Posts by Richard Neill

Tories offer record industry cash for righteousness

Idiot

What Cameron should be doing is promising the voters a cut in copyright lengths. This would be good for society, and would *also* be good for the labels/artists, because it would force them to create new music, rather than living off the old.

Oracle sends bloke cardboard laptop

s/baited/bated/g

I shudder to think what *baited* breath would be like.

EC wants to suppress internet bomb-making guides

Public safety

Actually, it's much safer for the general population if it is informed about the real nature of threats - then they make smarter political decisions. The bad guys already know how to make bombs, and this measure wouldn't change that. What it would do is stop ordinary citizens from finding out how terrorists work, thereby letting politicians be unaccountable. Consider which is safer:

1)Most voters believe that it is hard to make a bomb. They support politicians engaged in censorship.

2)Most voters realise how easy it is to make a bomb. They realise that the bombers can't be stopped by technical measures, and they vote for politicians who will solve the root causes of why people are driven to such extremes.

America wastes gazillions with always-on PCs

SSH

My PC is a Linux machine - and I tend to log in remotely on a frequent basis. How could I log in from home, if I'd turned it off already! Also, it's not just 2 mins of bootup time, but another 5 mins to get applications ready, revert to what I was doing etc. And if anacron starts up, then for 15 minutes, the disk will thrash, just after bootup (running updatedb).

What would be nice is some way to make the machine run in much lower power mode - a bit like suspend-to-ram for a desktop pc, but with the ability to wake on remote login, or cron.

DrinkorDie warez leader jailed for 51 months

Mala in se?

It seems to me that this guy did no real harm, and didn't even materially profit from his crimes. What he did isn't right, but the sentence is hugely disproportionate. I'm also sorry to see so many governments around the world yielding to US pressure - time our politicians stood up to them! Of course, we in the UK are just as bad at extraditing our civilians. I much prefer the Russians on this one for having a principled stance: no citizen may be extradited, period.

How to counter premature optimisation

Not all optimisations are evil

Consider a few examples:

1)Should a PHP script use echo, or switch out of PHP and embed raw HTML?

* echo "<p>example</p>"

vs

* ?><p>example</p><?

2)Loop evaluation: conditionals inside/outside the loop

* for (i=0; i < 4*PI*r*r; i ++){ z++; }

vs

* a= 4*PI*r*r; for (i=0;i<a;i++) { z++; }

3)Using (or not using) indexes for your database.

Example (1) is utterly pointless. Don't even consider the question.

Example (2) is occasionally relevant, depending on how complex the test condition is, and how many times the loop interates. (the evaluation of a takes much longer than the increment of z).

Example (3). If you don't index your commonly-used fields in a database, your queries will really really crawl.

Open sourcers rattle EU sabre at BBC on demand player

Broken DRM

If the BBC really *must* use DRM (which is itself a daft idea), then it would be in their interests to use a DRM scheme which can trivially be cracked(*). That would provide maximum value to the license-player.

In my view, I've already paid for all the BBC's content, and I have a reasonable expectation of permanent access to it. Furthermore, I'm particularly annoyed that they decided to exclude Classical music from the service (based on the argument that it would harm commercial CD sales - so what?)

(*)any open source DRM is technically impossible: you have the ciphertext, the plaintext, the key, and the algorithm.

YouTube - uTube showdown stays alive in federal court

This is silly

It's quite clear that Youtube is accidentally harming utube, and ought to compensate them for it. What Youtube/google ought to offer to do is this:

1)Host utube.com gratis.

2)If they can make sense of the user's intention (eg does the HTTP referrer from the search query say "video", or "plumbing"), then seamlessly redirect.

3)If the intention cannot be determined, serve up a simple page: "Did you want a)Video (YouTube) or b)Pipes (utube)"

That would fix everything - and it would cost a negligible amount.

Firm offers to patent security fixes

Surely that's illegal

Isn't this scheme illegal in multiple ways? It seems to me to be a cross between a protection racket, and trying to obtain a patent on someone's legal obligations.

So what's in a URL? The Reg URL?

Leave it

I think you should forward .com to .co.uk.

Tech readers are pretty savvy - they'll work it out.

Also, British news outlets (usually) tend to be, and are seen to be, much more trustworthy/competent than their US equivalents. For example, compare

the BBC to CNN.

BT declares ceasefire in broadband speed wars

Uploade?

Why can't we get and service with slightly decent upload speed? I'm trying to run a webserver here!

Antigua calls for pirates to return to Caribbean

It would be fabulous if Antigua just operated as an IP "haven"

There are offshore tax-havens; why not an offshore IP haven. In particular, protection from patents would be a wonderful thing for the world - and a great business opportunity for Antigua.

Actually, I think the UK should unilaterally withdraw from international patents, i.e. No patents, neither foreign nor domestic, will be enforced within the UK (and in return, we won't expect foreign countries to enforce ours). The result would be a huge inward investment, both of manufacturing, and of invention.

