Posts by Tom Chiverton

Nvidia touts Tegra with $99 handheld net tablet notion

Enhanced Flash ?

They don't mean hardware accelerated Flash Player, do they ? After all, it's just a bytecode VM... and given the announcement yesterday from Adobe about bringing Player 10 to everything except the iWank...

Boffin: Earthlike worlds within 30 lightyears of here

Dig out the nukes

Dig out those old nukes, we need to start building a ship, and it's on a one-way 60 year voyage, ready to depart in, ohhh, ten years ?

HTC waves wand, pulls second Android phone out of hat

not even when the Magic will go on sale

Well, of course not, all they have is, apparently, a copy of Photoshop :-)

Adobe and Nokia pledge $10m for Flash and AIR apps

Useful ?

@Steve Foster

Apparently, BBC iPlayer on Linux is impossible without Flash

UK.gov to tap BT as data harvester

Session data includes

Reading from part 3:

" 12.—(1) In  the  case  of  internet  telephony,  the  user  ID  or  telephone  number  of  the  intended 

recipient of the call. 

(2) In the case of internet e­mail or internet telephony, the name and address of the subscriber or 

registered user and the user ID of the intended recipient of the communication. "

So, err, just use Skype (or other encrypted transport such as a SSH tunnel) to defeat it. Madness. Couldn't the money be better spend *not* screwing us over ?

UK cybercrime unit to meet IT leaders

Spam

So, can I forward all my spam to them for investigation then ?

US spooks want 'stand off' biometrics-harvesting iPhones

Shh...

Shh... don't mention the Data Protection Act requires informed consent...

UK.gov to send your holidays to sunny Manchester

required.

This is exactly the sort of pointless system http://no2id.net work against.

Join today !

UK gov unleashes biometric IDs

Worse than you think

It's worse than you think:

"The manufacturers of the machines have also got to decide whether it is worth their while to produce them"

They may never even make them !

You've all joined your local no2id.net group already, right ?

Lords say surveillance society erodes foundations of UK

Take note, Miss Wacki

"There can be no justification for this gradual but incessant creep towards every detail about us being recorded and pored over by the state"

'nuff said, around about there.

I'm sure your local branch of no2id.net would love to hear from you, dear readers :-)

Toshiba wows crowds with sexy touch smartphone

sigh

"opted to base the TG01 on Windows Mobile 6.1"

They just do not get that 'start' has no place on a phone do they...

Lucky Mancs could get ID cards first, Jacqui declares

No thank you, Miss Wacky

I do not need the governments permission to travel, work or buy drinks, tyvm.

Has everyone joined their local No2ID group via http://no2id.net yet ?

The A-Team flies into Hollywood

Dear Hollywood

Dear Hollywood, please have an original idea. Any time this year. Just one. Please.

World's smallest working fuel cell developed

No......

"able to generate power without consuming any itself"

No, that would be perpetual motion, which is impossible.

Seagate firmware fix bricks Barracudas

People moaning about dead RAID

People moaning about dead RAID have just learnt an important lesson, namely never by all the disks from the same company.

Silverlight to follow Obama into US presidency

Can't write our own Silverlight

We can't write our own Silverlight runtime, because as soon as it gets traction MS will release Silverlight 3 and screw it over.

At least the Flash format is open and documented.

Take a hammer to your hard drive, shrieks Which?

!Hammer

You can still recover data from damaged platers, just costs a bit more.

MI5 head calls for comms data access

Of course they want it

Of course they want access to it - doesn't mean they should get it.

Join your local http://no2id.net group now...

First Windows 7 beta puts fresh face on Vista

DA

"Direct Access for network access without VPN"

Well, that's impossible, so what did you actually mean ?

Send old Shuttles to Mars, says Scotty ashes prang man

Supplies

He forgot to include any food or drink...

Mozilla Google relations strained by Chrome

@Carlos

People visiting W3C sites probably have FireFox more often than the general population.

Coffers Coffee Republic gets own cashless system

Based on shifting sands

"is actually based around Mifare"

That would be the 'everyone knows it's open to abuse' Mifare that had the Tube shut down for a couple of days, right ?

iPlayer finally makes friendly with Mac and Linux

"Only supports a few select Linux distributions anyway."

Although officially Adobe "only supports a few select Linux distributions", the AIR runtime should run on just about anything made in the last year or so, basically as long as it can find the libraries it needs, it'll be fine.

See the last two questions on http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2008/12/tips_on_resolving_application.html for instance.

US Navy's robot stealth carrier plane unveiled

!window

That's the air intake to the jet, not a window !

Adobe brings AIR to Linux

Deb too

"AIR 1.5 will run on Linux distros that use an RPM package manager"

It also works fine on those that use .deb aka apt package managers, such as the Ubuntu you go on to list.

Mozilla hastily shoves Firefox updates out door

all those who are gloating over this happening to non-IE browsers

all those who are gloating over this happening to non-IE browsers should consider how long Mozilla etc. had the serious bug open and being exploited for, and how long IE was over exposed...

Nine in ten emails now spam

IT fail

"websites were loaded with iFrames, malicious scripts"

An IFRAME is a HTML tag, not a (Java)Script, malicious or not. The one can be used to embed the other, however, which is no doubt what you meant to say

Royal Navy completes Windows for Submarines™ rollout

XP ?

