Posts by Tom 13

Microsoft: IE9's web privacy hole? A feature, not a bug

MS should let the users decide how it works.

Default should set to most restrictive, with an opt in for least restrictive. Taking either of the other sides is going to leave someone upset about how the lists work.

AT&T ends illicit handset tethering

Bad example.

Someone drills a hole in the side of the boiler. Boiler goes boom. No user, no problem, but also no money for the gas company.

The "plus 5" part is unproven.

If I were the sort of person to download movies from BitTorrent for my PC at home via my phone I could easily exceed "typical user +5 friends" usage. Still only me, just using the tethering for convenience. Landbased ISPs already essentially lost this battle. I expect the cell companies will too. They are essentially becoming ISPs but trying to apply teleco rules to it.

The data plan was unlimited.

Over 300G a month on an iPhone is a problem whether it was tethered or not.

I can see that AT&T has a case in that they sold the plan to one person, not many, and that tethering introduces the possibility that more than one person can use it. But that looks like a far dicier proposition to prove.

This one is going to wind up in US courts because they are the ones who ruled it was legal to jailbreak phones.

Full disclosure: I own an EVO HTC and have a paid tethering plan to go with my "unlimited" data plan, so no freetard here. Just someone fed up with the mess from the courts and the pigopolists.

Pervasive encryption: Just say yes

When Verizon sold my mostly computer illiterate mother

a wireless DSL the default encryption of WEP. At that point, the compromise Trevor referenced had been known for 2 years and WPA2 was available. If I hadn't been there to change it to WPA2 she could easily have been hacked.

Fukushima on Thursday: Prospects starting to look good

You might not be familiar with a little coal place here in the US.

Goes by the name of Centralia. There's been a coal fire in the abandoned coal mine for going on a century now. Odorless carbon dioxide has killed entire families as they slept in their homes. Some homes have suddenly collapsed into pits opened beneath them by the fire. So yes, coal has in fact caused at least one known disaster on par with your examples, but very few people cry about it the way they do potential nuclear threats.

Frankly, I think it is the denial by people like you of actual realities worse than potentialities that causes the vehemence of responses to your posts.

@Lomax

The quake caused the loss of power, the tsunami caused the backup generators to be flooded out. So no, it was not just a simple loss of power. You may be entitled to your own (wrong) opinion, but you are NOT entitled to your own set of facts. The diesels WERE the backup.

Supercomputer charts killer tsunami's course

Somewhat. But even more so

the Japanese constantly plan for earthquakes and tsunamis. And their people calmly but diligently follow the planned responses when the alarms go off.

Judge mulls 'wasted costs' as ACS:Law cases close

Oh please, please, please Judge Colin Birss,

I don't often pray for legal precedents, but this area of law is in desperate need of a GOOD one, even if it won't apply on my side of the pond.

Java daddy: 'Aggressively stupid' won't work for Oracle

Gosling seems to have forgotten Barum's dictum:

Never bet against aggressively stupid.

Make streaming a felony: Obama

Copyright isn't a matter of National Security,

but the national agencies that are responsible for enforcing also have national security functions, so the copyright bits just got folded in with everything else when Congress unthinkingly glommed all the National Security functions into one incomprehensible and unmanageable Department.

Fukushima situation as of Wednesday

@amanfromearth: Could be that most of us who do value life

have figured out that the ones yammering the loudest about the value of life are most frequently the ones who value money, holidays, or possession above life, and are merely using it as a cudgel with which to beat the rest of us.

Yes, the reactors are in a death spiral of sorts.

They are pretty much toast and will never be used again. They may take years to clean up and decontaminate. They have released radiation into the atmosphere. BUT nobody has been killed by the radiation. In what is in point of fact a worst case scenario (the earth has moved beneath the plant followed immediately by the ocean coming crashing in, the complete loss of auxillary services which might otherwise ameliorate the situation) with competently trained technicians on the ground, the great radiation disaster of such epics as "The China Syndrome" HAS NOT HAPPENED. And at this point, it is actually very unlikely to happen. They've cooled most of the reactors and only one remains troublesome. They have a plan to address that. They have taken extreme measures, and they will take whatever additional extreme measures are necessary. And no one was killed as a result of the nuclear part of the incident.