Drive-by Wi-Fi 'thief' heavily fined

Wifi polociy

Why can't we have a modification to the Wifi broadcast info which, along with the SSID, explains the access policy?

At the moment, there is no way to distinguish

"Open network, because the admin is utterly incompetent"

from

"Open network, by explicit invitation, as a public service"

Failing an explicit "keep out" sign, the latter ought to be the presumed interpretation.

MPs cosy up with Sir Cliff on copyright term

Infinte copyright

should be granted by law, but *only* to an artist who has done all the creating himself, without any external sources of inspiration. Anyone who has been inspired by the works of other artists, or who has drawn upon the public domain, should be obliged to compensate them in kind, i.e. to have his own work fall into the public domain.

Incidentally, creative works would not be harmed if there were no financial reward: those who think that creativity can be paid for don't understand the impulse to create. (I do think we should support our artists, but acknowledge that the best art/music comes from those who do it for love, not money)

Half a million kids' DNA on UK police database

False positives

Consider a crime where some DNA is found.

Case 1)

The police, using other evidence, find, arrest and charge someone with the crime. Then they test his DNA, and find it matches. The chance of a wrong match are approx 1 in a million, and the this evidence is brought to court; the jury convicts on the basis of it.

Case 2)

The police have no evidence whatsoever, except for the DNA, and so they look this up in the database. They find a match, and arrest the man. The same statistics are given to the jury, who convict.

The Bayesians reading this will spot the subtle flaw; most police and jurors will not. The flaw is this: in (2), we have already "used up" the information given by the low probability of a mismatch when we searched for the suspect. [Out of a population of 50 million, it's almost certain that someone in the database will match] We can't then use the *same* DNA statistics to prove guilt "beyond reasonable doubt".

This is why DNA databases are dangerous.

Don't let Paris Hilton do bird

Justice is blind

It seems to me that we ought to be strictly fair - the celebrity status should not count either for or against leniency.

It also seems to me that a jail term for driving without a license is probably inappropriate. Jail should only apply to things which are "mala in se" (harmful) rather than things which are merely forbidden. Thus, *if* she was driving competently and soberly [but without a current permit], then this is simply a breach of regulations. Driving dangerously, or inebriatedly would be different, for then it means the person is risking harm to others.

Clearing swap and hibernation files properly

Linux encrypted swap

It's one line in /etc/fstab to have swap automatically encrypted, with a fresh keey randomly generated at each boot. Simple (provided you don't also want to have suspend-to-disk).

As for whole disk encryption, I'd recommend just encrypting swap, /home and /var - there really isn't anything worth hiding in /usr/bin (for an Open Source OS !).

Beeb's iPlayer service gets greenlight

Classical music?

Why should classical music be excluded completely? If anything, classical music is the best example where the BBC *should* build a publicly available library of all the great works.

I don't see why it matters if the result is harmful to commercial CD sellers - it shouldn't be the BBC's problem! In the case of classical music (in the huge majority of cases), the composer is dead - and no amount of hypothetical royalties could encourage him/her to write any more music; thus no harm can be done by reducing the commercial value of recordings.

As for DRM, you'd think that the BBC would learn - it's a great disadvantage to legit consumers, an irritation to geeks (we just have to break it), and no deterrent to commercial "pirates".

American boffin touts sugar-fuelled mobile phones

"Nasty" nuclear?

Look at some of the newer designs:

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

In particular, note that there are no long-lived wastes. We could power the entire country for a year, and get less than a (small) room-full of waste; this would be harmless within 500 years.

Reg readers admit to faking it

Waiting times for queues

Why is it that so many companies can't even say "You are now X in the queue, your call will be answered in approximately Y minutes" ?

Also, most companies repeatedly do surveys that ask for easily analysed numbers.

Eg "Rate our friendliness on a scale of 1-5". Frequently, they have no way for the customer to tell them the important thing, because it isn't on the survey!

[For example, Vodafone are certain that I am a happy customer (because I gave them 5 out of 5 on all the questions that they asked. In fact, I told them that I was really cross about X, and in fact, switched to O2, but the customer service person could only say "sorry - there's no space on our form to write about X." !!

Software compliance is not just about licensing

GPL doesn't hijack your code

The main thrust of the article is that, if you naively copy-paste 100 lines of code into your program, then your entire work becomes "virally infected" with the GPL. This overlooks 2 important things:

a)A few lines of code would probably be allowed as fair use.

b)You always have the option to just remove the GPL'd bits. If this is only a few hundred lines, you can simply re-write them.

Obviously, if you used a large fraction of GPL code in your work, it would be impractical to re-write it - and you'd then have to release the entire thing as GPL. But that's only fair if you didn't do the work yourself! It's simply FUD to talk about the GPL "accidentally ambushing" a commercial project.