Posts by disfit

UK cops charge alleged Anonymous hacker

UK cops charge alleged Anonymous LOIC user

FTFY

Marketer taps browser flaw to see if you're pregnant

Sensitivity training

"...but not related to sensitive categories or sites."

Privacy == sensitive information.

Please move head to chopping block for adjustments.

Portuguese hackers strike back at Moody's downgrade

Re: Can't a woman like pink?

Of course she can .. or in this case you can and apparently do ;-)

But a Sony Vaio ... pink or otherwise? Now that just isn't right! ;-)~

Google Chrome extension busts Murdoch paywall

Re: What's yours is mine too

You should not comment when you have no idea what you are talking about. There are no locks, and by reading a whole article you are not circumventing or manipulating anything that even resembles a lock.

When you hit a NTY or WSJ article, the scripts (ajax, css, etc) determine if you can read/see the whole article, or put in other words if all the scripts are interpreted correctly client side (i.e. the browser) you will only be shown what WSJ or NYT are prepared to share with you pro bono. I am using NoScript for reasons other than reading whole articles at WSJ or NYT, so I can read the whole article (or have been able to, I haven't visited one of their sites in many weeks)

The fact that the measures in question rely on assumptions how the client's browser does things is contrary to anything remotely intelligent. I.e. if something is not under your control than you should not rely on it. The fact that they have done so in this case, and have spent millions doing so, means that everybody will be sent the full article and are given access to it based on their browser environment.

A lock is a lock if you control it, if you do not control it, it is not a lock ... Doh!

Complaining that the outside world does not work according to your functional specifications really does not fly.

Three-day gaming session kills Chinese man

Hype Vulchers!

http://www.cracked.com/article_18982_5-terrifying-online-trends-invented-by-news-media.html

Nuff said ;-)

Canonical betas Ubuntu music store

Re: Nice (criscros @ Thursday 4th March 2010 01:52 GMT)

> Has anyone here tried the beta? What's their selection like? What about the pricing?

Check out www.7digital.com since the article mentions them as the provider. Prices might be a little lower (subsidized by Canonical), although I would not count on that; i.e. still way too high.

Looking up a random CD (Eels, Beautiful Freak) gives me € 7,49 for the whole or € 0,99 per track. Numbskulls!

Checking ebay and local shops I get prices ranging from € 3 (2nd hand including sh&h) up to € 6 brand spanking new.

High time to sign the euthanasia waver for the recording industry ... it's suffering from too many ailments to count and it is not getting any better. Keeping it alive is too much of a burden for society (three strikes, ACTA, et al).

Aussie Sex Party in evangelist head-to-head

Ehrm....

Do they mix peyote or LSD in their Manna?

Either that or they have succesfully cultivated a special strain of idiocy.

Music industry cooks UK government's piracy stats

Sunday's statistics ... ehrm ... lies

Statistics is a wonderful playground for people with little or no education; including most politicians and managers. To please this crowd, the following lies might be used in the next report, just cut and paste, nobody will know ;-)

AFAIK Mandelson recently came out saying that 50% of the UK IP traffic was 'illegal' if we take this number and combine it with the (rounded-up) lie of 7 million 'pirates', we only need to know how much IP-traffic and how many household connections there are in the UK, to play a nice game of statistics on a Sunday morning.

Some time ago Cisco published a forecast paper on worldwide IP traffic, which can be found on:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_c11-481360.pdf

Unfortunately they do not separate their numbers by country, but the forecast for Western Europe (WE) for 2009 is 3,623 Petabytes (PB) per month, and to help us even more, they have also included data on consumer vs business traffic (table 1 on page 4).

The number for WE does not help us much in the statistics game for the UK, but if we assume that Cisco uses the Unesco definition of WE, we can move ahead with the help of the always factual and truthful Wikipedia and the table near the bottom of:

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

To do a quick recap: we have the total IP traffic for WE, and the countries that make up WE. So now we need to know how many connections there are in these specific countries to play on. Thank the interwebs, for statistic overviews like this brilliant overview of each European country and the amount and percentage of internet users:

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm#europe

Now we have al the information we need to continue. I will not bother you with calculations, but anybody with half a brain can combine the above in a spreadsheet (although the outcome might be different depending on previous schooling and experience).

First we start with the Cisco forecast and assume that the ratio between consumer and business traffic worldwide is the same for WE. This will give us a (rounded down) total of 2,562 PB.

Using the Unesco definition of WE and the table from internetworldstats.com, we find that the UK users are responsible for 475.75 PB per month. This is of course assuming that the traffic is equally dispersed over these countries (which of course it is not).

Using the same consumer/business ratio, the total UK IP traffic is 672.75 PB per month.

Now for the end-game, combining these numbers with the 'facts' of Mandelson (50% illegal traffic) and the Government-slash-Industry (7 million pirates).

First, the 50% illegal traffic.

A staggering 336.38 PB per month is illegal traffic. For the sake of in-game fun, let's assume that the average effective bandwidth for UK households is 4 Megabits per second (I know that's not true ... thanks to the Register's articles and comments, but hey ...). Let's also assume that people using the interwebs for illegal downloads do so 24/7, this gives us a monthly download capacity of 10,368,000 Megabits, or 1.3 Terabytes.

