Posts by Jonathan Richards 1

Live blog: Facebook's 'screw you' to Google revealed at last

Web of trust

It's all very well to say that (were I actually to HAVE a Facebook account), I could search for, oh, I dunno, say a new tablet computer and weight the results by the ones that FB friends and FBFs of FBFs etc. "Like". I can see how that would be a fun and geeky sort of thing to work out, if you've got terabytes of linked Likes.

However, it's much more likely that I'm going to think of an Actual Friend who kno more than 0 about tablets, and I'm going to give him or her a call and say "What do you think of the new Applung Nexoid 19.3, eh?".

I don't necessarily trust the judgement of every one of my friends, and certainly not equally across all of them with respect to any particular issue. That social graph is going to need its edges weighting carefully if the search results are going to be anything but dross.

'UK DNA database by stealth' proposed in £100m NHS project

Missing DNA

> most males are missing a huge chunk of DNA making them more prone to genetic disease anyway...

Erm... no, I don't think so. A male inherits one X chromosome from his mother and a (smaller) Y chromosome from his father. If anything, it's females who are missing a chunk of DNA, since they miss out on Dad's Y chromosome, and get an X from their paternal grandmother.

The gender-related gene complexes for female characteristics may not be *expressed* in the male phenotype, but they're still there, otherwise males wouldn't be able to father daughters.

Einstein almost tagged dark energy in the early 1920s

Urggh

If you're passing cookies, you probably need medical attention, and promptly.

Apple must apologise for its surly apology on its website on Saturday

Re: If the point is for people to NOTICE the ruling this does not comply. Under the fold.

What is this "resolution" of which you speak?

===========

$ lynx www.apple.co.uk

# Apple (United Kingdom)

#home RSS index

* Apple

* Store

* Mac

* iPod

* iPhone

* iPad

* iTunes

* Support

Search ____________________

iPad mini. Every inch an iPad.

* Watch the keynote

* Watch the video

* iPad with Retina display. Just as stunning. Twice as fast.

* The new iMac.

* MacBook Pro with 13-inch Retina display.

* iPhone 5. The biggest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone.

Shop at the Apple Online Store, call 0800 048 0408, visit an Apple Retail Store or find a reseller.

* Site Map

* Hot News

* RSS Feeds

* Media Info

* Environment

* Job Opportunities

* Contact Us

Copyright © 2012 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.

* Terms of Use

* Privacy Policy

* Use of Cookies

United Kingdom Choose your country or region

On 25 October 2012, Apple Inc. published a statement on its UK website in relation to Samsung's Galaxy tablet

computers. That statement was inaccurate and did not comply with the order of the Court of Appeal of England and

Wales. The correct statement is at Samsung/Apple UK judgement

===========

There it is, right on the first screen.

California begins crackdown on mobile app developers

N/A

If you collect no personal information, compliance is easy: please use this draft.

THIS APP COLLECTS NO PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION.

Job done.

A lesser-known new feature in iOS 6: It's tracking you everywhere

Anticlimax

Oh. I thought you were going to tell us that the music store was then trying to sell you a syphon flush. That would have been so much better.

Endeavour: donuts and a Toyota ease shuttle's drive through L.A.

Keypad

Get that freaky hexadecimal keypad on the centre (oh, alright then, center) console. It's laid out not like a numeric keypad but like a telephone dial pad, but then has hex digits A - F in the two rows *above* 0-9.

A B C

D E F

1 2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

--0--

Oh, well, I suppose none of the astronauts had to touch-type enter any object code in-flight. We hope...

Man charged over alleged April Jones Facebook trolling

Quote> It does seem like he posted it on his own page.

It's not about where it ends up... it's how it got there.

The Communications Act 2003 regulates communications networks in the UK. The guy committed an offence by sending the message over a public electronic communications network. The offence was committed at the moment he clicked on 'Submit', and he would have been equally guilty even if he had been putting it into entirely private storage. In that event, though, he would have been much less likely to have been detected. Actually publishing your offending material just makes it easy for the courts.

