Posts by Paul Hatch

Anons hack Asteroids into US DoJ website in Swartz death protest

Re: 0day Rules always Win Win .....

As their irc servers are usually compromised and feds monitoring, the longer they wait to publish the key, the greater the chance of the keyholder getting picked up.

The key must be in very limited circulation else it would have leaked already. They aint gonna get anything out of the gov, certainly not until they start taking people out like they did with the BART expose.

Any evidence of dirt that will stick to that bunch of DC swamp

dwellers should just be published one a day working up the dc foodchain.

Google may face grilling by MPs over 'immoral' tax avoidance

Re: I think it is about time

The loopholes you speak of relates to VAT, not corporation tax.

There are 2 forms of sales relating to Google, The first is sale of google services (advertising is the only one based in UK), the other is shopping and as a payment processor. In these cases Google acts merely as an agent of the seller and would charge the seller VAT on commision (not the sale price).

The £6m coporation tax, the UK treasury should count themselves lucky they got that. Large sums of revenue would be channeled out of the country legally in charges made by the parent on its UK subsiduary to cover the cost of services UK users are using. Without these services, there is no UK revenue generated. It is entirely up to the parent company how much they charge their subsiduaries and how much they leave as local profit.

Office for ARM will lack features, report claims

More Important than missing functionality is....

So what if the Arm version of Office does not support Macros.

There is a more important issue when it comes to 'mobile' or any 'cutdown' version of a full application that is marketed by the same company that is acknowledged by them as missing functionality of it's parent application.

What happens when a document generated on the parent app and utilizing functions not present on other versions is exportrd to them?

If the Arm version does not support macros, will it just ignore them or will it strip them from the file? Similarly elements such as tables of contents, indexes etc. If they are stripped out of the document, it makes updating a document from anything but the full desktop version a futile and pointless exercise and fails to give any benefit over any 3rd party app on the mobile platform capable of importing MS Office files.

For Arm or mobile variants of MS Office apps to be worth anything, If they do only offer a subset of the desktop functionality, they must retain the unsupported elements within the file to allow subsequent editting on the desktop with minimal remedial work to account for the mobile edits (such as updating TOCs.

EA sues Zynga over ripping off Sims Social

Not the first EA game copied

This isnt the first act of EA game cloning on Zynga's part

A few years ago Zynga released a short lived game called Rollercoaster Kingdom which was a direct cut down copy of the old PC/Amiga game Theme Park, even the graphics were near identical with customers arriving on a bus etc.

The game was actually quite playable until Zynga started adding hooks into the gameto try and monitize it, that was when user levels dropped and it met the axe some months later.

Now that EA actually have a presence on facebook and Zynga has a far higher profile EA seems to bekeeping a closer eye on what Zynga are up to.

Cruel new punishment for hackers: Twitter, Facebook bans

Reality check

The major flaw in this is enforcement.

Yes they can ban people under their real names but when stirring things up they never use real name accounts anyway.

In reality they force a deemed miscreant into setting up new accounts under yet another pseudonym. This is a double edge sword in itself. If the miscreant is left to continue using their existing accounts, it is far easier for the authorities to monitor them.

That said, once caught, they are far more likely to set up new accounts off their own back to shake the authorities off.

Just an idiot politician wanting to sound tough with no way of enforcing it.

HTC's iPhone, iPad ban bid derailed by US judge

Of course Apple innovates.

Only they could dream of charging you twice the price for a 10 inch netbook minus keyboard, installing a proprietry OS, locking you to their app store.

Judge OKs warrantless tracking of suspect's cellphone

Surely anyone who really wants to mask their location for the purpose of wrong doing is going to use a PAYG phone/sim in a false name and as a precaution leaving his 'named' mobile somewhere that would support a potential alibi

IP registry goes to Defcon 1 as IPv4 doomsday nears

Natting unis

Natting uni networks might also solve their alleged piracy problem the RIAA are always bleating about a then at least 1 person on campus would have to buy any cd copied :-)

Governments stonewall interwebs porn domain

Will lead to more porn NOT

How did they work that one out.

I doubt even the porn industry wants a .xxx TLD

As If some pied piper is going to migrate most of the porn onto its own TLD as pressure would then be applied to ISPs to block the TLD.

So I doubt BigJugs.com will be selling large coffee mugs or Tankards anytime soon

Pro-Wikileaks hacktivistas in DDoS dustup with patriot contras

Mastercard is Current Target

Mastercard's worldwide site is now down.

Dosing The Anonymous chatroom has little effect.

Firstly Current target IP address is posted far and wide so any numpty can put the address into LOIC manually. Secondly, The way the botnet is set up, Machines that are on the botnet will continue to hit a target until the central hub switches them off or supplies a new target. Dosing the bot hub merely locks the attack onto its existing target, currently Mastercard.

WikiLeaks re-taunts feds with US Amazon mirrors

DDOS attacks

In light of wikileaks having been hit a few times by ddos attacks they are I believe also releasing via the piratebay

So all in other than a few ddos attacks they sit on their hands rather than being seen to fail miserably at taking wikileaks down

Fossett aircraft contains 'minimal' human remains

As for the "coyotes did it" theory

you would expect at least skeletal remains unless he survived the initial crash as I would assume he was strapped into the pilot's seat and those belts are hard enough for humans to undo let alone coyotes or other scavengers.

