* Posts by Oliver Burkill

24 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Mar 2008

Graphite core? There are other ways to monitor your operation's heart

Oliver Burkill

Drop in replacement

InfluxDB can be used as a drop in replacement and is supioror in ever respect including paid support options.

123-Reg drowns in ongoing DDoS tsunami

Oliver Burkill

Re: Kicked in immediately

You can't sign up for a DDOS protection service in 40 miutes when you run your own datacentres and multi-homed network. It just doesn't work like that. I would guess they changed their BGP announcements so that some or all of the traffic was routed via their parent companies DC in Germany where it could be more effectivly filtered. a 40 minute turn around for that is not bad,

Google doesn’t care who makes Android phones. Or who it pisses off

Oliver Burkill

Like Tizen ? Which comes with support of the Linux foundation.

UK web host 123-Reg goes TITSUP, customer servers evaporate

Oliver Burkill

Re: Haters Gonna Hate, but...

Thjey were bought by the saem group that owns 123-reg and Heart ant the beginning of the year.

http://www.host-consult.net/internet-industry/paragon-internet-group-acquired-by-heg/

Heart Internet in 22-hour TITSUP after data centre power stuffup

Oliver Burkill

Re: Might be tempting fate, but...

Heart Internet was bought by Host Europe Group a couple of years ago so although their offices are in nottingham they use HEG's Leeds data centre along with 123-reg who where also affected by the outage.

90% of their data probably does go via London but they do peer at ixLeeds.

Verisign warns new dot-word domains could make internet unstable

Oliver Burkill

Bog off Verisign.

The root zone is about 80 KB. I'm not concerned that is going to break the internet.

Customers RAGE after Webfusion goes TITSUP

Oliver Burkill

Interesting you should say that as Fasthost had what seems to be a very similar outage (Massive DDOS against DNS) last week.

I think Botnet owner demonstrating power to take down UK hosts to potential customers.

Snooptastic US CELL TOWERS pose man-in-the-middle THREAT

Oliver Burkill
Pirate

"it’s still pretty secure." - Nope

Once you have torrented 2Tb of rainbow tables you can crack GSM pretty reliably and you can capture the traffic with a £10 USB TV tuner. I don't think that counts as "pretty secure"

VMware seeks patent for IM chats between servers and sysadmins

Oliver Burkill

Archipel already does this.

http://archipelproject.org

You can see a demo of at 3:05 of the front page video.

Silk Road 2.0 busted! At least two arrests as federal crackdown begins

Oliver Burkill

Re: It's all good

All drugs should be controlled. I believe we should have stronger controls on alcohol as one of the most dangerous, addictive and socially harmful drugs available.

Criminalizing drugs is not an effective means of controlling them.. Heroin and other opiates would be the first drugs I would control properly with some kind of legal framework to as far as possible destroy the illicit market.

You say drugs are not good for you but almost all of the downsides are related to the distribution and use being criminalized. The health issues with heroin given a pure supply and administered properly are constipation and physical dependance, compare that to alcohol which can also cause physical dependance but has a massive list of other health issues it causes that are much worse than constipation. While heroin is certainly more addictive than alcohol that's not the main reason that many more heroin users become addicted. Alcohol has been tolerated legally and socially for generations and the rules and customs of it's relatively safe use are built into the fabric of our society. Where alcohol has been introduced into cultures without that share understanding it is almost as disruptive as heroin can be. In our society alcohol has been controlled properly but the control of heroin use is in the hands of sociopaths with predictable results.

Oliver Burkill

Re: It's all good

No, more "scum" on the street as that's were dealing will move back to if it proves impossible to carry out online. You can't win the drugs war.

Kerching! Nominet preps for cash AVALANCHE from shorter UK domain names

Oliver Burkill

To be fair Nominet is a not for profit company.

Who's hogging Amazon's cloud CPUs? I'll kill 'em ... oh, look, it was me

Oliver Burkill

Re: Frankly ...

People list it, because employers ask for it.

Zombie PC herders issue commands from Tor hideout

Oliver Burkill

Re: What legit TOR traffic will a company ever use ?

By default tor relays use port 443, it's indistinguishable from standard https traffic.

Massive DDoS attack blasts 123-reg offline

Oliver Burkill

Re: @MJG

Phone number and address are on the site in the contact us section, however it's only displayed once you have clicked to say yes you have checked the online knowledge base.

Softphones strangled by smartphone battery life

Oliver Burkill
Stop

Re: Shoretel's real problem

Not my experience at all.