Offensive telecoms

This has been the case since God was in short trousers. Under the same legislation (Communications Act 2003) it's a criminal offence in the UK to use indecent or obscene language even in a person-to-person telephone call.

"A person is guilty of an offence if he—

(a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or

(b) causes any such message or matter to be so sent."

Source [legislation.gov.uk]

Experts troll 'biggest security mag in the world' with DICKish submission

Credibility?

No, absolutely no credibility. That one sentence should have given it away: every fule kno that data are plural.

Beached whale on Suffolk coast - Reader snap

Re: What to do with it?

Take it to wherever Her Majesty would like it put: "Over there will be fine. Mind the corgis".

No, really, the Receiver of Wrecks must be informed. Whales, porpoises and sturgeon are Royal Fish and when taken in the waters around the UK or when stranded become the property of the Crown, or of the Lord of the Manor, e.g. the Duke of Cornwall if the stranding is on the duchy coast.

Pair face £250k fines for spamming mobes with millions of texts

Re: So why doesn't the ICO go after the big names ignoring TPS?

I believe companies who can convincingly maintain that they have a 'business relationship' with you can ignore the TPS. I haven't looked this up, nor do I know how tenuous the business relationship can be. "You answered the door to one of our chaps with a clipboard in 2002"-sort-of-tenuous, probably.

Re: Hoorah!

> rather than fining public bodies of much needed cash

Do you think that public bodies should be immune from the Information Commissioner's attentions, then? (Think carefully; I pretty much guarantee that the majority of your personal information is held by public bodies rather than private ones). Or perhaps there should be a different approach to punishing disregard for the rules if a public body is at fault? Suggestions welcome, but they must be compliant with the human rights accords.

Nominet mulls killing off the .co from .co.uk

Re: Why ... when it has unintended consequences

As we have seen, registering and using a .com domain puts you within reach of the US Justice system with respect to materials you serve up with it. You may, or may not, like this 'feature'...

Ig Nobels 2012: Physics of ponytails, chimp arse-cognition and more

I cannot believe that I am the first to say...

...chimpanzees are NOT MONKEYS. Jeez, you'd have thought that the Librarian would have got through to everyone by now.

Space shuttle to slip surly bonds of Earth one last time over California

Re: As opposed to....

Actually, I think Capt. Cook sailed in His Majesty's Bark Endeavour. So much worse than his Byte, don'cha know.

Latest iPhone hacked to blab all your secrets

Re: email

But email addresses reside in the contacts list which was available to the exploit, if I read TFA correctly. Just the addresses of the people that CEOs communicate with in the course of business could facilitate a spear phishing attack, no?

The advice is good, if a bit elliptical: keep your confidential work communications safely on a confidential work communications network.

Reg hack uncovers perfect antidote to internet

Re: Safer idea?

Well, you'd probably need a water supply from, oh, I don't know, say a well, to supply your high-pressure pump, wouldn't you?

I spy: Drug drops and foxy couples

1950's bakelite model

I've still got mine, together with the set of 1958 Brussels World Fair discs that came with it. And, no, you can't have it.

Online dole queue tech 'not grounded in reality', say councils

Re: Airstrip two - multilingualism

TeeCee wrote:

> As far as I can make out, producing everything in umpty-something languages

> is something unique to British bureaucracy.

Not at all. At NATO (OTAN) everything important is always produced in both official languages (English and French), as is also the case in Canada, I believe. OK, two is clearly less than umpty-something. But the British bureaucracy doesn't produce *everything* in many languages, just the things that need to be so produced.

Office 2013 to eat own file-format dog food

Re: An attorney consulting on software? Wtf??

You haven't been paying attention to document standards issues, have you? Andy Updegrove knows more about the whole O(O)XML/ODF/doc(x) ball of chalk than any four or five of the commenters in this thread added together, me included.

