* Posts by Stuart Gepp

56 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Aug 2008

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Super Bowl's SUPER BALLSUP: CBS broadcasts Wi-Fi password

Stuart Gepp

Re: More to the point ...

That is actually the official New Jersey State Trooper uniform except he's taken off his hat. It is very similar to the Gestapo one except they have a really wide yellow stripe down the outside seam on the trousers and a sever lack of iron crosses.

Some of them behave like they're in the gestapo too, but the two I know personally are decent folks trying to a difficult job with morons in senior management positions - very similar to many IT positions.

Gorilla Glass fights dirty, dirty germs with antimicrobial coating

Stuart Gepp
Joke

Oh no! Time is running out for the telephone sanitizers. Better get working on th B Ark.

Wanna sell a phone in New York? Better have a receipt

Stuart Gepp

Re: Has he really had someone killed over an iPhone?

Don't assume the person killed was the rightful owner of the phone. The politicians over here (especially in Bloomberg's NY) will spin anything. e.g. Bloomberg's anti gun propagander machine even listed Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a victim of gun crime! He was the Boston Bomber shot by police trying ot escape. Some victim.

It could be the bad guy was trying to steal the phone as part of some other crime and was killed for his efforts. A vague reference by a politician should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Hey, how'd that guy get to be a BAZILLIONAIRE?

Stuart Gepp

All very well if you're only using SAN for storage consolidaiton. Try using local cache on cluster members. It can't possibly end well.

NIST denies it weakened its encryption standard to please the NSA

Stuart Gepp

Re: The terrible part is it's *logical* to ask the NSA for their opinion on vulnerability.

The only safe way is to ask the Chinese equivilent of the NSA what the American NSA would say of asked if the item of interest is secure.

Screw you, Brits, says Google: We are ABOVE UK privacy law

Stuart Gepp
WTF?

The complaint is that a cookie was placed on the devices where the browser was running by circumventing some security setting. The cookie was not on a server in the US. It was on the handset in the UK FFS!

PHWOAR! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, Prime Minister

Stuart Gepp
Holmes

Re: The filtering seems a bit too general.

What happens when Mummy is 14 years old herself?

The whole thing is yet another stupid example of how the politicians need to protect everyone from an evil thing to justify their own existence.

Hardship and bad things happening are what builds people into independent, functioning adults. If you wrap a child in cotton wool and protect them from every evil influence all you get at the end is a fully grown child who cannot deal with anything bad. Guess what! the world is full of bad things and you have to cope every day with something you'd prefer not to. You cannot know in advance what it will be. If you don't know how to cope you won't.

'Quantum network? We've had one for years,' says Los Alamos

Stuart Gepp

There is absolutely no truth in the rumour that I've done way more awesome things than that. Nope. Not me. Never. I just didn't happen.

FCC waves big fines at political robocallers

Stuart Gepp

Why stop at the beginning

These companies don't spontaneously leap into existance and start dialling on behalf of some politician. Assuming that there is some collaboration between the politician and the company breaking the law doesn't it become a conspiracy to break the law. The penalty should extend to all the parties involved.

Apple 'hasn't really run out of iPhone 5s AT ALL'

Stuart Gepp
Holmes

Re: LOL

Maybe they could have chosen a later launch date when they had enough to meet initial demand - no extra capacity needed.

It is marketing hype. They are within their rights to do it but the gist of the article seems pretty much spot on.

Judge frees nude TSA protester, citing free speech rights

Stuart Gepp

Re: Doubtful, I think

He had 1 rifle (AR15 type, not an AK), 1 shotgun and two pistols which he had hidden outside the fire exit and retrieved them after entering the theatre by the front door. He also had body armour and helmet in his stash.

Protecting the front door with any kind of scanner would not have been any help at all in this case unless someone can come up with an insanity and malicious intent detector.

Bad things happen and not all of them can be prevented unless we all spend our entire lives literally in cocoons.

For some reason our governments think we want them to protect us from everything and fail to realise that it is impossible.