Actually, my FB friend who actually works at the plant has posted, and while

he may be very Japanese, but even he isn't capable of putting on face so brave that he's making upbeat posts and joking about going back for his iPhone when they initially sounded the alarm for the building. And yes, he's a nuclear engineer, not a janitor. So I expect the radiation levels are quite safe despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth by the media and the rest of the professional mourner's lobby.

Not British myself but as a long-time reader I'd say it is short-hand for saying

somebody who has dealt with imminently life threatening scenarios and knows better than the average Joe how to meet and overcome them so you don't wind up dead, maimed, or injured on the other side of the event. Also someone who is familiar with the actual lethal effects of chemical, nuclear, and solid projectiles which are commonly associated with such events as opposed to someone who has only read mainstream media drivel about their possible effects.

And really, you have to admit that just writing "ex-royalnavy" is much quicker than that.

Too dangerous to approach

for people afraid of their own shadows perhaps. I rather suspect the radiation levels are actually within acceptable limits, but the effects of previous scaremongering and "abundance of caution" ninnies are exacerbating rather than helping resolve the situation at the reactors.

No, but perhaps you should review

Lewis's article about "fair and balanced neutral reporting."

I dunno. I think they'd be much more interested in pictures of

them pulling out the dead bodies if only there were more pictures of that to be had. The Japanese people seem to have done a generally good job of evacuating areas that allegedly could not be effectively evacuated in the case of a event of this magnitude. So I'd say the so called mainstream journalists are just fuck-all pissed that the Japanese are screwing up the templates for all of their tear-jerker stories. But the radiation scare works better for the new stations anyway because they get to keep asserting that experts can't KNOW there won't be significant ill effects because most of the ill effects will occur in the far future.

Balanced, neutral journalism is RUBBISH and that's a FACT

Some commentards here seem to suffer from the mistaken notion

that journalism involves the search for truth. When I had my introductory journalism class in college, I was told in no uncertain terms that if I was interested in the search for truth, I needed to go to a different building where they held philosophy classes. Journalists could only report what other people said. And if you did that for long enough, you might eventually be rewarded with an opinion column in which you could pontificate on your beliefs, but it still would not be truth. You might occasionally be able to find a fact, but even then you were better off quoting someone as saying it was a fact than reporting it was a fact.

Personally, I suspect the prof of having a predisposition toward the conclusion he reached, and that predisposition colored the results of his findings. Not because I disagree that clear positions are superior to balanced and neutral, but because I've never known an American college student who suffered the depths of despair he describes.

US Trans-Pacific Partnership proposal leaked

@flibbertigibbet: They're not necessarily aiming at the Australians

My guess is their primary target is actually US citizens. Passing Patent reform in the US would require the House approve of the measure. If The Big 0 puts it in a treaty, he only has to get Senate approval, which moots House approval. It's a weakness in our Constitution which didn't really foresee economic and legal harmonization treaties. Unfortunately a lot of other countries will also get taken out in the process.

Politically motivated exploits target activists on Google

@Will 28: Well according to Gatesand Company

IE is a necessary component of Windows, so according to that dictum, technically it is a Windows bug.

Google adds tool to block shabby, dirty, vulgar sites from search results

Nothing chilling about it.

The purpose of the search engine is to produce results people are interested in. If people frequently blacklist a site, that seems pretty indicative of a lack of interest in the site.

DDoS malware comes with self-destruct payload

@nasty

That's what backups are for.

Security isn't a wall, it's a series of incremental measures that ultimately protect the business operation.

Microsoft to Apple: 'Oh, yeah? Well, your font is too small'

Yes, and the clerks and judges who foist this injustice upon us

should be thrown into the belly of a Tatooine desert beast.

Yes, the spacing is also required.

Don't work in a law firm, but did support work for one of the local document farms. The court requirements are enough to make you yearn for The Penguin from Blues Brothers.

