Posts by Martijn Bakker

Turkey's YouTube blackout enters year two

Amusing

Couldn't help but laugh at all this indignation with the Turks, coming from residents of one of the few countries to block Wikipedia.

Might it be, that Turks are about as happy with their archaic internet laws as Brits are with the IWF?

At least the Turkish censorship has a basis in law and is subject to democratic control.

That said, I don't see why insults to Ataturk should be in a list of otherwise generally undesirable content either. Maybe one needs to be a Turk to actually understand.

Can a Turkish reader explain why insulting Ataturk is right up there with terrorism and child porn and the other great evils of our day?

Police union leader calls for 'killer games' sales ban

... lost in translation?

Maybe it made perfect sense when it was phrased in German.

When translated to English, this proposal appears as a classic case of flawed logic.

Since every serial killer known to date has had parents, I propose that we ban parenthood.

This only serves to confirms the existing prejudice against people involved in law enforcement.

BBC botnet 'public interest' defence rubbished by top IT lawyer

Victim complaint

Victims making a complaint..

Because their desktop wallpapers were changed, when they could have had their banking details and on-line identities stolen.

I have no doubt it will be a busy day at the computer crimes unit tomorrow.

.. Paris, because her tears are sincere.

Drunken BOFH wreaks $1.2m in Oz damage

The 1.25mln figure must be..

Bistromatically contrived

Makes you wonder who pocketed the 1.2 mln in change.

Indefinite liability for online libel must end

Fair enough

The decision actually seems reasonable to me. In this, the internet realy IS different from a newspaper, in the sense that the information is continually being publicised.

This might be unclear in the case of information which is clearly dated, such as a news site or newsgroup, but it becomes abundantly clear when one takes into account that there are a lot of hate sites out there (most of which have the ability to persist long beyond even the ire of their author), which have more potential for libel than legitimate news sources.

@Kevin Johnston: The problem with digital information is not that it gets deleted, but that it's so damn hard to get rid of. Between news archives, backups, Google caches and the standard practice of deactivating records instead of actually deleting them, getting information deleted from the internet is actually a lot harder than retrieval.

Visa's digital credit card could raise legal stakes

@Thomas

Assumed workings:

Take card number, PIN number and timestamp (or for devices lacking a RTC, like a creditcard, something reproducable on both ends like a transaction counter) add some padding (for added complexity) and encrypt this using a predefined cypher to obtain a confirmation code.

The receiving party has a decrypt key and can extract the relevant information before they decide to OK the transaction.

A keypad on the card is more secure than a separate keypad (which could store both the card number and the PIN code), but more vulnerable to wear and tear.

I guess we won't be seeing any more Visa commercials of ladies pulling a creditcard from their bathingsuit to pay with.

World needs mobile phone wallets, cries trade body

World needs mobile wallets like it needs....

Hardly surprising.

With mobile phones sales dropping and expected to drop farther in the next few years, phone producers (not the telcos, they have a steady income), chip producers and just about anyone else catering to the GSM market, need a new product.

Viagra for those shirevelled and limply dangling sales figures.

Don't be surprised if this turns out to be completely incompatible with currently existing technology.

Attorneys for Palin email hacker: 'Don't call him hacker'

@mr.K

This whole subjective meaning of words gig is all well and good, but it conflicts with the business of the courtroom, which has the purpose of finding "truth" (based on the somewhat outdated preconception that, in spite of all our subjective realities, there is only one Truth, which is a theoretical world much like Flatland or Alaska, where nobody in their right mind actually lives).

Therefore it seems reasonable that lawyers ask, in the interest of finding Truth, to refrain from the use of words whose meaning is so muddied by misuse as to cause confusion even among the experts (or at least people of some education) reading this site.

Language should be subjective, dynamic and in perpetual flux. The law should not.