As far as individual, concealed carry is concerned, if there were a half dozen citizens with pistols who returned fire they may or may not have succeeded in stopping the bad guy but there is a high probability that *they* would have been responsible for some of the innocent people shot. A packed movie theatre is not a good place to shoot and miss but missing is easily done shooting under extreme duress in the dark. There are numerous accounts of trained police officers finding that the nice tight centre-mass group that they can reproduce at the range over and over again does not happen when they are in a real life-or-death situation. Can you imagine trying to differentiate between the following:

1. A bad guy you have never seen before who is shooting an innocent you have never seen before.

2. An armed civilian you have never seen before shooting a bad guy you have never seen before.

3. A bad guy you have never seen before returning fire at an armed civilian you have never seen before.

Number 1 is easy, but only if you can see that the innocent has no weapon. 2 and 3 are indistinguishable when they suddenly appear in front of you.

People will bang on and on about how to avoid this in future. Some will advocate banning all firearms from the public (and the counter argument will be that only outlaws will have guns and there will nothing you can do to protect yourself) and others will argue that every responsible adult should carry a firearm every day (with the counter argument that you are making all the undetected insane people carry too). There will be innumerable arguments in between these extremes.

Firearms cannot be uninvented. If the guns used in this case had been illegal, would the victims be any less badly hurt? Remember, when the UK banned self loading rifles – that was in response to the Michael Ryan shooting spree in Hungerford in 1987 – he used a pistol for most of his victims. About a decade later, Thomas Hamilton went nuts in a Dunblane school with some pistols so the government banned pistols. Within a year of the pistol ban Jill Dando (a BBC TV presenter) was shot dead with a rifle banned a decade earlier. Jill Dando still suffered the same whether the rifle used was legal or not.

If you are going to disregard the law prohibiting trying to kill people you are quite unlikely to be overly concerned with the prohibition of the method you choose.

There will be arguments for mercy because the man was insane. I cannot fathom anyone not insane unilaterally deciding to shoot 71 people he or she does not know.

At the end of the day this gunman is responsible for his actions. Do not blame the people who sold him the guns. Do not blame anybody else that has guns. Do not blame the governments who have led the public to believe that all bad things can be stopped by greater and greater restrictions on freedoms.

Dad sues Apple for pushing cash-draining 'free' games at kids

Stuart Gepp
Paris Hilton

Re: I'm with Apple on this one

Unfortunately, <insert deity of your choice> is also in on the act.

There's this thing you can do with another player which seems like an awful lot of fun and you feel compelled to do it. However, 9 months later the bill arrives and by then its too late.

If you find it hard not to hand out access to your credit card, you have almost no hope of resisting this urge.

Top Brit authors turn flamethrowers on barmy IPO

Stuart Gepp
Trollface

Re: "Julia Donaldson, who wrote the The Gruffalo"

Miss! Miss! He did it again!

Stuart Gepp
Trollface

Re: "Julia Donaldson, who wrote the The Gruffalo"

Miss! Miss! Irish Donkey stole Julia's IP!

Brazil sues Twitter over police checkpoint tweets

Stuart Gepp
Happy

Coincidentally...

...I was watching episode 2 of the first series of Yes Minister last night and Bernard was explaining to Hacker that he could simply transfer all correspondence from his inbox to his outbox without needing to read any of it. The civil servants would then generate standard responses such as "we're considering the matter" or if they were feeling especially generous "we're actively considering the matter".

He went on to explain the former meant "we've lost the file" and the latter meant "we've lost the file but we're looking for it"

That was an amazingly insightful script written over 30 years ago.

Oz ISPs propose copyright enforcement trial

Stuart Gepp

On the surface it seems reasonable

"Upon receipt of the notice from the rights-holder"

There is no mention of checking the voracity for the claim by the "rights-holder" that copyright material had been abused. How was the infomation discovered and under what authority did the "Rights-holder" collect this information?

I thought there were privacy, wiretap and perhaps other laws to prevent this without the courts being involved. If the courts are already involved who needs a new quango to send letters out to people?

Man sues boss for 'condemning him to eternal damnation'

Stuart Gepp
Joke

Have you ever considered...

...what might be telling you this?

"The human brain is an amazing organ, fallible sure, but amazing"

Chocolate weighed in Schwarzeneggers: Official

Stuart Gepp
Joke

American chocolate

An oxymoron or you jest.

Boffins invent miracle pill that counteracts effects of booze

Stuart Gepp
Pint

Am I the only one that misread that as chauvinism?

Diebold e-voting hack allows remote tampering

Stuart Gepp
Trollface

Who cares?

Does it really make any difference?

The only effect of voting is to change the person the lobbyists have to contribute to. Most of them have hedged anyway and have contributed to both sides.

The days when your representative actually paid any attention to the people in their constituency have long gone.