Republicans believe in 'climate change' but not 'global warming'

Actually the reason for all the water problems out west

is that the libtards congregated in the desert cities, then insisted on converting it to the same sort of greenery from whence they came.

I've always been amazed by the fact that the much despised W lives in a house that actually meet AWG Al's requirements, whereas AWG Al lives in the house the haters think W lives in.

Adobe releases Wallaby to jump Jobsian Flash ban

True, but at least it always gave you

the same page layout regardless of whether you sent it to the cheap(er) office printer, or the press shop's Linotronic.

As for how they managed it, go back and read the history of the language. It was designed around both plotters and laser printers. That makes things a bit more difficult than an already bloated Word doc.

MS smartphone share falls despite WinPho 7

My Droid cost a hellovalot more

than a cell phone would have. Just last week I saw a 4G signal on it. For about 30 seconds, then it was gone.

Attachmate acquisition stalls Novell's Q1

Unless the Unix patents are transferred directly to an OSS caretaker

NEVER rest easy.

Right now everybody is watching closely. When the hoopla dies down and the fanbois will be happy because the evil M$ didn't get the Unix patents, they stayed safely with Attachmate. Who holds onto them quietly for a few years, then quietly disposes of them to some other holding company, which transfers them to another holding company, and then when people have lost track of who has the patents, MS buys them.

Groklaw has written about what SHOULD be the outcome of any cases involving the Unix patents. Unfortunately, the courts sidestepped that issue by deciding Sco didn't have the right to sue. Which means the roulette wheel spins when it finally does make it to court the next time.

Obama to overhaul heinous US patent system

patents are like money,

neither is inherently or generally evil, it is the LOVE of money which is the root of evil. Since patents generate money, the love of money corrupts the patent system.

The problem with the US Patent system (and Copyright)

is that there is more than 1 problem with it.

They don't get paid by the application granted, they get paid by the

application submitted. Then Congress grabs half the money that comes in and diverts to their slushie funds.

US companies added lots of jobs last month

The BLS numbers overstate the good news.

Of those 195,000 jobs about 60,000 are known to be temporary jobs - 6 month stints that they know up front won't become full-time.

Patent attack on Google open codec faces 'antitrust probe'

The long list of contributors and the relative size of their pools

is largely irrelevant to an informed reader. If you are a player in the business the business reason for your contribution to the patent pool is so you can avoid having to pay/being sued by all the other patent holders in the IP snake pit. What makes Google's current offering different is that they aren't trying to be the biggest snake in the pit, they're trying to clean out the whole damn thing. So that sort of make this a Giant Scorpion Death Match.

I'll give it a shot, but the explanation has an obvious fallacy.

Mr. Horn's group doesn't actually own the patents, they are only the managers for the companies that do. So his company doesn't know what is actually in the patents, and therefore doesn't know what might actually be infringed. They make their money from people who purchase a license for the codec because those people believe it is the best option for their purpose. Think of it as a SCO like operation with the exception that in the case of MPEG-LA, they've actually been hired to collect the royalties.

Now being the observant Reg reader that you are, you've obviously noticed the fallacy: patents are public, so MPEG-LA should damn well be able to know what is in the patents they are licensing.

Moreover, in the US anti-trust laws focus

on collusion rather than actual market share. If you capture a market without engaging in collusion, that is perfectly legal. But if you and I were to make a secret agreement to corner the market for nanobot video codes, that would be subject to criminal charges.

If you do achieve monopoly power, you can't use that monopoly to create another one. They treat it as sort of a one-company collusion.

Not a big Opera user myself,

but I get the impression that Opera is to the browser Market as Apple use to be to MS: the place where most of the innovating happens. Then the other app makers say "Coolness! How do we implement that differently so we don't infringe on their copyrights or patents?"

March Patch Tuesday leaves IE unpatched for Pwn2Own hackers

Yes, they will. Last time Apple had a really bad day

as they quickly went down when they opened to app issues. As I recall, none of the "strictly OS" systems fell, including Vista. I seem to recall Linux faring best after the apps were unleashed.