This would mean that there are only about 265,778 pirates in the UK, a minority group, but one with excellent connections which they only use for illegal downloading (this calculation does not give space for legal browsing, email, uploading, updating software, and a lot of other things commonly done on a connected PC).

Second, the 7 million pirates.

This number represents about 14% of the users, assuming that traffic is equally dispersed, this means that they are responsible for 96.59 PB per month, which of course should be classified as illegal; otherwise it would not be fair to disconnect them after three accusations of 'pirating'.

You are a pirate or you are not, so assuming 24/7 pirating, we get an abysmal speed of 0.04 Mbits per second. Pirates of the UK: I feel for you, life as a pirate is hard, but man ... this is a depressing life you lead.

Third, a bit of reality.

I will take an average 'illegal' downloading household (no I do not know them, and it is not us. Really, trust me on this). Let's assume that they have an 8 Mbit connection and only download what they can actually watch / listen to (yes max download is more than you can fill your day with, unless you really do not have a life). They also use their connection to do other interesting and very legal stuff. They average out on about 100 Gigabytes (GB) per month, of which we will assume 60 GB is illegal (according to Geffen, oops, Mandelson).

Combining this with the 'fact' 50% is illegal, we would have about 5,740,817 illegal downloaders in the UK, which comes closer to the rounded up 7 million, yet it still does not add up.

If there would be 7 million 'pirates' in the UK, averaging out 60 GB of illegal downloads a month, they would represent 420 PB a month, meaning much more than 50% of traffic, leaving almost not enough room for YouTube or BBC's iPlayer.

Of course all of the above is utter nonsense, as all statistics is once it is out of the hands of people who actually know what the numbers represent, and into the hands of people who only see the numbers and interpret them as they please, or as their selective perspective / myopic interests makes them see nothing else.

Truth be told, I have no clue on specific numbers on legal, or illegal downloads; regardless of the definition of 'illegal'. I do know however that the 'facts' do not speak for themselves, and are nothing less than lies for the spin-doctors to use, may the be corporate or governmental. My guess is that most internet users will have downloaded material that they have not paid for, some a lot more and frequent than others, and some probably without knowing it.

And dear Lord Mandelson, I will bet you are part of that group; maybe once, but more likely more than three times ........

Aussie net filtering goes into reverse

@frank ly, Similar words....confusion....

> "..a picture of the blonde Ministress, suspiciously captioned: "Coming soon"..."

> Am I the only one who read that as 'blonde Mistress' ?

Nope, and being curious I clicked .... and got horrified. Since it is early, I got woken up way too rapidly. Yikes!

AES encryption not as tough as you think

Not so shocking

A lot sooner than expected, but as with all practical encryption techniques (quantum isn't (yet)), AES was not built or advertised as being the 'eternal solution'.

The worst thing about this, is the predictable knee-jerk reaction of dimwits (managers, politicians and journalist/bloggers alike) of either:

- Oh dear, the end of the world is yet again coming at the end of the week;

- See! I told you, you cannot trust these IT and crypto boffins, they lied to us again!

Then again, there are still people using ultra-encryption techniques with pass-phrases that are barely better than '1234'.

Personally I think it is pretty cool that a technique has been found that endangers the 256, leaving the 192 and 128 alone. Such wonderful humor ;-)

Chicago Bears fan hit for thirty grand for a bit of Slingbox

@ AC 16:48

Ehrm ... it must have been a tough day, causing some logic failures at the end. The $220 was not the amount for the game, but the periodic bill (month, 4 weekly,..). Even though that was not mentioned in the article, it kind of goes without saying.

Eircom to block Pirate Bay

Muppets!

If state run censorship (examples of which are net filters as proposed in UK & AU) is considered as a pretty bad thing by most ppl and needs a firm democratic process, and a subsequent law, I think that we are looking at an illegal situation.

Pity that Eircom apparently has not been willing to take it to the courts, if not the Irish than the EU courts.

What's next, the fast food industry ordering the providers to block nutritional websites because it hampers their sales?

Democratic rep fathered alleged Palin hacker

Hacker????

The use of the word hacker is way over the top; it creates a nice headline and a lot of 'media buzz', but reading the article it is a misnomer.

If the facts mentioned in the article are correct, no specialized technical knowledge and/or techniques have been used. Instead Yahoo!'s public login and user identification pages have been used in a correct manner, i.e. by entering certain data in the available text boxes.

The data was not gathered in any 'dark or evil' way, but was collected from open sources (presumably) using nothing else than the proper channels (search engines).

Calling somebody who uses the available Yahoo! pages to login on another's account a hacker, would indicate that anybody who successfully logs in on his/her own Yahoo! account a Whiz Kid ... I am sure everybody agrees that that most likely is not the right or accurate description of a typical Yahoo! user ... or Palin in this case.

The point where the kid went astray was after he successfully logged in. He should have stopped there, since all actions before that might have been classified as misbehavior. With a good lawyer he could have made the case that he only used the publicly available data and did not (technically) misuse or hack computers and/or services.

Hacker? Nahhhh, come on!