* Posts by Richard IV

291 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

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Google Street View whacked by German prosecutors, Czech data watchdog

Richard IV
Grenade

Fair enough

Let us know your address and we'll all come round at random intervals to see if you've left anything unlocked. You won't mind if we take anything because, after all, it will be your fault for leaving it unlocked in the first place. We'll all be blameless as we'll just be helping steer you in the right direction.

Just because I could punch anyone in the face as they walk past, doesn't make it right for me to do so. Even if they should have had their guard up just in case.

William Shatner to star in Twitter-inspired TV show

Richard IV
Coat

Shurely

It's got to be called Shat my dad says

Jesus descends to Google Earth

Richard IV
Alien

While we're playing at apophenia

The field to the right has an image of a chap in a soviet-esque winter coat and hat looking towards the more, erm miraculous image, while a large cross shimmers as if in heat haze even further to the right.

How's Golden Palace going to transport this one once the inevitable eBay listing happens?

Verizon dubs sec researchers 'narcissistic vulnerability pimps'

Richard IV
Grenade

@Jlocke

Cite yes, because gosh - the same phrase was used - and I was pointing out the phrase wasn't even original, no matter how picaresque it is.

Agree with, mostly not actually - personally I'm in favour of default disclosure and some independent timing mechanism that doesn't depend on corporate vested interests OR the ego of a researcher.

I should point out that even managers have the occasional good idea (Disclaimer: I'm not one, nor do I want to be one). Balls of "XML", err XML tags containing only CDATA, are definitely not one of them though. I've had to wrestle one into submission without the aid of a safety net for, guess what, security competence...

Let me know when you're done on the straw URL, it might have some life in it yet.

Richard IV

Not a new term...

Marcus Ranum has been calling them that for a good few years.

http://www.csoonline.com/article/440110/The_Vulnerability_Disclosure_Game_Are_We_More_Secure_

The thing is is that there are a whole lot of hucksters in the disclosure space, possibly because the big IT to government space is now too crowded for them. This isn't to say that there aren't good, decent, hard-working individuals who act responsibly out there. It's like email - spot the word Viagra and you're starting to think of Hormel meat products - I get an awful lot of email with said willy stiffener in; fortunately my filters are pretty good in this regard; unfortunately, there aren't widely available filters on "security researchers".

Personally, I'd have switched the order of pimps and criminals...

UK Gov, and privacy invasion without a safety net

Richard IV

An old problem

I suspect that a large part of the problem with IT data security is with ad hoc analysis - slices of more data than is necessary to do the analysis being manipulated on local files and then being emailed for review, emailed back with changes etc etc ad nauseam.

It would be interesting to know in these cases whether the tools and training to do it any other way have ever been provided. Some initiatives in that direction might eventually work wonders. Such as storing files on the network (with appropriate permissions, natch) and not taking this kind of work home with you on your laptop.

Most breaches have seemed to be of the "I didn't know any other way to get my job done" variety.

The HMRC one was more a case of "the outsourcing contract would have made it phenomenally expensive to anonymise the data like the NAO asked so we didn't bother"...

Bromsgrove lass slapped with Boozbo

Richard IV

Let's just hope

that they've done the paperwork correctly this time:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/18/asbo_teen/

Now, personally, I'd be putting her on the Victorian version: a diet of Ink Caps - a lovely kind of mushroom that only becomes rather troublesome to the digestive system in the presence of alcohol :o

Trustpilot prunes florid iFlorist tributes

Richard IV
Coat

@AC 12:09

To go with the (Tarka?) Dhalias, it'll surely be Ghoshtbusters ;)

Is this true?

Yes, this man has no paneers.

Mine's the one with the Slimer pickle stains.

MSI tells 97,000 customers to 'Read The F***ing Manual'

Richard IV

Fantastic!

The Daylight Savings Week prank from last year finally kicked in :)

Virgin Media downed by thick Leeds 'copper' crooks

Richard IV

Don't forget Nigeria!

Where there are regular fires caused by the use of spark-making tools like angle grinders in attempts to nick oil direct from the pipeline...

Council deforests beauty spot to combat dogging

Richard IV
Joke

Answer

Yes, yes, yes!

'Perpetual' software licence doesn't last forever, rules court

Richard IV
Headmaster

Not only every word...

but also the punctuation: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/26/the_case_of_the_million_dollar_comma/

Brown creates one UK.gov website to rule them all

Richard IV
Pirate

OK!

yourself.gov.uk

... or should that be the ID cards' site ;)

BBC launches massively parallel Tweet-in

Richard IV
Badgers

Welcome to the Tweet-o-Drome

Good grief. And there I was spitting at Today on Tuesday when it seemed to turn into iPM breakfast (iAM??) with some random woman spouting out inchoate views on whether people should try to self treat before going to see the doctor.