I work in a contact center with about 150 users on a Shortel system. No complaints about call quality at all.

Yes, when the Shoretel rep is next in I will point to this comment and demand a free pint.

Bitcoin collapses on malicious trade

Oliver Burkill
Gimp

article not accurate

The value of bitcoin was not driven to 0. All the buy orders on the Mtgox exchange where fulfilled by a large sale (half a million coins not 60 as stated) leaving the price they you could sell at on that exchange at 0. Trades on the exchange are all internal and no actual bitcoin transaction take place. The hacker was only able to transfer out $1000 because due to cash out limits at the exchange.

MtGox has suffered a a CSRF vulnerability, DDOS attack and now account information leaked through SQL injection. None of this has any thing to do with the security or (long term) stability of bitcoins. Mtgox was a one man show run as a hobby. Newer exchanges, notably tradehill, are run by professionally teams with relevant industry experience.

The recent "heist" was the theft of someone unencrypted wallet file. The official bitcoin client should make managing wallet.dat files easier but individuals do not have to "implement personal security better than the likes of Sony, Nintendo or RSA can manage". Simply keeping the bulk of your cash on offline storage such as USB sticks makes it quite safe from theft.

Game stocks shops with Tesco 3DS consoles

Oliver Burkill
Alert

VAT

On preowned they only have to pay VAT on the profit they make. this will be worked out on on there overall expenditure and income on preowned not on a per item basis. They will not be ale to claim VAT back on the purchases of courses..

Open sourcers urged to adopt dancing poultry license

Oliver Burkill
Happy

PR gold

If I were a star up software I would deliberately break this license for the massive online exposure it would give me when my company did the chicken dance. I would ham it up of course wearing a suit and looking uncomfortable. Then I would issue a statement saying I was very sorry and would abide by the license. Once again gaining massive positive publicity.

Computacenter wins bus contract

Oliver Burkill

the maths

14 million divided by 5500 = 2 545.45455

Amazon does video game trade-ins

Oliver Burkill
Go

physical media will not die

we will not lose physical media any time soon because:

* emerging markets need phsical media. india, eastern europe and south america are potentially huge markets but dont have the infrastructure for digital distribution.

* some people move residence often (eg students) making download only very unatractive

* many people have chaotic finances that do not allow for the monthly contracts broadband requires (look how popular PAYG mobiles are)

* gifting is a huge part of the games market. people want somthing to wrap up.

Secondhand is arguably helpful to the industry because:

* many people who buy full price games only because they know they can sell them on.

* many people who buy full price games relied on second hand when younger and poorer

* people will take risks on less mainstream games if they know they can trade them in.

* without second hand there would be few specialist game shops. leaving supermarkets selling just a smll range, very unhealthy.

Minister urges end to videogame rating feud

Oliver Burkill

@aaargh

lots of my staff also get very frustrated when parents buy 18 games for kids.

I think its because they have been filled with all sorts of dark warnings of what will happen if they sell an 18 game to someone underage.

It actually doesn't bother me if a parent buy an 18 game for a kid. the BBFC is clear and they are making an informed decision. all kids are different and at the end of the day parents should have a choice. If they are "bad " parents we cant really legislate for that directly.

If little Jhonny is pulling the wool over their parents eyes then retailers should bring it to their attention, but we should not have an opinion on their decision.

Oliver Burkill

BBFC all the way

Ive worked in a game shop 8 years I often talk to parents on this issue. The answer is obvious to me, BBFC is the right choice, PEGI is clearly designed by a committee of do gooders and a waste of time.

PEGI is just not noticed by parents. The pictograms are useless. Parents don't see a small black and white picture of a syringe or gender logos and know that means drugs content or sexual content, it really just doesn't happen ever. Even if they did there is no indication of the strength of the "bad" content. What parents really want is simple age guidance. PEGI does offer this but parents just assume the 3+ PEGI logo means its aimed at 3 year olds and get confused when I suggest simtrain might be to difficult for their 3 year old, they then point at the logo...

BBFC on the other hand gives nice big colour logos that parents instantly recognize. Normally on the back it will give a concise explanation of why that rating has been given. eg contains strong and bloody violence. BBFC is also legally enforceable giving gamers a defense against those who seek to censor games.

Exec sounds death knell for games consoles

Oliver Burkill

physical media will not die

Two reasons why I think physical media wont die out soon.

Emerging markets, We may well have the infrastructure in this country for most games to move online, but their are huge potential markets where that does not exist. India, China and eastern Europe.

Gifting, A large percentage of game purchases are gifts, many people will be resistant to virtual gifts.