"It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in"

Amazon settles sales tax spat with Governor Moonbeam

Stuart Gepp
Stop

What a load of cobblers

The Supreme Court ruled ages ago that sales tax did not have to be collected by the retailer for out of State buyers (it was about mail order back then but it has been decided that the same rules apply if the order is placed via the internet instead of snail mail). It did not rule that the tax was not due. The buyer is required to declare these things on their State tax return and pay the sales tax to their home state then. At least this is how it is in New Jersey.

It seems the issue is that the State tax collectors can't be bothered to collect the tax and enforce their own laws and want Amazon to do it for them. What makes it worse is people supposedly knowledgable in finance like Tom Keene and Ken Prewitt on Bloomberg Radio keep saying internet retailers have a price advantage because their products are tax free. WRONG! The tax is due in the State where the items are bought, not where they are sold.

UBS tells IT contractors: Take a 10% pay cut ... or 100%

Stuart Gepp
Pint

I thought it was a joke at the time...

"If you're not embarrassed to state your rate, you're not charging enough"

Sorry Geoff - that one just stuck in my head for some reason.

Paintball round pops Bulgarian airbag

Stuart Gepp
Stop

Frozen paintballs don't work very well

As the paint in the ball is water based they expand when frozen. Big balls don't work because they need to be a close fit inside the breech and barrel. If they're too big they rupture when fired.

Here lies /^v.+b$/i

Stuart Gepp

Guess the OS

$ EXIT 452

Murdoch man who also worked at Scotland Yard ARRESTED

Stuart Gepp
WTF?

UK law applies

No matter what nationality the person is, operation of a UK company in the UK is subject to UK law.

I'm a Brit living in the USA. I don't drive at 70mph and claim its OK because I'm not American because in America I am subject to their laws.

Bloke ordered to remove offensive numberplate

Stuart Gepp
Joke

Reminds me of a Murray Walker/James Hunt exchange

Murray: Here comes the Honda. This car is absolutely unique!

Hunt: Except for the one directly behind it

Number plates still come in pairs, right?

PS Yes I know the front one has a white background and the rear one is yellow, but it still reminded me of dear old Murray.

Call of Duty given ultimate Star Wars makeover

Stuart Gepp

How long before...

George Lucas demands his pound of flesh?

US judge greenlights case against Google Wi-Fi slurp

Stuart Gepp
Pint

Great minds think alike...

...but fools seldom differ.

I wonder which we are.

Stuart Gepp

An analogy that works?

The unlocked front door/car door analogies miss the point.

Google did not enter anybody's private property to obtain the slurped data. They were in a public placeand got what they could. If the householder had secured the signals they were emitting Google would have got less.

Similarly, if Google had their cameras at normal head height in the street and took a picture through your window of you changing your underwear you may object but you were carrying out your shreddy-swap in plain sight.

You *could* have have closed the curtains but you didn't. Joe Bloggs *could* have configured WPA2 but he didn't.

It has already been ruled that if it can be seen by 'normal' viewing from a public place it can be photographed/recorded. Why should wireless transmissions be treated differently from photons?

BOFH: CSI Haxploitation Cube Farm Apocalypse

Stuart Gepp
Coat

King of the pedants

Where in the story did it say the disk was full. Maybe there was only 20kB on the 2TB drive.

If this was the case you could copy the entire contents of the drive to the USB stick quicker than you could troll a joke response to a parody of a fictional farce.

BT cheerfully admits snooping on customer LANs

Stuart Gepp
Joke

I used to work there

What's the difference between BT Martlesham Heath and Jurassic Park?

One is a futuristic theme park filled with dinosaurs and the other one is a film.

Official: Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5bn

Stuart Gepp
Gates Horns

How long will my iPhone be supported

I'm wondering how much longer I'm going to be able to use my iPhone - the original Linksys/Cisco one, not the Jobsian one which I never bought.

Oh well - its been good for the last 3 years.

iPhones secretly track 'scary amount' of your movements

Stuart Gepp
Joke

The other side of the coin

You cannot be tracked if you're holding it *right*

MythBusters: Savage and Hyneman detonate truthiness

Stuart Gepp
Headmaster

Bust this!

"Each bang has been bigger than its successor"

Are the bangs really getting bigger as time goes backwards?

Fuel foolery, merger warnings and Budgetary boons

Stuart Gepp
Joke

The other end of the scale

I think you'll find the last day of your life will have the highest mortality rate - 100% in fact.

