* Posts by Wayland Sothcott 1

365 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

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Joint Committee on UK Snoopers' Charter: Make like a dictionary and give a definition

Wayland Sothcott 1

I am pretty sure we will encypt everything and use TOR or something. Files can be shared with P2P why not whole websites and email accounts and maybe even money (BitCoin). Try getting Internet Connection Records for that lot.

Wayland Sothcott 1

Re: Header image

"She may be a horrible person, her actions certainly are, but deriding someone's appearance is pathetic." - you can tell a lot from appearance, don't be so politically correct, it's mind control.

Sure, encrypt your email – while your shiny IoT toothbrush spies on you

Wayland Sothcott 1

Connected telly

There is a reason you would connect your telly, it's to get more TV programmes.

Why would you want to "Turn on your hot water whilst talking to your daughter."?

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Re: The problem is that cloud services are allowed for such things

If I want to see what's in the fridge I open the door and look inside. Most have a high tech light operating by SCADA bus that detects the opening of the door. Obviously it could be susceptible to STUXNET virus.

BT broadband is down: Former state monopoly goes TITSUP UK-wide

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Core routers caught fire

failover routers were next to them so also burned.

Land Rover Defender dies: Production finally halted by EU rules

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So what exactly killed it?

This is a technical publication, we can handle the hard stuff. So what EU rules killed it and why is the Defender in particular victim of them?

In my opinion it was just JLR wanted to kill it but wanted to shift the blame to the evil EU. If it was an engine problem just fit a different engine.

ISPs: UK.gov should pay full costs of Snooper's Charter hardware

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Re: "tight safeguards.." "powerful Communications Data Request Filter is not abused."

BTW that phrase "Communications Data Request Filter" just wreaks of some civil servant weasel told "We can't call it a database, we can't call it a database"

Reminds me of Information Retrieval in the film Brazil.

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Re: Depressing.

Clearly they are screen *FOR* psychopathy.

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It's not a problem if criminals have your data. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.

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Re: Freedom of Information

They are restricting FOI now. Anyway if gov don't want to tell you they just respond to your FOI with a cover letter saying they don't have the info.

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Standard web logging ve The Machine from Person Of Interest

The TV series Person Of Interest has a computer system which watches everyone and creates a list of terrorists and a list of people with standard criminal problems. It's an AI and generally works beautifully.

The UK gov ought to just state that standard logging features be switched on. That would be cheap.

What they are asking for is a distributed database that works as well as DNS but is far far more complex and to be designed and built by the ISPs. There is no chance that this can be come about like other Internet features. It would require that an Israeli company create it as closed source and ISPs place it on their servers or as a hardware sniffer box.

Ten years in, ultra-high-def gets a standard

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Re: Really shit the bed with this spec

I think it's reasonable that they get the decent signal out there and the TVs are at least able to show the picture. I agree that there should be two logos, one for the basic compatibility and another for full compliance. That way the standard can get established and the TV makers can work on improving their TVs.

Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock dead at 42

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Re: RIP

Debian is a good platform on which to build your own distro. SteamOS for instance or use the Perfect Debian Server instructions to be lead through the build process from the ssh prompt.

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Re: Some human decency needed here...

So it would be normal for a neighbour not to comment, fair enough but the lack of comments does not mean lack of something to comment on. You can't say "someone would have said something" if the police are victimizing people who make reports to the police. Saying something is the very thing they would not do if the police did him in.

Wayland Sothcott 1

Re: Mental illness

That sounds like an external force affecting you. Maybe you ate something toxic or a cist burst in your body or someone was beaming microwaves at you. Did you feel physically unwell or was it all emotional?

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Deb + Ian excellent OS

I am sad and concerned that this high profile person has been killed. When you hear of suicide threats you think oh yeah he did it. But then if you're going to remove an obstacle to closed source spyware being placed in the OS you would want it to look like suicide so you would plant that meme.

Why Microsoft yanked its latest Windows 10 update download: It hijacked privacy settings

Wayland Sothcott 1

Re: people's unique advertising ID numbers

You make the advertising ID sound like a bad thing were as Microsoft say it helps improve my experience of advertising. I think I will go with Microsoft on this since they are the authority here.

Superfish 2.0: Dell ships laptops, PCs with huge internet security hole

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Re: Well if Dell says so . . .

Look, Corporations have lied in the past but it's a logical fallacy to say they will lie in future. In fact having been caught lying we can safely say they won't do it again, that's all in the past.

(Did you see how I used 'critical thinking' to slam you? Did you see how I tried to say that because they have been caught lying that they no longer do so?)