In the spirit of sharing, have a look at this interview [groklaw.net] from 2008.

Can YOU crack the Gauss uber-virus encryption?

Re: more info please

Jeez, mate!

El Reg wrote in TFA: More details and a technical description of the problem are available in a blog post here.

That's a clue for you to move your mouse cursor to the pretty blue underlined word 'here' and click the left mouse button. Or the right button if you've got it set up for left-handers. If you're reading with lynx, ignore the mouse. Use cursor keys to move the cursor before the word 'here', and press Enter. That should set you on the path!

BBC gives itself a gold in 700Gbit-a-second Olympic vid sprint

Re: "peddling"

Good point, aggressively made... But then, proofreading was never high on El Reg's agenda.

Now, will ALL comment[er|tard]s PLEASE stop writing [would | could | might] of <past participle> when those past tenses are formed with have.

Thank you.

Don't get sued or cuffed on Twitter: Read these top 10 pitfalls

Re: Is there a lawyer in the house?

Q0: Is there a lawyer in the house?

A0: Possibly. I Are Not One.

A1: re 140 char copyright infringements: I suppose it could - the ECJ judgement seems to indicate that they care more about the appropriation of people's efforts in selecting and arranging expressions than about absolute volumes. From my non-lawyer and (I believe) commonsense point of view, I can't see how substantial protectable effort can be put into selecting and arranging up to 140 characters.

A2: re onanistic cricketers: TFA did mention that idle abuse wasn't actionable. He's a big bloke, though, and owns some heavy bats, so you might want to make sure that your Reg account doesn't get hacked...

Jimbo Wales: Wikipedia servers in UK? No way, not with YOUR libel law

Re: In the future, people can't count

Early first millenium?

That would have been earlier than 500AD, then, roughly twelve or thirteen hundred years before the USPTO would be conjured into being. The second millenium began when the first one ended, in 1001AD, and we're now eleven [1] years into the third millenium.

[1] Yes, yes, I know that the departed Ms Bee forbade anyone to say here that the third millenium began on 1 January 2001, but it is nonetheless true.

Knowhere

I thought that might be a hidden gem, but actually it's a hidden turd. At a first glance, it comes across as a site for sk8tr boyz to vent their teenage angst, and moan about their localities without being informative or helpful. I shan't be giving it a second glance.

Patent troll Intellectual Ventures is more like a HYDRA

Re: Ban Hidden Patents

AC said: Not allowing a competitor to work around your patents by not disclosing what they are should be an offence in itself.

Maybe not an offence, but a defence for the competitor if the patent holder later tries to assert the patent in litigation. This would restore some of the value to the State of having a patent system at all, viz. that it is intended to drive the progress of technology. Some of that progress must consist of ingenious, different and quite possibly better ways of doing something. If you don't even know what patent you're supposed to be working around, that can't possibly happen.

Bill Gates, Harry Evans and the smearing of a computer legend

First client: SCO

...prolly.

Really, it appears that Zeidman has forgotten, or perhaps never knew, how software was developed back then. Big chunks of stuff were written directly in assembler, without there ever being a higher-level language source code. Space was tight. Carrying screeds of comments (i.e. human readable text within the object code) forward would only have happened if exact *copying* had taken place, and nobody ever alleged that, as far as I know.

Using a debugger to 'explore the internals' of the operating system you're cloning isn't a clean room implementation of the API, though.

Twitter airport bomb joke conviction binned in common-sense WIN

Re: Grow up and recognise twitter isn't private!!!

> Posting something on a public forum on the internet is not the same as screaming it out in a public place, no matter how many similar "people" like yourself keep trying to compare the two.

For legal purposes, they are pretty much the same. When you scream stuff out in a public space, people within earshot are perhaps better able to understand your degree of seriousness and intentions than when you post something on the internet, which (a) has no tone of voice and (b) has a practically unlimited audience. I don't think you'll find many lawyers who would draw a distinction between public speech, printed publication and posting online. They're all public.