HMV lines up a few VAT-free CDs and DVDs

From their own premise ?

I can see the vat wheeze working if you purchased over the net from your own home, but it does seem to be sailing close to the wind doing it from a terminal in their own store.

Effectively the transaction is taking place in UK HMV premises so I would expect vat to apply irrespective of where the goods are coming from.

Wasnt the differentiation between where the goods/service is supplied from v where the transaction takes place addressed in the issue of AOL's vat avoidance?

Eurofighter at last able to drop bombs, but only 'austerely'

Even the Tornado wasnt this late.

While the article implies the RAF are wanting changes/updates, that is about par for the course.

The plane was designed in the 80s is overr 20 years in the making and only now going into service.

Usually a military jet in an ideal world has a lifespan of 20-25 years and usually has a midlife update either half way through that lifespan, or after a war where they are reminded how out of date the aircraft's systems are.

With the sort of lead times being acheived, It seems no surprise if the RAF are already asking for changes.

BT starts threatening music downloaders with internet cut-off

They'll never win

As the BPI are not getting your details and the ISP is dealing with the matter internally, they are committing commercial suicide. As pointed out, hardcore sharers can block detection and casual downloaders if cut off will just move to another ISP by which time they will have wised up and gen up on how not to get caught. The only loser being the ISP that cooperates who will lose business both departing customers and others avoiding them.

As Ive mentioned before in a previous thread, it is futile trying to hit p2p when people at work/school/college can pass around 1TB HDs stuffed full of music or burning MP3 DVDs. Putting it in context, when the majors were having kittens over Napster, when it closed it only had 3-4TB and much of that was duplicates.

Dont know why I just thought about it but while a kid in the 70s my parents ran a pub. One day some busybody from either the BPI or Performing Rights Soc came in asking if my mum had a license to play music from the radio/cassette in public. She simply picked up the radio from behind the bar, moved it to the cellar next door, turned up the volume and left the door open. The radio was now being played in private, the fact it could be heard in public was incidental. In all the device had moved little more than 3ft. He gave up and walked off :-)

Force listeners onto DAB by killing FM

Save the Planet - Stick with FM

DAB chipsets chew up battery power like it is going out of fashion and for that reason alone is impractical for portable radios.

Unlike Digital TV, common digital radio standards are more important, especially within continental blocks such as North America, the EU etc. They cant even agree digital standards within the EU and so would require multistandard radios just to ensure your radio doesnt go silent driving between London and frankfurt (A journey I used to do regularly)

Trying to combat that problem without pan continental standards agreements by using multistandard radios is not only expensive but unworkable as there would be no control over different countries modifying their standards at different times.

Oh and the audio quality for anything other than talk radio is crap.

UK clamps down on bus-spotting terror menace

Two things spring to mind.

firstly, while easy to ridicule 'geeks' and their hobbies, It can often be only with hindsight that people see the value of their geekish activity as in time it can form a valuable historical and social document not of interest to the mass media of the day. The likes of Ivo Peters spring to mind who spent much of his life photographing and filming what was then contemporary public transport. Most noteably planes and trains. The collection he built up throughout his life is now considered to be of historic value. The collection of 16mm colour films he shot of the now defunct Somerset and Dorset line back in the days of steam has been the subject of a BBC TV series.

The other point was that its not that long ago that the Greek Authorities were ridiculed for similar over reaction to a group of British planespotters.

Apple blocks cheaper UK iPod sales

Blame the EU

Sadly Apple has the weight of EU law behind them, remember the cheap Levis in tesco?

EU law actually protects company distribution rights etc. Under EU law it is ok for a retailer to source goods from elsewhere within the EU but not parallel import from outside the EU.

Companies will say that it is to protect their regional licensing deals and they do exploit the situ by charging the maximum each market will bear.

The EU on the other hand seems happy to go along with it as they milk the consumer too, as their high taxes (vat, fuel, imcome taxes and import duties, property taxes etc) make EU retail prices uncompetitive anyway and so the EU governments put their snouts in the same corporate trough to protect their own tax revenue streams. The only loser is the consumer.

BBC vs ISPs: Bandwidth row escalates as Tiscali wades in

And what about the elephant in the room

Its a bit rich ISPs taking a pop at the BBC which is merely one of thousands of content providers or for that matter users for daring to use their broadband connection.

They should be addressing the real villian of the peace, BT who under invests in their network and grossly overcharges for both backhaul and their final mile monopoly.

Most of the final mile is over copper wire never intended for data transfer. Most people wouldnt dream of using twisted pairs of that poor quality for a 5 metre network cable let alone using it for 6km runs to the nearest exchange, burying it in the ground and letting it rot for 50 years and still expect it to carry 21st century data services.

ISPs should be complaining about BTs pricing, demanding the upgrade of the final mile to fibre in the first instance to the street cabinets and the cost and rollout speed of unbundled exchanges.

Alarm bells should be ringing as BTs 21CN upgrade is too little too late and compaired to what some countries are doing, already 10yrs out of date and fails to address the delapidated final mile.

ISPs should be well aware that demand and expectation for bandwidth is going to track the advances in IT, moores law and should structure their network upgrades and pricing accordingly and BT should be beaten over the head to do the same.