Posts by docjekill

Google pays $51.7m for newspaper destruction metaphor

Re:Speed of light????

Electricity and vacuum? Hello?

I take it you didn't pay too much attention when someone, say, at school, talked about these things, right...? It is *light* that travels at the speed of light in a vacuum and slower elsewhere (which doesn't matter much as most of the universe actually *is* a vacuum) - electricity, on the other hand, travels in conductive materials, which, for the most part, are rather dense... Metal, for example...

Now, funnily enough, it has been discovered, that electricity can be made to travel faster if the wire it runs on is frozen... which makes the Arctic a rather fitting place.

But to get to the actual point: Surely, data centres built in the Arctic would be using data links based on fibre optics, not electricity? Thus getting us back to (almost) speed of light - the (almost) being due to fibre optic cables not being vacuums...

To the original poster regarding ping-speed: I dare suggest that ping speeds from the Arctic would suffer no more than, say, ping speeds anywhere else across the globe. The Arctic, as it happens, is a lot closer to e.g. the UK than is any place in California. We still manage to connect to servers in California just fine, though. A few ms slower than servers in London, true, but what can you expect...?

I would concur with those who suggested that availability of administrators (swapping out dead servers only every few weeks still requires someone around in general...) and the like is an issue. And electricity is not going to be cheap in the Arctic area, either - for lack of it, mostly.

New Scientist goes innumerate in 'save the planet' special

Singing for <strike>Jesus</strike> the Economy

Ok, Parax demands someone pick a hole in the singing example. Well, here goes: It's not actually producing anything of sustainable value. You are turning something without material cost (your voice) into something without material value (a song). Can be done without much magic any day of the week.

But then, you'll say, how come people pay for it!? Well, to be honest, that really is a puzzling question. How many people have bought the winning singles from X-Factor over the years? Loads, I would suggest, given the fact that it is being tried every year again. How many are still proud owners of the winning X-Factor single of, say, three years ago? (I can't for the life of me remember what it was and must, therefore, resign myself to not call it by name)

So, people spent money on something (come to think of it, even for music, resources are actually <strike>wasted</strike> used, for CD production, distribution, recording, etc) which, ahem, did not exactly keep its value... Burning money on nothing is not actually creating wealth, though, is it? For the people involved with the original production, of course, but the purchasers do not get to keep something of equal value. So there is no overall improvement. Which we did not expect from X-Factor anyway.

And now for the actual article, which clearly hails a "dead Reg" icon: Every bit of human experience is that we improve design, yes, but in overall terms increase consumption all the same. You make CPUs faster and cheaper - yet their increased sale increases total use.

By simply claiming that improvements in a single unit of anything clearly means growth can be reached without additional resource consumption is ignoring the bleeding obvious: Growth first and foremost means increasing numbers. There was a time when a computer filled a whole room and had next to no computing power and memory, no graphics, no storage and no sound. I bet, it was a resource hog, too.

Still, at the time, all the computers in the world didn't use nearly as much electricity to run as the computers in a single medium-sized company will today. Despite the current ones being so much more efficient individually.

Scale up any other development in the world and you'll find the same thing. Yes, we improve the designs. Efficiency means less consumption per unit - but the increase in units always makes up for it. More than.

And one final thought on music: There was a time when music was heard by making it. You played in the privacy of your own home. You went to a concert, possibly directed by Mozart of Beethoven themselves. And the energy spent on making the music was nil beyond the living requirements of the musicians.

These days, people have massive audio systems, likely in more than one room in their house, in all of their cars and if they are out and about, iPods and their competitors will happily sap away some batteries' power to play music straight into their ear canals. And you are going to say that growth (i.e. the sale of all those things, because growth is measured in sales values) comes without an increase in resource consumption?

Reading privacy policies takes 10 minutes on average

"not even to keep us out of prison"

Ah, yes, that certainly would have been read in less than 10 minutes - but could you honestly have stuck to the letter of the policy, I wonder...?

Black helicopter, because, well, yeah...

Sky Broadband puts the fault into default Wi-Fi security

@Cracking WEP

Firstly, it is important to note that aircrack and aircrack-ng are two different things. You want the "-ng"! Secondly, you also want -z option available in more recent versions of aircrack-ng, which has the "break 128bit WEP with just 40,000 IVs option". That feature is not available in backtrack2, yet, though. And even if it was, that would not help with your unfortunate choice of chipset, anyway, because backtrack is simply a Linux system that boots off a CD and not a magical solution to having the wrong hardware.

In the end, I found it easier to setup a Debian system with exactly the stuff I need than dealing with backtrack2. If your chipset *is* functioning nicely for injection, the patched drivers are out there available for download already.

I find it necessary to point out that I do WEP cracking for testing purposes only and always only attempt breakins into networks I own or administrate...!

RE: Have you tried to crack WEP

Yes, I have. Not 64bit, actually, I only tried 128bit. On a near-silent network it takes a few minutes to pick up enough IVs to start injecting your own. After that 128bit WEP can be done in under five minutes using the current aircrack-ng. And I am twice as old as your 15yo script kiddie.

The simple truth is, you don't need to hang around to get into a protected network - you create the necessary traffic yourself. And 40,000 IVs will do even for WEP128 with current cracking software. I encourage reading the tutorials on aircrack-ng's website. It's not difficult to do if all you need is in one place...!

And for Paolo and Matt: It's much more interesting using someone's wireless network who believes themselves to be secure rather than using the already unprotected one. Granted, unprotected is easier (and thus will be used often enough by someone else), but owners of protected networks have things like network shares and all sorts of other things they find they can "trust" their own network with...