PS. You put "people" in quotes, there. Dehumanising your debating opponent is puerile and counterproductive.

Re: Grow up and recognise twitter isn't private!!!

My thought exactly. From TFA: "...a series of tweets to ... Sarah Tonner". No, clearly not. A series of messages published to the world, and in the offending message clearly not addressed to her but to the airport. "You've got a week and a bit ...".

Bitching about the airport in incendiary terms in private would be one thing, but publishing it was shortsighted, and Twitter messages are definitely published.

Microsoft unfurls patent lasso, snares Linux servers

...but they shouldn't be

> They are state-granted monopolies in the space of ideas.

Ah, but patents are meant to be protection for inventions, explicitly NOT for ideas. If you have an idea, the correct way to make money from it is to build a better technological item with it, which you can then patent and license and/or build it yourself. You should not, in any current patent regime, be able to get a patent on a mere idea.

What happens when Facebook follows MySpace?

Re: No need even for your own server

> not sure if there's anything out there which does this

Check out piwigo.

It was offered as a plugin service on my web host, and does a lot of the things you mentioned. Works for me.

Facebook's Zuckerberg awarded privacy patent

Re: "Share with no-one" == just don't upload to FB.

> you might want to look at it yourself or show it to people face-to-face

Set up a website of your own, then. Hosting + domain name registration is simple, cheap and you have total control over your own data and who gets access to what. It seems simpler than all this worry and angst over whether social network sites' privacy settings do what they say they do.

Australians receive SMS death threats

Binding contracts

Actually, and regrettably to interject a fact into an hilarious comment thread, a purported contract to engage in illegal activity is not enforceable. Illegal contract is illegal.

Carry on!

Readers fret over LOHAN's chilly bits

LOHAN gets tighter as well as colder?

The nozzle diameter is 3mm at room temperature, in a Spanish summer, but what is the coefficient of thermal expansion of the nozzle material? I expect that a metallic nozzle would shrink with a 90K temperature drop. I can't do the maths to know if the shrinkage would be significant.

BT to patrol MoD's cyber borders for another 7 years

Re: http://www.mod.uk/../../

That domain is separate from the Ministry of Defence's real working networks. Of course.

$ dig www.mod.uk

...

;; ANSWER SECTION:

www.mod.uk. 5388 IN A 94.236.30.88

whereas the MOD owns an entire IPV4 /8 subnet for operational use, 25.0.0.0/8

Judge: Patent litigants behave like animals

Re: Light in the dark.

@FuzzyTheBear, who wrote

'what's a patent good for except stiffle competition?'

It's meant to promote progress. You invent something novel and innovative, which improves the state of some technological art. You can keep your inventive steps secret, and sell the product if that's what you want to do. The State, however, will give you another option. In order that the inventive step does not have to be replicated by other researchers (I'm trying hard not to mention re-inventing the wheel, but I just failed), you may get a time-limited monopoly on the invention in exchange for full disclosure. The patent gets published, and as a competitor to you, I can study your invention and see if I can improve on it. See, improvement and greater competition. What got stiffled?

Submarine patents

Ah, now you put your finger on a problem. "When you have it working". Once upon a time, in a patent protection regime far, far away, one had to submit a patent application for one's better mousetrap with a *working model*.

So many patent applications in the software field can be summarised as "it would be really cool if you programmed a computer to do <insert cool idea here>". Submitting code, or even a binary working program, is not required. Consequently, the USPTO has granted any number of patents which surface and torpedo current innovators: the submarine patent problem.

Repeat after me: "Patents do not protect ideas. Patents protect inventions".

Apples and pears

You're not comparing the same things, at all.

1 cancer treatment drug == 1 patent

1 'medium to large-sized software development project' == 10-1000 patents, who can tell? Microsoft says, precisely but without specification, that Linux infringes 233 of its patents (that number is remembered, but I know the company is very precise).