EU's Paris terror response includes 'virtual currencies' crimp

Wayland Sothcott 1

Re: Virtual currency? How about "follow the money" instead?

You are using flowery because you don't want to be called a conspiracy theorist. To me the event was a set up to generate just the sort of 'reactions' we are see. The event seems a bit desperate to me since they already had one terror thing in Paris this year. Perhaps some consequences will be unwelcome because it's counter to a unified EU. However boarders can be left open if every individual can be 'chipped' and tracked. Fortunately the Smartphones have 'chipped' most people and are even being used as money by many banks and shops.

Really this event is good for everyone, except ISIS and Extremists like myself and yourself.

Tech firms fight anti-encryption demands after Paris murders

Wayland Sothcott 1

Real Time Messages

So during the attacks they would not need to use encryption since there is not enough time to use the intercepted messages to get ahead f them. During the social media phase they are not using encryption. During the planning is the only time encryption would be an advantage. If people want to communicate secretly then they can unless someone on the inside leaks the info.

'Shut down the parts of internet used by Islamic State masterminds'

Wayland Sothcott 1

Re: Well that's a good solution

You are answering the wrong question. You think the question is "How do we fight ISIS on the Internet?" which you have answered very sensibly but really anyone could have thought of that but the Gov don't.

The real question is "How can we monitor every aspect of everyone's lives?" Blanket surveillance of everybody is a good place to start, not targeted on just ISIS.

IT contractors raise alarm over HMRC mulling 'one-month' nudge onto payrolls

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Re: Not about IT?

As a contractor you are far more in control of your working life than as a permie. You're more like a Pirate than a Royal Marine. Companies need both types of people. I expect you were hired by a department within a company who are able to pay other companies to get stuff done. I expect it was corporate HQ who issued the hiring freeze so technically you are not a person but a supplier.

A company (customer) expect another company (supplier) to look after their own staff and taxes. The customer tells the supplier what they are looking for and the supplier figures out how best to deliver that. As long as the customer is pleased with product or service and the supplier is pleased with the payment then business has been done. As long as no one gets run over by a forklift then the human aspect is OK too.

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Re: KeithR Re: Long overdue

"Rather asinine, isn't it, for a contractor to complain about lack of job security?"

It's not a case of complaining. Job security has a value. Permie get paid less but are in full employment. Depending on the contracting area a contractor may have long or short periods of no work. That has a negative monetary value.

If the proposals take away some benefits of contracting but don't compensate with the benefits of a permanent job then the complain is it's making you worse off.

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Re: I Don't Understand The Logic ....

You're forgetting that pemies get paid less. So the pay cuts would equate to less tax paid. But then that's more profit for the employer and so they pay more tax. It's not obvious which way it goes for The Revenue.

Wayland Sothcott 1

Re: I Don't Understand The Logic ....

You would think it would bring more money in to get Farcebook to pay their tax than try and make thousands of contractors pay a bit more. As noted a contractor has a larger tax bill than a permie.

We suck? No, James Dyson. It is you who suck – Bosch and Siemens

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Re: HUH?

Look, we have to save the earth. I happily pay 5p for a shopping bag that used to be free and have noticed planet earth is a little less endangered. You must have noticed a reduction in global warming since we switched to environmentally friendly light bulbs. These AAAA vacuum cleaners have made the sky a bit bluer too.

Broadband powered by home gateways? Whose bright idea was THIS?

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Re: FttDP

If you're powering your own service and you're the only one who loses out if you switch the power off then no big deal. However if you are the only one powering a shared hub then that's a guaranteed nightmare. You could turn your power off when you go on holiday and upset other people in your street.

Of course you can text and call while driving – it's perfectly safe

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Vaxhall TV advert

The neighbors boy complements the man's car and asks if it has a twitter account and a MySpace webpage or something. The bloke seems disheartened that his car does not have an Android app. "Didn't you want all that shit?" the boy asks.

I wanna know what car he has because that's the one with out the CAN bus vulnerabilities. You don't want someone doing a Michael Hastings or a Paul Walker style assassination on you. It's mad enough battling Merc drivers in a 20 year old Peugeot. Ah maybe I need a powerful microwave oven element as a WiFi booster sending out scrambled data. That would disable a Merc.

Microsoft now awfully pushy with Windows 10 on Win 7, 8 PCs – Reg readers hit back

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Linux

Most people who get work done on computers are only just able to make them work. My wife can install Adobe for her mum. I can build a Linux based server that will run for years serving files and emails for a small business. Small businesses are at the level of installing Adobe.

Farewell to Borland C++: Embarcadero releases Delphi and C++ Builder 10

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Re: We miss Borland..

