is much different.

Conversely, Ubuntu comes with no firewall configured. The blessing and curse of linux - configurability - means that it doesn't come with, say, firestarter, because some people (like, er, me) like to hand-hack their iptables scripts, and some other people don't want a firewall at all. (Funny how the blessing and curse of linux is the curse and blessing of windows, eh?)

Personally my gut instinct (that and a second mortgage will get you a cup of coffee at Kosta) is that a well-tuned ubuntu box is more secure than windows, that ubuntu is not tuned specifically for security out of the box, that ubuntu is easier to tune than windows, and that windows is fairly well tuned out of the box.

The question is, how are most net-connected machines out in the wild configured?

How big an eco-hazard is IT equipment?

frymaster

@Greg Fleming

Yes, in aggregate 1-watt standby is pretty bad. The point is, in aggregate a lot of other things are both a) worse, _AND_ b) potentially easier to sort out*. And, as intimated, the carbon footprint of zero-watt standby production may be higher.

The 'green' car tax grabs that don't add up

frymaster

@Conspiracy

"I'll tell you what it is. Public transport is shite in the UK because it suits the Government for it to be shite."

Yes, because they've nothing better to do in Parliament all day than interfere with local politics.

I had this blinding inspiration, so decided to live in a CITY. Specifically, the same city where I work. These "cities" have this wonderful invention called a "bus". My brother has a car because he does river kayaking at the weekend. He uses the buses during the week - it's cheaper, and faster, and you don't have to park.

Now if only most people lived in cities, we could have public transport... oh, hang on a minute, they do.

Portsmouth student peeled in potato laptop scam

frymaster

"You can't con an honest man"

Yes you can!

It's just harder; both to con them, and to find one first. Hence no-one bothers

Dear ISP, I am not a target market

frymaster

Apparently, and other alleged truths

Apparently, each page is only analysed to find the categories, and then thrown away, so you can tell someone's been looking at car related sites but not that their mid-life crisis is kicking in and they're about to buy a Porche.

I have to say, if I wanted some random low-life scum to start skimming my browsing habits, this is the least privacy infringing way to do it. But I don't.

Also apparently, this data will only be used to target ads that Phorm would be sending to your browser anyway, instead of making it random. But they also say they have the ability to add to the stream, but apparently will only do this if they think there's a phishing risk. Apparently, they won't insert their ads into pages or replace competitors ads with their own.

Apparently

Two centuries of Hansard to move online

frymaster

RE:What happend to 2005-2008 then?

I'm wondering what your agenda is here. As I look on their site (6pm 6th of March) They have stuff up from after 8pm on the 5th. What exactly is it you feel is not put online fast enough?

Tool makes mincemeat of Windows passwords

frymaster

Re: Frank Bitterlich's comment, and benefits of this over boot CD approach

So Frank's comment implies this situation is securable on all platforms? Surprised at least one of them hasn't done it by now than.

All you need to retrieve passwords etc. from a laptop is firewire connected to a linux (prolly, any) system... at least some iPods can run linux and have firewire ports... this would beat the hell out of that boot disc memory reading attack for getting hdd encryption keys out of a locked laptop. Someone leaves the room, you connect up your iPod to the lapop, unplug it from the mains, and scarper with it while it's busy getting all the passwords. Well before the battery runs dead you'll have all you need.

And note that changing the password with a boot CD a) wouldn't give you hdd encryption password, and b) would invalidate any autocomplete password entries someone's got in IE (not sure about FF, but I bet you could get whatever you needed to bypass its encryption also) which makes it easier and faster to exploit anything this guy has access to.

IE8 to follow web standards by default

frymaster

@Jeremy

"So now i have to code for IE 6 & IE 7, in addition to the standards browsers which i was coding for anyway... now i have IE6, IE7 IE8 and the standards browsers."

There's a _fully_ standards compliant broswer? Tell me quick, I've been stuck with Firefox and Opera...

... and the point is, no, you don't have to code against all of them. If IE6 compatability is such an issue for you, write one version of your styling that works with firefox/opera, one version that works with ie6 quirks, and use a) conditional comments and b)ie8 renderer selection to ensure that a) the workarounds only appear on ie, and b) all versions of ie will render it the same (i believe if you're in quirks mode ie7 behaves like ie6 anyway)

I would also note that people who equate "standards-compliant" with either the most popular versions of firefox OR opera, are asking for as much trouble as people who only test webpages with IE6

Jimbo Wales dumps lover on Wikipedia

frymaster

People talking about wiki bashing are missing the point

Yes, of course it ain't perfect. The question is, what does it do about it's imperfections?

And in this case, I do _NOT_ mean "low quality articles", I mean how does it handle disputes, conflicts, etc.

And the answer, for a site promoting the hell out of its egalitarianism is, not very well. It seems to me to be insanely cliquey in its upper levels, and any time certain especially favoured or reviled people are involved in conflicts, any notion of consitency and impartiality goes out the window. This goes double for Jimbo, who practices classic hit-and-run management style ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/08.html )

Virgin Media taps Microsoft in lengthy email outage

frymaster

VM's current setup

Incoming SMTP goes via the EXIM front servers, to the spam filtering servers, to the Exchange SMTP servers (mix of 2000 and 2003 at the moment)

To the person who can't work out how to configure the anti-spam - it's off the options part of the webmail system.

This is the only reason I personally use squirrelmail, the availability of plugins to control extras like spam settings

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