Didn't the Now Show try this a while back and get an email from a listener saying that they'd started listening to keep up with British Current Affairs but had been shocked to learn later that it contained elements of satire and/or humour? I've a feeling a similar result may come of this with elements of news...

Then again, from the odd bits I catch on the World Service, their letters tend to be of the wide-eyed isn't radio wonderful variety, or genuinely interesting. If the latter category keeps their end up, this might stand a chance. Not that I think for a second that it will - more likely is an international version of Go 4 It, the reason I discovered 6 Music :o

'The LHC will implode the Moon or PUT OUT THE SUN'

Richard IV

Something like that

Also, teeny tiny black holes don't last very long at all, or eat very fast. There's a good write-up at http://startswithabang.com/?p=878

Home Secretary swats away calls for Mosquito ban

Richard IV

Hoorah

Assuming anything actually gets done with regards banning, of course.

I'm well past 30 and can still hear the bloody things.

On a slightly related note, does anyone know of any inks in that portion of the near infrared that is visible to CCTV cameras? One could have a lot of fun with that :)

NY chef offers mam cheese canapes

Richard IV
Coat

Is this...?

Anger at Angerer's Dare Lori slices?

Tories ask: Why BBC3, BBC4?

Richard IV

I would but...

I've still got about 6 months worth of WNYC's Radiolab (http://radiolab.org/) to catch up on. It's like what Horizon used to be way back when it wasn't obsessed with Super-volcanoes and Mega-tsunamis.

Employers call for end to Mickey Mouse degrees

Richard IV
Badgers

So let me get this right

An organisation whose members are outsourcing like mad and now recruit 25% fewer graduates than they did 20 years ago according to their own figures (but about the same as they did when Labour came to power and the '50% in higher education' target was introduced) say that in the future fewer students should pay through the nose for a smaller chance at grabbing a premium which itself is getting smaller as the jobs get outsourced.

Even today's allegedly illiterate, innumerate students should be able to spot the disconnect.

BBC: Grasp the high-speed runaway cloud nettle

Richard IV
Welcome

The future's bright.

So they say, but for many blue sky thinkers there is a cloud on the horizon. _The_ cloud, a distributed data processing black box, is where business is moving its large scale computing infrastructure.

However, some in the security industry say that at the dawn of the information age the clouds are red; like the old shepherd's warning of the coming storm. There is hope, however, that building security in sooner rather than later will stop that, much as the Soviets would seed the clouds to ensure that the rains didn't spoil the May day parade.

Google says desktop PC is three years from 'irrelevance'

Richard IV
Coat

Roman Legions

I seem to remember the Romans losing 3 legions in Germany and never going back.

Aren't the Germans now agitating against Google?

Mine's the one with "Made north of Hadrian's Wall" on the label.

Ofcom wades into UK 'Net Neutrality' row

Richard IV

Dumb?

The only way that could happen is if everyone had a private line that didn't ever touch anyone else's. As soon as contention is thrown into the mix, the dumbness has to go as well, otherwise plain old browsing ends up suffering when you're unlucky enough to share an exchange with binge downloaders.

Think of the ways you could use up a per month download quota - use it all in a couple of days, use it fairly constantly, etc etc.

Personally I thought BTs alleged shenanigans with regards iPlayer were a bit off on account of them targeting that specifically; to be fair they should have throttled all streaming traffic so that all were affected equally.

Twishers reel in 'distracted' Boing Boing blogger

Richard IV

Distracted

Isn't that a given if you're prominent on Twitter?

Google execs protest Italian guilty verdicts

Richard IV
Alert

Desirable, possibly

"Google said it was impossible to pre-screen all YouTube content"

It looks like the court agreed with them; Google should, however be screening their most viewed clips.

I think I agree with the court on that. Clue to Google: "most viewed" implies "making most advertising bucks out of"

Wired defines the storage 'PornYear'

Richard IV
Paris Hilton

erm... no

Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera et al are SI _decimal_ prefixes denoting factors of 1000.

Kibi, Mebi, Gibi, Tebi et al are the IEC _binary_ prefixes denoting factors of 1024 that were introduced to avoid confusion.