Android malware attacks show perils of Google openness

Most of the early malware on PCs masqueraded as legitimate applications.

We're not talking drive by malware on smartphones yet. The day will come, and the iPhone will be just as hacked as the rest of them are when it does.

Solution found for climate change: Nuclear war

And the major volcanic eruption of equivalent magnitude within recorded history

doesn't backup the assertions of the paper. Of course it's only one data point. But that's the problem with all this climate change malarkey: too few reliable data points to come to real conclusions.

Didn't TSR release an RPG

based on that thesis?

Oh, and that would be "scientific projections on the effects of multiple nuclear explosions is pretty robust." Until you perform the experiment, it isn't science. And since we don't seem to have a spare planet earth laying about on which we could run the experiment, this is one time I would prefer to keep it at projections instead of science.

If you're running long enough for the sun to burn out, then yes

everything is finite. But breeder reactors solve the problem of limited fissionable materials. They operation is pretty well documented I believe.

Scientists crack spotless Sun mystery

Where is page 2?

You spent the whole first page setting up page 2. Where the help is it?!

Apple to Microsoft: 'App Store name is not generic'

That would be a slightly different rabbit hole in the warren.

If you own a legitimate trademark in an area but you haven't actively used it in commerce in the last year, somebody else can grab it away from you.

Pass the buttered popcorn, please.

This is going to get interesting. Bear with me for a moment for a hypothetical journey down the rabbit hole of US Law.

Let's assume for the moment that Apple wins its case that "App Store" could in fact be trademarked. In this event, MS can refile for the mark to be invalidated because Apple has failed to enforce their trademark, and they can cite the testimony from the case in which Apple wins the trademark as evidence. You see, under US law, trademarks (unlike patents) require you to defend them if you are aware of infringement. The most prominently recognized cases being apirin and allen wrenches which were once trademark names. But because their respective trademark owners did not defend them, they entered into common usage and became generic terms. With 30% of the references being to non-Apple app stores, the term has clearly entered common usage.

Or Apple

for that matter. And I don't care if we are talking computers, vinyl, or any of the subsequent replacements for vinyl.

Yeah, that's one of those cases

where I wish the judge had issued a summary judgment against MS as soon as it made the Windows trademark case in court. In point of fact, I would even more prefer the heads of the morons at our trademark office to be placed on the ends of pointy sticks which would then be placed at the entrance to the trademark office as a reminder to others that some stupidity comes at too high a price.

iPhone 'Death Grip' effect is real, plastic cases don't help

The key bit being

"...Apple's attitude to the problem with their high-end device where style has prevailed over best-practice RF engineering."

If Apple had owned up to it whether saying it was a design flaw or a design decision, the flameage would not have been as intense. Granted saying design flaw would probably have been more expensive as people would then have expected them to FIX the design and retrofit it to all the devices already sold, but it would have reduced flameage.

PlayStation hacker defiantly posts 'bible' following police raid

There have been several attempts to make companies write T&Cs in plain English

(on both sides of the moat) and all have failed miserably. It seems that where law-types are involved, English (British or American) IS a second language, and one they can't comprehend.

Lumping the development costs with the price of the manufacturing

IS the only way to do the accounting for the cost of the console and there is NOTHING disingenuous about doing so. While it is true that their business model is up to them, the ability to use your hardware as you see fit is quite another issue.

Now, what might be acceptable is for Sony to say if you use your PS3 for a Linux console, you can only use it for a Linux console, not both a Linux console and a PS3. But I do rather think that any system bought under the original license which said you could do both ought to continue being able to do both, and Sony ought NOT be able to change the license just by updating the firmware*. The concept of a contract has always implied some negotiations between both parties. Absent negotiations, there tend to be laws limiting the sorts of changes one unilaterally can make to the contract.

*This might be a licensing and tracking nightmare for Sony, but that's their problem, not their customers. Like selling a console below cost, it's part of the business model if they choose to undertake it.