Posts by Richard Neill

Reding's 'right to be forgotten' bill polarises Euro biz world

Right to be forgotten: what about credit reference agencies?

Does the right to be forgotten include the right to have unflattering data removed. For example, can a person with a poor credit record force the credit rating agency to delete it? What about the right to be removed from CCTV footage? Or the right to have one's data-retention-act-mandated logs deleted.

Or even giving some teeth to the rules on criminal records expiring (many police forces aren't good enough about this).

This law might do some good if it were targeted at government and commercial agencies, rather than just at facebook.

Aside: would it also make companies fish out their backup tapes to delete data from them...

Android-powered goggles bring virtual reality closer

Relativistic Goggles

What would be really awesome is if we could use these to experience a changed reality. For example, one reason special relativity is hard to grasp is that we can't actually perceive it. So how about using these to let us walk about in a world in which the speed-of-light is reduced to 30mph...

Ideally, I want to walk around in the real-world, and have the computer calculate the effects for me...

Anyone who has read "Mr. Tompkins in Paperback" will know what I mean

Laptop display pixel counts to quadruple in 2012

QXGA would be nice

I upgraded my T60p with a 15" 2048×1536 panel, which is a wonderful device, but had to be found from new-old-stock, last made in about 2005. The best thing is that it includes a decent amount of vertical space too. Why is it so hard for manufacturers to offer a decent screen-height these days?

Stallman: Did I say Jobs was evil? I meant really evil

Patents really are immoral

Locking down your own platform is wrong, but at least consumers have a choice.

But using a patent for anything other than self-defense is immoral. Asserting patent "rights" is an attack on freedom of thought, and to use this legal weapon is unjust and hypocritical (if you stand on the shoulders of giants, you don't deserve to monopolise your own microscopic incremental invention).

Let's be clear: just because it is legal doesn't make it right. It was once legal to own people as property, but decent human beings chose not to have slaves. Likewise, choosing not to assert a patent is choosing not to to assert an unjust power over the independent thought of another.

Stallman may be a gadfly; he is frequently tactless; but I've never known him be wrong yet...

Why modern music sounds rubbish

Compression knob?

Why don't more mp3/ogg players/car-radios feature a compression knob as well as a volume knob? When I listen to classical music on an aircraft or an audio-book on a train, I want to crush the dynamic range, to compete with the background noise but not be deafened. But I want to hear the same music with full range on my home HiFi.

El Reg to unleash rocket-powered spaceplane

Diffusion

Hydrogen forms H2 molecules, which are much larger than He atoms. This should mean that the diffusion problem is less for hydrogen than for helium.

World Health Organization: Mobile phone cancer risk 'possible'

Microwaves and wifi

I actually did the opposite: with a (new) microwave, and a strong wifi signal, I put the netbook inside the microwave to see what happened. (Obviously I didn't turn on the microwave!). With the door ajar, wifi gets in easily; with the door closed, the Faraday cage really does work - no signal at all!

Hasty legislation will make a mess of Europe's 'right to be forgotten'

What about credit references?

For example, should someone be entitled to demand that Experian delete their credit record?

I think the answer here is yes - they are making money out of selling data on someone without that person's consent, (even if that data happens to be true).

Another way to achieve a similar goal would be that any data about a person is co-owned by that person. Example: the paparazzi take a compromising photo of a celebrity. That celeb shouldn't get the right to have the photo deleted, but he *should* get the right to re-use the photo as he sees fit. He is in it; the copyright would therefore be partly his. What he can do is then use his right as the subject of the photo to give away free copies. This would set the value of the photo to zero, making the paparazzi photographer's income less lucrative. It doesn't hurt free speech, but it does hurt those who invade privacy for profit.

SwiftKey offers alternative for Android typists

SlideIT

Try the app called SlideIt. This is similar to Swype, but you can actually get it in Android market.