What was so amazing about the original Turbo Pascal was how accessible it was for such a powerful tool. I think it was £45 plus a bit more for the libraries. I had become restricted by MS Basic on a DOS machine but as soon as I switched to Turbo Pascal I was instantly productive.

I feel that Borland lost it's appeal for me with Delpi. Yes it was a good tool but for the type of business applications I was producing MS Access was far faster and had a better database back end.

Now the tool is super expensive unless you are creating a major program with a very big budget.

Death knell for Windows with Bing, licences carved up

Wayland Sothcott 1
Devil

Computing is becoming both easier and more difficult

You are totally right.

Windows is known for getting slower and slower over months and years. The solution which always worked was format and re-install but in the last few years as you just said the computer is just as slow having done the updates.

I envy the people who just unlock their fondle slab and instantly start doing stuff. Windows should be like that. It never was but it's further from that than ever. No one who has first used a tablet will ever take to a PC. People who use PCs will migrate to a tablet once there is no reason to cling to a PC.

The computer industry is like a fast flowing river, you can hold your position or even paddle upstream but everyone including your parents are swept along with the technological flow. They are not using cloud services because they know more about computers than you do, it's because their new computer came like that or a button popped up and they pressed it.

Computing is becoming both easier and more difficult. It's easier for those who are clueless and harder for those who know what they are doing.

AMD unveils 'single purpose' graphics card for PC gamers and NO ONE else

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Re: I wish there was a game I actually wanted to play.

You know what. It might be a good thing you got bored of computer games. We have a massive great big high bandwidth super real Matrix to play in. A word of warning, the game's maker has said in the printed manual "That which openeth the Matrix belongeth to me."

Will fondleslab's fickle finger of fate help Windows 10?

Wayland Sothcott 1

Re: No need to anything Microsoft in the home anymore.

Windows PCs are very hard to operate but have always been very capable and adaptable. Android and iOS are fare easier for the average person to use for their average stuff. Microsoft dumbing down the PC is in recognition of the fact that most people don't need the power and complexity. However they have not been able to make them as easy to use as Apple products and the dumbing down makes them even harder to use for the things they are most suited for.

Basically Microsoft are hastening the PC demise.

They should have kept windows like Windows 7. They should have done all that Metro stuff just on the Tablets and Phones.

Just imagine if they had got the Windows 8 speed improvements and it still looked like Windows 7.

Just imagine if you could fit an ARM co-processor and run the Android and Tablet apps on the PC at super speed.

Wayland Sothcott 1

Re: I think I'm getting old :(

Well basically you are removing all the 'improvements'. Might as well stick with the earlier version. Yough can get a program for Windows 8 called Start Is Back. That helps.

Wayland Sothcott 1
Meh

Re: I think I'm getting old :(

Well I downloaded Windows 10 beta from Microsoft and it works very well and quite quick. However it still suffers from the main Windows 8 problem of having a Metro interface and requiring a Hotmail account. As long as Microsoft think they can make money from their 'iTune Store' clone then they will keep the Metro interface. However if you ignore the Metro interface it's almost as good as Windows 7 but not as good at XP. The only reason not to use XP is various new versions of programs from Microsoft are not supported.

The police are WRONG: Watching YouTube videos is NOT illegal

Wayland Sothcott 1

Re: The police are WRONG

I find the police give you some respect if you put up a fight. You get treated like a criminal, ie they are scared of you and not like a law abiding citizen which means they walk all over you.

Wayland Sothcott 1

Re: If they want to stop terrorists...

The video is at it's most effective when it's talked about but not watched. Getting it taken off the main places ordinary folk will see it is the best way to get most people to know *about* it. When you do watch it it's obviously terrible acting, poor special effects and far too good audio quality for a cheap camera outdoors in the wind. If too many people saw this too many people would know it was a fake. Their will be people at the BBC who know it's fake but they don't want to get their friends into trouble.

Higgs boson even more likely to actually be Higgs boson - boffins

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Re: One small fermionic decay for a boson

I agree, the discovery of the Higgs is as significant as the moon landings and the discovery of Piltdown Man which changed our understanding of evolution for ever.

One amazing reason why NASA boffins are celebrating Curiosity's 687th day on Mars

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Incredible

What's more plausible? That NASA spent all this money for this crap or they did it on the cheap in a studio like Capricorn One?

The best bit about this whole mission was the landing but Curiosity never even attempted to make a selfie.

What a load of bollox.

Greenwald alleges NSA tampers with routers to plant backdoors

Wayland Sothcott 1

Person Of Interest

I think Snowden gets most of his intel from Person Of Interest TV series, or is it the other way around?