In the recent Oracle v Google case, it was placed in evidence that Sun software engineers had competitions to see who could get the most blatantly stupid software patents past the USPTO. There's no doubt that in the USA the whole software patents scene is in horrible dysfunctional disarray.

New gov.uk site hits beta, flashes SINGLE typeface to punters

Re: It put cookies on my computer, and I wasn't given a choice about this

It did? I visited the site with Lynx, which always and without fail gives one the choice of accepting or rejecting cookies, and it didn't try to set any for me.

Tryit it with different browsers

@Rono666, who wrote: You just know it's only going to be IE friendly

No, not so. I just tried it with lynx, and it works just fine. I can indeed 'get in, find what I want and get out'. I wish that the Meteorological Office would adopt some of these design principles.

BBC TV boss George Entwistle nabs director general post

That endless taxi service...

...clearly has two ends, which you mentioned in the very same sentence. Or perhaps you meant continuous taxi service? POINH, or a url at least.

Ofcom: Here come the UK online copyright rules ... in 2015. Maybe

Static IP?

> After three snail mail letters within a period of 12 months, the customer's IP address

> may go on a register, or CIL and the rights-holder may obtain a court order to impel

> the ISP to reveal the customer's identity.

I'm certain that I've had more than one IP address (allocated by one of these ISPs) in the last twelve months. Is it a corollary of these regulations that ISPs must hold IPs static, and/or track their allocation over time periods measured in years? It'd be nice in a way to be able to rely on a static ip address; I wouldn't have to subscribe to a dynamic DNS service.

Foxconn daddy: 'Don't buy Galaxy S III, wait for iPhone 5'

Re: The Marxist understanding of the market is going strong, I see

> "society" (a handwaving term designating a thing that does not exist as such...)

Is that you, Margaret? Ask Nurse and she'll explain why trolling El Reg is a Bad Thing. When your meds kick in, you'll see the funny side of equating market regulation with Marxism - how we laughed!

Google in dock again over defamatory auto-complete

The Googlebot comes here...

...and you just created a web page which has the words "Daniel Bower" in close proximity to the words "committed rape" and "I am a rapist". Welcome to the world of the defamed.

This occurs because of Jonathan's Second Law of Information Retrieval: The set of words in a document do NOT tell you what the document is about. That is to say, the meaning comes in the grammar and semantics linking the words together. Google is just a huge index of words, after all.

Google coughs up what it coughs up to govs - and what it suppresses

Re: I didn't notice the election that voted the Google oligarchy into power

What is this power of which you speak? Google &reg; just told us something about the requests for information they get from authorities about the users of Google's services. Google isn't administering some sort of global resource like air or the oceans. They only have as much power over you, personally, as you give them by agreeing to the Terms and Conditions of Service. If you don't like it, don't use the services.

Asteroid zips past Earth

Re: 4 days warning, and it's 500m across....

@S4qFBxkFFg, who asked :

...how many rockets can be launched in 4 days, and how many nukes can you stuff in each one?

I was about to suggest that you need to set aside several years of international diplomacy to renegotiate the terms of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, because I believed that Nukes in Spa-a-a-a-ce were forbidden by it. However, Article IV declares that "States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner."

OK! Nukes on an intercept course for an inbound mountain are not in orbit, nor are they "stationed", so we can stand the lawyers down, and maybe even send them to observe at about the site(s) of impact for thousands of tons of irradiated gravel! Result!

Canary Islands host long-distance quantum teleportation

> In quantum teleportation, the phenomenon known as “entanglement” to transmit information instantaneously.

This sentence no verb.

ICO: Managed to comply with Cookies Law? Go help the other kids

Here you go

I had occasion to send this useful link to a .gov.uk organisation only yesterday:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electronic_communications/the_guide/cookies.aspx

You'll listen but probably not here

s/they're/their

Did you have a point?