Code for open-source Facebook littered with landmines

Rock vs Hard Place

When starting a new project, there are 2 approaches:

1. Get the base functionality done first, noting bugs and security stuff as "todo", then fix it.

2. Build a perfect infrastructure, then add the functionality.

Approach #1 is potentially dangerous (if you get the architecture wrong, you have lots of changes to make, and if you don't build in security from the start, you may not be able to add it later). But it has some major advantages:

- You have a working environment early, for testing ideas and prototyping

- You have a working demo environment (so it's easy to get backers and funding)

- You can prove to yourself that it will work in principle, which aids motivation.

- Other hackers like working code...it's much more motivating for people to potentially join a new project if there is something released that works, at least a bit.

- It gives the artists, css, documentation, and translation people something to start work on earlier, helping with critical paths.

Approach #2 only works well if you have a very small group (ideally one) who already have the design fully-formed in their heads, or if you want ultra-perfection (eg NASA) and have a matching budget.

So I applaud them choosing model #1...provided that the FIXMEs do actually get fixed before release!

US immigration dodge is permanent

Less data required

Its reasonable for our government to know that you *are* a UK citizen. It is not right that it should record *which* UK citizen. Passport entry should only establish your right to move, and should be, by design, incapable of recording who is where.

Dirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide

Buy a good case and go for a silent PC

The upside to buying "silent" PCs (or at least very quiet ones), with good cases and air-filters is that they fill up with far less dust. I believe that a PC should be quiet to the point that you can hear birdsong through a closed window when the PC is running...and that makes a huge difference to how pleasant they are to use, as well as to re-build.

So what we do when ID Cards 1.0 finally dies?

Why over-authenticate?

There is a creeping "disease" everywhere that is requiring authentication for trivial things. Most services shouldn't require *any* authentication, and we should make it harder for businesses and services to require it.

Every jobsworth in the country now seems to want proof of identity when 10 years ago, the same process used to be accomplished without doing so.

Jacqui's secret plan to 'Master the Internet'

National security?

The very concept of "national security" is inimical to the nation actually being safe. When our government has secrets, and the electorate is not fully informed, then we encourage politicians to make bad decisions and act in a way in which we would not approve.

On another tack, why is it that, having failed so spectacularly in the past (no 9/11 warning; the dogy dossier etc), isn't it time we just give up on the "intelligence community"? I say we should fire the lot of them for incompetence(*), and spend the money on international aid instead.

(*)There is an argument that these people are doing a valuable job protecting us from threats which are too secret to tell us about, and that therefore we should just trust them. But in this country, we do not have completely secret trials. Therefore, if GCHQ et al had done anything useful, we'd know about it, at least in outline, after the court case. So we can be sure that these people have done nothing useful up to 2007 (though it is just conceivable that, notwithstanding the track record, they may currently be protecting us from a threat that will only become know in a few years.) I, for one, am unwilling to delegate trust to the security services without accountability.

Private ID scans leave fetish club-goers feeling exposed

who do the @#*&%* Met think they are?

Really, it's time we made these policemen realise they are the SERVANTS of the people, not our masters. The police must not have the power to require others to demand ID; furthermore, it should actually be illegal for the clubs to do so.

Laptop Hunters snare Microsoft on Linux

Wine is not an emulator

> They want their apps(esp. Games for home users) that they have paid for to run on it (before

> anyone points out 'but WINE will work" nobody wants to have to pay for additional hardware

> to run an app at the same speed that they were before)

Worth explaining here that wine really is not an emulator, it's an independent implementation of the Win32 API. Most applications run at similar speeds on Wine as they do on native Windows. Some run faster on Wine, because they can take advantage of a better underlying OS.

To be fair, not everything works yet on Wine, but it's pretty good.

Microsoft cries netbook victory against Linux

And another one

I bought an Eeepc 701 last week as an emergency desktop replacement (it's surprisingly good with a sensible monitor and external keyboard). Of course, as I needed one there and then, I had to pay the Windows tax, though I deleted XP immediately in favour of Ubuntu.