Scientists warn of FOUR-FOOT sea level rise from GLACIER melt

Wayland Sothcott 1

This has always happened

There are many cities under the sea showing hundreds of feet of sea level rise in some cases. 4 feet is nothing.

UK's pirate-nagging VCAP scheme WON'T have penalties – report

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Re: Remember Kids

"Mmmm Bieber" smiles the mother in the Argus advert last year. Can you imagine Argus doing an advert where the father smiles "Mmmm, Miley Cyrus" instead of "Mmmm X-Box" or whatever acceptable product he was thinking of.

WTF is Net Neutrality, anyway? And how can we make everything better?

Wayland Sothcott 1

Free Internet?

When people fisrt started getting on the Internet back in the early 90's the most astonishing thing was that you could reach any server anywhere in the world for free. Free once you had got online that is.

How was it possible to talk to Australia for free when phoning there cost a fortune?

Not only that, how come the content was free too?

The next astonishing thing was that you could host a website and anyone in the world could look at it for free. You could pretty much say what you liked on the site and it was only discretion keeping you sensible.

Obviously the efficiency of HTML and TCP/IP compared to the vast bandwidth available meant it was probably not costing anything to use it in any case. It was this freedom and utility which got the Internet to catch fire the way it has.

Video is so massive compared to any other form of data that it requires new technology and new rules. TCP/IP is the least obvious choice for sending video yet the most readily available. It maybe possible to build a P2P video network to rival YouTube but who wants that sort of traffic flowing through their home connection all day?

We are seeing the maturing of the Internet rather in the way we nolonger see open SMTP relays which were once left open to assist everyone's email.

No anon pr0n for you: BT's network-level 'smut' filters will catch proxy servers too

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Marvin

The changes in the world probably don't affect you because you are very average and stay clear of the edges. However the road is narrowing. Acceptable behavior standards are being drastically altered like turning a massive ship. An article in the Daily Mail yesterday said "60% of parents admit to snooping on their children's Internet use" Surely the headline should have read "40% of parents admit to allowing their children to use the Internet unsupervised".

These filters will allow the corporations to become the parents. I can think of some examples of bad corporate parenting like allowing children to sit in front of the Disney channel. Likes like inviting a paedo to babysit. Just look up Donald Duck Ride in google image search if you need some evidence to kick off your own investigations.

Wayland Sothcott 1

Re: If it's using DNS,

Presumably it would be easy for BT to divert the DNS protocol to BT servers. This loophole will remain only as long as BT want it to.

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Re: Seriously?

The average bloke in this country no longer has balls. They have TV adverts telling us how useless men are. There is one where the wife does not allow the man a house key. She and her friends are sitting inside laughing because he is outside and has missed the curfew. Can you imagine an advert being shown where the man treats the woman this way? This is how deep in the psyche this mind warping social engineering has gone.

Men are seen either as harmless sports loving fools or sick perverts and not much in between unless they are pretty.

Men should grow some balls. Dare they?

Winamp is still a thing? NOPE: It'll be silenced forever in December

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Re: Well at least the llama will be happy

I use it every day to listen to live streams. The shoutcast streaming format is pretty good. It should be developed. There are Open Source versions of WinAmp. It's a classic.

Death of the business Desktop

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Re: *ahem*

So it's all messed up due to licensing?

I am sure they can change that.

Outstanding analysis, thanks.

Bitcopocalypse! Top cryptocurrency can be hijacked, warn boffins

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Re: Electricity is free is you steal it

The nature of the BitCoin maths is that PCs are rubbish at mining. You can buy something a million times more powerful that it's just not worth trying to get PCs to do it.

However Graphics cards are 100 times better than the CPU for BitCoins so an online games company programmer decided to put mining software into the game. He mined quite a few but got caught when gamers graphics cards started getting very hot.

LiteCoin mining is another matter. The maths that drive that can't be done so easily with non-PC hardware. The PC is the best tool and the graphics card is the top component.

Wayland Sothcott 1

Re: Increasing difficulty of mining Bitcoin

The difficulty reflects the amount of mining power automatically. Some people drop out when mining becomes unprofitable and the difficulty will re-adjust. Some people continue because they speculate on a price rise. BitCoin history shows that unprofitable mining in the past made huge profits because of the price rise.

It is true that the difficulty is so high that some forms of mining can never be profitable. But the price of replacing a graphics card with a block eruptor of the same power is £12 with a tiny 2watt power usage. So high performance is still within reach of the individual miner.

Although it's concerning I don't think this will happen.

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