Umm, isn't that due for EoL in only a year or two...

Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

VM != ISP

If you don't like it, get a real ISP that doesn't throttle, gives you want you pay for, and promises not to Pharm you.

Some of them even have clueful support teams who will take to non-Windows users...

Python 3.0 appears, strangles 2.x compatibility

Slower, doesn't run my old code

So Python 3 runs slower, and my old programs will stop working (maybe) ? Sounds like windows :-)

Speaker distances himself from police raids on MP

who had no search warrant

Would *anyone* let the police in without one ? Geez...

Queen's speech targets bankers, unemployed, and immigrants

not much else for the bill to do except

"not much else for the bill to do except transpose European data regulations into UK legislation" that'll be the one that allows the government to search your computer remotely then ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7758127.stm) ?

Prosecutors gather evidence on secret BT-Phorm trials

@The Other Stev

"massive random noise will [not] prevent you from being profiled by the proposed government interception system, despite the many idiotic comments to the contrary"

Not if everyone/large numbers of otherwise not 'persons of interest' produces random noise ... It's like the poll tax or ID cards, if more than some relatively small number of people need to be prosecuted or flagged for further investigation, the whole system screws up because we run out of court/police time.

Government finally names the day for porn ban

Plausible deniability

Ahh well. Time to whip out http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=plausible-deniability then.

Stupid law.

MacBook buyers bite Apple over copy protection cock-up

Simple answer... not cheap though

I smell a market for DisplayPort spoofers, like the ones you can get for HDMI.

Adobe's Flex Builder to woo Microsoft C# developers

@E

There is limit'ed POSIX support by default, I think, and if you want to staticly link in the whole STL or what have you, feel free.

Academics warn of EU 'three strikes' back door plan

@Conor Turton

"you can't cry about a law being unfair when you're wantonly breaking the law".

Unless, of course, you didn't break it and have just been mis-identified.

It's impossible (as has been demonstrated in the US) to prove which person did it, which has led to everyone from grandmothers to people with no computer being sent to court. Imagine you (a law abiding citzen) have just been disconected from the internet without due process or a chance to put your case.

Wacky Jacqui's £12bn gIMP could be unleashed by 2012

@AC

"when did the government invent quantum storage? 'cause they're going to need it."

Hell yeah. ADSL users don't have an out bound gap, generally, so can happily send fake traffic all the time to random* locations, masking their real activity.

It worked in Cryptonomicon...

Happy Birthday, Turing's universal machine

More than binary

"No matter how smart the software the computer can only do stuff that binary logic can do. "

Err, no ? It's perfectly possible to have it emulate a non-binary system such as trinary, for instance, or analogue (just ask Reason :-) )

British pilots ramp up opposition to ID cards

Particulary wacky today

"[ID cards help by] speeding up pre-employment checks"

How does adding an extra (pointless) check speed the process up ?

Lets speed up the process of getting these things scrapped - join your local No2ID branch at http://no2id.net !

Adobe rallies Flash and AIR mobile partners

ARM ?

Never mind ARM, what about PowerPC ?! The Wii is shipping ~2 million units/month and is still stuck with an older player...

Adobe proposes open access to app stores

!rival

"Adobe is set to follow rival Apple"

Adobe is a software company, Apple is a hardware company.

DoS and distributed hacking tools finally criminalised

Too broad

'Computer Misuse Act has also been changed to make it an offence to make, adapt, supply or offer to supply any [program] which is "likely ... to assist in the commission of, [a hacking or unauthorised modification or DoS] offence'

Umm ? There goes everything from ping to nmap ... their 'likely to assist', right ?

Ofcom's pilot starts seeing signs

Google ?

So, where's the Google-powered GIS for us all to see this on then ?

Mankind to detect alien life 'by 2025'

AC should research better

@Not that simple

The content of the signal isn't important. SETI@Home, for instance, just looks for enough of a peak above background - because radio transmissions are narrow band and noise isn't.

Working under a cloud

Luncay

"extensive sports-related building site in London that the company isn't allowed to name"

Is this the start of pre-Olympics paranoia then ? Or is there another large sports complex in London ?

Motorola legal tie to pull pricey Aura phone off eBay

can't sell it on eBay

There's plenty of other auction services.

MPs decry Heathrow T5 fiasco

compromising the time needed to complete the full testing

Geez, the building was late, so they cut time from testing/QA ?!? We know in the software world what happens when you do that, and it turns out the same thing happens in the real one too !

Microsoft's Geneva Server: Hailstorm done right

Ummm ?

"CardSpace has its own user interface, built into the browser, so it is hard for a phishing site to fake it"

When I've stopped laughing, I'll be able to ask you if you were awake when you wrote that... *Even if* MS has managed to build the imposable (a non spoofable GUI) what on Earth makes you think a user will be able to spot the different betwen the one 'built into the browser' and the very similar one embeded into the web page ?

Geez. And ti runs on spoofable DNS too. Handy.

Oh well. Another MS tech, to ignore, who prints this rubbish :-)

Mandelson's dept mulls UK internet power grab

.gov.off

How about they do what they like with .gov.uk and leave the rest of us out of it ?