Two things surprise me:

- why is it still so hard to get a refund on the "Microsoft tax"?

- why can't netbook manufacturers ship a decent version of Linux by default

Carbon capture would create fizzy underground oceans

Just as long as we don't over-saturate it.

This is the possible result:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limnic_eruption

Brussels: Old-school lightbulbs to be gone by 2012

The elephant in the room...

...is that our world-wide electricity production is going to go up by a factor of 7 by 2050 (as the 3rd-world countries come up to our standards of living), while the world-wide CO2 emissions need to go down 50%. That means that cosmetic changes are red herrings. The *only* solution that will work is nuclear power.

Reg Reader poll on notebook quality: results are in

Lenovo, please try even harder

I've been a great fan of Thinkpads for years. However, Lenovo have been trying too hard to compete on price, and no longer do as well as they used to on providing a really excellent machine. The thinkpads are still pretty good, but Lenovo needs encouraging!

Also, please please will someone make a laptop with a proper full-height LCD again? 15",1600x1200 was the best I ever used.

Shuttleworth gets cloudy with Ubuntu 9.10

Restricted formats

There is a reason why Ubuntu doesn't ship with DVD and MP3 codecs. It's a pain, but it's really not their fault. If you look here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

then it's pretty much a one line fix.

The IWF: Charity disparity?

Market pressure?

Any chance of getting an ISP that promises not to use the IWF?

Yes! It's the cardboard PC!

Why are we making items that should be long-lived into throwaways?

PC cases ought to be made from sturdy metal, so that the machine can have a useful life of 10 years+ Even if the innards die, the case can usually be re-used for the next one! So this is a really inappropriate place to use cardboard. Built-in obsolescence?

You're barcoded: The sneaky under-25 route to compulsory ID

Am I the only one

who doesn't see underage drinking (in moderation) as a bad thing? I would hope that pubs continue to accept fake IDs for 17-year-olds who want to enjoy a quiet pint. Far better that than have people out on the streets.

BT puts the 'free' back into 'freephone'

Free anytime minutes

The stupid thing here is that I have more inclusive minutes than I can ever use, and they include cross-network mobile calls and daytime calls to landlines. So I should be able to use these free minutes for the 0800/0845 calls. But I can't. It's really annoying!

Can't Ofcom fix this? Or could the kind businesses who provide 0800 numbers please give us a regular (charged) landline number so that I can call them for free...

[There must be a business opportunity here on the margin]

UK.gov 'to create anti-net piracy agency'

Common carrier?

If I were the ISP, I'd want to make very sure indeed that I didn't know (and couldn't know) what information were passing over the link. As soon as they know, they lose the ability to be a common carrier.

Forget Google rationing: Only lighting farts can save the planet

Re: OLEDs

Only true if the display itself consists of OLEDs pixels. At the moment, it's just LED backlights that are in use - and you can't dim the backlight, unless the entire screen is dark.

Take a hammer to your hard drive, shrieks Which?

is dd good enough?

My understanding is that the data actually written to the disk is essentially analog. (Say between -128 and +128). Each write move it to nearly fully positive or negative, however there is some trace of the previous value. Eg a "1" overwritten with a "0" will be at analog -110, whereas 1 "0" overwritten with another "0" would be at analog -120. Both will normally read back as logic zero, but careful data recovery can tell the difference.

1. Is this correct?

2. If so, is an external tool (eg MFM) required, or can the disk's own hardware be programmed to report the analog value?

3. Also, if there is any such redundancy available, why aren't the HDD manufacturers already exploiting it together with error-correcting-codes, as a way to increase capacity?

4. Is a single pass with dd really good enough for deletion? Or is the page at

http://16systems.com/zero/ just irrelevant?

5. If the drive is merely opened, and then the platter bent double with pliers, is that good enough to frustrate most data-recovery tools?