It's only been that way for the last 10 years or so *sigh*

Bonus factoid: Megabyte used to have 3 definitions - the third being 1000 kibibytes (as used on the IBM floppy). A quick back of the envelope calculation reveals this to be about 1/30 of a porn second - roughly equal to a money shot ;)

Twitter bomb threat joke man faces possible jail sentence

Richard IV
Black Helicopters

Graduated response

It's somewhat ironic that the UK intertubes are up in arms about a graduated response with regards filesharing (hint: it's the burden of proof that's the bigger problem), yet a blatant failure in suitably grading a response by South Yorks police force has the UK intertubes up in arms...

As this (virtual) rag (and lesbian magazine) has noted many times in the past, "humour" doesn't translate very well once one throws attention deficit into the milieu as the innernet does by default. Granted, a sane person would look at it, snort at the tiny following and overall banality of the other tweets, and move on. These are not sane times however, and I have to say I'm surprised that this didn't result in a general dragnet on Twitter and Stephen Fry being dragged off to Belmarsh amid accusations that he was contemplating doing something unspeakable to an iPad.

I do wonder, though, whether said airport even attempted to "get their shit together" to avoid the terror, or whether they stuck to HM.gov's standard "we do not negotiate with terrorists (except when they are a national government and BAE are out for a contract)" terms of reference.

Why you subsidize Google's Soviet-style Net

Richard IV

just more propaganda

That's not the only model of a non-neutral network. As it happens, I agree that the one you outline in believing the doomsday model your Googly corporate overlords would have you swallow is not conducive to happiness on the tubes. There are others, however, such as separating/prioritising on service _type_ rather than destination. DSL, now with faster HD video access as an option (additional monthly charges may apply)...

Personally, I'd pay extra for a service that de-prioritises adverts if I thought for more than one second that the content creators got to see any of that cash rather than the ISP :)

Chilean mint misspells Chile

Richard IV
Grenade

the answer

a lot less than still having an ordinarily secure civil service post.

It's not like that in Britain of course, there's loads of MPs standing down at the next election after taking hefty advantage of the rules (while still barely being in them for the most part) - funny how they never mention the £60,000 do pass go several times bonus^H^H^H parachute payment they get for doing so.

Racist content on US server 'within UK jurisdiction'

Richard IV

Probably another irrelevant comparison

It would be interesting to see the substantial measure test applied over in libel land to stop the tourists...

John Mayer tweets remorse over Playboy interview

Richard IV
Coat

Golly!

One suspects that the buns are only redeemable at the grand opening of Biccies & Beaujolais, Macaroons & Macon or whatever the future Penrith Confectionery & Chateau-neuf Emporium is pencilled in as...

(when the fine wine is on offer, I'll start _really_ holding back, promise ;)

MEPs to US: Hands off our bank accounts

Richard IV

Question

So is this the first time that the Council of Ministers doesn't get to overrule the European Parliament like what they normally do whenever MEPs make anything approaching a sensible decision?

If so, then hoorah! It's always amused me in the horrified onlooker who can't do anything about it sense of the word that the least democratic wings of the EU have veto power over the democratic bit, and it's the democratic side that gets all the criticism aimed at it.

Vodafone Twitterer takes aim at some beaver

Richard IV
Headmaster

And how's it errant?

Apostrophes can also be used to indicate skipped letters and/or contractions.

Don'[o]t get me started on the general habits of these ne'[v]er-do-wells. E'[v]en nigh on half past 2 o'[f the] clock I knew that homo'[sexual]s could well be valid.

Save DAB! Send FM radios to Africa

Richard IV
WTF?

It's the other way round for me

Every single DAB radio I've owned has broken inside a year. It's not as if I bang them around or anything. By way of comparison, I've had cheap as chips FM radios that the BOFH would struggle to break without WMDs.

I'm skipping to streaming when they shut down FM...

Retailers fooled by fake and borrowed IDs

Richard IV
Pint

Proof of Age standards scheme

"A whopping 71 per cent had not heard of the scheme at all and only four per cent of those surveyed would get such a card."

Hmm, wonder why. Might it be because cards only a step up from being done with crayons and sticky-back plastic succeed at the teenager's aim (Proving to the satisfaction of the retailer that they are over 18, even/especially if they aren't)?

Perhaps we're safer than we feared about teenagers being the soft target for ID cards. £30 for doing the same job as I can do for 50p with some laminated cardboard and a felt tip? You're having a larf incha?

French mock British G-spot probe

Richard IV
Coat

Variability

"It cannot be reduced to a yes or no or an on or off."

Presumably the French are suggesting that it can be reduced instead to a yes, yes, yes or no...

Mine's the one with what she's having.

Fujitsu: 'iPad? That's ours'

Richard IV
Troll

Not news

It would be news if Apple actually owned a trademark prior to announcement...

Science czar calls for openness on climate questions

Richard IV
Headmaster

Actually...

