Posts by David McQuillan

Gay-bashing cult plans picket of Steve Jobs funeral

The can picket me when I die

I'd be only too happy to join in the company of Jobs by being picketed by the Westboro Church when I die

New NASA model: Doubled CO₂ means just 1.64°C warming

dmcq

Reduce warming by, not to. Big difference

IWF pulls Wikipedia from child porn blacklist

Censorship tags

I contribute to Wikipedia and I do not agree with Jimmy Wales in what he said. The Register should not confuse Wikipedia and him. Censorship is different around the world, for all I know soon in Britain it'll be back to Victorian times with ankles being covered up again - will we then want wikipedia not to show any images of ankles? Personally I think the articles should be tagged with markers for various types of self censorship and if a nanny state like Britain then wants to block stuff instead it can.

Scorpions tale leaves IWF exposed

Starting to use encryption

My editing of wikipedia got disrupted by this censorship stupidity so I now use https. I dislike this control freak government intensely with its scaremongering and hate fermenting, the way they want to tag everyone and pry into everybodys' business at a detailed level, put cameras everywhere track the cars and mobile phones,listen in to conversations read email collect web browsing history etc etc. I guess soon even https will be intercepted if it isn't so already so they can monitor us real time even with that and they'll ban us from encrypting things any other way because anyone might be a terrorist or pervert. The stazi were only playing at being secret police, how can one be proud of and want to be part of such a society?

Info commissioner says comms database is leap too far

Put a microphone in every house

Surely we need microphones installed in every room in every house in the country and every few square yards elsewhere. Law abiding people need fear nothing from this but law breakers beware! Every word you terrorists,paedophiles, and scum haranguers at party conferences will be stored in the 10*21 byte/sec database. Future enhancements will include extnding the curren visible and infra red video surveillance to sitting rooms bedrooms toilets and any other place crime may be committed.

IBM's eight-core Power7 chip to clock in at 4.0GHz

I could use that

I was just working out how much power I needed to do a nice display in real time of something recently and it came to about 4TB of memory and 100 teraflop of processor power. How soon until I can buy one for £1000? :)

Dancing to power London nightclub

Brilliant idea

To the one saying they are idiots - the idea of a sprung floor is to absorb the energy of impact safely so people aren't injured. Some should be returned to give lift to the dancer but 100% rebound is for bouncy castles. Great idea, hope the feel is good, it might encourage proper dancing. Most illuminated dance floors are rock hard to protect the lights and people shuffle around barely lifting their feet.

Street View spycar prowls Inverness

Surely they can hide people?

I know they are talking about recognising and smudging peoples faces, but surely with modern hardware one cold fairly easily compare multiple photos while driving along and remove everything that moves? It could build 3D models as well as it goes along too. It wouldn't do anything about the M25 in rush hour but at least it would leave the faces on statues.

Trousers Brown: Blighty faces 'food security' threat

Does talking emit greenhouse gasses?

I was wondering what he was up to, was it all just more hot air? It looks like he wants to force GM crops on us, probably to please some friends of Bush I'd guess. What worries me is how successful he has been getting his ideas through with his scare tactics. Rational discussion has completely gone out the window.

AVG disguises fake traffic as IE6

Sounds like a good vector for virus writers

Forget about the javascript passing back a clean page to AVG - the obvious path for a virus writer is to find a bug in AVG's code. That way they can install a virus every time anyone using AVG does a search which returns a page with a link to a hacked site in it. If AVG are stupid enough to include this 'feature' they're certainly stupid enough to have easy bugs in their code.

New code strategies to fight side-channel attack

Comparing against encripted form

Hopefully very few people have a plain password to compare with! What I think they meant is the compare with an encrypted and hidden password. If this uses a string compare then comparing the process time allows one to determine it a byte at a time by going through passwords that encrypt with one byte at a time in order changed - so a 10 byte encrypted password just needs 2560 probes. Of course generating such weird passwords takes some work but even a dictionary of the first 4 characters probably would indicate the general form for a lot of passwords.