[Incidentally, a very few disks do have glass platters; namely the older IBM De{sk,ath}Stars. The nice thing here is that you can shatter the platter without even having to open the disk. Most drives have aluminum platters.]

NEC breakthrough paves way for powerless standy-by modes

You obviously don't recollect your schooldays so well!

> flip-flop ... a transistor-based circuit of the type assembled by schoolboys to make two

> lightbulbs flash alternately

No! A flip flop is a simple (bi-stable) memory device, which can store 1 bit of information. To make it oscillate automatically, you must add two capacitors. Then you have an astable multivibrator.

Native-Linux music player Amarok gets major overhaul

Grey?

Why do KDE4 apps looks so ugly? What's with the enormous expanses of grey? I've been a great fan of KDE since the early days of KDE2, but it seems to get buggier, less unix-y[1], and now it's really ugly too! I'll stick with the 3.5.9 as long as I can, but I think my next upgrade will be to XFCE.

Also, anyone who releases a new version of an app without including the majority of the key features of older versions deserves to be slapped with a wet fish. I like Amarok, but a higher priority ought to be making it run long-term without crashing...

[1]In my view, a "desktop environment" should be a collection of self-contained apps, sharing a toolkit and a design view, but not "welded" together, i.e. respecting the Unix philosophy of small simple tools. What don't get is the need to have so many KDE-specific "frameworks". Eg sound should be handled by alsa or (maybe) by pulseaudio, but not by yet another daemon.

Interflora sues M&S over Google keywords

Users want choice?

Sounds to me that when a user searches for "interflora", that should be the top result (because that's what the user *asked* for). But what about the other results on the page? Maybe the user actually wants to know what alternatives there are. In many cases, trademarks have a legal force which isn't reflected in common parlance: the average user might well say "interflora" when he means "flowers delivered", just in the same way that "google it" is an instruction to search the internet (not necessarily with google!)

Academics warn of EU 'three strikes' back door plan

Open wifi

What about those of us who choose to leave our Wifi open, as a general public service?

Or anyone running a Tor endpoint?

IBM employee poaching suit hypes Apple

why silicon valley is in California

As i understand it, one of the reasons for the success of Silicon Valley is that historically, East-Coast states accepted non-compete agreements as binding, whereas California deemed them invalid. So, all the talented people who couldn't be re-employed ended up migrating.

MPs: Fight grog-fuelled crimewave with PDAs

Too much funding, actually

In Cambridge, at least, I'd argue it's time for a substantial budget cut for the police. They have far too much idle time on their hands, and it shows. As a result, they are always busy with make-work activities such as cyclists going the "wrong way" down a pedestrianised street, or delaying all passengers at the train station for a 15-minute sniffer-dog search because there might possibly be some people bringing Cannabis to a fair.

Gary Glitter expelled from GCSE paper

Please let's not start censoring Art because we don't like the Artist

that route, madness lies. How many composers of great music have had flawed personalities?

Ubuntu 8.10 - All Hail new Network Manager

@Paul - Autologin

Just to let you know, Auto-login has been available in both KDM and GDM for ages and ages. You just have to enable it. I agree, it's perfectly OK in certain situations.

Also, you can remove most password prompts by setting up sudo correctly: add the following line to /etc/sudoers:

XXX ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: SETENV: ALL

where XXX is your userid.

Obviously this is a bit insecure - but it's OK if you know what you are doing. (personally, I've always thought that system-wide stuff requiring root access is unimportant (on a single-user system), whereas the stuff in my home directory is what matters.

French Senate passes bill to disconnect filesharers

Internet Access is (or should be) a fundamental right

I'd draw two comparisons:

1. If you don't pay your gas or water bill, it's generally very difficult for the utility to cut you off. That's because, legally, we acknowledge that non-payment may be bad, but depriving someone of water (or heat in winter) is worse. The legal due process is extremely drawn out.