"By making your data open, there's LESS chance of people being able to manipulate it to draw false conclusions."

...There's just as much chance, if not more. There is, however, less chance of them getting away with it without someone noticing.

California school pulls 'oral sex' dictionary

Richard IV
Coat

In other (good) books...

" I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste."

Song of Solomon 2:3

-- Mommeeeee!

-- What's this? <Flicks through Ezekiel as well> This is pure filth! Must... Protect... Children...

Mine's the one with the much-highlighted Old Testament in the pocket

Entire UK will be on ID database sometime in next 3 millennia

Richard IV
Coat

Using Home Office pedantry

Of course it's a pilot scheme.

Why else were BALPA so riled up about Manchester airport? Involves pilots == pilot scheme. QED!

UK.gov uses booze to lure London kids into ID scheme

Richard IV
Black Helicopters

Aha!

Well, it would mean the Home Office could use the standard Web 2.0 "number of users, ever" method of counting how many ID cards there are for starters...

Air France offers two-seat deal for fatties

Richard IV
Coat

And in the spirit of Ryanair...

A further charge will be applied if the fatty wants the extra armrest lowered ;)

Bob the Builder slapped with CGI rendering

Richard IV

Me too, almost

Unfortunately, because of IndianaJ above; it's the theme to BERTHA.

Stoppit & Tidyup - now there's an unhummable themetune. Muuuuuh!

UK BitTorrent admin acquitted on fraud charge

Richard IV
Headmaster

Actually

NOT been proven to be ILLEGAL

There's a huge difference. The prosecution didn't prove their case with respect to the charges that were brought. Quite how making money by providing exactly the service that was being paid for constitutes conspiracy to defraud is beyond me - surely they'd have stood a better chance on something along the lines of aiding and abetting or one of the other conspiracy offences...

West Country pagans tie horses in knots

Richard IV
Coat

Alternate theory

"To start with we thought they were being marked for theft but that is clearly not the case."

Maybe they were: "Don't nick this one, that's the sheriff's gal"

Stargazers spy super-Earth waterworld

Richard IV
Troll

May I be the first to say...

No, it's NOT too hot for Kevin Costner.

5 words of justification: Coffee Grinder Dances With Wolves

Quarter of France Telecom staff 'psychologically vulnerable'

Richard IV
Boffin

Marvellous fun this statistics lark is...

"1 in 3 people will suffer from mental illness during their life, hence 33% of the population is phychologically vulnerable but only 25% of France Telecom employees are"

Note the "during their life" bit! 25% of France Telecom employees are having such problems *right now*. That's pretty darn high. Prevalence of mental illness *right now* in the general population doesn't generally get much above the 10% mark, and that includes ailments that aren't very correlated with suicides, such as OCD, ADHD and narcolepsy.

Villagers revolt over BT chairman's broadband

Richard IV

I'm so close to agreeing...

the major caveat being that it's a bit of a meagre trial if there's only one person trying it on said exchange.

The trialiness seems to be a bit of marketing spin after 1) the chairman threw a hissy fit 2) the IT dept did a bit of seeing what they could do to spare themselves more hissy fits.

Call it a hunch, but I'm willing to be that there'll be a few folks in the neighbourhood who can afford the £3000 per line quoted. They merely resent being treated like the great unwashed when they've got houses costing squillions. I'm not sure which attitude is funnier.

Replace Bulldog gridiron mascot with robot, PETA demands

Richard IV
Pint

Am I the only one...?

... who wanted to swap PETA activists and bulldogs in the first paragraph of the article?

Anyhoo, for the only time (so far) in my life I not only agree with them but would extend the principle to pretty much all "pure" dog breeds. Except in Norfolk, breeding amongst close relatives has never been considered a good idea. Generally dog breeds were bred for specific purposes, and the bulldog's (fighting bulls) has been somewhat defunct for a good century and a half. I still can't get over the thought of poodles as hunting dogs though, those Frenchies *sheesh*!

A prize to the breeder of the first bullshitdog.

Advertisers say new cookie law met by browser settings

Richard IV

Fine

I can go with this argument so long as browsers are set to not use cookies by default.

Gov advisers slate Home Office over innocents' DNA retention

Richard IV
Boffin

Numerical context

"We know that the DNA database is a vital crime fighting tool, identifying 410,589 crime scenes between 1998 and March 2009 with a DNA match and a possible lead on the possible identity of the offender."

So, assuming that there's a 1:1 match of crimes to crime scenes (I'm willing to bet it's actually 1:1 and a bit though), that's less than 1% of recorded crime has DNA evidence.

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