Gamers raid medical server to host Call of Duty

Stuart Gepp
Flame

People who live in glass houses...

Dear, oh dear.

It looks like the lid was left off the acronyms box again and someone is waving one around to try to gain credibility.

The routing protocol used has almost nothing to do with WAN latency. There are many choices, each with their advantages and disadvantages.

The fact is though, that there is a direct relationship between the distance between two points and the minimum latency for data transmission between them. It happens to be pretty close to the speed of light.

That would only give you the minimum, however. In practice the actual time taken will be increased because very few circuits follow a straight line path between two points.

Called 999 recently? They've got your number

Stuart Gepp
Coat

you forgot...

...mountain rescue

Alan Sugar's 'cockup braindead in call centre clueless' BT row

Stuart Gepp
Joke

Variation on an old BT rumour

Sugar: Don't you know who I am? I'm Lord Alan Sugar!

Call centre drone: Hmmm. Do you know who I am? No? Fsck off then! <click>

Boffins bring us one step closer to a quantum network

Stuart Gepp
WTF?

Unlimited, instant broadband...

...over a distance of 1mm. Useful.

Spy app firm charges £1.86 to remove its software

Stuart Gepp

Pull the pin out of what?

The new shirt you haven't even gotten on to your back yet?

Sorry I was still thinking about your govmint comment.

Clegg's taking away Your Freedom

Stuart Gepp
FAIL

Bungling Bungle

Bungle was from Rainbow

George Lucas rattles lightsabre at Jedi laser firm

Stuart Gepp
Grenade

I wonder how much GL paid Mauser

The blaster pistol that Solo carried has a striking similarity to a Mauser C96 "Broomhandle" pistol.

Home Office to secure mobile phones

Stuart Gepp
WTF?

I have a business proposal

Who has connections in the wallet/purse manufacturers realm?

We need a phone cover which incorporates a pocket for a card - brilliant or what?

'Aurora' code circulated for years on English sites

Stuart Gepp
Stop

Re: Really? A/C 12:07

Easy peasey lemon sqeezey.

Just look at some of the sites aimed at pre-school children. Nickjr.com and disney.com have websites where the word on clickable buttons is spoken through the PC speakers so kids who can't read yet can still navigate around.

Vonage drops off the net

Stuart Gepp
Megaphone

Communications in the modern age

"We tried to contact Vonage about the problems but the company hasn't responded to our enquiries"

You have to send them a letter - the phones are out. Hang on, the post is useless too.

Get a megaphone and shout to them.

Man queues overnight to buy iPhone 3GS... and take it to bits

Stuart Gepp
Boffin

@AC 14:00

O2: "Our online shop saw a 150% increase in online traffic in the first two hours."

- wow - that's almost.. half their regular users again.

If you're going to be a pedant, at least do it right. A 150% increase is your normal traffic plus 1.5 times your normal traffic which is 2.5 times your normal traffic.

Royal Navy trials 'paging system' for submarines

Stuart Gepp
Stop

@David Webb

Teh soudn the speakers make is caused by your phone TRANSMITTING an acknowledgement of the signal it was send from the cell tower. The cell tower sends the signal in all directions at once and is picked up by all the cell phones on the frequency. Only the one it is addressed to does anything with it - e.g. acknowledge it.

This new submarine thing is one way only. The sub does not transmit a response and is therefore not subject to detection just because it received a signal. The key thing you are spectacularly failing to understand is that the submarine pager is one way only. Cell phones are two-way.

BTW, don't even think of trying to make another pathetic analogy with TV detectors.

Brutish SSH attacks continue to bear fruit

Stuart Gepp
Linux

Huh?

Why doesn't the OS lock the account being attacked after 3 wrong passwords or at least suspend it for a while. If the attack continues against the same account extend the time of the suspension or lock it out.

If the same address is hitting lots of accounts (or non existent accounts) block it.

The big question is why does Linux need add-on packages to do any of this? It has been built in to VMS for years.

The penguin has been chosen as a mark of my cynicism.

Illinois restores Pluto's planetary status

Stuart Gepp
Joke

Surely a mistake

I'm certain many thousands, nay millions of Americans have spotted Pluto whilst on vacation in Florida and California.

Amazon pulls Japanese rape simulator from shelves

Stuart Gepp

@AC 20:59

"Labour MP Keith Vaz has no idea how the Amazon marketplace works"

The last five words are unnecessary.

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