2. If you become bankrupt, certain things may not be seized in lieu of payment, including "the tools of one's trade".

UK.gov plans 'consensus' on PAYG phone registry

Good possible PR for a phone company

If, say, Vodafone were to come out and say that it would seek to maximally frustrate compliance with any such schemes, and provide minimal co-operation with data-retention requests, I, for one, would consider switching back to them.

Nuke-nobbling US laser jumbo fires test beams

Wrong Strategy

It's interesting to point out that, for less than the US spends on the military, they could eradicate poverty worldwide. Wouldn't it be more effective to actually get people to like them?

Furthermore, the paradox of defence is always that the better the defence, the more you are likely to need it. The more you shield politicians from the consequences of their mistakes, the dumber their decisions get...

UK's top boffin: Renewables targets were 'a mistake'

Nuclear should be classed as "renewable"

Nuclear energy ought to be classed as a "renewable" for these purposes. At any rate, it has all the benefits.

We should also get on with the Generation IV reactors. Eg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor

(which essentially eliminates the nuclear waste problem)

Ofcom considers termination charges

What about 0800 numbers?

Why is it that I can't get freephone on 0800 when I call from my mobile.? In fact, I can't even get it included in the (effectively infinite) number of free minutes that I have. From a mobile, it costs *more* to dial an 0800 (allegedly freephone) line than a standard landline!

American man too fat for execution

Death row for 22 years

Isn't 22 years almost a double life-sentence in this country?

Executing criminals (by any means) is barbaric.

EC proposes overhaul of patents and industrial rights

Backwards, as usual

What we need is protection *from* other people asserting "IP rights", rather then protection *of* our "own" rights. Small businesses don't want to get involved in litigation; they want peace of mind that they won't be sued.

Greenpeace: UK gov trying to strangle wind power

switch to nuclear?

There are plenty of schemes that let people switch their electricity supplier to back Wind power. Why can't I back Nuclear? I actually tried this last week, and there is no provider in the UK that will let me vote with my money to back nuclear power! This is daft. The best option so far is apparently "ecotricity", which strongly back wind power, and seem to tolerate nuclear as being "a bit better than coal".

Tories would have to compensate ID vendors

Announce this strategy

If the Tories promise to void the contracts, and (if necessary by act of parliament) pay no compensation, then this is a good way to kill the scheme - if I were a contractor, I'd demand payment in full up front. (which would put the cost up hugely). Even then, the Tories could promise some sort of windfall tax, thereby ensuring that the company contracting for the scheme would make no money at all!

How to destroy 60 hard drives an hour

IBM Deskstars

The IBM Deskstars had one big advantage here: they used a glass platter rather than a steel one. So data destruction was pretty easy - strike once, hard with a hammer.

Lenovo ThinkPad X300 sub-notebook

Ports on back

Glad to see Lenovo have returned to the original design of having ethernet and VGA on the back, where they belong. The T60 is a pain because the cables are on the side.

Still, pity there's no line-input, no firewire, and it has this silly "shortscreen".

BTW, how does the SSD cope with a journalling FS? Linux support?

Asus Eee PC 900 Linux Edition

Trackpoint

Can we have a trackpoint, please? The IBM trackpoints are so much nicer, especially as they allow a 3-button mouse (with emulated scroll). And there'd then be more space for the keyboard.

Aussie gov to treat laser pointers like knives and guns

Guns don't kill people; people do

With idiot laws like this, I'm beginning to see the point of the gun lobby's argument. I'm no fan of the gun lobby, and I can't see any justification for carrying them (there's no "legitimate" use for a gun), but banning laser pointers is daft. Go after the people who misuse them, not the product which can, in some rare occasions, be misused.

Microsoft: Finding flaws on our website is OK

Good fo MS

It's not very often I have good words for Microsoft, but I I think they deserve our praise here. This is a very sensible idea.